Baddies in books: Captain Blicero in Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow

He may be satirical, but Pynchon’s unsettling, cruel and perverted Nazi is a composite of the fears of the American psyche in 1973

Thomas Pynchon’s Captain Blicero appears to be an archetypal baddie: a sadomasochistic, sexually indiscriminate pederast Nazi and the source of the mysterious 00000 V-2 rocket that is the white whale of Pynchon’s postmodern masterpiece Gravity’s Rainbow.

Blicero made his first appearance in Pynchon’s 1963 debut, V, as Lieutenant Weissman, a decadent German army officer stranded in the former South-West Africa seven years after it ceased to be a German colony. In this earlier novel, he is a mysterious, occasionally transvestite figure who appears to be engaged in a sadomasochistic relationship with the German agent Vera Merovering. He is sneaky too, potentially drugging and then stealing from another character, Kurt Mondaugen. More droll than disquieting, he is not yet a fully-fledged bad guy.

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