VLVL the collapse of the Youth Movement

[Otto]

----- Original Message -----
From: "jbor" <jbor at bigpond.com>
To: <pynchon-l at waste.org>
Sent: Sunday, February 22, 2004 12:13 AM
Subject: Re: VLVL the collapse of the Youth Movement


> > Frenesi is not insane, yet her motivations are unclear.
>
> She's working for Brock, doing what he wants her to do because he tells
her
> to. It really is as simple as that.
>
>       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 [...] (216)
>
>       Frenesi was on her own here, improvising. She knew she was
>     messing with Rex, using him against Weed, wasn't sure if she
>     wanted to, knew that Brock wanted her to, that had been clear
>     since the day of the tornadoes [...] (236)
>
>     She would have hated to admit how much of this came down to
>     Brock's penis, straightforwardly erect [...] (241)
>
> Without Frenesi's active intervention Weed would not have been killed.
Even
> she recognises and accepts the fact that she bears the burden of
> responsibility for what happened ("What she would then have to bear with
her
> all her life ... " 245-6).
>
> And, in the larger scheme of things, it's Frenesi's work which directly
> causes the collapse of PR3, and she realises this when she congratulates
> Brock that his plan has been so successful:
>
>       "It's all coming apart. Suddenly everybody's got a pay-off story
>     to tell, total paranoia." (239)
>

I still have trouble with your proportioning of the "guilt" -- without
Frenesi it would have been another woman Brock would have launched to get
Weed Atman. Without Rex there'd been another fanatic, but without Brock
neither Frenesi nor Rex would have committed that murder.

I think there's another layer here, kind of historiographic metafiction that
tells us how parts of the movement really became violent (Weatherman,
Baader-Meinhof) -- but that the murders and terrorist acts wouldn't have
happened without the preceding interference of federal agents delivering the
first guns.

> The other point I've made several times now is that Brock is also guilty,
> operating far outside his brief as a federal agent, and that he would have
> been convicted and sentenced had his role in what transpired ever been
> brought to light. But the destruction of PR3 couldn't have been brought
> about without someone like Frenesi on the inside who was willing to betray
> both her friends and the Movement.
>

I think her motivation counts here. She dreamed of getting Brock exclusively
in the end. Maybe Zoyd wasn't totally wrong in that Hawaian hotel on p. 60
although it sounds a bit like sour grapes: "Fuck her, he chirped to himself,
today's your release date, let ol' Brock have her, let him take her on into
that lawyers' world where they can get away with anything and get everything
they want (...)."

> After DL drops her off at "Las Suegras" Frenesi has no friends and no
place
> left to go. So she latches on to the first dupe she finds: Zoyd.

Right, it surely wasn't a difficult task getting that unsophisticated hippie
who was really believing in the power of love, the hippie-credo:

"Frenesi, do you think that love can save anybody? You do, don't you?" At
the time he hadn't learned yet what a stupid question it was. (39)

Why is it a stupid question? The answer is given on p. 216 by the same
narrator. Of course she believes in love, but Zoyd isn't the object of her
desire:

". . . it could've been about the only way she knew to use the word *love*
anymore, its trivializing in those days already  well begun, its magic
fading, the subject of all that rock and roll, the simple resource we once
thought would save us. Yet if there was anything left to believe, she must
have in the power even of that weightless, daylit commodity of the sixties
to redeem even Brock, amiably, stupidly, brutal, fascist Brock."

> And Zoyd,
> looking back now, realises that he "must've been an easy mark" and beats
> himself up because she was able to fool him into believing "how innocent
she
> was" (41-2). Their marriage is one big con job from start to finish, just
> like their wedding. And, the *real* issues of the day (the government's
war
> in Vietnam, the murder of political activists like MLK, Malcolm X and
> others, and the slaughter of African-Americans and incineration of their
> communities), have been totally forgotten.

Well, that man's been really happy that day.

> These issues never figured much
> on the hippies' agenda in the first place,

I disagree, Love & Peace -- the rebellion against the Puritan repression and
the resistance against the war have been the starting points of the
movement. And don't underestimate the importance and influence of the Blues
(one thing I really miss in Vineland). The music of the movement, a basic
element, was grounded on and cannot be separated from the knowledge under
which social circumstances this culture had developed.
LeRoi Jones' "Blues People" (1963) was a book that had been read.

> but Frenesi is the link here back
> to the Youth Movement, and in what she has done and wrought at College of
> the Surf in bringing about the destruction of PR3 and the Movement she has
> also betrayed these causes.

Sure she has.

> The issues haven't been set aside just for the
> day of the wedding -- this completely misses Pynchon's point here -- these
> events are now "off on some other planet".

I'm not convinced. The magic word is "now."

> It's as though they never
> happened,

Why this? Why never? We've read enough SF to imagine that things might
happen somewhere on other planets.

And isn't this a very common expression ("off on some other planet"),
meaning explicitly that this state of mind won't last, is an exception to
the daily routine? Isn't that "all must have been" just another expression
for "as if"?

> and so the causes have been irrevocably lost as a result.
>
>     War in Vietnam, murder as an instrument of American
>     politics, black neighborhoods torched to ashes and
>     death, all must have been off on some other planet. (38)
>
> best

When I use this expression in my speech does this mean that I really have
forgotten them or doesn't it mean that I did manage to forget the things
troubling me for a very special occasion, a special day, a short time, but
they will be back tomorrow?

Why should they have been "irrevocably lost"? Because the bridegroom admits
that he nearly had forgotten them on the day of his wedding? That doesn't
make sense to me.

Otto