blicero's sexuality

[Otto]

>
>
>  "by dressing as a woman with artificial genitalia fashioned from various
>  synthetics and by interdicting the natural attraction between gottfried
>  and katje, blicero is undertaking to found a competing sexual order,
>  one that is entirely the product of human imagination rather than the
>  natural instincts and that serves death - the oven - rather than life."
>  (dwight eddins: the gnostic pynchon, pp. 148f.)
>
>
>  isn't this interpretation a little stuffy, if not homophobe?
>
>  weissmann's passionate "polymorph perversity" makes him, imo,
>  all too human.
>
>  compare this to pointsman!
>
>                                        frontschwester frederieke
>
>

Eros-Thanatos

Generally, the "Evil" Pynchon is telling about in his novels was/is working
on both sides of the Channel (and the Atlantic as well), today worldwide as
the Luddite-essay indicates.

Our race is in love with death, promoting, spreading death. Our excrements
are wasting the planet. With a shit-eatin' grin on our faces we're on our
way to the world's suicide. This is the 70's message and it has not been
turned down or proven wrong yet.

So it's no wonder that we see deadly sexual games on both sides of the
actual war-in-the-novel which is, as we have seen, only "theatre" - "They"
are backing up both sides.

Some of you guys out there are right that Blicero is condemned much to
easily by the common reader but I don't see that Eddins judges him in any
way morally by observing that the common (to avoid the term "natural"
because homosexuality isn't unnatural) order of sexuality (which got at
least three purposes, fun, social contact, and proliferating mankind which
won't happen and isn't achieved at the two Weissmann-parties we're informed
about in Pynchon's novels) is changed, reversed or whatever to an order that
is only proliferating death and no fun anymore.

Not the sexual act itself - no, but the circumstances under which it is
acted out. The achieved "control" of everything - even the sexual relations.
While the White can play Master&Servant the Black who are the really
servants are victims of  a genocide.
There are people dying at Foppl's Party, Foppl's own stories tell of sexual
slavery, rape and death in SüdWest.
Blicero's Oven-game, the upside-down turned fairytale, is meant to kill
Hänsel aka Gottfried.
But these are no statements about homosexuality in general. I can see no
homophobia in what Eddins states. Homosexuality is just a "Spielart" (in
this context a wonderful German term for 'type of') of sexuality. How should
it not be affected when S&M pornographic movies can father shadow-children.

What Eddins says about "another order" build up *entirely* of "human
imagination" is supported by Denis Crowley in "Before the Oven" (PN 42-43,
pp. 181-198). He's got a lot to say so here just two pieces.

"The Oven-state's romanticised idea of a feudal past, its participants'
obsession with destiny and the structuring of its power relations in
accordance with a charismatic Führer principle indicate that it shares many
features with the National Socialist state." (185)

I don't think that one can compare Blicero's games with the games of
innocent children as indicated by the term "polymorph perversity" Kai used
to describe the only important nazi who has a major function in the novel.
Do we ever see him in a submissive position?

So why Pynchon's only descriptions of a chief-nazi's favourite spots
(Weissman is agitating at least since 1922) and the ones of the highest
British officer we get to know are images which, let's put it mildly, are
taken out of Krafft-Ebing (232) or the "120 Days of Sodom" - remember
Pasolini?

What has this to do with literature?

"(...) the function of the game is to narrativize control, and in this it
reveals many characteristics of "Fascist aesthetics," which, according to
Susan Sontag, "flow from and justify a preoccupation with situations of
control, submissive behavior, extravagant effort, and the endurance of pain;
they endorse two seemingly opposite states, ego-mania and servitude."
[Sontag, A Susan Sontag Reader, 1983, p. 316, quoted by Crowley, p. 187].

The meta-narratives that rule our written past always had the function to
guarantee the status quo and the Nazi burning-books thing was an attempt to
turn back the time when only one story ruled: the male, hierarchical story
which is described very well by Sontag.

I simply don't get Kai's point. There's no condemnation of homosexuality
here, no homophobia, neither in Pynchon nor in Eddins nor in Terrance F.
Flaherty.

It's all about the abuse of sexuality (any kind of), a human need, for
immoral political or private purposes, and the innumerable literary and
cultural references the binary opposition of Eros-Thanatos provides.

Back to sex:
Compared to Pointsman's sex (which is poor, only one blowjob in the whole
novel as far as I remember) Weissmann's sexuality of course is much
"richer" - when the Oven-game won't work anymore he changes to Wilhelm
Tell - our narrative past is full of this stuff that can be used by "Them"
to make other people die for them in their "games".

But I would prefer to compare Blicero not to Pointsman, but to Pudding, who
is linked to Weissmann through Katje in the shit-game. Pynchon turns the
sides again, reverses the oppositions here too like he always does. It's the
fictional British officer vs the historical deutsche Gefreite here but their
essential WW-I experiences are the same and so is their posttraumatic
stress-disorder resulting from this. Sorry, it's not only what Pynchon
thinks about a Golden Shower, or it's a simple coincidence that Pudding
lives out a sexual fantasy with Katje which is exactly the fantasy Hitler
lived out too (or would have liked to), with his nice Geli Raubal -his only
"real love"- who turned away from him and committed suicide (if we may
believe this) after he had written her a letter with a specific content
about his sexual fantasies which were precisely like Pudding's as described
in the Domina Nocturna-episode.

This is quite different from what JJ did with Nora Barnacle or wrote to her
(Selected Letters of James Joyce, edited by Richard Ellmann, Faber & Faber,
3 Queen Square, London, 1975, pp. 180ff, 2. December 1909, MS Cornell) or
has written in his literature, always trying to break up and reveal the
meta-narratives. In the fourth chapter of 'Ulysses' Bloom reads on the john
and wipes his ass afterwards with his lecture.

Otto