blicero's sexuality

[lorentzen-nicklaus]

 ausflüchte, nichts als ausflüchte ... well, let's see:

> I disagree with your speculative characterization of the
> Eddins interpretation. 

 it's not speculative, i quoted his words. & this is eddins' view on perverse  
 sexuality in pynchon throughout the whole study. i'll give you two 
 more examples, one concerning the v-chapter we're gonna start to discuss the 
 day after tomorrow, the other refering to gottfried:

 "hedwig, sixteen years old, is herself - in her precocious decadence and 
 perverse artifice - an emanation of this goddess [venus] and a precursor of 
 bianca in gravity's rainbow. in both, the innocence symbolic of the virgin's 
 transcendental status has given way to a squalid hypersexuality, that 
 specializes in the unnatural." (p. 69) --- uuh, "squalid hypersexuality" sounds 
 really good ...    

 (ever heard of those indian girls who embody a certain hindu goddess for 
  several years and then, while being still teenagers, get a life-long pension?)

 "gottfried has been a crucial part of blicero's assault on the natural order 
 through his participation in the increasingly bizzare and unnatural sexual 
 fantasies enacted by the latter. blicero's perversion is a systematic and 
 aggressive subversion of the male-female polarity integral to return ..." (p. 
 148). wait a moment: what was that word? "natural order"?! ain't such thing in 
 this eternal dance... there's homosexuality among animals, & in tribal human  
 societies we find all kind of "psycho-sexual" cultures, among them - see the 
 famous ethno-psychoanalytical study by morgenthaler/parin ("fürchte deinen 
 nächsten wie dich selbst") - very rigid ones we today would associate with 
 "anality" and, perhaps, s&m ... the role of the shamam in tribal societies is  
 often taken by queers, &, of course, there are various forms of "bizzare and  
 unnatural sexual" practices as well as skilled artificial manipulations of the 
 body ... gender-crossing, fetishism (masks!), tatoos, body-piercing (often in  
 genital regions), sex-magick ... my fellow human beings didn't need modernity  
 to become good perverts ...   
   
> Although you did say something about a "mono
> cultural positivism" and I'm sorry I'm not sure what this
> means and I don't want to misinterpret, so if you could say
> more on this I would appreciate it. 

 clean your glasses! i wrote "mono-contextural" and by that i here only mean 
 that eddins, like you, adds it all up to one coherent picture as if gravity's 
 rainbow were "the world according to garp" or something ... can't you see how 
 this is violating the ecological poly-contexturality of pynchon's texts?  
 orpheus puts harp down: now everybody! there is, at least since gr, no tight   
 coupling between the characters perverse sexuality and the historical process 
 of standardization ... sometimes perhaps - think of frenesi in brock's    
 re-education camp - a loose, playful coupling, but never in that strict  
 ontological sense. let's get real with mchale's "ontological pluralism"!
 
 (back in the end of last year,when the grgr was over and we were having another 
 round of our holocaust debate, you wrote one time that we will never understand 
 what the holocaust in gr means if we not understand first what jewish religion 
 means in the book. onlist i asked you: "???", but here, like in other cases, 
 you prefered not to answer. anyway, i don't see any closer textual connection 
 between the two issues;  this might work as another example for the dangers of 
 mono-contextural (some would say "modernist") readings. you people always have 
 to make tight couplings where there are, at best, only loose ones. of course  
 this is all  v e r y  pynchonesque  ...)  


 [the term "poly-contexturality" was first used by gotthart günther; to 
 explicate its comtemporary sociological meaning we would have to go a little  
 deeper into luhmannian systems theory. for starters, "idealtypisch": while 
 pre-modern societies, with their overlapping onto-theological semantics, were 
 living in a "mono-contextural" world where all things had its one and only 
 place (structurally grounded in primary hierarchical structures), the modern 
 society with its generalized communication media like money, power, or 
 scientific "truth", operates heterarchically in a "polycontextural" world. 
 that's, btw, why music becomes atonal and the visual arts abstract ...]    


 you quote eddins in context:

> "Buggery, however, is only the starting point of Blicero's
> violations. By dressing as a women with artificial genitalia
> fashioned from various synthetics and by interdicting the
> natural attraction between Gottfried and Kaje, Blicero is
> undertaking to found a competing sexual order, one that is
> entirely the product of human imagination rather than the
> natural instincts and that serves Death--the Oven--rather
> than Life. The ultimate perversion in this wildly escalating
> fantasies to sacrifice the Beloved, garbed in feminine
> stockings and shrouded in Imipolex, to the very principle of
> perversion. The firing of the 00000 symbolizes an artificial
> apocalypse, engineered to celebrate the religion of gnostic
> artifice." 

  we'll probably find quick agreement that the sacrifice of gottfried - though  
  this fulfils his deepest wish and destiny - is not unproblematic in a 
  normative sense. however, what i'm interested here is the sexual aspect as 
  such. taken this, all these strong words like "ultimate perversion" or "wildly 
  escalating" (would "mildly meandering" be better?!) or "very principle of 
  perversion" do not say anything. the question remains if the sexual perversion 
  as such is, in pynchon's universe, part of this historical process of 
  standardization or not. what does it mean that (gr:723) all the people in   
  blicero's dreamed great glass sphere, hollow and very high and far away on the 
  moon are - men? does this idea sound more life-orientated when barbie & ken   
  would be living there? on page 616 we read: "... but the life-cry of that love 
  has long hissed away into no more than this iddle and bitchy faggotry. in this 
  latest war, death was no enemy, but a collaborator. homosexuality in high   
  places is just a carnal afterthought now [sic?!], and the real and only   
  fucking is done on paper ..." or take, from a talk of ombindi and enzian, page 
  319: "... what's under discussion is the act of suicide, which also includes  
  bestiality (...), pedophilia (...), lesbianism [sic!] (...), coprophilia and  
  urolagnia (...) fetishism (...)." all in one sentence. how do you read these 
  passages? what's the significance of perversion in pynchon's work?

> What does Eddins mean 
> here when he writes the words "gnostic," "natural" (?)

  good question. since you, i repeat this, have been riding on his ticket for so 
  long,  y o u  may give us the answer. more than once and with quotes from 
  reputated scholars i have been argueing here that voegelin's "concept" (it's 
  more a historical fantasy) of gnosis can be found under www.bullshit.com ... 
  but among intellectual paper-weights "gnosis" has, in the meantime, become   
  some kinda "buzz-word", & so we had all these "conferences such as 'gnosticism 
  and modernity', where they discussed such topics as 'the gnosticism of 
  lincoln's political rhetoric'..." as richard smith writes in "the modern 
  relevance of gnosticism" (in: james m. robinson: the nag hammadi library. 
  revised edition. san francisco 1988: harper, pp. 532-549, here 542f). smith   
  also sez there: "voegelin's writings could be regarded as silly were it not   
  for their strong impact within and beyond his own field of political science". 
  indeed ...         



frontschwester frederieke (playin' with her little natural machine ...)