Re. Warped and Distilled?

[calbert at pop.tiac.net]

Paul:

> I'm getting more and more in the grip of Charles' take on Frenesi.

You are constantly leavening my simplistic utterances with your 
insights. 

> 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. 

Undeniably - that uni fixation she inherits from her mother is 
indellible. But the echo is there in Sasha's folks as well. If you 
view Jess Traverse (Sasha's dad) as a participant in a struggle, it 
would not take a gargantuan intuitive leap to see a little of the 
"uniform fetish" at work even back then. Jess isn't just a worker 
with a gripe - he is an "organizer", in effect, a recruiter for his 
cause. This formalizes his opposition, and starts the slippery slope 
to Frenesi and Brock.
 
> 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.

And what an odd sexual dynamic THAT is! A form of mental masochism.
"I'm so dirty and unworthy....but sooooooo turned on."

> 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.

Which , I think brings us full circle back to the subject of systems 
raised recently with Mr. Dangerfields immense contributions of a 
couple of weeks ago outlining Spencerian system pathology. As an 
unrepentant Oswald Spengler disciple, that stuff really resonates 
here. THe fact that it dovetails so sweetly with my dilettantish 
grasp of the role of synchronicity in Pynchon's works makes me 
positively moist with self congratulation.
 
> This may well be an important part of the story.

Without your scholarly elaborations, it would just have been more 
bits over the transom. Thanks.
love,
cfa, who is fair dying for a shot at COL49