AtDTdA: (9) 266-267

[Tore Rye Andersen]

Jasper admiringly quoted:

"At the moment of surrendering, she found herself wishing only to become
the wind. To feel herself refined to an edge, an invisible edge of
unknown length, to enter the realm of air forever in motion over the
broken land. Child of the storm."

- and reflected on Lake being described as a "Child of the storm".

The first thing I thought of when reading that moniker (introduced by Webb 
on p. 190) were a couple of significant scenes in Vineland. The first scene 
occurs in a suite at the Imperial in Tokyo, just after Ralph Wayvone has 
bought DL at an auction (VL, 137-38), and the second episode takes place in 
another hotel room, between two different people, namely Brock and Frenesi 
(VL, 212-15). The scenes are in effect mirror images of each other (just as 
DL and Frenesi are doubles -- The theme of mirrors/doubles/twins is almost 
as important in VL as in AtD): In both scenes a woman sells her services 
(and in effect herself) to a male figure of power, and in both scenes, a 
storm is raging outside the window, and Pynchon describes these storms in 
lavish and scary detail (see VL, 138, 212, 215):

Here is DL's storm:

"A lightning storm had appeared far out to sea and now, behind them out the 
window, was advancing on the city, taking brightly crazed shots all along 
the horizon." (138)

And here's Frenesi's:

"...weather maps kept breaking in with updates on a number of storm cells 
moving out in the landscape, surrounding the city. Ghostly predigital radar 
images appeared, of gray mother storms giving birth from their righ-hand 
sides to little hook-shaped echoes that grew, and detached, to glide off on 
their own as murderous young tornadoes. Weather commentators tried to 
maintain the tradition of wackiness the job is known for, but could not keep 
out of the proceedings an element of surrender, as if before some first hard 
intelligence of the advent of an agent of rapture. Outside, from a remote 
camera, the sky was the underside of a beast, countless gray-black udder 
shapes crawling in in front of a squall line, behind it something distantly 
roaring, dangling immense stings veined with lightning, sweeping, 
destroying....She felt electrically excited" (212)

- and it goes on:

"Outside, beyond the dense rubberized drapes, now a solid black rectangle 
rim-lit with a least glimmer of failed daylight, was the storm, the Event. 
Just when she thought they were nestled safe in the center of America - here 
were sounds in the air they couldn't have imagined [...] At the sight of the 
black rolling clouds she caught her breath - she'd never seen a sky like 
this on Earth, not even with the help of LSD [and the descriptions 
continues]" (215)

Both DL and Frenesi make some extremely bad choices here: they sell their 
souls to the wrong men, with the storm as a background. Note, furthermore, 
how the Storm in the second quote is described as some female Beast (udders 
and all), giving birth. To what? To Children of the Storm, naturally, to DL, 
to Frenesi, and to Lake (who seems to share many characteristics with the 
Frenesi character).

_________________________________________________________________
Log på MSN Messenger direkte på nettet:  http://webmessenger.msn.com