Vineland, anonymity, limbo (fwd)

[David L. Pelovitz]

From: Andrew Dinn <andrew at cee.hw.ac.uk>

>Hartwin Alfred Gebhardt writes:
>
>> I also 
>> quoted the above passage recently (or parts thereof) - it is, I 
>> think, the key to unravel much of TRPs attitude towards the sixties 
>> in general, and the USA-dominated post-WW2 zone in particular (in 
>> _all_ his works).

>Another key quote is Isaiah 2-4's comment regarding the sell-out of
>Zoyd's generation to television (`Problem with your folks generation
>is...' it comes early on when Isaiah is hoping to get money out of
>Zoyd for a family entertainment, ethnologically sound, shoot-em-up
>adventure park involving guns, slum buildings and used TVs). He
>describes TV as reducing the hippies to `el deado meato' aka
>thanatoids and the price was `way too cheap'. The irony of this
>sitting alongside his Thatcherite/Reaganite entrepreneurial bull
>(there must be a pun in there somewhere about converting weapons into
>shares) seems to be lost on Isaiah.

I find the quote about Frenesi's attitude toward the witness
protection program as freedom (71-72) fundamental as well.
"facing into the deep autumnal wind of what was coming, that she 
 thought, Here, finally - here's my Woodstock, my golden age of
 rock and roll, my acid adventures, my revolution.  Come into her
 own at last, street-legal, full-auto qualified, she understood 
 her particular servitude as freedom, granted to a few, to act outside 
 warrants and charters, to ingore history and the dead, to imagine
 no future, no yet-to-be-born, to be able simply to go on
 defining moments only, purely, by the action that filled them."

her vision at once acknowledges Brock's vision of the extended
national family and the idea of rebellion against the parent
that Frenesi can only achieve by becoming a snitch.  

the irony is that Brock's national family doesn't give the
government much control in the end (funding and all that) and
Frenesi's snitching doesn't give her the freedom she desires.
But that all makes perfect sense in a novel that illustrates
how mucht he 60's desire to change the world actually did 
change the world.
	
David Pelovitz - dqp5805 at is.nyu.edu