VLVL(6): Prairie

[rj]

In many ways it is Prairie who is the blank page of this novel. The bulk
of the last half dozen or so chapters has consisted of recounts of
characters' experiences explicitly for her benefit and elucidation. And,
her 'education' is an unconventional one, for high school certainly
doesn't emerge as a primary consideration in her mind or those of any of
her immediate caregivers thus far: Zoyd, Isaiah, DL, Ralph, Sister
Rochelle, Takeshi. It's that ol' Tube, and the subversive viewing habits
which Zoyd has managed to inculcate, as well as the attitudes of her
peers, co-workers, grandparents and Isaiah, which have prepared her for
her first 'journeyman foray', as it were, into the world. When Prairie
is served by Takeshi's R2D2-like drinkwaiter, for example, "the
creature" is described as having "the kind of voice Prairie had come to
mistrust even before she could talk."(193.20) I think it's the
identification and deconstruction of this type of insidious
indoctrination which emerges as one of the key themes of the narrative.
(And, it's a process performed and reperformed in the novel's metatext
on the 'unsuspecting' reader viz. the knee-jerk aversions and empathies
to and with Brock, Ralph, Frenesi, Zoyd et al. which are, if not
overturned ultimately, stretched to the very limits of credibility.)

One by one the characters tell their stories to Prairie. Even Zoyd's
Hawaiian reverie is addressed to her in absentia. And because the
intrusions of this framing narrative are sporadic and often trivial I
took them at first as afterthoughts (eg Takeshi's retospective
introduction as the source of narrative agency at 149.14), and as
indicative of the apparently speedy and slapdash construction of the
novel. But I now see that this is not only an integral structural device
(and one repeated on a much grander scale in _M&D_), it is also of
immense symbolic significance. The passages at 195.6 and 198.28, as
Prairie views the 24fps footage, remind me of Oedipa's nightmare trek
through San Franciso, when the "legacy America" is brutally revealed.
Mediation occurs in the later novel, of course, for Prairie is
distracted somewhat by Frenesi's lensplay: the medium has become the
message. But there is an amount of 'leakage', for want of a better term,
and Prairie *is* learning. And, as in the Kunoichi kitchen, doing just a
spot of re-educatin' herself, 'bout things like youth and innocence and
vitality and spontaneity.

As with Oedipa's surprise nomination as executrix of Pierce's will in
_Lot49_, Prairie is propelled headfirst into the 'secret history' of her
nation and culture by virtue of circumstances imposed on her --- i.e.
flight from the clutches of Brock --- but circumstances which at the
same time give her an element of freedom to decide for herself which way
to turn and who to believe in, and as with Oedipa there is an only
partially-mocked quest for identity (personal, social and cultural)
involved as well.

Prairie is tabula rasa, the wide open plains: she is America to be.

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