Our class is coming to the end of our initial reading of Percival Everett’s Frenzy. Personally, I’m really enjoying Everett’s unique style, but I bet we’ve all picked up on a certain practice of Everett’s at this point; he seems to jump from moment to moment, without any warning. Whether you’re enjoying it or not, this can come off as a bit jarring. Sometimes I find myself reading an entirely new scene without even realizing that the time period, characters, and context have all changed in the blink of an eye. What stood out to me the most as an example of this was what Dionysos experiences. He constantly subjects Vlepo to this continuous whirlwind that is time to a god. Interestingly enough, this detail may relate to another concept we’ve come across in class recently.
For homework one evening, we were introduced to the idea of a nouveau roman, also referred to as an antinovel. The authors of such works “…experimented with dislocations of time and space, repetitive descriptions or situations, and shifts or uncertainty in point of view, reflecting what they saw as the ambiguity and incoherence of human experience” (Murfin and Ray, 342). The way consciousness works for a god strikes me as a very anti novel aspect of Frenzy. It occurred to me when I considered the way Dionysos lives his life. The continuous stream of memories, and the way Vlepo appears to jump from time to time when he experiences them himself, reminds me of those concepts key to an antinovel. There is no linear timeline; everything is happening, has happened, and will happen at once.
Basically, the god’s thoughts seem to work as an antinovel might. For example, at the very beginning of the novel, Dionysos and Vlepo have a conversation. In one moment, Vlepo is speaking to Dionysos, and in the next, he is transported to a different time and place. He says “…I found myself situated in the fetus Dionysos, located inside the womb of his mother Semele” (Everett, 10). After a brief memory of Semele speaking to Hera, “I [Vlepo] found myself wrenched away from one thread to another. Now I was inside the infant Zagreus, born to Persephone after having the violence done to her by her father Zeus”(Everett, 12). Sometimes, there is a break or statement in the novel to indicate a switch in time. In other cases, there isn’t any distinction; “Zeus swallowed us into his body, where we dreamed of those hideous creatures biting away our form. ‘Do you still feel it?’ Hera asked. ‘And so Zeus planted you again in this body.’ She touched the frozen beauty of Semele’s face”(13). Here, the change is very abrupt. The scene begins with Semele speaking to Hera. An older memory of Persephone and Zeus follows, and then in the same quote, the story jumps back to Hera and Semele. Another case of this sudden change occurs later in the novel. Here, the narrator isn’t even made clear until a few sentences in; Vlepo has lost his spot as narrator to Kadmos, who reflects on his status as king. The quote goes “I am still the king here. The cow ate like all cows, dispassionately, slowly, stupidly, oblivious in all significant ways to the activity around it…A young Kadmos studied the beast as it ruminated….’This is the land of my city,’ he said. I watched from some space without knowing why I was watching…:” (75-76) The narrator for the whole novel is Vlepo. Here, however, not only is there a jump in time period, but there is a change in narrator that isn’t clarified for quite some time.
It’s enjoyable to see how the texts we read in class relate to one another in minor ways. All of these shifts in time, space, and point of view within a gods mind remind me of an antinovel, and I think the way Everett uses these elements to portray the chaotic nature of time to a god is pretty effective, no matter how confusing it may be to me (and, I imagine, to Vlepo).