VLVL(6) Children of the Revolution

[rj]

Remember the Tristero...

The members of 24fps in their ideological obsession with and bickering
about "light" seem a rather motley crew of self-indulgent and
pretentious avant-gardists to me. The opportunistic siphoning off of
electricity from the grid which Frenesi envisages as a political act of
some sort, sticking it to the "fascist monster, Central Power itself"
202.2, comes across as sloganeering and hyperbole, a justification of
the theft rather than legitimate or considered revolutionary antagonism.

The "classically retrograde cult of personality"(205.11) which surrounds
Weed is similarly misguided and ignorant: "Not only was nobody thinking
about the real situation, nobody was even brainlessly reacting to
it."(205.9) PR3 seems like a bunch of potheads holed out and stumbling
around in some surfer's house. 

Weed is "just tall, that's all," and not even particularly charismatic.
Jinx and Frenesi's sly character demolition of him on the way to the
airport further undermines any mystique he might have retained, though
after his prior (tho' subsequent) appearance in the novel as a
Thanatoid, and the slapstick circumstance of his elevation to cult
leader, such commodity would surely be in scant supply to even the most
generous of readers.

And Brock! Is he evil *yet*? Finally appearing in person, "some little
guy with a jocklike walk"(199.31) who looks like Moe from the Three
Stooges, framed in Frenesi's viewfinder "a compact figure in a beige
double-knit" suit who could easily be mistaken for a "pompous little
functionary"(200.12), he's just a male chauvinist clown. Frenesi's
sexual submission to him can no more be ascribed to her apparently
genetic uniform fetish than can her attraction to Weed. Like all the men
in the novel --- Zoyd and Hector and Ralph and Takeshi and Weed ---
Brock is a fool, a goose. And yet it's these geese (polter- and Zeit-)
with which the Vineland women are forced to contend, and their moments
of sodality (such as Frenesi and Jinx's just before) are generally the
least satiric sequences in the text. Frenesi ponders whether the
miniskirt she wore when first she met Brock was premonitory or simply
fate, but by the end of the section she has come to realise how her
feminine allure can be used as a weapon. And that's all it is with
Frenesi: long legs, blue eyes, a femme fatale of few words held in
thrall by her genital urges. Brock knows she's just "this set of holes,
pleasantly framed"(214.9) and that she can be used to manipulate the
power blocs in the patriarchy, which is his little kick. But Frenesi's
horror comes not at this but when she realises that Brock has been awake
all along as she pours out her love. It is simply the horror of
self-revelation, of being found out, a vanity reflex. 

Maybe this is the 'absence' we are being shown, these empty and selfish
posturings at a time when there *was* actually so much to revolt
against. There are enough hints and allusions to the farmers' struggle
and the Civil Rights Movement and the Vietnam War and the logging of the
forests (cf. Brock's magnificent log jam analogy 215-6) in _Vineland_,
and, yes, I get a sense that the characters (like *us*, perhaps?) hardly
feel a need to reference these things overtly at all. They are givens,
so familiar, and once committed to film or myth they become so cliche:
why waste time on the obvious when we can bicker about protocol, right? 

But what is that on the horizon, "the storm, the Event", assailing
Frenesi and Brock in Oklahoma City where they should be "nestled safe in
the center of America"?(215.8) Sounds like the Apocalypse approaching,
and unlike the close of _GR_ (where Armageddon takes us unawares) I get
a sense of ambivalence if not longing even, both Frenesi's and the
narrative's, at this prospect of imminent doom.

best