Blicero's sexuality

[jbor]

----------
>From: lorentzen-nicklaus at t-online.de (lorentzen-nicklaus)
>

>  even if true, this, of course, would not change at all the crucial issue
>  (sexual perversity as mechanism of the historically increasing enfetishment
of
>  the inanimate?) of my question.


>From Locke's NYT review also:

    One feels in the end that Pynchon's imagination is so taken with the
    imagery of Nazi death, so close to Blicero [ ... ] Pynchon's sensibility
    and achievement here are limited by the very paranoid traits that he is
    ostensibly criticizing.

    Like one of his main characters, Pynchon in this book seems almost to be
    "in love, in sexual love, with his own death." [ ... ]

So many of the critics have needed to identify the lack of condemnation of
Blicero in the text of _GR_ as a flaw. Others, like Eddins, need to invent a
complicated framework whereby so-called "gnosticism" and non-white bread sex
are deemed to signify "evil". More than this, they need to claim that
Pynchon *intended* these to signify "evil" in his composition of the text.
Their readings of the actual text, however, don't hold up.

And, on the other hand, if Blicero is simply claimed to be some demonic
fictional creation, wouldn't that also qualify him as something of a Badass,
those Gothic/Romantic monsters which Pynchon seems to like so much in that
there 'Luddite' essay?

    There is a long folk history of this figure, the Badass. He is usually
    male, and while sometimes earning the quizzical tolerance of women, is
    almost universally admired by men for two basic virtues: he Is Bad, and
    he is Big. Bad meaning not morally evil, necessarily, more like able to
    work mischief on a large scale. What is important here is the amplifying
    of scale, the multiplication of effect.

    [ ... ]

    What gave King Ludd his special Bad charisma, took him from local hero
    to nationwide public enemy, was that he went up against these amplified,
    multiplied, more than human opponents and prevailed. When times are
    hard, and we feel at the mercy of forces many times more powerful, don't
    we, in seeking some equalizer, turn, if only in imagination, in wish, to
    the Badass -- the djinn, the golem, the hulk, the superhero -- who will
    resist what otherwise would overwhelm us?

    [ ... ]

    The craze for Gothic fiction after The Castle of Otranto was grounded, I
    suspect, in deep and religious yearnings for that earlier mythic time
    which had come to be known as the Age of Miracles. In ways more and less
    literal, folks in the 18th century believed that once upon a time all
    kinds of things had been possible which were no longer so. Giants,
    dragons, spells. The laws of nature had not been so strictly formulated
    back then. What had once been true working magic had, by the Age of
    Reason, degenerated into mere machinery. Blake's dark Satanic mills
    represented an old magic that, like Satan, had fallen from grace. As
    religion was being more and more secularized into Deism and nonbelief,
    the abiding human hunger for evidence of God and afterlife, for
    salvation -- bodily resurrection, if possible -- remained. The Methodist
    movement and the American Great Awakening were only two sectors on a
    broad front of resistance to the Age of Reason, a front which included
    Radicalism and Freemasonry as well as Luddites and the Gothic novel.
    Each in its way expressed the same profound unwillingness to give up
    elements of faith, however "irrational," to an emerging technopolitical
    order that might or might not know what it was doing. "Gothic" became
    code for "medieval," and that has remained code for "miraculous," on
    through Pre-Raphaelites, turn-of-the-century tarot cards, space opera in
    the pulps and comics, down to Star Wars and contemporary tales of sword
    and sorcery.

http://www.themodernword.com/pynchon/pynchon_essays_luddite.html

best