SLSL "TSR" frogs = death?

[jbor]

on 5/12/02 11:25 PM, Otto at ottosell at yahoo.de wrote:

> 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.
> 

> Maybe an unconscious allusion?

Certainly a possibility (along with the very real probability of other,
perhaps unconscious, *influences*), but I think that _The Frogs_ play is too
well known, too obvious, for him to know it and not know he was alluding to
it. Either he'd never read or heard of the play at the time and came up with
the frogs himself, or he did know of the play but put the frogs in without
consciously alluding to it, or else it's an actual, very poor and very
poorly done, allusion in the "Make it literary" department. As I said
before, without persuasive evidence or arguments that an allusion has been
made, I'm willing to give Pynchon the benefit of the doubt on it.

Similarly, if, as I did, a reader reads the "frog chorus" passage,
consciously makes the connection to Aristophanes' play, and then rejects it
as irrelevant in this instance, is that somehow wrong?

Not that I'm arguing for it, but I think the plague of frogs in 'Exodus' is
an equally likely (or more so) "intertext" or "allusion", what with God's
wrath, the terrible storm, the Wandering Jews and whatnot.

I think that once you blend the two poles of the continuum between what a
writer consciously puts into the text and what a reader honestly takes away
from it then you really do leave literary interpretation open to all of the
worst excesses of subjectivism and relativism, as Terrance has been arguing
here for a long time. It's also the sort of argument that the Old Guard of
traditional criticism always use when they knock deconstruction,
postmodernism and post-structuralist theory. I don't think that an "anything
goes" approach is such a good thing.

Relativism applies to relativism, subjectivism to subjectivism, as well.
Neither are "objective" or immutable phenomena.

best