VLVL (6) Frenesi: Watergate

[jbor]

on 28/9/03 7:05 AM, Terrance wrote:

> I mean, Frenesi was one confused cookie growing up with all them adults
> acting like kids, beating people up, screwing their friends and being
> screwed over. I guess we could use that old daisy chain to explain it.
> If your going to San Francisco ...

Yes. And we do get insights into Frenesi's thoughts and motivations here
which make her, just like Zoyd, a more or less sympathetic character also.

The major part of this chapter is set in the present time of Frenesi's life,
and it details what Hector told Zoyd about a few chapters back (26-7), how
the "budget cuts" under Reaganomics have impacted on her, how she has been
removed from the Witness Protection program, how her file is destroyed, and
the dire situation that will leave them in. And, Justin is more on the ball
about all this than his parents are! (88.17-26)

We also get insight into Frenesi's ongoing guilt over dumping Prairie, her
regret, her pretty sad life with Flash, and background on her childhood, and
then a couple of brief flashbacks inserted into her reminiscing which trace
her mother's and grandmother's marriages.

We get another perspective on her sell-out in this chapter too, Frenesi
recalling the time during the lead-up to Watergate when she began to believe
her career of infidelity and informing was justified, when she was snitching
*against* those men responsible for the "Nixonian Repression":

    Here, finally -- here's my Woodstock, my golden age of rock
    and roll, my acid adventures, my Revolution. (71.32-4)

I think the ambivalence of this particular passage is noteworthy, describing
how Frenesi saw 

    her particular servitude as the freedom, granted to a few,
    to act outside warrants and charters, to ignore history and
    the dead, to imagine no future, no yet-to-be-born, to be able
    to go on defining moments only, purely, by the action that
    filled them. Here was a world of simplicity and certainty
    that no acidhead, no revolutionary anarchist would ever find,
    a world based on the one and zero of life and death. Minimal,
    beautiful. The patterns of lives and deaths. ...

In this view of the events leading up to Watergate what Pynchon again seems
to draw our attention to is the double standard which condemns one set of
acts of snitching on criminals as "wrong" and which valorises another set of
the same acts as "right".

What's the implied author's stance on Watergate, I wonder.

It's telling that Frenesi soon comes to realise that this era had been just
another phase of "the Repression". And that the narrative describes Flash,
the man Frenesi has eventually married, as one of the "gargoyles" clinging
on to the facade of this regime (73.17), one of "the sleek raptors that
decorate fascist architecture" (287.3).

best