douglas fowler

[Terrance]

Otto wrote:
> 
> Terrance, do you consider Fowler's approach not postmodern? He's been the
> one that got me hooked on binary oppositions.

I should not have used that stupid word. It's not a matter of Modern,
Postmodern, Postmodernist. The matter is, should a person spend $100 on
the book and my advice is that if I were that person with $100 to spend
I would not buy Fowler, I would buy a used copy of Weisenburger and take
Rosita out to lunch. And, if I got her out for brunch I would buy
Rilke's novel or that new book that caused such a fuss on the Oprha
Winfrey show. Yeah, Moore is a good read, although I was disappointed
with the part on the gods in GR and I'm not sure he got the Norbert
Weinder correct at all. The chapters on science are very good because he
goes through some basic stuff and explains that Pynchon is not a rocket
scientist but a novelist. 

Kyle, I would rather read Toni Morrison's Song Of Solomon than Fowler on
Pynchon any day. But that's just how I feel about it.  I would love to
teach GR so I could have an excuse for reading it again and again and I
may get the chance to do just that, but I got to thinking maybe that is
a very selfish thing to do because I think half the students would not
finish it. Life, if you are blessed, is choices. Harold Bloom once said,
we can't read them all. Coming from him that's good advice. What do want
to read? Man, that's not too bad. You can read Fowler or Faulkner,
Pynchon or Spiderman, the Village Voice or the Daily News. A nice thing
about Pynchon-l is that we all like to read and talk about what we have
read or might read or tried and didn't like. Most of us don't lioke this
internet list stuff as much as reading a good book or going to the park,
but we do have an opportunity to talk books with other people who give a
shit sometimes. 


> 
> You may not like the idea but GR *is* structured the way of the War of the
> Worlds, one of GR's theses is that the economy has become like something
> supernatural that threatens "our" world (the core of all gothic).

Structured? I don't know about that. I'll agree that this "thesis" is
one of the things going on in the book:  the Gnostic economy--the
business of the War, conspiracy of markets, synthesis and control of
technologies and labor, alliances expediently made and unmade.... and
that Fowler's comparison has some merit, but I can't go so far as to
agree that TWW and GR share a common structure.   It seems to me that
GR, if it has a structure, is structured by the trajectory of
rocket/Rocket in the theatre/Theater. 

> 
> Far worse you say, but I'd say that his whole genre *is* this indictment.
> Not anti-American, not anti-Christian, not anti-Catholic, not
> anti-Protestant, but an indictment that the way the world has been run
> before and past WW-2 by Western Christian civilization will (maybe it's
> still so, even after 1990?) lead to the end of all mankind.

I beg to differ, in GR at least, the Western Christians have no more
control over the running of the world than the Eastern non-Christians or
anyone else. Little old Slothrop and his penis seem to be controlling
quite a lot of the world in the novel. Moreover, those that think they
can control the world or that they are somehow in control of nature are
fatally mistaken.