VLVL (6) Frenesi: Watergate

[Terrance]

> 
> 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)

As Newton's Father used to say, "The apples never fall too far from the
trees."
Justin knows what's going on because he watches the Tube. Back when the
Nixonian gilded age (72) was coming to an end for F&F, Flash stayed home
and watched the Watergate hearings all day, then he'd watch them again
at night on PBS (U.S. "Public" Television Channels). Justin has been
watching PBS too. And he's gotten an ear full (87). Like Frenesi he
absorbs politics (81). The description of Flash watching the Watergate
Hearings reads like the description of the Gates Family watching movies
on their Tube (82). 

"What've you been hearing, Justin?" 

Axed! 

Too many mouths to feed. (88) 

 

> 
> 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".

Not sure about that. Plenty of wrongs. Where are the rights? Who was
saved? 

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

Negative! Why? Another Witch Hunt. Hey, he's a Pyncheon after all. 



> 
> 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).