Rilke & Page 666 in my text ;-)

[alice wellintown]

see "Deviations." page 319

Sexual relations in GR are not so much an expression of
human desire, as symbolic of the attempt to transcend the cycle of
life and death ( Earth's
Natural realm) through violent sado-masochistic acts and other
"deviations" or anti-fertile SUICIDE.

Japan is the best current example of this pathology, one Pynchon never
stops writing about. In fact, while some read his VL, as Robin does,
as some kinda Feminist Awakening to a Rainbow world where sexuality is
orientated far to the Left of Pynchon's confession in SL Introduction,
this kind of reading is not only a mis-reading of the author's
attitude, which has not changed that much, his tone, but also, because
it is obvious, very obvious that the author has been concerned about
sexual repression and its impact on culture since his Farina days, but
to skew him to the Left of Wica Lesbians and Village queers is to miss
the point.  The pathology in Japan, akin to the Oedipal struggles and
the Sick Dynamo Mothers of GR, is an idea young Pynchon developed, in
part, from Orwell's 1984. So, China, in some respects, a cult Sold on
Suicide, though India too has been slaughtering its females, is,
because it is a totalitatian fascist state, whereas, America, not
Amerika, is a democratic one that has spilled its fecundity and broken
its promises.

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=120696816


So if you read the list of "sexual acts" (318-19) and
consider several of the most important themes and metaphors
and ideas and symbolisms-- color for example,  white
and black, the male sperm is white, white being the
color of the Rocket and  Man's attempts
to dominate natural cycles and so on. This white seed  flows
into black feces, the color of the repressed,
and this causes a poisoning (Angel and Rilke), a
poisoned manure. A poisoning, we are told at several  points
in the novel, that is Angelic--the Angel from Rilke to GR is
the anti-Holy Ghost, the present dispensation (a religious
term) , and remember that fathers carry
the poison, the sickness, be it Christian or in Freudian
terms the Oedipal situation in the Zone.

Also ("once only" for example, and "sold on suicide," "the empty ones"...this
is in fact what is happening in the sewer, Benny's contract
with the alligators, destroyer and destroyed in V. and so
on, it's a religious bond).

Again, I think it is not a matter of anal intercourse being
"death orientated" and "sterile," (although this is its symbolic
function in GR.

It is one act of many, and the sexual "Deviations" serve larger themes,
in fact, sex in all of Pynchon's fiction functions as such.

In any event, P's novels, the themes of his fiction include
a gnosticizing, the "Neo-Platonic Nature". So, for example,
the conviction that the material universe and its God are
evil,  that temporality is slavery; that salvation, being contingent
cannot be sought; that
humans are now forced to lead an inauthentic life in a treacherous
dream world, or nightmare,  like the "Oneirine
hauntings"(GR 703) or the reference to the "Dark Dream" (GR
697) suggest; that by despising such a world they experience
an existential estrangement (GR 660) and the
"bitterest of freedoms" (GR 704); finally, that they suffer
a self-destructive licentiousness, as in the moral
deviations through which the Hereros attempt to commit
racial suicide (GR 319).



>From the Gnostic perspective in P's fiction,
moral laws are "Their" laws, the product of a conspiracy
against Man & Life, so human beings are free to ignore them and may
even violate them rebelliously.

In fact, the case with a rebellious character like Blicero is much the
same as that
of Melville's Ahab whose mad rantings, as many a Melville
scholar has argued,  only become intelligible when seen from
a Gnostic perspective, but as the white whale is almost like
a Rocket, think about how it is different, Blicero is a
different Ahab altogether.

See Thomas Vargish, "Gnostic Mythos in Moby-Dick," PMLA 81,
No.3 (June 1966) , pp. 272-77.

And the other essay, the Rocket and the Whale, but I'll have
to look up the citation.