VLVL Prairie and DL

[Michael Joseph]

Quck responses:

On Wed, 15 Oct 2003, Paul Nightingale wrote:

> DL meets Prairie because of the amulet: this signifies both the absent
> Takeshi (to DL) and, to Prairie, the absent Zoyd. For the reader of course
> it signifies the absent Ch5, the sole purpose of which was to 'pass the
> baton' from Takeshi to Zoyd (in a flashback) to Prairie (in the present).
> She "at first had been reluctant even to touch it" (56).
>
I agree with the implication that Prairie is accepting the
inexplicable--as a marker of her liminality, as her position as reader,
and think it significant that VL endows the card with wonderful
properties, that it suggests something holy, or sacred. (I am harping on
my reading of Hawaii 5-0/Jack Lord as double-coded marker of the sacred.)

> In Ch7 she still needs to have the amulet's significance explained to her.
> In terms of the narrative it now signifies, or represents, the absent
> Frenesi. And the meeting of Prairie and DL (99) begs the question: what
> would happen if, quite by chance, DL's scanner hadn't picked up the amulet?
> This is an accident that needs to happen.
>
The amulet seems to have many significances: it "presences"  Frenesi, as
well as Zoyd and Takeshi, and insinuates Takeshi's technical prowess, his
exotic Japanese cleverness and savvy, another trope which _VL_ has both
ways.

> Momentarily, Prairie and DL seem to recognise Frenesi in the other (99);
> although Prairie instinctively feels threatened, transforming the brush from
> a tool that has invoked Frenesi into a weapon with which she might defend
> herself against her mother's stand-in. Nonetheless, for both Prairie and DL
> the mirror transforms daughter into mother, while DL also recognises Frenesi
> in herself ("we ran together", etc - 100) when recalling her own past.
>
> As did Zoyd earlier, DL has to deliberate before 'going back': "She said the
> name with some effort, as though she hadn't pronounced it out loud for a
> while" (100). Frenesi's name, then, or even just the sound of it, perhaps
> echoing the sound of the scanner, is itself representative of much: to DL
> here, but in the novel also, where Frenesi-as-signifier stands in for so
> many stories different characters will have to tell. Frenesi-as-signifier
> also stands in for Frenesi-&-Brock (as when Zoyd says: "I don't see
> Superfuck anyplace, what happened?" - 59). To reduce Frenesi to a villain,
> whose very name is enough to embarrass her former friends, is to do the
> complexity of the narrative a disservice.
>
I couldn't agree more. Frenesi fulfills a number of archetypes. For one
thing, she is he catalyst that lifts Prairie out of pubescent complacency.
She cannot be pigeon-holed, or narrowly judged as if she were a defendant
in a docket, and to attempt to treat her this way shaves into an essential
element of Vineland's multivocality.

Michael