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

[Mark Kohut]

Besides all that Kai writes, and his ending question we should all
have a go at, i think....
I want to offer this possible reading of that Central Park scene in 
Chap 13....

In this first world-history novel of TRP's, 1913 is also the year before 
the firestorm of WW1...that war so important in Pynchon's vision carrying
lifelong through Against the Day.....
 
I want to suggest that maybe this scene in Central Park, overtly playing
with time, is an image of Europe right before the Great War..........
 
I offer as evidence, gentle readers, that curious image of the stream in Central 
Park as
'like the glass of a chandelier, in a wintry drawing room when all the heat is 
turned off
suddnely and forever.".....Sounds pretty like TRP's vision of what the war did 
to the 20th Century,
yes, reflected in the arts as Kai writes below and more in AtD...
 
That the seemingly "warm, sense of population" and eventfullness park that Benny 
sees 

was, sez the narrator "near-deserted and cold" and which Stencil sees as 
'quiet'.
 
Stencil, establishmentarian, cannot see this decadence---gay guy beating up a 
cop, juvenile
delinquents marching by singing, that brassiere-trailing woman chasing a used 
condom---
I mean, this is Cabaret, no, one war ahead?----as the end of empire, the 
conditions before the war.
 
Or he can---he sez it is 1913---but not as decadence but as quiet, peace, no 
cultural problem.
whereas Benny sees it as ....the life of the preterites, so to speak. The losers 
before the firestorm.
 



 


----- Original Message ----
From: Kai Frederik Lorentzen <lorentzen at hotmail.de>
To: pynchon -l <pynchon-l at waste.org>
Sent: Sun, January 9, 2011 6:19:57 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