VL[8]: Frenesi the Unredeemable? Long

[Meg Larson]

Reading Paul M's post, this question suddenly hit me:  on some level, is
Frenesi aspiring to be Brock?  Rather, maybe Frenesi is as simplistic as DL
explains to Prairie:

"I knew it!" Prairie exploded.  "My mother and this creep, and you better
tell me how serious, DL--"
"Serious."
"So my dad and my grandma've been lyin' to me all this time?  They told me
she was on the side of the people--how could she've ever gone near somebody
like this Brock guy?"
"I never could figure it either, kid.  He was everything we were supposed to
be against" (141.5-12).

Is Frenesi the female side of Brock?  Frenesi's making the turn, from
self-less idealism to cold-hearted realism; she's _becoming_ everything she
was supposed to against.  Like Brock, she bursts into and out of everyone
else's lives, wreaking havoc, affecting everyone she comes near, and she is
the center of attention; like Brock, you (or I) just cannot NOT watch her,
and be fascinated by her at the same time.  I still think she is, if not a
total shit, than at least as much as a shit as Vond, and he's just
fascinating, on some perverse level.  I wouldn't want to hang with either
one of them at a party or anywhere else, but they certainly are active and
things are always in motion when they're around.


And let us not forget, as I suggested at the beginning of the VLVL, that
Frenesi's making some conscious choices along the way--she's not just
fumbling her way through, a victim of circumstances; she's _not_ Oedipa
Maas.

"Beginning the night she and Rex had publicly hung the snitch jacket on
Weed, Frenesi understood that she had taken at least one irreversible step
to the side of her life, and that now, as if on some unfamiliar drug, she
was walking next to herself, haunting herself, attending a movie of it all .
. . [n]o problem anymore with talk of 'taking out' Weed Atman . . . but even
sex was mediated for her now--she did not enter in" (237.25-36).

As for F being the female B, I submit:  "It wasn't that Vond was following
any moral code of his own, though he might have wanted to look at it that
way--but Roscoe recognized it as simple, massively protective insulation.
Some things in life has just never touched this customer, he would never
have to think about them . . ." (272.2-6).

They are insulated from the world they play with, the people they fuck with.

Off the soap box now,
M.