Nixon & GR

[Heikki Raudaskoski]

Thanks for unveiling what GR is about. What is more, its essence is
easy enough to memorize: Nixonland around 1970. For 25 years, I've
been trying to figure out what to make of the novel's encyclopedic
and stylistic exuberance, so the revelation was long overdue.

However, the Finnish translation of GR, "Painovoiman sateenkaari",
comes out in April, and I don't know what to think of its fragilely
celluloid cover. E.g., what is this "B" on the side of the rocket?
Gottfried's buttocks?

http://www.risingshadow.fi/library_link/images/books/6810.jpg


Heikki

P.S. C o n g r a t u l a t i o n s, tofuman!


On Wed, 16 Jan 2013, alice wellintown wrote:

> One could write a book on this subject, and perhaps some ambitious
> young scholar will do so....as we wait for this we might consider how
> Nixon fits into the networks that GR explores, and how the old
> network, the setting of the romance, the War, functions as the Puritan
> American period does in The Scarlet Letter or in the Cruciable, but
> the novel is about, its contemporaries and the lives in the balance,
> and so the new network, and, of course, the new money; yes,  P's
> concern is with new money and the Nixon period, not with the old
> money, though readers have often focused on the Nazis and the Standard
> Oil, ICI, and IG Farben Octopus, but just as P explains how Orwell has
> been misread as saying something about the past, or as a propher, he
> is neither, and neither is P prescient, but only writing about his
> world, the new money world of Nixon, so of aerospace and defense
> contracting, of oil, and natural gas, and of the alliances, yes, the
> military industrial complex alliance,  formed around these domestic
> opperations, in contrast with the international IG Farben and Standard
> Oil and so on of the War Period...of the setting of the novel's
> historical events, so we need to look, to a zone actually, but that
> zone is not European History, but American Expereince circa 1970, and
> so, as TSI and CL49 suggest, we need to look at real-estate operations
> during the postwar period, and the new money invested there, in the
> sunbelt, where the population explodes and so....Nixon.
>
> To argue that the book declines as it brings this into focus, or
> foregrounds it, is to engage in a selective misreading, as the
> evidence of the theater that is America circa 1970, as aopposed to the
> theatre that is the War in Europe is there from the very first
> page....and when we meet Malcolm X, or Little, and as we read on into
> the post-Invisible Man Nixonian  American Experience, there can be no
> mistake as to where we are: in Nixonland.
>