Hite

[jbor]

----------
>From: Terrance <lycidas2 at earthlink.net>
>

> almost tragic here,
> as I read Hite, is not like almost "going all the way,"  but
> rather like almost being pregnant, in other words, not
> tragic

So, you're saying that when Hite writes "almost tragic" she means "not
tragic"? That seems rather odd.

> She describes him accurately, as a "Nazi, sadist, sexual
> pervert, nihilist, and murderer."

She says that although he is these things he is "disconcertingly
comprehensible and almost tragic." (I assume she means 'to the reader',
don't you?)

> yes, she says the narrator, but of course she is still in
> the same  paragraph that began with ... so
> your suggestion that this is the narrator here doesn't help
> me understand your position.

According to Hite it is the narrator, and *not* Blicero, who invokes the
"alluring synthesis" of myth, idealism, and gnosticised technology.

Hite's note 37 merely indicates that that image in Rilke's tenth elegy can
be aligned with "rocket metaphysics", which is precisely what Blicero does.

> But most importantly, it
> is his loathing of the Natural World that motivates him to
> murder.

You really should have quoted the next bit as well, Terrance, if you had
wanted to keep things in their proper context:

    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]

You deny Hite's reference to the "familiar paradigm" which Blicero's
sacrifice of his "son" fulfils, by saying "all of the allusions here are
ironic". Which allusions? And, how does the irony operate? Does it operate
against Blicero, or against the protean narrator's "alluring synthesis" of
Christian mythology and rocket metaphysics? Certainly, your view diverges
from Hite's here, doesn't it? You still haven't responded to David Morris's
observation that "the 'cycle of infection and death' which _Blicero_ refers
to" is his Blicero's own take on the way "Nature's cycle" has been corrupted
(rather than his "misreading of Rilke", as you continually propose yet have
never substantiated), and Hite is making the same connection between the
"natural cycle" and what *Blicero* is calling "the cycle of infection and
death" as well.

Blicero is not a "god", but he is revered as something like a "god" by his
disciples. This is what makes him a Badass, like King Ludd, or Dillinger, or
even, as Scott has pointed out, Major Marvy.

best