GR | Spoiler | Bilicero @ The Heath...

[Bryan Snyder]

great post.

I am not so educated about Don Quixote, so can someone give a reason/thought
about why Blicero's quest is quixotic?  Does that mean that it's futile? Or
Grand?  Impossible?

I never had someone force me to read Don Q. and it's one of those books,
like... say...  A Tale of Two Cities which a teacher had to force me to read
otherwise I would have never read it.

The image of the swastika is working for me... it's mandalic (spelling?
word?) and if one looks a bit at the history of the swastika's use by the
nazi's and why they picked that specific symbol works in the theme of the
whole "the occult DOES matter" themes of GR (meaning how realistically
Pynchon treats the supernatural and the seriousness he gives those themes as
well).

It's such a haunting image, Bliciero's description and the eye... what his
plan was for Gottfried

this whole thing was started because someone quoted a literary critic that
called into question both Scarsdale Vibe and Blicero's realness and
scariness and I thought that at least w/r/t/ Blicero - the point couldn't be
more off target and the likeness Scarsdale Vibe has to several high-level,
wealthy, turn of the century Americans is (to me and so far) very real and
very very scary.



On 3/6/07, Dave Monroe <against.the.dave at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On 3/6/07, Thomas Eckhardt <thomas.eckhardt at uni-bonn.de> wrote:
>
> > The combination of the cross and the circle seems to be GR's counterpart
> > to the letter/shape V. in "V." and the Tristero in COL49. It is
> > certainly an overdetermined image, for the reader as well as for
> > Slothrop: On page 624 of the Picador edition, shortly after we have
> > learned about van der Groov's windmill dream via Pirate Prentice,
> > Slothrop scratches a grafitto (the sign that says "Rocketman was here")
> > depicting the V2 from above. Slothrop then thinks of other "fourfold
> > expressions - variations on Frans van der Groov's cosmic windmill",
> > including the swastika. On page 625, shortly before he becomes a
> > crossroad himself, it says "Crosses, swastikas, Zone-mandalas, how can
> > they not speak to Slothrop?"
> >
> > We should also remember that Frans experiences the "purest form of
> > European adventure" (111) while obsessively aiming at and killing
> > Dodoes. The haakbus did probably not yet have crosshairs, and Pynchon
> > does not mention any, but the imagery certainly suggests a connection
> > between Frans' genocidal obsession with shooting Dodoes and the
> > "reticule of tree-branches" of the original quote.
> >
> > And then, of course, there is the wind that drives the mills....
>
> Thanks again, good to have you back ...
>
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