Rocket(s) & Savagery.7

[Terrance F. Flaherty]

Paul Mackin wrote:
> >
> 
> P indulges in a funny sort of characterization.  Abstract and at the same
> time quite corporeal. The sex is well fleshed out. With Weissmann
> dualities reign supreme. On the one hand he's an ordinary civil
> servant carrying out assignments at his country's bidding. But he is the
> exact opposite in his apparent refusal to let the normal contraints of
> finite being hold him back. This makes him hard to cotton up to as a
> fellow human being. He's just not like us.

There are, what?, three I think, at least three different
descriptions of Weissmann's transformation and Blicero's
transcendence. None of them anything like a fellow human
being. Blicero and Greta are fabulous figures, corruptions
of deities. The scientist/mystics await his presence at the
castle where the blood of christ is co-opted as a polymer
for the cartel. 

Weissmann is a man, I'll grant that, he's human, we must, I
think, insist that he is human, but I don't read him as a
simple civil servant doing his job anymore than I read
Pointy as such.  And all of the ideas, the
Freudian/Brown/Marcuse Father Imago, the Weberian charisma,
the history of the Nazis, Dora, the role he plays at the
siege party, giving the genocide to V., his role as the
prototype of the Party's reading of Rilke, his  sex roles.
Plastic strap on.  In this fiction, this novel, this story,
sex, S&M, Sodomy, Plastic, function symbolically and the
theme here is anti-nature, anti-life, anti-other.