blicero's sexuality

[Otto]

I wrote:
> 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.

you wrote:
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.
------------------------------------
There has never been a race on this planet that was able to destroy the
whole thing and this ability has a lot to do with V-2 rockets.

I wrote:
> 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.

you wrote:
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.
---------------------------------------
The only binary I have used was Eros-Thanatos.

I wrote:
> 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.

you wrote:
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.
-------------------------------------------
I absolutely agree with both things you say here but my explanation is
different. As I said in our earlier discussion I think that what we read in
V. gives way to the interpretation that the boy has been raped before by
Christian priests so he believes that this is the way it has to be. And this
is totalitarism: making others believe that the bad things which are done to
them are quite ok and the way it has to be.

snip

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

you wrote:
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.
----------------------------------------------------
Katje is a victim of the Oven-game as Gottfried, and the original fairytale
*is* turned upside down in Weissmann's perverted game because it's not the
witch that is meant to go into the Oven at last as with the Brothers Grimm
but the children. We know in advance when we read the original fairytale
that the children will be saved. Here we have no doubts that Gottfried will
have to die in the end.

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

You wrote:
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 can see misunderstanding of homophilia you are presenting here.
My argument about the three functions of sexuality (fun, social contact and
babies) isn't mine at all but the point of universitarian psychology about
sexuality. If you see homophobia in this you are simply wrong because the
kind of sex isn't mentioned at all. It's only logical that homosexuality
misses one third of the definition but of course in real life this doesn't
make gay worse then hetero, only in the eyes of puritans maybe who are just
to cowardly to give in into the fact that no hetero can deny that we all got
a little bit of it in ourselves too, that it might be nice to provide a
blowjob instead of receiving one.

I wrote:
>
> 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?

You wrote:
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* . . . "
-------------------------------------------------
You should better answer to Kai's posts or do you really agree with him that
the fictional character of Weissmann aka Blicero is playing innocent
children doctor games as the misused term "polymorph perversity" indicates.

Blicero in the passive role: "*Blicero is looking at him."*
You forgot to snip in the sentence before this: "Gottfried kneels..." A very
submissive position of Weissmann indeed, looking at the boy kneeling in
front of him...
------------------------------------------------
You wrote:
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?
-------------------------------------------------

Blicero is no simple civil servant as your expression "bureaucrat"
expresses. He is SS-officer and running a rocket battery.
Katje is Secret Service. She's no nazi of course, but what is worse than
this is the fact that she is working for "Them" on both sides of the channel
until she joines the counterforce.
Gottfried as an soldier isn't necessarily NSDAP-member, but of course is
full of the nazi-education that makes him an easy victim.
Pöckler and Mondaugen behave like Mondaugen says in V. - not interested in
politics but in technology. This makes them usable for "Them" - they let
themselves instrumentalize.
And on all the others: of course they were all you say or as Goldhagen has
put it so masterly: Hitler's Willing Executioners. They may have been only a
million or so actually be "working" on the Holocaust but what is striking
(and really disturbing to me) about it, is the fact that it could have been
another million, totally different German individuals and the Holocaust
would have happened as well.

I wrote.
> 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?


You wrote:
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.
-------------------------------------------------
In my reading of the text it's the "Berlin-Rome Axis" and other S&M-stuff
and Weissmann always on the "S"- and never on the "M"-side. And his "job"
was never to play S&M-games but agitating in SüdWest or keeping up his
rocket-site. We know that in reality Hitler wasn't interested at all what
games his fellow-nazis played in private as long as they did their "job" -
which was torturing and killing people.

I wrote:
> 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.


You wrote:
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.
----------------------------------------------------
No, the fun-thing, one-third of the definition, can be homoerotic as well.
It's an assertion that homosexual intercourse is excluded by it.
The fact that one major function of sexuality is procreation cannot be
discussed away and isn't homophobe at all. The "original" function of
sexuality is procreation, induced by hormons. This cannot be denied. What we
have made out of it is social contact and fun. But it's still hormons and
lot of pheromons. "It's as simple as that."
And of course there is (and always will be) a hetero bias on sexuality in
general because mankind would have died out for long if it wasn't.
I say it again: there's no fun in the games Weissmann likes to play and if
he would not have his position as a major nazi (are there higher ranked
nazis in the novel?) he wouldn't be able to play it - in fact if he wasn't a
powerful nazi he would become an inmate of an 175-camp himself.
-----------------------------------------------------

You wrote:
Re. Pudding as Hitler: it is Pointsman who is exploiting the Brigadier's WWI
memories through Katje.


Did you know the similarity of both fantasies?
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You wrote:
And, in Holland, it is the Dutch Resistance who are
similarly exploiting Blicero by using Katje.

ex-ploit: use selfishly, or for one's own profit

Seems as if we are using different dictionaries. The only ones I can see
exploiting various people are Blicero and Pointsman.

------------------------------------------------------
You wrote:
A question to be asking is: how
come, if Weissmann is only a homosexual sadist, he allows Katje into his
life and home?
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No Hänsel& Gretel Oven-game without a Gretel.
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best