VL-IV, Frenesi's god
Joseph Tracy
brook7 at sover.net
Thu Jan 29 14:35:08 CST 2009
Of course the pathetic level of "reward.. , freedom,... simplicity
and certainty "she identifies as a golden age is what makes these
thoughts so indigestible, so empty. She isn't even a successful
fascist or a high value cop. Her mistake was doubly sad : on one side
the failure to see the power of the artistic record she was putting
together ; or, even in betrayal, the failure to recognize the
bargaining power of her role in the movement. But this is the
seductiveness of "security". The amount of money and power that
circles that desire , and the force of its momentum is what all
Pynchon stories confront both in its inner and outer dimensions.
What makes Frenesi retain my sympathy as a reader is that she still
imagines this freedom within herself and that is the fertile ground
of a painful change. It is impossible for this reader not to se some
of Frenesi in my own life.
Frenesi and Zoyd seem to be linked like paired electrons lost in a
Rip Van Winkle sleep. The story starts with Zoyd waking from his
dreams of messengers with light in their wings which he cannot reach,
only to find Hector and the Feds on his tail and with Frenesi
waking from her masturbatory Tubal cop fantasy to find the Reagan
revolution no longer requires her services or feels obligated to
negotiate a severance package.
The sixties are indeed over, but the revolutions just keep coming.
On Jan 29, 2009, at 9:56 AM, bandwraith at aol.com wrote:
> tres
>
> "When the sixties were over, when the hemlines
> came down and the colors of the clothes went
> murky and everybody wore makeup that was
> supposed to look like you had no makeup on, when
> tatters and patches had had their day and the
> outlines of the Nixonian Repression were clear
> enough even for the most gaga of hippie optimists
> to see, it was then, facing into the deep autumnal
> wind of what was coming, that she thought, Here,
> finally- here's my Woodstock, my golden age of
> rock and roll, my acid adventures, my Revolution.
> Come into her own at last, street-legal, full-auto
> qualified, she understood her particular servitude
> as the freedom, granted to a few, to act outside
> warrants and charters, to ignore history and the
> dead, to imagine no future, no yet-to-be-born, to
> be able simply to go on defining moments only,
> purely, by the action that filled them. Here was a
> world of simplicity and certainty no acidhead, no
> revolutionary anarchist would ever find, a world
> based on the one and zero of life and death.
> Minimal, beautiful. The patterns of lives and deaths...."
>
> Such is Frenesi's nostalgia on the cusp of a new day
> which will find her back up "on the surface" to deal,
> fiinally, with the "clockwork of cause and effect"
> from which she fled underground those fifteen or so
> years ago. Her nostalgia balances that of the aging
> "hippie optimists" - the other side of the same coin.
> It has the ring of romantic nihilism common to all
> fascist movements, but it goes beyond even that
> and transcends the need for what Michael Polanyi
> called "moral inversion," in that there seems to be
> no justification required- i.e., your society is corrupt
> and decadent, so therefore, anything goes, any-
> thing is justified to bring it down- the dismissal of all
> "bourgeois" values, checks and balances, etc. For
> Frenesi it's a more honest than that, no need for
> rationalizations or appeals to secularized religion,
> just her own personal aesthetic.
>
> This must be operant somewhere in the back of
> her mind as she is about to become "clairvoyant."
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