MDDM Decadence

[Terrance]

In their Decadency these Virginians practice an elaborate Folly of
Courtly Love, unmodified since the Dark Ages


  -- RWC's  SDB, M&D.275

 Decadence? 

A process, condition, or period of deterioration or decline, as in
morals or art; decay. 

Of course the word is also defined in the novel V. 
as,  "a falling away from the human." 

In terms of GW and Gersh, an interesting comparison might be
Winsome/Sphere. 

In the SDB entry, the RC sounds quite a lot like the conservative
narrator of V. (that is Stencil & Co.). 

In fact, RC is the narrator of M&D just as Stencil is the narrator of V. 
The parallels are too many to outline just now, but it's obvious that
M&D is a novel close on the heels of V. 

We can  read RC's conservative
moralizing as the author's position, but this kind of reading can not be
squared with the liberal politics often attributed to the author. 

We can, however, attribute these politics to Pynchon's sources, i.e.,
Henry Adams and Denis de Rougemont. 

 In all likelihood, courtly chivalry was never more than an ideal. The
earliest writers to mention it commonly lament its decay, but in doing
so they overlook that in the form which they would like it to assume it
has only just come into existence in their dreams. It is the essence of
an ideal that its decay should be lamented in the very moment it is
clumsily striving for fulfillment. Moreover, to contrast the fiction of
some ideal of living with tyrannical reality is precisely something
possible in romance. 

Denis De Rougemont, LWW 
  

  In the early days of colonization, every new settlement represented an
idea and proclaimed a mission. Virginia was founded by a great, liberal
movement aiming at the spread of English liberty and empire. The
Pilgrims of Plymouth, the Puritans of Boston, the Quakers of
Pennsylvania, all avowed a moral purpose, and began by making
institutions that consciously reflected a moral idea. No such character
belonged to the colonization of 1800. From Lake Erie to Florida, in
long, unbroken line, pioneers were at work, cutting into the forests
with the energy of so many beavers, and with no more express moral
purpose than the beavers they drove away. The civilization they carried
with them was rarely illumined by an idea; they sought room for no new
truth, and aimed neither at creating, like the Puritans, a government of
saints, nor, like the Quakers, one of love and peace; they left such
experiments behind them, and wrestled only with the hardest problems of
frontier life. No wonder that foreign observers, and even the educated,
well-to-do Americans of the sea-coast, could seldom see anything to
admire in the ignorance and
brutality of frontiersmen, and should declare that virtue and wisdom no
longer guided the United States
To a new society, ignorant and
semi-barbarous, a mass of demagogues insisted on applying every
stimulant that could inflame its worst appetite, while at the same
instant taking away every influence that had hitherto helped to restrain
its passions. Greed for wealth, lust for power, yearning for the blank
void of savage freedom such as Indians and wolves delight in, -- these
were the fires that flamed under the cauldron of American society, in
which, as conservatives believed, the old, well-proven, conservative
crust of religion, government, family, and even common respect for age,
education, and experience was rapidly melting away, and was indeed
already broken into fragments, swept about by the seething mass of scum
ever rising in greater quantities to the surface. 

   

  --Henry Adams, American Ideals 1800

Roger Kimball, The Long March: How the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s
         Changed America


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