Eddins on Blicero

[Terrance]

jbor wrote:
> 
> 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


Eddins does not ignore and thus misread.  Blicero's comments
on Europe and America are perfectly consistent with Eddins'
reading.