Hite

[Dave Monroe]

But ...

--- jbor <jbor at bigpond.com> 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?)

I assume that as well.  However, apparently, in the
case of some readers (say, Terrance, myself, others),
she's mistaken ...

> > 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.

Keep in mind, "narrator" not necessarily equal to
"Thomas Ruggles Pynchon, Jr.," but, as we've been
ostensibly working on V., GR not at hand ...

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

But how to determine the "propriety" of "context"? 
Anyway ...


>     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]

This is "seductive," much less "sympathetic"?  I would
have quit at "disturbing," though do note all those
qualifiers, "eerily," "grisly," "parody," "dreadful,"
"disturbingly."  "Honesty," "sincerity" here does not
mitigate, redeem such actions, actions which may well
result in capital-D Destruction, Mutually Assured or
otherwise ...

> 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.

And I think that "badass" thing and why neither Marvy
nor Blicero (much less Weissmann) is one has been
clarified by Otto, albeit letting Pynchon do most of
the talking.  Reminds me, there's nifty chapter on the
importance of King Kong in David Cowart's Thomas
Pynchon: The Art of Allusion (Carbondale: Southern
Illinois UP, 1980).  Don't have at hand, else I might
have excerpted it here ...

__________________________________________________
Do You Yahoo!?
Get email at your own domain with Yahoo! Mail. 
http://personal.mail.yahoo.com/?.refer=text