Eddins on Blicero

[jbor]

Speaking of colonial genocide ... Blicero sez, 

      "In Africa, Asia, Amerindia, Oceania, Europe came and established
    its order of Analysis and Death. What it could not use, it killed
    or altered. In time the death-colonies grew strong enough to break
    away. But the impulse to empire, the mission to propagate death,
    the structure of it, kept on. Now we are in the last phase. American
    death has come to occupy Europe. It has learned empire from its old
    metropolis. [ ... ]
      "Is the new cycle over now, and a new one ready to begin? Will our
    new Edge, our new Deathkingdom, be the Moon? I dream of a great glass
    sphere, hollow and very high and far away . . . " (_GR_ 722-3)

Pynchon writes, to Thomas F. Hirsch (1969):

    But I feel the number done on the Herero head by the Germans is the same
    number done on the American Indian head by our own colonists and what is
    now being done on the Buddhist head in Vietnam by the Christian minority
    in Saigon and their advisors: the imposition of a culture valuing
    analysis and differentiation on a culture that valued unity and
    integration.

But here is Dwight Eddins on that long final speech of Blicero's:

    Blicero [ ... ] imagines the moon reached by the rocket as "our new
    Deathkingdom" [ ... ] It is an utterly perverted ideal, embodying with
    shocking honesty the gnostic desiderata of antiorganic permanence and
    of Return rendered unfeasible [ ... ]
    (The Gnostic Pynchon, p. 140)

Eddins totally ignores Blicero's recital of that long heritage of colonial
genocide which has marred human history (722.19 - 723.2), and he thus
misreads those rhetorical questions about the moon being the next colonial
"Edge", and Blicero's dream of the futuristic space colony, as Blicero's
"ideal". That's quite wrong.

The "cycle of infection and death" which Blicero wants to "break out" of
(724.6) is just that "cycle" (723.3) of colonial genocide he has delineated,
the European "order of Analysis and Death" (722.32) imposed on all the
continents of the globe; it is a "cycle" which Fathers "infect" their Sons
with (723.30-36), a cycle of patriotic conquest, destruction and
self-sacrifice.

best