V-2nd: "Adorned" (p. 414, Picador)

[bandwraith at aol.com]

But that's his point then, eh? To tweek the counter-
force with their (our) own t.v. dreams of power and,
alas, futility. Henry James didn't have Desmond on
his side, however  : )


-----Original Message-----
From: Kai Frederik Lorentzen <lorentzen at hotmail.de>
To: pynchon -l <pynchon-l at waste.org>
Sent: Sun, Jan 9, 2011 7:20 am
Subject: V-2nd: "Adorned" (p. 414, Picador)


Now, the meaning of "1913" is pretty much like the meaning of "1910" in
Against the Day. It's a
date which indicates the rise of fascist tendencies in avantgarde art.
What's Italian Futurism in
AtD, was in V --- Stravinsky. The place and time - Paris, 1913 - leaves
no doubt that the musical
performance described in chapter 14 is nothing else but "Le sacre du
printemps".  The scandal
actually took place (including cops entering the theater) as described
by Pynchon. Over the years
there have been two or three people here (ok, one of them was me) who
made the suggestion
that Pynchon did read some Adorno. The "Philosophy of Modern Music"
(Philosophie der neuen
Musik) was published in German as well as in English in 1949. So it's a
possible source for V.
While Adorno reminds us "not to overlook the dialectical
double-character of Stravinsky's effort"
and insists that it could have never been put unto stage in Nazi
Germany, he names as the core
of "Le sacre du printemps" (and also already of "Petruschka") the
"anti-humanistic sacrifice to the
collective: a sacrifice without tragedy, offered not to the rising icon
of new mankind, yet to the blind affirmation - be it through the
victim's self-mockering, be it through its self-elimination - of the
status quo" (rough ad hoc translation from page 137 of the German 
edition).

But can stepping back to a pre-avantgardistic way of writing à la Henry
James, as Pynchon at least
partly practices it since Vineland, really be an appropriate answer to
nowadays Neo-Totalitarism?

Kai