AtD On a plist discussion topic

[alice wellintown]

This scene reminds us of GR, of course, as a homosexual character who
is into S&M,  whose name evokes, first Orpheus and Rilke, second
Weissmann/Blicero, and third, Enzian and Gottfried, as well as other
mapped-on characters, for here we see Pynchon's parodic playfulness as
characters flicker into modernist view and wink on and off and into
other characters or faint memories of struts they made upon the stage
or off in films hundreds of pages and thousands of lines...reels and
reels ago. We are reminded of the German youth reading Herman Hesse &
Co.

But I would say you've misread this passage. For Cyprean fails to hear
what might have been (that subjunctive, as Tanner so brilliantly
describes it in his essay on M&D is quite sigficiant here) prophetic.
The period of the next sentence is not the romantic period (and one
might argue that Mozart is not a romantic afterall), but this period.
And, it is the failure, or the distortion of the current period, an
unnatural heightening that is the target here, not the romantic's
sublime but the perversion, and here, as in GR, it is the hoomosexual
S&M perversion of romance that is the target of satire.

On Sun, Mar 18, 2012 at 9:03 AM, Mark Kohut <markekohut at yahoo.com> wrote:
> On p. 713, in his offhand, oblique narrator saying kind of way, TRP gives us this
> on Romanticism and Romance (two senses of) in this
>
> Romance known as Against the Day: Cyprian hears, either inside of outside his head (!!)
> the Adagio from the Mozart Piano Concerto in A Major, K. 488. "It might have been prophetic
> had he been listening. This was a period in human emotion when "romance' had slipped into
> an inexpensive subfusc of self-awareness, unnaturally heightening the effect of the outmoded
> pastels peeping from beneath, as if in some stylistic acknowledgment of the great trembling
> that showed through, now and then, to some more than others, of a hateful future nearly
> at hand and inescapable. But many were as likely to misinterpret the deep signals as physical symptoms......
> ....'as nerves"....as "romance".....
>
> Take THAT, Romantics. Take THAT Harold Bloom.