Frenesi

[Terrance]

Toby G Levy wrote:
> 
> Terrence wrote:
> 
> >There is plenty good about her. Why do her Mother and her Father love
> her? Why does DL love her?
> 
> Yeah and Hitler's parents thought the baby fuhrer was a bundle of joy.
> Then when he grew up millions of people adored him.  Does that make him a
> good person.

No, obviously Hitler was a very bad person.  

I'm talking about Frenesi's parents. Why do they love her? Why do they,
despite  their differences--their marriage  falls apart--come together
to take care of her when she is very sick with postpartum depression?
Sasha and Hub put aside their bitterness and work together to save
Frenesi and Prairie. Zoyd is MIA. Brock Vond, like a fiend,  is hanging
around haunting her with patronizing anti-life propaganda. Sasha is up
to her eyeballs, exhausted, a new baby, a suicidal and infanticidal
mother. Hub shows up and the two of them save the kid and the mother.
Who was saved? 

> 
> I have read Vineland maybe a dozen times and every time I get to this
> Frenesi/Vond episode my blood begins to boil.  She is an incredibly bad
> person.

You know, I've been thinking about the college novel part of this book
because of the recent debate about the college kids and their impact on
civil rights and organized labor and so forth.   I think, that the
college kids, the privileged class kids like  the Mouth sisters and
Frenesi were rebelling against their parents and doing the Marcuse dance
against time and death. So what else is new. 



In the Introduction to Fraiña's BDSL Pynchon says, 

Undergraduate consciousness rests in part on a set of careless
assumptions about being immortal. The elitism and cruelty often found in
college humor arises from this belief in one's own Exemption, not only
from time and death, but somehow from the demands of life as well. 


On this level it easy enough to forgive Frenesi and the Pisk (Mouth)
sisters. On the allegorical level, however, Frenesi and Brock Vond
represent the Turn (Betrayal) and Fascism (anti-life or death with a
capital D). So of course she makes your blood boil. Pynchon is a great
novelist. 

Why don't Vato & Blood boil your blood? Were they only preterit
hamburger? Is that why we can forgive them for making meat loaf on both
sides in SE Asia? 

VL is a novel about work. And the greatest work of all, as St. Paul
says, is charity. 



> 
> And I wish to Briefly respond to Bandwraith's comment that "Hippie-dom
> would have been equally as  marginalized except for several important
> events- the acceleration of the civil rights movement, and, Martin Luther
> King's courageous anti-war stand."
> 
> As one who lived through those days I can tell you that most of the
> hippies had no clue who Martin Luther King was.  All they knew was that
> government wanted to draft them and put them in a country where people
> wanted to kill them.  It was self defense that built the antiwar movement
> and it was the end of widespread hostilities and the scaling down of the
> draft that ended the movement.
> 
> Toby
> 
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