NEILSCHMITZ
no sexual interest to anyone, and yet here are their sons, still trapped
inside inertias of lust that are 40 years out of date . The fathers have no
power today and never did , but because 40 years ago we could not kill
them , we are condemned now to the same passivity , the same masochist
fantasies
they
cherished in secret, and worse, we are condemned in our
weakness to impersonate men of power our own infant children must
hate . .. So generation after generation of men in love with pain and
passivity serve out their time in the Zone , silent, redolent of faded sperm ,
terrified of dying, desperately addicted to the comforts others sell them,
however useless , ugly or shallow, willing to have life defined for them by
men whose only talent is for death.
125
Thus Pynchon restores Ahab to us, Captain Blicero of the SS, the evil
father whose malice is our only hope of heroism, whose metaphysical
ass-fucking promises us a glamorous death, death with our boots on. But
seemingly to no avail. "The petit-bourgeois is a man unable to imagine the
Other," Roland Barthes writes in
Mythologies .
" Ifhe comes face to face with
him, he blinds himself, ignores and denies him, or else transforms him into
himself. In the petit-bourgeois universe, all the experiences of confrontation
are reverberating, any otherness is reduced to sameness." This has been
Pynchon's fate, the smarmy embrace of toleration. He shares the National
Book Award this year with Isaac Bashevis Singer.
