Eddins on Blicero

[jbor]

The other odd thing about Eddins' _The Gnostic Pynchon_ is that, while on
the one hand he condemns Blicero as a "figure of such portentous evil and
insidious culpability" (142) for shooting off the 00000, he valorises both
Slothrop's (explicitly "gnostic") revelation on the crossroads as part of
some born-again *Christian* "Orphic naturalism", and Enzian's quest to
launch himself in the 00001, which he sees as indicative of the "Herero
conjunction of netherworld and moon as Holy Center" (140). As well as
totally ignoring Blicero's explicit critique of the centuries of Western
imperialism, and misreading both the "dream" that the moon will only become
another of man's colonial Deathkingdoms (as Blicero's "ideal" rather than as
a ghostly premonition) and his emphatic statement of wishing to "break out"
from "this cycle of infection and death" which has produced colonial
Deathkingdoms (genocides and wars) -- which is what Gottfried's grand
gesture of love and faith (cf. Jesus) is all about btw -- Eddins also
totally overlooks the fact that what Enzian aspires to with the 00001 is an
attempt to reconstruct and emulate *exactly* what Blicero was doing with the
00000. There is no actual substantive difference between either the act of
launching the rocket or the human sacrifice to be made: the explosive
warhead will be removed, the Schwarzgerat will be fitted, the chosen Son
will take his place, and the firing will be a religious ritual. What Eddins
(and his ticket-riders) are never able to explain is why Blicero is so
obsessed about firing that *particular* rocket at the very end of the novel
in the first place, what that climactic scene and monologue at 721-4
actually reveals to the reader *directly* about Blicero's motives. And,
until the reader can come to terms with these things then they are going to
be forever stuck in that *Orpheus* Theatre at novel's end, with some or
other despotic leader as "night manager", feeling smug and self-satisfied,
and totally oblivious to the text's, and history's, messages.

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