VLVL2 (4) Off-stage

[Paul Nightingale]

>From Michael J:
> 
> > Ch3: Hector introduces Frenesi and offers Zoyd a role as player in
his
> > scheme. Zoyd resists but the introduction of Frenesi opens up the
text,
> > in Ch4, to the flashbacks that are informative, certainly, but also
> > intrusive. By the end of Ch4 there is just no room for Zoyd. Prairie
> > (the 'next generation') will become the key to history.
> >
> 
> "Key to history?" Can you explain that a little, Paul? Am I rightly
> connecting what you've written about history here to this statement to
> infer that Prairie symbolizes a potential synthesis of personal time
and
> historical time?
> 
> 
 
So much of what we find out subsequently is what Prairie either sees
(watching old footage from the 60s) or is told: the narrative is,
increasingly, filtered through her consciousness. One of the key
structuring moments in the novel, repeated often to tug the narrative
back to the nominal present, is her sudden reappearance in the text,
serving to remind the reader that she is an audience for the story being
told. As a character, Prairie doesn't actually 'do' very much: she
watches, and listens. In fact, from this point on (ie the end of Ch4),
not an awful lot of anything happens, if by that we mean 'happens now'
as opposed to 'happened then, being told now'. Compared to the rest of
the novel, some 300+ pages, there's a lot of action in Ch4.

Hence, the reader reads Prairie reading. The breakfast scene (40)
recalls both Ch1 and Ch2, and at the heart of it is her reading of
Zoyd's 'confession': "What mattered at the moment was that he knew how
to visit Frenesi ... and that could only mean he must feel a need for
her as intense as Prairie's own." Prairie goes looking for the mother
she has never known, just as Zoyd yearns for the wife he never had; but
where he wants to rewrite the past, effectively erase it, she'll uncover
countless histories, both personal and political.

A lot of time has been wasted (predictably) arguing over the meaning of
the word "vet". What should be pretty obvious is, if Pynchon wanted to
write a detailed back story for RC he would've done just that: consider
the amount of information given over to Millard and Blodwen (46-48). By
way of contrast, references thus far to Vietnam are somewhat coy; that
is, the narrator is coy when referring to History. So the novel, it
seems, is asking the question, how to represent History?

Subsequently, the novel is rather less coy, once History has been
exposed as a text. At which point Official History can be challenged by
a subversive history-from-below, subversive because it insists on the
power of memory: Hub watching the Hollywood film on TV (ie not a
TV-movie), raging against the "scabs" and "fascist fucks" whose names
appear in the credits (82). That of course is Frenesi's flashback in one
of her few appearances in the novel: she remembers Hub remembering.