VLVL Rex and Weed

[jbor]

>> Frenesi is sleeping with Brock. She lies about Weed being a snitch
>> at Brock's request: in fact, she's the snitch (and it seems that Weed, Rex
>> and DL suspect this even before the final showdown).
> 
> Sure they do. They've all been sleeping with Frenesi. She's a very
> powerful lover, the kind that can drive men or women mad. Brock, of
> course, doesn't quite fit into the man or women category.
> 
> Rex is pissed off at Weed because Weed hasn't turned out to be the
> protégé he had hoped to produce, but there is a sexual anger as well
> (it's homophobic, homoerotic, hetero-envious and the narrator invites us
> to consider all of these possible contexts at page 233, the object in
> Rex's purse, pants ... ). We will need to wait and see about Brock's
> sexual idiosyncrasies, but we are getting a few clues to them in these
> two chapters (Motel and Murder Chapters). We should also consider the
> Light that excites Frenesi in the Motel scene and her rejection of the
> TV evangelist weatherman.
> 
> "What are you looking at?" Rex clearly agitated and getting more so.
> "Nothing." 
> "you were looking at my bag. You think my bag is nothing?"
> "you seem upset tonight, Rex, what is it?"
> 
> They both new it was Frenesi ... After a series of consultations with
> the others in the unit, DL had suggested to Howie, who admitted he could
> use a break from the Pisk's Trasero-heightened surphobia, that he find a
> way to keep and eye on Frenesi.
> 
> VL.233.28-234.1
> 
> Also, Jinx is spying on everyone too.

Yes, I agree that she is spying, and she confirms DL's worst fears about
Frenesi (237.15-24), though I think Jinx's main motive is sexual jealousy. I
think there's also an insinuation that Rex might be an infiltrator as well.
The dream-future Weed says:

      "Well, we were being set up all the time, it turned out. The FBI
    was in there like some little guy in a bar going let's-you-and-
    him-fight. Anonymous letters and phone calls, night riders, flat
    tires, job and landlord troubles, all made to look like it was
    coming from ol' what's his name here and the BLGVN/US." (232-33)

Also: 

    Rex was supposed to be out someplace, and for the first time in
    anyone's memory, the bag had not gone with him. (243)

I think Pynchon deliberately leaves a lot of loose ends -- indeterminate,
you might call it -- and, apart from Frenesi of course, we don't know for
sure who's secretly betraying anyone else.

I tend to think that in _Vineland_ Pynchon perceives and depicts the problem
with the '60s Youth Movement and the way they tried to set up an opposition
to the "fascist" government is that it took in all-comers -- infiltrators,
zealots, extremists, hypocrites, monomaniacs, loonies, druggies -- which
both sped up its collapse as a coherent political entity and which also made
the Conservative government seem like -- or just made it -- the lesser of
two evils. The same thing is happening in 2004; Bush's second term will be
largely thanks to the efforts of the lunatic fringe and proponents of
violence who have attached themselves to the opposition like barnacles, and
who appear to (in the public imagination), or who actually do, sympathise
with people like Timothy McVeigh, Osama, Saddam &c. Who's to say that some
of these types aren't in fact infiltrators who are working for the other
side, seems to be part of Pynchon's point in the novel.

best

    

> Lot of Katje and Blicero oven games here. Moving for the camera alone.
> Notice that when Frenesi is filming the farm workers, she is herself
> being filmed, and she digs it, she senses the camera sucking up her
> image. It's her first step into the LIGHT.
> 
> 
> 
> And, as with the worms, children's games.
> Pynchon's source has been identified and I've mentioned it a few times,
> 
> _The Lore And Language Of School Children_
> Iona & Peter Opie, Introduction by Marina Warner, 1959
> 
> Feminist readings simply miss the mark because Frenesi is no Nora (even
> though Ibsen never intended to make a feminist statement). Frenesi's
> Doll House, where she pretends to speak with DL and Sasha, is a sacred
> space, recall that V plays colonial games with her dolls while in Church
> and that her inverted Catholicism includes a Black Mass.
> 
> 
> A medium of exchange (in GR Katje terms), Frenesi doesn't quite
> understand her power or why she can't use it on Brock, but she knows
> what he wants. She wants it more than him. She wants to put her Light on
> it. 
> 
> 
> 
> She understood as clearly as she could allow herself to what Brock
> wanted her to do, understood at last, dismally, that she might even do
> it-not for him, unhappy fucker, but because she had lost just too much
> control, time was rushing all around her, these were rapids, and as far
> ahead as she could see it looked like Brock's stretch of the river,
> another stage, like sex, children, surgery, further into adulthood
> perilous and real, into the secret that life is soldiering, that
> soldiering includes death, that those soldiered for, not yet and often
> never in on the secret, are always, at every age, children.
> (VL.216.16-25).