pynchon-l-digest V2 #1689

[Doug Millison]

rj
>It's a hard stretch for me to see that lone sentence at 606.24 providing any
>sort of equivocation about Marvy's character (I agree that he is both comic
>relief and a stereotype), particularly as he's just contemplated drowning
>Manuela in the tub, or breaking her fingers, and admitted that all he wants
>is "that sweet and nigger submissiveness". But I guess if it's enough to
>"humanise" Marvy for a reader then so be it; it really doesn't measure up to
>anywhere near the complexity of characterisation which Blicero is given in
>the text.

Your previous point was that ""I'm not sure that there are any such 
equivocations about Marvy  at any stage in the novel" -- a rather 
emphatic statement. I pointed out one such equivocation.  Clearly, 
Pynchon doesn't give as much space to Marvy in GR so Marvy won't have 
the layers that Blicero/Weissmann has, but in this small turn in the 
encounter with the prostitute, Pynchon does make Marvy somewhat 
human, as I said.

If you're going to argue that the various descriptions of 
Blicero/Weissmann throughout GR actually refer to different 
characters, go for it. That's not what Pynchon does, however -- he 
provides a multifaceted portrait of Blicero/Weissman made up of views 
of the character from the perspective of many other characters and 
narrators.  As a reader, I guess you can indeed take your pick, throw 
out what you don't like and keep what you do, but you wind up with 
your own creation, not Pynchon's. Of course any reader has the right 
to read however she wants to read.

I said, " the final picture of Blicero shows him considering 
Gottfried's sacrifice in the Rocket "for purposes of self-arousal" 
(758)". rj said, "The subject of that particular sentence is 
"anyone", not Blicero."  But, the scene is narrated from Blicero's 
point of view, start to finish, so this is in fact the way that 
Blicero sees Gottfried now "as an erotic category, hallucinated out 
of that blue violence for purposes of self-arousal" (just a few 
paragraphs before, Blicero has been fantasizing about Gottfried's 
"creamy buttocks knotted together in fear") -- the next to last 
picture of Blicero that Pynchon gives us is of Blicero -- Nazi, 
Rocket project manager, German Romantic -- using the sacrifice of 
Gottfried in the Rocket as masturbation fodder. Pynchon implies that 
Blicero will call up this scene as a masturbation fantasy in the 
future, perhaps -- my conjecture -- when he's sitting on one of those 
Boards of Directors of a U.S.-based multinational corporation in the 
American missile program.  The final picture that Pynchon gives us of 
Blicero comes from Gottfried's POV on the following page, Blicero as 
"death" again in a phased transformation into the whiteness of death.

rj can make Blicero/Weissmann a tragic hero if he wishes but only by 
leaving out most of what Pynchon writes about Blicero/Weissmann in 
GR, and the interpretation will stand or fall by how convincing 
others find his reading. I find it rather humorous -- and terribly 
hypocritical --  that rj goes to such lengths to rewrite Pynchon's 
texts to fit his theories, but at the same time heaps abuse on a 
Pynchon scholar like Hollander who follows names and historial 
references and allusions to deduce his own theories about Pynchon's 
texts, and what Pynchon is saying about the world outside the text 
based on the way he treats characters and situations inside the 
novel. Doubly hypocritical when rj will take similar liberties in 
connecting a character in GR (Major Marvy in the present instance) to 
the world outside the novel, and argue that Pynchon is passing 
judgement on the U.S. military in his portrayal of Marvy -- then 
castigate Hollander for reading Pynchon in similar fashion.
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