VLVL "the famous worms of song" (238)

[jbor]

on 3/2/04 6:17 PM, jbor wrote:

> 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.
>
> [...] 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.

And, in the reversal of the cause and effect sequence here -- Frenesi's
hallucination comes many years before the actual experience which ostensibly
inspired it -- Pynchon seems to be a playing on the idea of a "worm-hole"
through space-time. (And cf. also that "dreamed hillside" of the future on
pp. 232-3, 246, the hysteron proton stuff with the rockets and their sound
in _GR_).

best