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

[Ian Livingston]

I think Mark has an excellent point here. There are the signs and
symbols, and there are the associations conjured by those signs and
symbols. Here is the calm before the storm, yes? Having seen a couple
storms approach over the years, it is very clear that the "calm" is
anything but. The air is charged with ions and people are edgy,
expectant, often in denial that a storm is about to blow in dowse the
terrain.

On Mon, Jan 10, 2011 at 3:08 AM, Mark Kohut <markekohut at yahoo.com> wrote:
> 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
>
>
>
>
>



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