Pynchon's Badass

[Terrance]

David Morris wrote:
> 
> >From: Eric Rosenbloom <ericr at sadlier.com>
> >"Choosing victimization" is perhaps better stated in this context as
> >"choosing martyrdom," that is, in principle, however vague, refusing to
> >live by The Man's terms
> 
> But the other aspect of the "Badass" is what links him to Blicero: the
> Mutant, the Monster, the Repressed.  Blicero is a Mutant, a product of the
> Death System.  He is its prophet.  They did not consciously produce him.  He
> too overtly expresses their nature.  His goal is an END to the cycle of
> death, to transcend and cross over.  He doesn't want to glorify or proclaim
> the realm which already IS, the death cycle.  Why should he?  He wants to go
> BEYOND.  He wants to end the death cycle.  This is what makes him heroic.
> 
> David Morris

I can't agree, because what he says is, 

"I want to break out--to leave this cycle of infection and
death. I want to be taken in love: so taken that you and I
will be gathered, inseparable, in the radiance of what we
would be come...." GR.724

The "cycle of infection and death" is Earth's cycle (Rilke,
not Weissman's misreading of Rilke), the cycle of life, of
Gravity and the fecund force that draws even those outright
hostile to it, even those allergic to the bananas, even the
snot, the shit, the piss and puke of the preterite, and  as
you say here, Blicero knows what Their cycle is,  he is the
god of the rationalized death serving order that is an
imitation, a pornographic and an inanimate usurping plastic
cycle of Death worship.  Can this be a heroic figure in GR?
How can he be heroic, David? He stands for all that is Death
as P uses it in GR capital D DEATH,  in this book, he stands
against all that is life and death. Even Molly Hite, who
wants like so many of P's best critics to credit the author
with great tenderness and sympathy, Thomas Moore goes her
one better in this regard, only errs in saying that Blicero
is "almost heroic," but she does not say that he is, he
cannot be heroic. Moore goes in search of the most beautiful
and tender and sympathetic passages in the book, he
discovers many of them, the ones that turn you over and make
you cry or laugh at the poetic genius of Thomas Pynchon, but
his study, an easy read like Hite's (not like Eddins,
completely misunderstood here I'm sorry to say) comes to the
same conclusion as all but a small handful of P's critics,
Blicero is beautiful, complicated, but evil and not heroic.