Re. Warped and Distilled?

[Paul Mackin]

I'm getting more and more in the grip of Charles' take on Frenesi.
Might we go so far as to see our girl as a sexual sadist. The pleasure
she derives from consorting with the evil Brock is part and parcel of
the pain it inflicts on her parents, not just Sasha and her father but on
left politics in general. 

It might bring to mind a classic case in literature. In  __In
Search of Lost Time__, Mlle. Vinteuil enhances her illicit Lesbian 
pleasure with her friend by means of the desacration (sp) of the memory of
her saintly dead father. Yet Mlle. Vinteuil retrains a modicum of the good
girl image her father had of her just as Frenesi retains some of the
adoration of her betrayed comrades. In fact, Proust makes the point that
a certain underlying goodness is essential to a satisfying pursuit of 
evil.

This may well be an important part of the story.

			P.

On Thu, 14 Jan 1999 calbert at pop.tiac.net wrote:

> 
> 
> > So the whole thing becomes Oedipa(L). Intergenerational battle to the
> > death--which fits the sixties all right.
> 
> Oh thats for sure, with the usual P. twist. The traditional battle 
> would be twixt the Eisenhower repub parents and the doob twisting 
> spawn of McCarthy, but Frenesi revolts against her "lefty" origins.
> I'll forego any analysis of P intent in this regard.
> 
> > Frenesi does seem stricken with a death wish.
> 
> That's why I thing the little geneology bit is so underestimated. 
> What is, on the surface, a touching family epic, is constantly 
> undercut by the occasional cartoonish hyperbole. I guess if you have 
> lived on a steady diet of "goodness" over several generations, evil 
> will have a certain cachet. That uniform fetish does cross 
> generations, sorta like a bad seed. Combine enough undesireable 
> recessives, et voila, the apparent enigma of Frenesi. 
> 
> love,
> cfa
>