Word: horner
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Days Without Weather. Horner, just turned 28, has suffered a paralyzing case of "birthday despondency." A sinister Negro doctor brings him out of it. In describing the doctor's manifold therapies, Novelist Barth shows a true satirist's hatred for all the quackery visited by blind belief in the healing powers of science upon muddled, addled and wicked souls...
...doctor's methods include the Nutritional, Dynamic, Informational, Sexual, Devotional, Preoccupational, Virtue and Vice Therapies, not to mention Theotherapy and Atheotherapy. This genius-quack, "a kind of super-pragmatist," tells Patient Horner: "It would not be well in your case to believe in God. Religion will only make you despondent. But until we work out something for you it will be useful to subscribe to some philosophy. Why don't you read Sartre and become an existentialist? . . . Study the World Almanac: it is to be your breviary for a while...
...Jacob Horner goes off to the sunlit campus of Wicomico State Teachers, where he has wangled an instructor's job (English). He tries the World Almanac cure, but boning up on statistics about air line distances between principal cities only demonstrates that facts cannot minister to a diseased mind. He knows his bad days, when there is "no weather," a haunting waking and sleeping dream in which he is deprived of contact with the natural world. When Horner re-establishes contact with people, it is through the "pretty dedicated bunch" at Wicomico. Here he discovers his true calling...
Fallible Device. Soon, in his one-man campaign to stamp out mental health, Horner seizes on his fellow teacher Joe Morgan, the energetic pragmatist. Morgan's wife Rennie is a kindred empty spirit. Says Horner of her: "She had peered deeply into herself and had found nothing." Rennie herself seems to agree. Of her life before she met Joe, she says: "I just dreamed along like a big blob of sleep." Now she regards her Joe as her personal God. After she discovers, in a grotesque episode of peeping tomfoolery, that her husband is not God after...
...failure of that fallible device leads to a nightmare of abortion in which Horner's doctor is revealed as the evil destroyer of life, spirit and flesh. Existentialism and pragmatism have had it at the hands of a calculating crank...