VLVL Frenesi and Brock

[jbor]

>> this narration is a flashback mediated by DL,
> 
> jbor wrote:
>> I don't think this is necessarily the case. How would DL even know about
> this meeting?
> 
> Because DL had it out with Frenesi on pages 260-261.  They spent the
> night talking and then another day and night of "sad human shittiness."
> Through all the malarky that Frenesi came up with, DL was able to piece
> together what was the true story of frenesi's relationship with Vond.  OR
> you might say that the scenes between Frenesi and Vond are asDL imagined
> them to be, not as they perhaps actually were.

It's a possibility. In my opinion, however, there's nothing in the text to
support the idea that DL is reconstructing the scene from her own
imagination and narrating it to Prairie and Ditzah. I actually think that
Frenesi continues to lie to DL at 260-1, coming up with false excuses for
her actions and betrayals. I think that the recount of the conversation
between Brock and Frenesi at 239-42 is supposed to be a "true" account -- as
I said, I agree that DL (and Prairie, Ditzah, Rex, Weed etc too, for that
matter), could imagine that meetings like that must have taken place between
the two of them. But I don't think there's any definitive evidence in the
text to indicate that Frenesi does tell anyone what happened on "the
next-to-last day" (239), and certainly not in the detail which we're
provided with.

I think that what lasted "another day and night" (261) is simply that final
encounter between DL and Frenesi, and that the "sad human shittiness" is
just more of the same of what's already there in the text -- the tears,
pleas, insults, "getting things wrong on purpose", the relationship "falling
to pieces", and, particularly, Frenesi "blaming external drug molecules for
each of her failures, complicities and surrenders" (260-1).

best

> I don't think this is necessarily the case. How would DL even know about
> this meeting? I think that, in terms of narrative agency, we have long since
> shifted away from the conversations and film-viewing at Ditzah's. Pynchon
> uses a process of narrative sleight-of-hand that allows us to zoom in on
> other events (cf. the way the narration zooms inside the computer system to
> provide more information about the meeting between DL and Frenesi *after*
> Prairie has gone to bed 115.23).
> 
> I think the rendezvous and exchange is supposed to represent an accurate
> account of this meeting between Brock and Frenesi. I guess it could be what
> Prairie or DL imagine might have taken place, though there's nothing in the
> text to establish this, but as readers we're offset from DL's and Prairie's
> point of view.