Blicero's "cycle" & his Critics

[Terrance]

In 1978, just five years after GR was published, Mark
Richard Siegal published his extraordinary study of
GR--*Creative Paranoia In Gravity's Rainbow.*

In his book he says,   

An adequate understanding of religion and of the
metaphorical functioning of religion and mythology is
necessary to a full realization of what Pynchon has created
in Gravity's Rainbow. CP.99

If the reader oversimplifies the possibility of life
presented in the novel, he will not be able to appreciate, 
for instance, precisely what Blicero means in his desire to
"break out of this cycle of infection and death" (GR.724).
To get only part of the point with Pynchon is often to miss 
the whole point. Again, Gravity's Rainbow is "not a
disentanglement from, but a progressive *knotting into*"
(GR.3) the profusion of life seen in all of its
potentialities. CP.103

Siegal's reading, only five years after the publication of
GR, is on to it: the religion must be adequately understood.
Moreover, the idea that the progressive knotting into is a
profusion of life seen in all its possibilities is crucial
to understanding GR.  However, Siegal's reading is flawed in
my humble opinion. More specifically, his reading of Blicero
and the "cycle" is a misreading (again, IMHO)  because he
misreads the Blicero "cycle," and thus, his own reading is
itself inadequate because it fails to discern and appreciate
P's religion and the metaphorical functioning of religion
and mythology in Gravity's Rainbow. 


Well, it's GR folks, and it has strained the muscles and
exercised the negative and the positive capabilities of even
the most able of critics. If so, why would an unlettered
cripple like me even strain and struggle to  lift its
imposing weightiness off the shelf? Only because it's fun
and beats the hell out of TV. 

My point is that Seigal  (after reading Cowart, Levine,
Kraft, Mendelson, Locke, Tanner, Slade, Stark, Wood, etc.)
identified two very important things that are taken by
subsequent critical studies and developed so that the
"knotting into and the profusion of life" and the
religion/myth are reasoned out and the Blicero cycle
explained. 

 Chapter Two ("Narrative Point Of View") is very strong, but
it is, in part at least, Seigal's heavy lifting in this
chapter that causes his reading of the religion/myth, the
knotting into, and Blicero's "cycle"  to be strained and
finally to give way.  (again, just my opinion) 

With the benefit of nearly ten additional years and ten
full-length books--Slade, Siegal, Plater, Cowart, Mackey,
Stark, Fowler, Schaub, Cooper, Hite, (but significantly, not
Weisenburger's Companion, much more than a Companion it
includes remarkable discoveries about the depth and breath
of P's use of religion) Thomas Moore's *The Style Of
Connectedness* 1987, identifies a "common critical practice
[that has grouped] Pynchon with those "reflexivist"
contemporary novelists whose chief concern is with what is
felt to be the inherently involuted, self-referential nature
of language itself." Moore's study of film and Weber in GR
is impressive, but although he devotes an entire chapter to
Pynchon's "Gods," and attempts to correct Siegal's
misreading of Blicero's "cycle," his reading of the "cycle"
is not quite adequate because it too fails to account for
P's religion and the "knotting into." Note that (again in my
opinion) Moore disagrees with Siegal, but there is a
tentative, almost uncertain tone to his reading of the
"cycle." 

This is understandable because Blicero does, as you have
argued here David Morris, "fit the mold in a sense. "
Moreover, Moore's reading is in part, a Freudian reading,
and since he cannot claim that Pynchon in fact used the
Freudian case he cites or that Pynchon applied the theory as
he (Moore) employs it, he says, [Blicero's} falling at the
end MAY be
" He says Blicero's "cycle" "can be taken
only
if
But if, instead
Blicero may well have
Iago
"  


I cannot agree with Siegal and others who want to take
Captain Blicero largely positively, as an inspired mystic
and charismatic
prophet who seeks to transcend a dull, rationalized world.
He does fit this mold
in a sense, but his charisma is all negation of life, as is
made explicit in, for one
thing, its expression  as homosexual lust: Death in its
ingenuity has contrived to make the father and the son
beautiful to each other as life has made male and female"
(723). The madness into which Greta and Thanatz remember him
falling at the end may be a Freudian withdrawal and
implosion--"his eyes rolled clear up into his head"
(465)--which presages his final building of a sexual
cathexis, through Gottfried and the V-2, with death. At the
final accent, his I want to break out--to leave the this
cycle of infection and death" (724) can be taken to point to
a positive kind of "transcendence," as Siegal takes it, only
of we interpret the "cycle" in question as Their
rationalized, death-serving order. But if, instead, the
cycle is the greater one to which Gravity's Rainbow
constantly directs its awe--the ring continuity of the
organic creation--then Blicero's vicarious accent is an
active denial of life and of life's soul force, which is
gravity, to which the final accent is "betrayed" (758) when
the rocket starts falling from its parabola's peak.
Blicero's imagination is wholly of sky, hardly at all
connected to the book's earthly life; what ever rises simply
to escape and negate gravity will thrown back to that Earth
that, as Rilke affirmed, is the matrix of both life *and*
death. At books end Blicero may well have simply become-as
the 175s, homosexual prison camp inmates, believe-an earthly
refugee, on the loose somewhere, his evil
unconquered, like Iago or like any escaped Nazi killer:
"he's out there...alive and on the run" (667).

It's important to read Moore's "Freudian/Jungian"
interpretation of  Blicero's "Homosexual libido" 

Weisneburger's Companion was published in 1988, so now we
have around seventeen years of Pynchon scholarship. In it
Weisenburger says, 

In my view, the most significant discovery of the annotation
is that Gravity's Rainbow unfolds according to a circular
design. Across the novels four parts, historical events
intersect the Christian liturgical calendar, inferring
possibilities of return and renewal, but possibilities that
Pynchon's satire (again, see Weisenburger's book *Fables of
Subversion) hopelessly equivocates. This means that readers
might have a novel as elegantly modeled as Joyce's Ulysses
and have their deconstructionism too. Indeed, one might read
Gravity's Rainbow as a satire on the very desire for such
plots, or metanarratives, a desire the narrative unmasks as
the terrible dynamic of a culture huddling on the brink of
nuclear winter. I take up these interpretive problems again,
briefly, as this introduction ends. GRC.3

In 1990, Dwight Eddins published Gnostic Pynchon. In it, he
does exactly what Seigal said needed to be done, 


An adequate understanding of religion and of the
metaphorical functioning of religion and mythology is
necessary to a full realization of what Pynchon has created
in Gravity's Rainbow. CP.99

If the reader oversimplifies the possibility of life
presented in the novel, he will not be able to appreciate,
for instance, precisely what Blicero means in his desire to
"break out of this cycle of infection and death" (GR.724).
To get only part of the point with Pynchon is often to miss
the whole point. Again, Gravity's Rainbow is "not a
disentanglement from, but a progressive "knotting into"
(GR.3) the profusion of life seen in all of its
potentialities. CP.103

He deals with the "knotting into" right from the start, he
presents a full study of religion/myth in Pynchon's fiction,
provides the best (IMHO) reading of Blicero's "cycle."  

I have, as best I could, tried to introduce the Eddins
reading to the list. 
If you read it and want to discuss it I'll be glad to.