blicero's sexuality

[Terrance]

Otto wrote:
> 
> "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.

sniped

Thanks again Otto, 

This also goes to Mondaugen and Weissman and as Moore
demonstrates, to Pokler and Blicero. 


Franz Pokler the rocket engineer is a Cartesian rationalist
who thinks he prefers always to move "by safe right angles
along the faint lines" (399). He might have been saved from
Blicero's plotting by his politically canny wife Leni, but
unfortunately the Poklers, with symmetrically opposite
psychologies, disengage and slide past each other: Leni
leaves Franz in favor of Peter Sachsa, her spiritualist /
revolutionist lover in Weimer Berlin. Leni manages to
combine political (1020s Leftist) idealism with holist
mysticism. Since for her, "everything in connected" in
politics as in the living universe, she disapproves of
Franz's "pure,"  apolitical interest in rockets, according
to which, for the sake of future "expeditions to Venus"
(401), Franz justifies taking development funds from Nazis
and blinks at the rocket's probable use as a weapon of war.
And Leni knows too that Frtanz's "rational" self and
self-image lies in his very German vulnerability, like
Blicero's, to "fantasy, death-wish, rocket-mysticism-Franz
is just the type they want. They know how to use that"
(154-55). Thus his dream to expeditions to Venus, ancient
V-1  of the morning, is necessarily also a mystical and
masochistic dream of V-2; target and craft, victim and
aggressor, morning and death-star all fusing in a single
inamorata that vamps him out of himself: 

Moore quotes GR,  (405-6) see the entire passage: 

He would become aware of a drifting away


...So he hunter, as a servo valve with a noisy input will,
across the Zone, between the two desires, personal identity
and imperial salvation.  


Political allegory: Polker, a "Victim in a Vacuum" (414), is
the Weimar German to whom it can seem that the fierce grids
of poverty, necessity, and confusion might be escaped if one
surrenders the "personal identity" with which democracy
burdens one to a promise of "personal salvation": the rocket
is Pokler's Nazism. During the war, Pokler and his personal
Fuhrer, Blicero, maneuver in an office political power game
whose stakes are, for Pokler, Isle, and for Blicero, Rocket
00000. The relationship models the perverse power relations
between totalitarian rulers and ruled and suggests as well
the perverse metaphor of inanimate systems'
"self-awareness," the rocket in flight parodying "life,"
creating I turn its creators' personal lives as impersonal
mechanisms, politics as technology as sadioinanimation as
"los[ing] Himself in His Work' (277). 

The Style of Connectedness, Thomas Moore 94-5
Moore makes judicious use of Love In The Western World

He does not note this passage from that text, but I thought
some might see the connection. 

>From one of P's sources, *Love In The Western World*, Denis
de Rougemont 

But Hitler's dictatorship, for the very reason that it
claimed to operate for racial and military ends, was bound
to address itself at the the very outset to repairing this
breakdown in the nation's morals. To begin with, the
anti-social ideal of 'happiness' and that of 'living
dangerously' were countered by the promotion of a collective
ideal. 'Gemeinnutz geht vor Eigennutz!' The general interest
comes before that of the individuals! Next, by means of
every spectacular, didactic, and even religious instrument
that it could devise, Hitlerism effected the extraordinary
transference (1) which resulted in making the one legitimate
and object of
passion the concept of a Nation symbolized in its Fuhrer.

The Totalitarian temptation is still there. We are not
forbidden to imagine that our democracies will one day yield
to it in the name of some 'science' or sociological hygiene.
The enforced practice of eugenics may succeed there where
all moral doctrines have failed, resulting in the effective
disappearance of any 'spiritual'--and hence artificial--need
of passion. The cycle of courtly love would be complete. The
Europe of passion will be no more. A new and unforeseeable
Europe would be taking its rise in the laboratory.   

(1) for the use of this term, see the chapter "The
Transplanting Of Passion Into Politics," where Hitler is
quoted.  D extrapolates and we can also turn to P's use of
Weber and "charisma," but here it is from D's  LWW: 

"the passionate influence over the masses described by
Hitler is accompanied by a rationalizing influence over
individuals. Furthermore, this influence is not obtained by
some agitator, but by the Leader who incarnates the Nation.
This is why the transference of passion from private to
public life has resulted in an unprecedented concentration
of power. It will need a superhuman passion to orchestrate
the stupendous catastrophe of passion become totalitarian."