Hite

[Terrance]

jbor wrote:
> 
> 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?)

Yup. 


> 
> > 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.

Can it be both and...?

"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 disconcertingly comprehensible and
almost tragic. 
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 (note #37)
"For Rilke this total surrender is a a precondition for
recognizing the seamless
continuity between life and death, self and world. In the
last stanza of his Tenth Elegy, Blicero's favorite poem, he
celebrates the cataclysmic inversion of values that turns
self- abnegation and even death into triumph. The imagery
transposes easily into the context of rocket metaphysics: 

And we, who have always thought
of happiness climbing, would feel
the emotion that almost startles
when happiness fails.
(Duino Elegies, P. 85) Trans. J.B. Leishman and Stephen
Spender, NY, 1939

> 
> 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]