MDDM Ch. 56 Vortex

[jbor]

It's perhaps fairer to cite the whole thrust of the original poster's point.
As Brian McCary mentioned, "the primary reference is Descartes", and any
suggestion that there is a deliberate allusion to Wyndham Lewis or Vorticism
as a movement in 20th C. abstract art on Pynchon's part isn't really borne
out by the context of the reference in the novel. From the earlier post:

    [...] But Emerson, a
    Newtonian, would have been slagging off the Cartesian
    opposition. Under vortex we have, M17, 1 a In Cartesian theory: any of
    the rapidly revolving collections of fine particles supposed to fill
    all space and by their rotation account for the motions of the
    universe; the whirling movement of such a collection of particles, usu
    in pl M17, b Physics A rapid motion of particles round an axis; a
    whirl of atoms, fluid or vapour [contrast that with earth, water, air
    and wind]. The Vorticists being the Continental school of philosopher
    scientists under Descartes and then Leibnitz, the English camp, under
    Newton, supporting an alternative theory of indivisible Atoms. Both
    camps, assuming as a first principle that Nature abhorred a vacuum,
    had to account for how space was filled by matter, yet still left
    enough room for it to move around. The vorticists assumed these whirls
    of varying sized lumps of matter whose swirling motions added up to
    the gross motions of objects at our coarser level of perception. The
    Atomists assumed matter reduced to minimal size components which were
    free to move around in open space. They accounted for the filling of
    this absolute space by assuming a propertiless substance called the
    ether which filled the space but through which atoms could freely
    move. [...]

Vorticist artworks and Wyndham Lewis are interesting in and of themselves of
course, but I don't quite see that there's a case to say that they are
relevant here, or to Pynchon's work in general. To my thinking the use of
the term "Vorticism" is nothing more than a lexical coincidence.

best


on 6/6/02 6:12 PM, Otto at o.sell at telda.net wrote:

> 556.1-3:
> "A Vorticist. Lord help us, his Mercy how infrequent!" Emerson, believing
> Vorticists to be the very Legion of Mischief, had so instructed ev'ry
> defenseless young Mind he might reach.
> 
> 
> from the first M&D-reading, Fri, 13 Mar 1998:
> "I hope we are not talking Wyndham-Lewis here, although who knows, but the
> primary reference is Descartes."
> more at:
> http://waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l&month=9803&msg=24800
> 
> vorticism , short-lived 20th-century art movement related to futurism. Its
> members sought to simplify forms into machinelike angularity. Its principal
> exponent was a French sculptor, Gaudier-Brzeska. The movement, however, had
> its largest following in England, where Wyndham Lewis, Ezra Pound, James
> Joyce, and T. S. Eliot wrote about it.
> See W. C. Wees, Vorticism and the English Avant-Garde, 1910-1915 (1972)."
> http://users.senet.com.au/~dsmith/vorticism.htm
> 
> "Vorticism was a literary as well as an artistic idea. Vorticist prose, of
> which Lewis's Nietzschean novel Tarr was the apotheosis, certainly followed
> Imagism in its verbal economy. It was terse and was characterised by clear
> visual images. Lewis did not enter, empathetically, into the emotions of his
> characters, but viewed them externally, as a painter or sculptor.
> (...)
> Vorticism, like Futurism, captured the zeitgeist of the pre-war age and was
> destroyed by the war in which Hulme and Gaudier-Brzeska were both killed."
> http://www.fluxeuropa.com/wyndhamlewis-art_and_ideas.htm
> 
> Otto
> 
> 
>