VL-IV: Chap 8 & pg.381- Frenesi and DL

[Robin Landseadel]

On Jan 19, 2009, at 2:37 PM, kelber at mindspring.com wrote:

> At the time DL meets Frenesi:
>
> "... DL was just cruising up and down 101 looking for girl  
> motorcycle gangs to terrorize, drinking drugstore vodka out of the  
> bottle, hustling guys named
> Snake for enough double-cross whites to get her to the next  
> population center offering a suitable risk to her safety." (p. 115)
>
> Is this being a witness to bad karma or atoning for bad karma or  
> just Hell's Angel's-style nihilism?
>
> Laura

This is just Hell's Angel's-style nihilism but DL's closer to a real  
character, a round character, than most in Pynchon. She has a  
character arc, learns stuff in time, slowly gathers wisdom, becomes  
more attentive as the novel progresses, becomes a better person, more  
caring. Part of the fairy tale within the fairy tale is that DL  
finally falls for Takeshi:

	DL couldn't quite bring herself, then or later, to tell her mother,
	who did keep asking, any of the details of how they'd met - no
	Japanese whorehouses or Vibrating Palms - nor of his
	resurrection by Puncutron Machine, nor their yearly visits back
	to the Retreat of the Kunoichi Attentives to be checked out and
	to roll over the partnership agreement - none of that. She
	understood that if she ever started to tell the tale, why sooner or
	later the matter of the no-sex clause would emerge and
	Norleen's kindly dreaming be perhaps fatally contradicted, only
	earning DL her mother's contempt. Why get into it? But that
	turned out to be the year she and Takeshi finally renegotiated
	the no-sex clause, and DL found out what she'd been missing 	those  
other years. "Whooee!" is how she expressed it.

	"Oriental love magic!" Takeshi wiggling his eyeglasses, which
	he had not removed, at her languidly, "right?"

	Hmm, not exactly, but intense enough to make her curious.

	"Takeshi, 1 didn't know you felt like this .... I didn't know I felt  
like
	this. What's going on?" Even after the clause change, it had
	taken them days' travel, back on 1-40 again, to get around to
	this, and if she hadn't been so off-balance she probably
	wouldn't be asking . . . .

	Vineland, page 381

It's in the manner of classic comic opera to have multiple weddings  
ending those works. In this new-age context, what happens between DL  
and Takeshi right here is their wedding.