VLVL p. 98-99 mirrors

[Michael Joseph]

With Pynchon's rimshot joke "On the other hand," Isaiah said, "they loved
'Volare,' VL segues into a recognition scene: Prairie "up the hill a level
or two" (topographically, but perhaps also suggestive of a heightened
awareness) stands in front of a mirror, "ornately framed gold-veined"
(98) in a "powder room or ladies' lounge of stypefying tastelessness"
(98). She is suffering an onset of THO--Teen Hair Obsession. (Light parody
of pyschiatric analyses, see BDD, AVP, but also a reminder that Prairie is
an adolescent, and her story is a Bildungsroman. One might also reflect
that VL in this section is much concerned with liminality.)

As Prairie looks into the mirror, VL tells us "It was easy to see Zoyd in
her face." Zoyd of course looks into a mirror on p. 4. The effect of
remembering this is to create a hypertextual link. I think VL intends us
to make that link, hence it uses the term "rat" (to tease) in the phrase,
"She started picking again at her hair, with a coral plastic ratting brush
a friend had shoplifted for her" (98), echoing the earlier phrase (p.4)
"and [Zoyd] proceeded to the men's room at the Breez-Thru gas station,
where he shifted into the dress and with a small hairbrush tried to rat
what was on his head . . ." The isomorphism of "rat," and of "brush," and
Prairie's "see[ing] Zoyd" in her own reflection conflates these two
moments. Prairie does in some real sense see Zoyd, and Zoyd's own seeing
is completed in her reflection. And there is additional imagery of
conflated identity. The taps on the marble sink are mermaids (half
fish/half woman), and, tellingly, the walls contain "a raised heraldic
pattern." Heraldic patterns forge diverse aspects of early family history
into a unified and glorified symbolism: Zoyd and Prairie's reflections are
temporally bounded but they are not temporally determined. They merge and
suggest something transcendent. VL is clearly pointing at itelf to suggest
the mode of its composition reflects a reality greater than the mere
textual conventions by which we read it. Transcendence implies its own
context, traces of which adhere in "heraldry," "Roman repro" and the
correspondence of the "FM stereo" to "insect song,"--VL's own obsessively
ubiquitous music perspectivized as a kind of symbolic cultural swarm of
cicadas. The artistry argues that its own hypertextual virtuosity mirrors
a natural, existential, reality--one as close and as yet undecipherable as
insect song.

WIth the final paragraph on p. 98, VL triangulates the relationship of
Zoyd and Prairie to include Frenesi. In a remarkable similitude of
transcendence we get a description of Prairie's eyes, "now burning so blue
through the fringes and shadows, to creep herself out, no matter what time
of the day or night, by imagining that what she saw was her mother's
ghost. And that if she looked half a second too long, it would begin to
blink . . ." (98-99). Prairie is able to look into the mirror and conjure
Frenesi. Her gaze is able to penetrate the "fringes and shadows" of
actuality to see beyond its illusions and capture the essence of her
mother, Frenesi, dwelling within. (See reference on 223 to lucid dreaming
for additional material re VL's use of paranormal perception and
childhood.)  Frenesi is more than merely her "biological mother".  She is
an indelible part of Prairie's being, an ever-present pattern of awareness
or psychic structure. She is Prairie.  Although this is a notional reality
explored in depth within the genre of YA literature, the textual realities
of VL are constructed upon a scaffolding of such imaginative and
transcendent perceptions of identity, or the coincidence of identity.

Okay, time to press send and leave the virtual world. More later~


Michael