VLVL Berger: Frenesi

[jbor]

While Berger makes good use of Foucault and Deleuze & Guattari in connecting
Frenesi's turn to "the fascism in us all, in our heads and in our everyday
behavior, the fascism that causes us to love power, to desire the very thing
that dominates and exploits us", he mistakes Frenesi for Sasha. It's Sasha
who meditates on "some Cosmic Fascist" imprinting a perverse "DNA sequence".
Frenesi rejects her mother's thesis, over the years moving through "anger"
to mild annoyance and eventually to sadness (and this final stage is,
possibly, seeing as how she has fallen victim to the same "swoon" herself,
the sadness of self-realisation and resignation). (83-4)

    [...]
    Frenesi, nevertheless, does betray the Movement, her lover
    Weed Atman, her husband Zoyd, and her daughter Prairie as a
    result of her sexual obsession for her worst political enemy,
    the federal prosecutor Brock Vond. Frenesi's failure, her
    "helpless turn toward images of authority," is at the center
    of Pynchon's portrayal of the failures of the 1960s. And
    Frenesi fatalistically conjectures that "some Cosmic Fascist
    had spliced in a DNA sequence requiring this form of seduction
    and initiation into the dark joys of social control." Indeed,
    Frenesi fears "that all her oppositions, however good and just,
    to forms of power were really acts of denying that dangerous
    swoon that came creeping at the edges of her optic lobes every
    time the troops came marching by. . ." (83)
    [...]

http://www.themodernword.com/pynchon/papers_berger.html

Still, despite the error (which someone really should have picked up before
the essay got to the publisher), Berger's argument here is quite insightful.
It dovetails nicely with the description of the self-deceit and
ineffectuality of the Counterforce in _GR_, and that novel's main theme
about how "[t]he Man has a branch office in each of our brains, his
corporate emblem is a white albatross, each local rep has a cover known as
the Ego, and their mission in the world is Bad Shit. We do know what's going
on, and we let it go on." (GR 712-3)

best