175s

[jbor]

As I understood it, Paragraph 175 predates the Nazis by a generation or two
at least. Of course, we're talking about fictional 175s in a novel, but it
seems that the critical commonplace about fictional representations
referring to sociological, anthropological or historical actaulities seems
to have miraculously come into play again.

Blicero is openly homosexual throughout his career, in Sudwest, at
Nordhausen, and while commander of the rocket battery (see eg. 95.31,
404.15, 352.21). If that wasn't one of things that the SS guards at Dora
were "whispering" about I'd be extremely surprised. The choice of Blicero as
the 175s' top god *surely* has something to do with his homosexuality: what
other connection between them is there?

It is Thanatz who is advocating "sado-Anarchism" at 737.15, not the 175s.
Their society is anything but anarchist! I find it enormously ironic, not to
mention odd, that the Nazi-collaborator and pederast Thanatz is being
invoked as a narrator whose perspective is in alignment with the author's,
in order to support a totally idiosyncratic reading of Pynchon's supposed
Catholicism. I really don't think Miklos's narration, and attitudes and
opinions, are intended to be accepted at face value any more than Greta's
are.

What has happened to Gottfried's, Katje's and Enzian's love for and
adoration of Blicero in all of this?

best