MDDM Decadence

David Morris fqmorris at hotmail.com
Wed Jul 10 09:57:00 CDT 2002


>From: "Monica Belevan" <meet_mersault at hotmail.com>
>
>There is a separate understanding of ´´ decadence´´ in the 19th century, 
>best personified by the French poetes maudits.
>
>It is an aesthetic understanding of decadence, a certain macabre allure for 
>idealized dark. I think this perceptual understanding of the term, and not 
>the Websterian definition( Webster dictionary defintion, that is, and not 
>the poet Webster, ´´ much possessed by Death´´, who is, himself, fittingly 
>decadent), is what Pynchon´s prose buys into.
>
>Some of his characters and situations are very representative of this 
>particular periphery of vision: Blicero, with his Rilkean affectation, La 
>Jarretiére as a porcelain lola, the complete canon for schlemilhood...


Maybe (or not) your take on "decadence" above is Pynchon's personal take, 
but Terrance's focus was significantly on the both book's conservative 
narrator's P.O.V. as further exemplified in his quote from Henry Adams.  
_V._ is full of statement/explorations of the concept. At it's center the 
word is a moralistic one exposing the prejudices of the speaker.  Here are 
some telling examples from _V._ (gleaned from the HyperArts site):

"the world can only be rescued from certain decay through Heroic Love." 125

"Pig Bodine a byword of decadence throughout the squadron" 218

"This sort of arranging and rearranging was Decadence, but the exhaustion of 
all possible permutations and combinations was death." 298

Roman Catholicism "always becomes fashionable during a Decadence" 353

"a falling away from what is human," 405



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