VLVL The Sisterhood: evil capitalist fascists?

[jbor]

    By the 1960s the kunoichi, looking for some cash flow
    themselves, had begun to edge into the self-improvement
    business (107.22-3)

At the outset Pynchon highlights the capitalist ethos of this "ninjette"
Sisterhood in which DL is a loyal and subservient member, and it's
reiterated at the close of the chapter when DL tells Prairie about the
"financial consultant name of Vicki" and "Amber the paralegal" down in LA
who administer the finances (128.134-7). I don't believe that Pynchon is
characterising this aspect of the organisation or DL as "fascist", however,
as some here seem to want to have it. It strikes me as a fairly gentle
satire on the irony of a New Age-style resort preaching selflessness but
being in it for the cash. And of course there's that ubiquitous Pynchon
crack at the legal profession: "lawyer up at Century City ... since the
indictment." (128.37-8)

If anything, it's the state of affairs which exists in the retreat's kitchen
("indefinite culinary penance") which might be termed "fascist", and which
Prairie insightfully observes seems like a "type of kidnapping". It's all
the more pertinent and immediate to her, of course, because that's the fate
she's facing (and it's ironic that, so far, it's Zoyd, Isaiah and DL who
have taken her away from her home and placed her in an odd assortment of
hostile or enclosed environments). But the text immediately makes the point
of the inmates that:

    No -- they had all signed instruments of indenture, releases,
    had all arrived somewhere in their lives where they needed to
    sign. (110.19-22)

I hear an echo of Kesey's _One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest_ in this, but
there seems to be a broader thematic point about masochism and willing
subservience to extreme and cruel authority. It maps onto both DL's
deference to Sister Rochelle (108.34-7) and to Frenesi's sexual fetish,
which Prairie gets her first glimpse of (114.22-3) on the retreat's
computer. The computer, by the way, with its user-sensitivity features and
hyper-politeness reminds me of a more a benign version of HAL from _Space
Odyssey 2001_.

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