Back o the novel

[Joseph Tracy]

Back to the novel: I still think it is an interesting theory
interpreting Frenesi as a metaphor for America herself.

Otto
 
 Yes, I think Frenesi is a metaphor for America's confusion and wavering about her loyalties and desires. But I think Prairie is a metaphor for America's potential. There are several reasons to assume this metaphor is intended by Pynchon, perhaps not in the grand sense of representing the whole of the country but in the sense that each new generation , and each new child is a new experiment in self government and the possibilities of freedom, but each new child is also shaped by the past. The American prairie is the rich open heartland of the country, one of the richest,  most fertile areas of the planet, and the region of many great conflicts over who will control the abundance which is there, but in the end it is the way we think of ourselves which is our greatest potential for abundant life or self destruction.  In many ways this novel is an argument over who are Prairie's rightful family, who and what  will shape her mind, her experience, her values. She, as no one else in the novel sees the diversity of forces at play, hears the history of herstory and the herstory of history from different points of view, learns as much from the non-western Takeshi  as from the  traditional conflicts of the west. Despite this, she too is tempted by the claims of monotheism/monoculturalism/imperial power  represented with all its inseparable hypocisy by Brock Vond. 

America is both a hypocritical  political slut trying to connect to her abandoned child, and  a single parent child state trying to figure out who the real father is and who s/he wants to be. The  paternal claimants are all flawed but some are human and loving and do their own honest work. In that sense I think this novel is a reiteration, sans absolutist accretions, of  Moses' statement,  "This day I have set before you life and death; choose life that you may live." I think Pynchon hung out in Humboldt county and came away with enough hope and good humor to write this book.

Joseph Tracy
brook7 at earthlink.net
Why Wait? Move to EarthLink.
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