Blicero

[Terrance]

jbor wrote:
> 
> I've been quoting selected excerpts from Molly Hite's excellent study
> entitled _Ideas of Order in the Novels of Thomas Pynchon_. Here's another:
> 
>       One index of the narrator's protean capacity to enter into the
>     motives and desires of the characters is the way that Blicero, the Nazi,
>     sadist, sexual pervert, nihilist, and murderer, emerges as disconcert-
>     ingly comprehensible and almost tragic. [ ... ]

Almost tragic? What does this mean, "almost tragic" ?????


> 
>     By an archetypal and eerily seductive displacement, Blicero translates
>     Rilkean self-surrender to filicide, so that in the closing sections
>     he plays Abraham to Gottfried's Isaac (pp. 749-50), acting out a
>     familiar paradigm of denying human ties in obedience to a seemingly
>     irrational higher will. By sacrificing his "son" to the rocket, Blicero
>     offers a grisly parody of acceptance. 



This "acceptance" is really a
>     repudiation of his own involvement in the natural cycle, "this cycle
>     of infection and death" (p. 724), 

Repudiation of the natural cycle. 

This cycle of infection and death is Blicero's conception
and stands in opposition to the natural cycle. 



and in a moment of dreadful sincerity
>     he tells Gottfried that his horror of his own mortality prompts him to
>     make a burnt offering of the younger man [ ... here she quotes the
>     passage from p. 723 of the novel beginning "oh Gottfried of course yes
>     you are beautiful to me..." ] In this moment, when Blicero reveals that
>     his infatuation with the rocket's version of the providential trajectory
>     stems from jealousy and self-loathing, he is disturbingly sympathetic.
>     It is not only his honesty that is unsettling; it is also the
>     implication that allegiance to any of the totalizing "structures
>     favoring death" arises from such quintessentially human motives.
>                                                 [pp. 147-8]
> 
> best

I find nothing to disagree with here.