SLSL "TSR" frogs = death?

[Otto]

----- Original Message -----
From: "jbor" <jbor at bigpond.com>
To: <pynchon-l at waste.org>
Sent: Wednesday, December 04, 2002 8:35 PM
Subject: Re: SLSL "TSR" frogs = death?

> on 4/12/02 7:51 PM, Otto at ottosell at yahoo.de wrote:
>
> > Intertextuality:
> > I think it's impossible to use a choir of frogs in literature without
> > automatically pointing out/alluding to the Aristophanes-play.
>
> It's a realistic story set in a swamp after a hurricane. Isn't it more
> likely that they're actual frogs? Pynchon makes no mention of the play in
> his 'Intro' even though he refers explicitly to the sex scene and the "too
> fancy to read" language it is framed in (5-6). And he's already sourced
> the "literary" intertexts he used for the story.
>

Good arguments. I should have ended the sentence: *for some readers at
least*. Actual or not, they're frogs in literature, in a text.

I think he hadn't in mind fully what he was doing in using "thousands of
frogs" (49) and "frogs intoned a savage chorus" (50) for accompanying the
sex-scene in his swamp wasteland, maybe unaware of it in 1959 and not
thinking of it in 1984.

>
> I think that there's a difference between a conscious allusion made by an
> author and a reader making a connection, though these are both aspects of
> "intertextuality". You seem to be saying that any connection a reader
> makes is "automatically" an allusion made by the author. I disagree with
> this, but I'd be interested to hear your argument.
>
> best
>

Maybe an unconscious allusion?

"Allusion is distinguished from other varieties of metaphor or analogy by
the greater complexity and potential its context necessarily brings with it;
it is a metaphor with an almost inexhaustibly number of points of
comparison. No matter how skillfully an author uses an ordinary image, such
as a rose, there are only limited points of comparison to be
developed--color, beauty, lenght of life etc. But an allusion to Lucifer,
for example, provides a framework of relations among characters, qualities
of personality, themes, structural patterns, all of which may be put to use
if the author has the desire and the genius to do so."
Weldon Thornton: _Allusions in Ulysses. An Annotated List_, The University
of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill, 1961 and 1968, p. 3.

I focus upon "an almost inexhaustibly number of points of comparison" here
which make the possibility of unconscious allusions very likely on a general
level, there's no need to have a specific text in mind while alluding to or
being influended by it nevertheless:

"(...) a critic remarked that my novel had been influenced by Otto Rank's
_Myth of the Birth of the Hero_. I borrowed the book from the Penn State
Library; I peeked into it; sure enough the critic was right."
John Barth: Mystery and Tragedy ..., _The Friday Book_, NY 1984, p. 43.

It doesn't matter to me (the reader) whether the author has made an allusion
unaware of doing so or has intended to do it. If it's there for me it's
there. And If I read about a "choir of frogs" in serious literature I'm
alerted that I'm somewhere in hell, that's all.

Otto

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