MDDM Decadence

[Monica Belevan]

Let me dish out answers here and there:

Gregoire-- ´´decadentism´´, is, in fact, the art of supreme affectation, and 
if you are merely picking at the smaller threads and timelines you only have 
part of the picture. More than decadent art ( a contradcition in terms, 
perhaps?), there is a decadent cosmovision. That is precisely what 
Parnassians, Symbolists and even French proto-Surrealists like Lautreamont 
share, that special disposition, that agriculture of spleen. The term itself 
is English and was coigned by Baudelaire, who set the definitive antecedent 
for this form of aestheticism. If you trace it further back, you shall 
discover a rich Gothic influence as well. Abridging the decandent esprit to 
schools and petit comites, however, testifies to your own affectation, and 
fails to do much justice to it´s historical import in the reconstruction of 
aesthetics.
This was all discussed to some extent in recent p-list postings, ´´ The 
Aesthetics of Ugliness´´.

David-- I don´t have either M&D or V. with me, so it is impossible for me to 
address you an answer as punctually as I would like to. No less, I was 
referring to a more global atmosphere to Pynchon´s texts. To reading the 
Pynchon that Paul likes to read, he´s the Pynchon I like best as well. And 
your quotations testify to this. If you read them, as they are, you will 
notice that V.´s intrinsic polyhedric architecture makes of Decadence an x 
variable, a term of multipe acceptations, and shifting affectations as well. 
One of the quotations, in fact, even points to a particular vitality in 
decadence:

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

I do not believe we disagree.

Love, Monica



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