AtDtDA23: Another Incursion into the Bourgeois Calm

[Dave Monroe]

"... another incursion into the bourgeois calm ..." (AtD, Pt. III, p. 662)


the Campanile in Venice

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St_Mark's_Campanile

"the tower collapses" (AtD, Pt. II, p. 256 f.)

http://against-the-day.pynchonwiki.com/wiki/index.php?title=ATD_243-272#Page_256


"the roof at the Charing Cross Station in London"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charing_Cross_railway_station

Cf. p. 577

http://against-the-day.pynchonwiki.com/wiki/index.php?title=ATD_557-587#Page_577

The elegant original roof structure collapsed on 5 December 1905....

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charing_Cross_railway_station#History

Cf. ...

"the fall of a crystal palace" (GR, Pt. I, p. 3)

http://books.google.com/books?id=iPDGp7VT8H8C


"the revenge of Deep Germany"

We have seen an earlier reference to deeper Germany, to the
pre-Christian, pre-rational Germany, here supposed to be avenging
itself upon the mechanised, rational order that has supplanted it.

This pre-Christian Germany was the mythical Golden Age Nazism sought
to draw upon and revive. In 1936 G.G. Jung wrote essay entitled
"Wotan", in which he argued that the German psyche had been
overwhelmed by the sudden awakening of the archetype of the ancient
Norse god. Wotan, who had slumbered for 1,000 years, was the god of
frenzy and magic and would, Jung predicted, more than likely lead the
German people into some cataclysmic event.

http://against-the-day.pynchonwiki.com/wiki/index.php?title=ATD_644-677#Page_662


"the modern age of steam"

Schivelbusch, The Railway Journey:
   The Industrialization of Time and Space in the 19th Century.
   Berkeley: U of California P, 1986.

http://books.google.com/books?id=890nCC_kZeIC


"shameless German primitivism"

... concepts associated with modernist aesthetics--including
regeneration, spiritualism, primitivism, and avant-gardism--were
integrated into the anti-Enlightenment pantheon of fascist values,
with the result that many artists found common ground with these new
movements....

[...]

Common denominators uniting modernist aesthetics and fascism include
concepts of cultural, political, and biological regeneration; the use
of avant-garde techniques, such as montage; notions of "secular
religion"; primitivism; and anticapitalist theories of space and
time....

[...]

Primitivism

The fascists' new politics had its roots not only in state-sanctioned
cults and religious institutions but also in the cultural politics of
avant-garde primitivism...

[...]

While fascist avant-gardists in France and Italy treated the European
peasantry and their rural setting as mythic ciphers for primitivist
aesthetics, their counterparts in Germany wrestled with a more
problematic relation to primitivism, primarily due to the debate over
what constituted a regenerative form of art. For Hitler and his
followers, the term primitive held positive and negative valences
depending on its racial import. Nazis argued that the essence of the
German folk resided in an Aryan genealogy with roots in Classical art
and culture and that of the Gothic and Renaissance eras. Historians
have noted Hitler's and Nazi ideologue Alfred Rosenberg's literal
association of Greek sculpture with their own eugenic program to
create a fascist "new man," untainted by the degenerative effects of
racial "mixing." As a result they circumscribed their notion of
regenerative primitivism within the geopolitical boundaries of Europe
and subsumed German society in the "organicist" politics of
corporatism and racial collectivism.

Proponents of this geopolitical and racial paradigm could not
countenance forms of primitivism that appropriated the art of
non-European cultures as sources for European regeneration." Russell
Berman has touched on this very issue in his analysis of the complex
relation of Emil Nolde's primitivist Expressionism to the primitivism
of Nazis such as Rosenberg....   As Berman notes, "primitivism here
ceases to be inimical to European identity and instead turns out to be
congruent with the German nationalist rejection of the Impressionist
canon, and the Nietzschean call for a new barbarism." ...

http://www.encyclopedia.com/doc/1G1-84721212.html

And see as well, e.g., ...

Berman, Russell A.  "German Primitivism/Primitive Germany:
   The Case of Emil Nolde."  Fascism, Aesthetics and Culture.
   Ed. Richard J. Golsan.  Hanover, NH: U P of New England, 1992.


lime sorbet

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sorbet