BEg2 ch 24 Windust/Maxine reminiscent of you know who

[Michael Bailey]

Frenesi & Brock in that grammatically disputed passage in _Vineland_

Which a quick look at might be fun.

Holistically, the _Vineland_ passage shares a paragraph with a longer
lament of Frenesi’s for a lost connection with her mother Sasha.
And develops out of that; and includes a reference to it. The paragraph  -
A) says she eventually got over the postpartum hatred for Prairie and the
animosity toward Sasha
B) says she longs for lost mother-daughter closeness
C) even more than all kinds of other desires, romantic, political,
atonement for her betrayal of Weed
D) she doesn’t understand why
E) and hopes to never understand - is ready to lapse into unquestioning
dutiful motherhood so as to avoid understanding
F) which she considers to be a betrayal on the order of that in “The Last
Temptation” (at least her formulation reminded me of that)
G) after this partial Hegelian progression,
synthesis “lost confident daughterhood - desire for its return”
antithesis “willingness to abandon that quest and disappear into motherhood
role” …

H) Instead of a synthesis,  “Brock Vond [reenters] the picture, at the head
of a small motorcade of unmarked Buicks, forcing her over near Pico and
Fairfax, ordering her up against her car, kicking apart her legs and
frisking her himself, and before she knew it there they were in another
motel room, after a while her visits to Sasha dropped off and when she made
them she came in reeking with Vond sweat, Vond semen - couldn’t Sasha
*smell* what was going on? - and his erect penis had become the joystick
with which, hurtling into the future, she would keep trying to steer among
the hazards and obstacles, the swooping monsters and alien projectiles of
each game she would come, year by year, to stand before, once again out
long after curfew, calls home forgotten, supply of coins dwindling, leaning
over the bright display among the back aisles of a forbidden arcade, rows
of other players silent, unnoticed, closing time never announced, playing
for nothing but the score itself, the row of numbers, a chance of entering
her initials among those of other strangers for a brief time, no longer the
time the world observed but game time, underground time, time that could
take her nowhere outside its own tight and falsely deathless perimeter.


Somebody prominent objected to “before she knew it…after awhile” wanting a
new sentence at “After” which, strictly speaking, it probably does need,
but as parse-perfect as Pynchon usually is, I’m inclined to grant a
variance.

Anyhoo - in _Vineland_ the bad guy has his vigorous way with Frenesi and
neither Zoyd nor Sasha nor Hub has anything in their armamentaria to (what
is that phrase from CoL49 where Oedipa sees the alcoholic guy - “cam her
out of that furrow?”) break Vond’s spell.


So in BE - Windust has his way with Maxine, but she is made of sterner
stuff, perchance.

“ His hands, murderer’s hands, are gripping her forcefully by the hips,
exactly where it matters, exactly where some demonic set of nerve receptors
she has been till now only semi-aware of have waited to be found and used
like buttons on a game controller . . . impossible for her to know if it’s
him moving or if she’s doing it herself . . . not a distinction to be
lingered on till much later, of course, if at all, though in some circles
it is held to be something of a big deal . . .”


So instead of like Frenesi being likened to a kid in an arcade, (with
Vond’s penis as the joystick & the rows of “unnoticed” other players
presumably manipulating other fascist wieners, dopamine-addicted to
wringing points from the games/oppressors which award them no joy, love or
hope)

-Maxine is herself compared to a video game controller -
“Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day? No, more like an XBox controller.”




Instead of Brock’s motel rooms and unsubtle verbal gloating/domination,
Windust has a shithole pied-a-terre in a building which, rather ironically,
is undergoing forced gentrification a la his
“market freed to predators” philosophy. And he talks to her with a measure
of respect. A small measure to be sure.

Instead of Frenesi’s paucity or downright lack of recourse in family and
friends, Maxine has a support system - and instead of lamenting, like
Frenesi, a lost connection upon which she used to be able to rely, Maxine
has already a skeptical understanding of the limits of the help she can
expect from family, friends, even her therapist, but works with them anyway
as being far better than nothing.