Blicero

[Terrance]

jbor wrote:
> 
> This is the full paragraph from Molly Hite:
> 
>       The fact that the narrator refuses to stand aloof from the characters
>     has implications for the value systems of _GR_. The novel deals with
>     some of the most horrifying prospects of contemporary life: the rise of
>     megalithic international corporations, the corresponding dehumanization
>     of twentieth-century society, the immanent purposes of technology, the
>     threat of global annihilation. But though the text insists on a
>     polarized vision with indelible lines drawn between Us and Them, it does
>     not condemn any of its characters. The narrator treats even the most
>     villainous characters with such compassion that it becomes impossible to
>     regard the novel's world as populated by villains and heroes. A villain
>     can stay a villain only if he is regarded from a rigorously "objective"
>     standpoint, and this narrator eschews objectivity to such a degree that
>     the reader is forced to understand and even sympathize with
>     conventionally repellent types like Pointsman and Blicero. In a way,
>     such sympathy is more shocking than pronounced antipathy because it
>     insists that there is no real They in the final analysis: only Us.
>                         (_Ideas of Order in the Novels of Thomas Pynchon_,
>                             Ohio SU, Columbus, 1983, p. 144)
> 
> Her readings of the actual text are very astute.
> 
> best

Indeed it is, but the implication here, that a poster
neglected to include the full paragraph from Hite's book is
not valid. No one mentioned Hite, you were confused, but no
matter. 

Earlier Dave Monroe posted a few excerpts from Robert
Holton's essay and I will add to these. Hite's astute
reading, and it is very astute we agree, even if we disagree
about it's conclusions concerning Blicero and other matters.
BTW, Thomas Moore, takes much the same issue with Hite as
Holten, as do quite a number of other critics, but he
praises the book, calling brilliant. 

>From Holton: 

There is a clear moral and historical imperative governing
Pynchon's 
representation of "real" historical events and their
apparent pattern.  It 
can be detected perhaps in the way the Bondel's
post-revolutionary song (a 
failed revolution) echoes in V. through decades and across
cultures: in 
Porcepic's appropriation of African polyrhythms for white 
European 
modernist music (V., p. 402) and in Sphere's black American
jazz with its 
"rising rhythms of African nationalism" (V., p. 60). (336)

Here Holton continues, " While a number of patterns do
repeat in the historical and 
contemporary chapters, it is an overstatement to claim as
Hite does that reality in V. is somehow 'static...which
suggests that past and present exist simultaneously or even
that they are reversable....in V. past and present reflect
each other in receding vistas. There can be no question, for
example, of reversing the genocidal atrocities carried out
against the Hereros, and to suggest an equivalent to 'Mafia
Winsome's intellectual racism' is clearly as
disproportionate as is here equivalence  of Fopple's siege
party (with its racist torture, murder, rape, and depravity)
and the relatively mild bohemianism of the Whole Sick Crew.
This response to the novel is quite common, however, and
results from approaching it as an abstract philosophical
statement or an epistemological puzzle (albeit a puzzle that
may not allow the possibility of a solution) to the
exclusion of the concrete social and historical detail. 

Holten begins his essay by noting this blind spot in
Plater's *Grim Pheonix*

Holton's essay, have not read the book, only the essay, has
a few errors, minor, but 
since he notes the national origins of the characters to
support his thesis, this should be corrected. Fergus is
Irish, Armenian, and  Jewish, not Irish American Jewish, and
Benny is Jewish on his mother's side and Italian- Roman
Catholic on his father's side, not Irish and Jewish as
Holton states in his essay. 

 
The recurrence of mirror imagery in discussions of V. is
symptomatic of a 
prevalent problem in postmodernism: the possibility that an
acceptance of 
relativity entails a trivializing of interpretation.  (336)

A dangerous tendency of cultural relativism, Fabian adds, is
the fact "that 
such mirrors, of placed at propitious angles, also have the
miraculous power 
to make real objects disappear." (336, citing Fabian, Time
and the Other, 
pp. 44-5]