resonances with joseph furphy

[julian nasti]

hey there,

i'm 16, and i'll be darned if i'm not one of the youngest ever readers of 
gravity's rainbow. i'd just like to make a few, rather naive and desultory 
remarks about my impressions of the tome as a whole...

this, especially for non-australian (ie. 99.9999% of p-list) subscribers, 
may seem a rather obscure reference, but what struck me upon first reading 
was the distinctive parallels between the overall structure and textual 
modality of gr and that of joseph furphy's late 19th century australian 
classic "such is life".

"Such Is Life" presaged many of the techniques of the modernist movement - 
especially those of stream of consciousness and shifting point of 
view/narratorial perspective (note especially faulkner's "the sound and the 
fury") and held to some of the tenets of the post-modernist movement, 
namely, the rejection of plot as a defensible novelistic concept. Now I'm 
not saying that narratorial voice/perspective changes much at all during 
gravity's rainbow (though I still maintain that the more comic sections of 
gr, un perm' au casino hermann goering, the bit with the troupe of monkeys 
and all the capers around the v2 test stands at swinmunde or peenemunde or 
whatever, pynchon does change the characteristics of his narratorial voice 
to some extent), and, in fact, passages in gr (despite their occassional 
complete obscurity) may very rarely be described as stream of consciousness.

damn. gotta run. i was gonna say that, in a similar vein as to how furphy 
uses the structure (characterised by shifting voice) of his masterpiece to 
reflect the then nascent concept of Democracy in Australia, pynchon uses the 
sheer intricacy and obfuscatory textual modality of gr to reflect the 
unfathomable complexity of Modern Technology (represented by the v2)and that 
he's some sort of Jethro Tull figure...this is all really badly 
articulated...i'll have more time soon...

jules
________________________________________________________________________
Get Your Private, Free E-mail from MSN Hotmail at http://www.hotmail.com