blicero's sexuality

[jbor]

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>From: "Otto" <o.sell at telda.net>
>

> 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.

I'm not sure I agree with this, or that it's Pynchon's message. Shit is part
of the natural cycle -- organic shit at least. So is death.

> 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.

I think you, like Eddins, have constructed a false binary here. What is the
"common order of sexuality" as represented in _GR_? Is it Roger and Jessica,
for example, whose sexual lusts are aroused the further into the s-w London
No-go Zone they venture for their trysts, where the danger of annihilation
from the falling rockets becomes an aphrodisiac? In your construct of "the
common order of sexuality" they are really only having as much "fun" and
"social contact" as Blicero, Katje and Gottfried are, and the opportunity or
intention to procreate is no greater.

> 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.

I guess we will continue to disagree on Enzian's willingness as sexual
partner: the fact that it is he rather than Weissmann who *initiates* the
only sexual act between them which is represented in the text is very
significant imo.

snip

> Blicero's Oven-game, the upside-down turned fairytale, is meant to kill
> Hänsel aka Gottfried.

Remember that Katje's playing the Oven-game as well. There is nothing
"upside down" about it. The witch in the fairy tale always intended to put
Hansel and Gretel into the oven. But the point in _GR_ is that both Blicero
and Katje are *conscious* of the reversal at the end of the fairy tale which
sees the witch in the oven instead. It adds a perverse element of
Schadenfreude to the game; it's perverse in that Blicero knows it's his own
fate to be the one finally pushed into the oven and yet he still consciously
plays out the role, delights in it in fact. But it's no more perverse than
the game Roger and Jessica play, consciously putting each other's lives in
jeopardy just to have, and to heighten the thrill of, sex.

> But these are no statements about homosexuality in general. I can see no
> homophobia in what Eddins states.

I can see homophobia in the paradigm you have constructed above as well. The
notion that one "purpose" of sexuality is, or has to be, procreation,
doesn't really apply to the majority of human sexual encounters, whether
straight or gay. Never has. This is not to say that *you* are homophobic, or
to try to insult you or stop you from expressing your point of view. The
argument you are making about the purpose of sexuality is constructed on an
anti-homosexual, rather than an anti-procreational, foundation.
>
> 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?

Yes we do. That last image of Gottfried and he in the text at 724.10 places
Blicero in the passive role: "*Blicero is looking at him."* He is a frail
old man: white-faced, myopic, has been chain-smoking. He is waiting for
Gottfried to make his choice. The boy is frightened, not because he is being
coerced into anything but because, for once, "he has a decision to make".
The emotional intensity is electric: "*Why is he suddenly asking* . . . "

By the way, who counts as a Nazi? Blicero the bureaucrat, certainly; but
what about Katje when she is working for the S.S. in Holland? What about
Gottfried, a German soldier? What of Pokler, Leni, Mondaugen, Thanatz,
Greta? Perhaps not card-carrying party members, but ... supporting ...
working for ... citizens of ... Nazi Germany ... ? Aren't they?

> 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?

Weissmann goes where he is sent in his job/s. His "favourite spots", from my
reading of the text, are when he is with Enzian, or playing house with
Gottfried and Katje, or reading Rilke.

> 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.

For one, Kai said that Eddins' *interpretation* was homophobe and stuffy,
and it is. It doesn't help when a simple statement like this is twisted to
say that Kai is name-calling. There is an implicit heterosexual bias in the
construction that sexuality's purpose is procreation -- even when it is
hedged as only one of three -- because the only reason for including this in
the "rule" of what constitutes "common" (your word) or the "natural order
of" (Eddins's phrase) sexuality is to effect the exclusion of homosexual
intercourse. It's as simple as that. Acts of heterosexuality which don't
have procreation as their purpose (such as Rog and Jess's) are in fact
equally as common and "natural" as those which do, more so. So, why is
homosexuality being deemed to be uncommon, or "unnatural", on this score.

Re. Pudding as Hitler: it is Pointsman who is exploiting the Brigadier's WWI
memories through Katje. And, in Holland, it is the Dutch Resistance who are
similarly exploiting Blicero by using Katje. A question to be asking is: how
come, if Weissmann is only a homosexual sadist, he allows Katje into his
life and home? Some critics have found it necessary to argue that she is
only there to arouse Gottfried, though there is no solid textual basis for
this I think. Gottfried seems to think of her more as a sister than be
turned on by her, and is no less loyal to Blicero before she appears or
after she leaves. She certainly doesn't seem to be, or to have been, playing
up to Gottfried.

best