Eddins on Blicero

[jbor]

      The Nazi ideology of the Zero finds its avatar in Blicero, a figure
    of such portentous evil and insidious culpability that his creator
    Pynchon occasionally seems, like Milton, to be of the Devil's party
    without knowing it. (_The Gnostic Pynchon_, p. 142)

I'm not sure about Milton, but Pynchon seems fairly deliberate in his
decision to focus on Blicero in _GR_, and in both the extent and minutiae of
the characterisation. I don't know that Blicero is in fact an "avatar" of
Nazi ideology at all: he is on a downward slide through the ranks and
doesn't seem much interested in his actual job/s as a Nazi. And I don't know
how "portentous evil" and "insidious culpability" might actually lure an
author's sympathies, knowingly or no.

    The reason that Blicero elicits Pynchon's lyricism lies in the
    peculiarly poetic quality of his gnostic vision. (142)

Wouldn't Pynchon be the creator of the "poetic quality" of the character's
vision as well? Wouldn't it thus also be logical to say that the "gnostic
vision" elicits Pynchon's "lyricism"?

    More precisely, he is the embodiment of a demonic Orphism that
    parodically inverts the Rilkean valuations of the novel's norm.
    With a virtuoso touch, Pynchon roots this parody directly in
    Blicero's own affinity for Rilke's poetry. It is ultimately an
    unfounded affinity, one made possible only by the distortion of
    the poet's totalizing affirmations into support for the death-
    oriented values of gnosticism. (142-3)

I'm not sure that there are "totalizing affirmations" in the _Duino
Elegies_, nor that the "values of gnosticism" are death-oriented. Nowhere in
the text does Pynchon indicate that Blicero's "affinity" for Rilke's poetry
is "unfounded", or that his interpretations are a "distortion". And, any
constructed notion of the "novel's norm" is highly suspect imo (let alone
that wild conclusion about Slothrop's Orphic naturalism as "an anti-gnostic
gnosis" which provides a "potent theoretical norm"!?) More later.

best


----------
>From: Mark David Tristan Brenchley <mdtb at st-andrews.ac.uk>
>To: Terrance <lycidas2 at earthlink.net>


> On Thu, 29 Mar 2001, Terrance wrote:
>
>> B/W and Gottfried and Sartre:
>>
>> The sadist's triumph is not and never, for even when he
>> thinks to explode into victory some implicit unavoidable
>> defeat rises: his victim looks up and makes of him an
>> object. The sadist then, is compelled to realize that it is
>> not an object but a subject he has possessed and this moment
>> is a failure for sadism but a failure for masochism as
>> well,  for an epistemological and ontological chasm
>> separates self from self, freedom from freedom, and each is
>> left to choose themselves within the system of the closed
>> circuit of solipsistic history.
>
>  hmmm, someone has read their Being and Nothingness. I once thought
> that sado-masochism was the perfect relationship, with each person knowing
> and getting exactly what they want from the relationship. Course its a
> murkier issue than that, but there's still something to be said for the
> masochist and sadist conjoined.
>
>
>>
>> B/W and Gottfried and Jung:
>>
>>  Jung says, "in Freud's myth the father becomes a
>> demon who created a world of disappointments, illusions and
>> suffering."
>>
>> In  GR, "The fathers have no power" and "the sons are
>> condemned to the same passivity, the same masochist
>> fantasies *they* cherished in secret...."
>>
>> But Blicero's power is Absolute.
>>

snip