blicero's sexuality

[Terrance]

jbor wrote:
> 
> ----------
> >From: Terrance <lycidas2 at earthlink.net>
> >
> 
> > ***We need first, to define in what sense these sexual acts
> > are said to be perverse sexual acts, unnatural sexual acts,
> > in the fiction.***
> >
> >
> > Eddins does this for us.
> 
> snip
> 
> This is the point, Terrance. Eddins defines what is "perverse" and
> "unnatural", what are "violations" of some apparently absolute natural
> "order", and how "human imagination" and "natural instinct" are somehow
> opposite phenomena, and then he attempts to overlay all this baggage on the
> text. However, they ultimately remain his definitions, not the text's.

No, Eddins defines what he means when he uses the term
perverse, no what it means 
as part of some apparently absolute natural order. Those are
your misreadings of his text, if you have read it. He never
makes this claim. Also, the quote that Kai provided, out of
context, the second sentence of the concluding paragraph of
the study of Blicero as a character in GR, the one that you
have taken your binary from-- human imagination/natural
instinct-- is a distortion of the text as I have explained. 


> 
> Your attempted distinction between the depiction of individual people and
> cultures in fiction and the individual people and cultures that such
> depictions are said to represent doesn't really hold water, particularly as
> it's a commonplace which you seem to accept when you are offering your own
> interpretations of the texts.

I have made the distinction and it's not too difficult to
see if you are willing to 
open your mind just a bit, but I think the point here, as
usual, is to attack the person that presents ideas, and not
the ideas themselves. So Kai has audacity to label a scholar
a homophobe. You have the chutzpah to say that a review of
GR that fails to address the narratology of  Enzian reflects
the Waspishness bias of its author. You guys need to quit
this, it's become a cancer here. 


> 
> Fictional or no, the characters, their behaviours and sexual practices, and
> whatever these are interpreted as representing in the "real" world, are not
> "condemned" by either Pynchon (or "the text") within the text. They are in
> fact "condemned" by *readers* of the text, such as Eddins and yourself in
> this particular instance.

I have not condemned anything or anyone, but you, who have
not read the book, feel obliged to judge its author and my
representation of it here. You are the one pointing fingers
again. You don't seem capable of handling this discussion
jbor. You should stay out of it. 


> 
> That balance sheet of "good" and "evil" characters which some readers
> attempt or need to construct is always a process of their interpretation of
> the text. I take Kai's point that Hedwig's (or Bianca's, or, indeed,
> Blicero's) "squalid hypersexuality" being opposed to Paola's or Fina's (or
> Gottfried's) apparently innocent (though perhaps equally "hyper") sexuality
> is very artificial and arbitrary, and perhaps indeed both mono-contextual
> and xenophobic into the bargain.

Xenophobic, homophobic, you don't know what the hell you are
saying man. Please bite your tongue.