GR and M&D related: telluric forces

[jbor]

Yes, Blicero's monologue to numb, patient, kneeling Gottfried is certainly
an expression of the failed hope for a fresh start that the New World -- all
the New Worlds, "Africa, Asia, Amerindia, Oceania" -- presented to Imperial
Europe, in fiction as in real time, but it is expressed in the past tense,
as something lost, an opportunity missed. Blicero's perceptions are
definitively post-colonial.

This long soliloquy is much more than simply a representation of Blicero's
cynicism, however. It is a parent's confession to his child, a generation's
-- a *civilisation's* -- apologia pro vita sua. It ties many of the novel's
themes together, and resonates with Enzian's ("savages of other continents,
corrupted but still resisting in the name of life, have gone on despite
everything"), Pokler's and Slothrop's journeys to enlightenment also.
Blicero asks:
"Will our new Edge, our new Deathkingdom, be the Moon?"(723.4)
The rocket, this weapon of mass destruction, was fabled as a vehicle of
transcendence (just as Christianity is likewise fabled). The cruel irony
that Blicero sees is that even used as a means of space travel it would only
have served to spread the Western infection across new frontiers (as
Christianity has). It is Technology itself which has always been the source
of infection: the tangible hardware of "Modern Analysis", the "sterile
grace" of Science and Theology in concert; and which bleaches everything to
frozen lunar silence.

"I remember that you used to whisper me to sleep with stories of us one day
living on the Moon . . . are you beyond that by now?" Blicero asks Gottfried
(723.27). This links with Pokler and Ilse's renewed filial intimacy; and
both fathers are mocked by their own lies as desperately they seek after
some hope for final salvation. Ilse and Gottfried have already been doubled
at Zwolfkinder, he "her own second shadow" (429.21). And Gottfried's are the
same rocket-fables Ilse has dreamt for Franz (410.5-15), the happy ending to
Franz's story which was always just another version of his false faith, his
self-deceit, like his faith in Nordhausen as a "city of elves, producing toy
moon-rockets" (431.22):

   [Leni] "What kind of Wandervogel idiocy is it to run round all night in a
   marsh and call yourselves the Society for Space Navigation?"(162.12)

But this delusion Franz maintains to the very end of the war. It is the
reason Leni was forced to leave him in the first place:

   [Franz] "Your wings . . . oh, Leni, your wings . . . "
       But her wings can only carry her own weight, and she hopes Ilse's,
   for a while. Franz is a dead weight. Let him look for flight out in the
   Raketenflugplatz, where he goes to be used by the military and the
   cartels. Let him fly to the dead moon if he wants to. . . . (162.3up)

Franz finally renounces any hope of a happy ending by relinquishing his
wedding band at war's end. It is an admission to himself that Leni and Ilse
are gone forever. He has seen his complicity as an agent of the war and its
horrors in working to build the rocket (432-3), and recognises his foolish
gullibity in believing in the Western myths of God, Nation and Family: he
admits his own dream of a happy family as nothing more than an incestuous
fantasy (420-1), one which They had diagnosed from the start.


Like Slothrop too, mesmerised in front of that newspaper wirephoto and
fractured headline of the Hiroshima blast (693-4), Weissmann in this
visionary serenade sees that a reversal has taken place:
"Now we are in the last phase. American death has come to occupy Europe. It
has learned empire from its old metropolis." (722.6up)

For Slothrop such a revelation is all the more difficult as it will
ultimately involve a personal loss, a renunciation of self, a type of
treason:

"--papers might not mean so much in Europe . . . waitaminute, so much as
*where*, Slothrop? Huh? America? Shit. C'mon--
  Yup, still thinking there's a way to get back. He's been changing, sure,
changing, plucking the albatross of self now and then, idly, half-conscious
as picking his nose -- but the one ghost-feather his fingers always brush by
is America. Poor asshole, he can't let her go. She's whispered *love me* too
often to him in his sleep, vamped insatiably his waking attention with
come-hitherings, incredible promises. One day -- he can see a day -- he
might finally be able to say *sorry*, sure, and leave her . . . but not just
yet. One more try, one more chance, one more deal, one more transfer to a
hopeful line. Maybe it's just pride. What if there's no place for him in her
stable any more? If she has turned him out, she'll never explain. Her
'stallions' have no rights. She is immune to their small, stupid questions.
She is exactly the Amazon bitch your fantasies have called her to be." (623)

best

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>From: Thomas Eckhardt <uzs7lz at uni-bonn.de>
>To: Lycidas at worldnet.att.net
>Subject: Re: GR and M&D related:  telluric forces
>Date: Sun, Feb 13, 2000, 11:33 AM
>

> Terrance wrote:
>
>>"America was a gift from
>>the invisible powers, a way of returning." (GR.722)
>
> Weissmann's perspective. He goes on: "But Europe refused it." Weissmann
> articulates what one might call the New World theme: the age-old European
> dream of being born again in some New Eden, an Earthly Paradise (or to find
> the "Realms of Prester John", Fountain of Youth etc.) exempt of history.
snip

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