Blicero

[Terrance]

Jeremy Osner wrote:
> 
> Agreed -- I have never seen Blicero as an unequivocally "evil"
> character, well, not since early in my first read anyways. Now Marvy, I
> tend to think his function is comic relief, but yeah, he's not at all
> likeable or sympathetic. I think the only two non-sympathetic characters
> in the book (that I can think of) are Marvy and Bloat -- Bloat is IMO
> way more *evil*, Marvy is just corrupt good ole' boy, kind of funny in
> that he always fucks up -- a bad guy but incompetent. (And in the end
> impotent as well.) Blicero/Weissman is OTOH complex and deep, certainly
> *evil* on a basic level; and also as you note *loved* by several
> sympathetic characters, and obsessed, and...

Blicero functions on several levels. On one level or on more
than one level, he is clearly the embodiment of evil. We
often talk of the "both/and" construction here. This is a
useful way of approaching Pynchon and Thomas Moore's *The
Style Of Connectedness* is an excellent study that applies
this approach. Just as an aside, Moore notes that Pynchon
may have looked into  Martin, James Stewart, *All Honorable
Men* Little Brown & Co., 1950 (Marvy's Naming of Dillon
Reed). 

Marvy is in a very great sense "comic relief," but he too
functions on several levels. We might ask, what is the
tragedy that Marvy relieves? Is there a tragic element to
the Zone? Because I think Pynchon has written a menippea,
where oxymoronic combinations are 
knotted into the inserted genres reinforcing the
multi-styled and multi-toned (also the three worlds--earth,
nether, olympus-- separate, "other side," "the wall," etc.,
but connected--by sewers and other conduits, ) nature of the
menippea, we can read Marvy as comic relief, at least, for a
little while for the audience if not for poor Slothrop. In
fact, as comic relief, Marvy heightens the tragic elements
by contrast, for both Slothrop and reader. Marvy's own
comments, while drunk--a tragic relief tradition found in
menippea but also generally in tragedies--the drunken porter
scene in Macbeth (locus classicus) comes to mind when
reading Marvy's going away party (paid for by GE)--are
reliable only in so far as they can be connected to
Slothrop's "planchette on a Ouija board slide into the
Darkest Africa of his  and America's consciousness. Slothop
meets Marvy, as the reader does, on a train. Slothrop has
just learned of the tragic past that is his and America's,
Lyle Bland, JAMF, the octopus IG, Jim Fisk, Rathenau, the
terms of Versailles, Paper, eight ink marks-- SLOTHROP, 
Harvard, and so on. Here he is a reporter. 

Again, check out Mikhail Bakhtin's *Problems of Dostoevsky's
Poetic* (Introduction by Wayne C. Booth) wherein he lists
the fourteen elements of Menippean Satire, all of them are
clearly applicable here, but number 14 says that menippea is
concerned "with current and topical issues. This is, in its
own way, the "journalistic" genre of antiquity, acutely
echoing the ideological issues of the day."

That Slothrop meets Marvy and Enzian together, on film, is
evidence enough to me anyway, that Pynchon is echoing the
ideological issues of the day.