VLVL (6) Working for the Man

[Terrance]

> 
> The passage in question begins, top of 87, as follows: "He'd brought home a
> quickly compiled list, all independent contractors like themselves. Frenesi
> got out a couple of frozen, or with the state the fridge was in actually
> semithawed, peperoni pizzas, put the oven on to preheat, and made a fast
> salad while Flash opened beers and read off the names."
> 
> Then after the passage already quoted selectively, a new paragraph
> continues: "Or so they must have believed. But now, no longer on the
> computer, how safe could any of them be feeling?"
> 
> Hence, the immediate context is that of Frenesi's domestic situation and the
> helplessness of the "motley collection" of (technically?) non-persons. If
> they can be cast adrift so easily, they can't be all that important, and Ch6
> offers a detailed account of Frenesi's 'downmarket' lifestyle: her status
> isn't really that of someone who is benefiting from crime. As a snitch she
> is exploited just as much as she is working at the mall.
> 
> More broadly, the chapter, having introduced Frenesi, has adopted flashbacks
> that differ significantly to those in previous chapters. I've already
> suggested that the presence of such flashbacks in this particular chapter is
> structurally significant. The Ch6 flashbacks emphasise the brutality of the
> Employers' Association, against whom the law is (or chooses to be) helpless
> (75); and that's before references to the Pinkertons (76) and "the
> anticommunist terror" (81-82) as sponsored by the state. Hence the first
> extended account of Frenesi's life after Zoyd is juxtaposed to the text's
> first detailed account of labour history and class conflict, which is the
> purpose of the chapter as a whole.


Obvious to those of us reading the book. However, I'm not sure we can
say that Frenesi has a life after Zoyd or that he has a life after her.
(see Flash/Zoyd at the Picnic) They are connected by a daughter and a
contract. That contract is an independent contract. And, as Buster
reminds Zoyd, at any moment it can be deleted from the  government
computer.  

"We're all in it together, kid." 

B/T uttle in Brazil