VLVL Thorazine

[jbor]

    >>>>> So how do you account for the Reveille? VL.242.30
>>>> 
>>>> Small "r" reveille, as in wake-up call. How do you account for the "motel
>>>> sheets" (242.30), and the fact that it takes place in "a city, days
>>>> distant"
>>>> (242.14)?
>>> 
>>> Well that's easy enough, she's in a hotel. She staying in a hotel with
>>> Brock.
>> 
>> Precisely. She's not in the re-education camp, and she's not being held down
>> by orderlies, injected, given suppositories etc, which is what she describes
>> to DL at 260-1. She's staying in a motel room and giving evidence before a
>> grand jury. And, in her testimony, she lies.
> 
> Right, she is in a hotel at the moment. Brock is a mobile unit of the
> DOJ. He's got his own GJ and he moves about the country. He's also got
> his own Campus, PREP, and he takes Frenesi there right after Rex murders
> Weed. And on page 269 he shows up at reveille.

The "reveille on the PA" on 269 is not the same "reveille" which wakes
Frenesi up in the motel room, of course, but it does suggest that there's a
connection between the PREP camp and the grand jury hearing. Recall that,
earlier, "Brock had convened his roving grand jury up in Oregon to look into
subversion on the campus of a small community college" (199-200).

> I'm reading these as a sort of montage. The plot line is dotted and we
> can't know for sure if some of what Frenesi tells DL isn't the truth.

I think that we can infer that quite a bit of what Frenesi tells DL isn't
the truth. And I think the connections between what happens to Weed when he
goes to Dr Elasmo's, which he can't remember (228), Brock describing these
visits to Frenesi, "in detail often crude enough to make her afraid" (240),
and what she tells DL happened to her when she tries to blame "external drug
molecules" for what she did (260-1). We see exactly what she did -- and how
conscious she is of what she is doing -- and we know for certain that it
isn't "external drug molecules" which force her to do it.

I don't think the fact that she lies at the grand jury hearing is beside the
point at all. She lies to the jury, but not because she has been drugged or
coerced. She lies to conceal both her own part in Weed's murder and her
liaison with Brock. She hasn't lost her memory at all.

Sure there's a possibility that some of what she tells DL is true, and we
never really know for sure, but, ipso facto, there's also the possibility
that a lot of it isn't true, and there are hints enough to support the idea
that it *wasn't* because Brock drugged Frenesi -- if in fact he did -- that
she did the things she did.

best




> We
> know that DL doesn'e believe a lot of it and we that Frenesi is a liar,
> betrayer, manipulator, but it's not all phoney bo log en uh yeah like
> well he um you see and word was that he ...
> 
> I guess one could argue that Frenesi may be taking the coffee and
> tranquilizers for breakfast before she goes before the GJ sort of
> voluntarily, but she's not  talking the night's drug combo, which hasn't
> worn off by morning voluntarily, so she's not doing any of these things
> sober and free of Brock. The fact that she lies is beside the point.
> It's all just rubber stamp and pro forma. Brock has a spirit (Weed) and
> a body (Frenesi) and a gun.