Blicero

[Terrance]

jbor wrote:
> 
> I've been quoting selected excerpts from Molly Hite's excellent study
> entitled _Ideas of Order in the Novels of Thomas Pynchon_. Here's another:
> 
>       One index of the narrator's protean capacity to enter into the
>     motives and desires of the characters is the way that Blicero, the Nazi,
>     sadist, sexual pervert, nihilist, and murderer, emerges as disconcert-
>     ingly comprehensible and almost tragic. [ ... ]

And this paragraph continues

Blicero kills his paramour and symbolic son, Gottfried
(whose name, "the peace of God," is heavily ironic), out of
intense loathing for the natural world. By invoking an
alluring synthesis of Greek and Hebrew mythology, German
idealism, and Kabbalized technology, the narrator is able to
communicate both this loathing and the extent to which it
permeated Western civilization: 

"Want the change," Rilke said, "O be inspired by the flame!"
To laurel, to nightingale, to wind...wanting it, to be
taken, to embrace, to fall toward the flame growing to fill
all the senses and...not to love because it was no longer
possible to act...but to be helplessly in a condition of
love....(p.96; Pynchon's ellipses 

here there is a note #37

should we read it? 

I would. 

Then she continues with what jbor posted: 



> 
>     By an archetypal and eerily seductive displacement, Blicero translates
>     Rilkean self-surrender to filicide, so that in the closing sections
>     he plays Abraham to Gottfried's Isaac (pp. 749-50), acting out a
>     familiar paradigm of denying human ties in obedience to a seemingly
>     irrational higher will. By sacrificing his "son" to the rocket, Blicero
>     offers a grisly parody of acceptance. This "acceptance" is really a
>     repudiation of his own involvement in the natural cycle, "this cycle
>     of infection and death" (p. 724), and in a moment of dreadful sincerity
>     he tells Gottfried that his horror of his own mortality prompts him to
>     make a burnt offering of the younger man [ ... here she quotes the
>     passage from p. 723 of the novel beginning "oh Gottfried of course yes
>     you are beautiful to me..." ] In this moment, when Blicero reveals that
>     his infatuation with the rocket's version of the providential trajectory
>     stems from jealousy and self-loathing, he is disturbingly sympathetic.
>     It is not only his honesty that is unsettling; it is also the
>     implication that allegiance to any of the totalizing "structures
>     favoring death" arises from such quintessentially human motives.
>                                                 [pp. 147-8]
> 
> best


The book is, although I disagree with its
secualar-historical reading, wonderful.

"By invoking an alluring synthesis of Greek and Hebrew
mythology, German idealism, and Kabbalized technology, the
narrator is able to communicate both this loathing and the
extent to which it permeated Western civilization;" 

see above...then Rilke....then note #37 and the rest jbor
quoted...and to the conclusion of this  very readable and
astute take on GR. 

But Hite, as has been the case here on this list and more
generally in P criticism, does 
not really address the "alluring synthesis of Greek and
Hebrew mythology, German idealism, and Kabbalized
technology" and we should add another, maybe  20 or more
religion/myth invocations to Hite's  "alluring synthesis",
in short the catholic Pynchon. 

The card? What about it? The end of the text is in part
fragmented by silent films and all sorts of things come
together. To say it is indeterminate w/o first saying what
the Hell it is or what on Earth it is, is cutting the wind,
not the ice. 
 





		Fire and Ice

                Some say the world will end in fire,
                       Some say in ice.
                  From what I've tasted of desire
                 I hold with those who favor fire.
                   But if it had to perish twice,
                  I think I know enough of hate
                  To say that for destruction ice
                        Is also great
                      And would suffice.

                       --Robert Frost


Still waiting to here a serious critique of dwight eddins'
*Gnostic Pynchon*