VLVL "the famous worms of song" (238)

[jbor]

> Frenesi has no idea of the meaning of the tiny pinochle players
> until years later.

She has a vision or premonition of Weed's death before it happens. Whether
or not she understood it at the time, that's what it is. The obvious
significance is that Frenesi is the one who is going to be directly
responsible for Weed's death, which is why she has the hallucination in the
first place and why she reacts to it as she does. It's the inevitability
that Weed will be killed as a result of events she sets in motion that is
alluded to here. The fact that she later recalls the vision of the worms
reminds her -- and tells us -- that she knew exactly what was going to
happen when she placed the gun in Rex's bag, even if she was trying to
suppress or otherwise evade that certain knowledge.

It follows on directly from the paragraph on p. 237 where Frenesi is trying
to fool herself that it was all just some benign movie scenario, that nobody
would realloy get hurt; and it's reminiscent of the way Katje and Blicero
play the Oven game in _GR_.

> In fact, it is only the song which makes the
> trip across a universe of time and space.

Wha? The song has been around for 100 years at least, and the text actually
says that later in Indiana Frenesi "understood" that she "had seen the
famous worms of song". Of course she knew the song.

> The players have become
> human. This is a premonition offered by the narrator to the
> reader alone: Frenesi will be around years later, unlike Weed.

This isn't correct. Frenesi actually hears and sees the human pinochle
players when she's "trying to find out, as usual, about a stipend check" in
Indiana many years later. Her livelihood has come about as a direct result
of her betrayal of Weed -- effectively, she is being paid for setting up his
murder. 

> What's interesting is the way Pynchon uses, what must seem
> like a bizarre coincidence in Frenesi's flashed-backed mind, to
> supply the reader with this premonition, and to ponder its
> meaning with respect to the future of "justice."

It's more likely, I think, that it represents Frenesi's awareness of her
guilt in respect of Weed's assassination. What she remembers is that she saw
it all clearly at the time -- in the form of this hallucination -- even
before the murder happened.

best