VL-IV: Chap8- Ghosts

[kelber at mindspring.com]

"She already knew about how literal computers could be -- even spaces between characters mattered.  She had wondered if ghosts were only literal in the same way.  Could a ghost think for herself, or was she responsive totally to the needs of the still-living, needs like keystrokes entered into her world, lines of sorrow, loss, justice denied?... But to be of any use, to be 'real,'  a ghost would have to be more than only that kind of elaborate pretending..." (VL, p. 114)

There's a longing for ghosts here, as opposed to human memory, which is flawed, and computer memory, which is mechanistic.  Memory of any kind is a form of elaborate pretending:  Sasha's reworking of Frenesi's story to make it palatable for Prairie; the media's reprocessing of "The Sixties," as something to be made palatable by turning it into a marketable concept.  Prairie's first impressions of the photo of Frenesi and DL are of the superficial media-mediated kind:

"Prairie had an eerie feeling that miniskirts would be back."  Or her conception of what Frenesi and DL were saying in the picture:  "'Right on, sister!' "Psychedelic!'"

After she walks away, the ghosts emerge from the computer and we learn first about what was happening in the picture, then dig deeper into the past:  Frenesi's and DL's first meeting, then all the way back to DL's dad's early life, DL's childhood and adolescence.  These ghosts are "real" for us, the readers, because they're unmediated by Prairie's preconceptions.

Laura