Tristan and Isolde

[Terrance]

http://pages.whowhere.com/internet/f.vazquez/reviewgr.html

Locke was on to it in 1973. Three years prior to Eddins
ground breaking book, Thomas Moore, in his book *The Style
of Connectedness* came to exactly the same conclusion. 

Weisenburger, who, to barrow Dave Monroe's phrase,
"disagrees violently" with the book's 
conclusions, see his own book *Fables of Subversion*, wrote
the dust jacket blurb, praising the book. James Wood, in his
book, *Broken Estate*, agrees mostly with Weisenburger, but
takes the opposite opinion, while agreeing with
Weisenburger, although we need to understand how both
re-define the terms "Fable,"and  "Allegory," and the use of
techniques like irony and so called "black humor,"  that
Pynchon writes a postmodern "fable of subversion,"  Wood
takes Pynchon to the wood shed for doing so. 

Wood concludes his study of Pynchon thus: 

"What is left are novels that draw attention only to their
own significations, which hang without reference, inflamedly
pointing like a severed arm to nowhere in particular."



The majority of P's critics, and yes I have read the vast
majority, do not agree with Siegel's reading of Blicero.
However, disagree as they might and as mightily and even as
violently as they disagree, they do attribute these
disagreements to the other critics "phobias" and "biases." 

There are lots of ways to read Pynchon. 

K. Hume's study of the construction P's characters in P's
fiction is of some use here:  

Thinness of character in Gravity's Rainbow disquiets even
the book's partisans. Pynchon confounds us with an opulent
Ulyssean world but denies us the filigrain
complexity of Joyce's psychological portraits. Weissmann's
squalid attempts to
transcend, for instance, glisten darkly in the ashes of the
Zone, but Pynchon does not
ground that quest in the psyche of the individual--a
puzzling failure by the standards of realistic literature. 

Pynchon's mode of constructing characters is addressed to
the problems of such
people. Now as much as any time in the past, we need
generalized thinking about what
it means to be human and about the ordinary concern of how
to survive, because we,
too, live in the postmodern world. To overlook this
conservative moral and prophetic
strain in Pynchon's endeavor because we are intellectually
drawn to the radical and
postmodern is to impoverish our experience with the
complexity of his text.

Hume, neither a xenophobe, nor a homophobe, has no
difficulty noting that Weissmann provokes revulsion.  
                                                             

I made the distinction between the symbolic use of sexual
practices, tropes, metaphors, and the lives and practices of
real people. I have always maintained that Pynchon is a
satirist, I agree with those that find his characters are
for the most part flat, but also agree with those critics
that have worked to defend these characters, not as human
people, but as Satirical players on Pynchon's grand stage
where the film is always flickering the lightness and
darkness of consciousness on the screen and melting into the
painted scenery and at any moment a troupe of his most
amusing mimes and machines, who have been waiting in the
wings, parade onto the stage singing dirty little ditties to
relieve us of the burden of complicity and bad shit and
tickle us away, if only while we join in and sing, form the
whispering horrors and the folly of being only human after
all. 

 Those that take this approach have no difficulty
recognizing that their "condemnation" of evil actions on the
part of characters like Pointman and Weissmann, are not
judgments, condemnations,  of cultures or peoples. The
German in GR, even Weissmann,  is not other worldly and
gnostic, he is US,  and we are all together. Blicero is evil
and we all know why.