VV (19) Disposal of Profane

[Terrance]

see "Deviations." page 319

Sexual relations in GR are not so much an expression of
human desire, as symbolic of the 
attempt to transcend the cycle of life and death ( Earth's
Natural realm) through violent sado-masochistic acts and
other "deviations" or anti-fertile SUICIDE. 

Enzian is flirting, the Rocket, Suicide. 

So if you read the list of "sexual acts" (318-19) and
consider several of the most important themes and metaphors
and ideas and symbolisms-- color for example,  white
and black, the male sperm is white, white being the
color of the Rocket (not quite a whale) and  man's attempts
to dominate natural cycles and so on. This white seed  flows
into black feces, the color of the repressed, 
and this causes a poisoning (think Angel and Rilke), a
poisoned manure. A poisoning, we are told at several  points
in the novel, that is Angelic--the Angel from Rilke to GR is
the anti-Holy Ghost, the present dispensation (a religious
term) , and remember that fathers carry
the poison, the sickness, be it Christian or in Freudian
terms the Oedipal situation in the Zone. Also ("once only"
for example, and "sold on suicide," "the empty ones"...this
is in fact what is happening in the sewer, Benny's contract
with the alligators, destroyer and destroyed in V. and so
on, it's a religious bond).  

Again, I think it is not a matter of anal intercourse being
"death
orientated" and "sterile," (although this is its symbolic
function in GR. It is one act of many, and the sexual
"Deviations" serve larger themes,
in fact, sex in all of Pynchon's fiction functions as such. 

In any event, P's novels, the themes of his fiction include
a gnosticizing, the "Neo-Platonic Nature. So, for example, 
the conviction that the material universe and its God are
evil,  that temporality is slavery;
that salvation, being contingent cannot be sought; that
humans are now forced to lead an inauthentic life in a
treacherous dream world, or nightmare,  like the "Oneirine
hauntings"(GR 703) or the reference to the "Dark Dream" (GR
697) suggest; that by despising such a world they experience
an existential estrangement (GR 660) and the
"bitterest of freedoms" (GR 704); finally, that they suffer
a self-destructive licentiousness, as in the moral
deviations through which the Hereros attempt to commit
racial suicide (GR 319). 

Another point, on this moral stuff that Thomas is writing so
smart about. From the Gnostic perspective in P's fiction,
moral laws are "Their" laws, the product of a conspiracy
against man, so human beings are free to ignore them and may
even violate them rebelliously. In fact, the case with a
rebellious character like Blicero is much the same as that
of Melville's Ahab whose mad rantings, as many a Melville
scholar has argued,  only become intelligible when seen rom
a Gnostic perspective, but as the white whale is almost like
a Rocket, think about how it is different, Blicero is
different Ahab altogether. 

See Thomas Vargish, "Gnostic Mythos in Moby-Dick," PMLA 81,
No.3 (June 1966) , pp. 272-77.

And the other essay, the Rocket and the Whale, but I'll have
to look up the citation.