SLSL "TSR" frogs = death?

[Otto]

----- Original Message -----
From: "jbor" <jbor at bigpond.com>
To: <pynchon-l at waste.org>
Sent: Thursday, December 05, 2002 9:48 PM
Subject: Re: SLSL "TSR" frogs = death?


> 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.
>

That's ok to me too -- after his "Make it literary"-admission I was already
thinking of a "poorly done allusion" given the content of the play.

> 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?
>

No, not at all, there are no convincing evidences, just a slight possibility
of a "poorly done allusion" or of a "missed opportunity."

> 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
>

That's absolutely right. But in the case of Pynchon's frogs a critic should
talk about and look at the Greek play and then reject it as a possible
allusion.

Otto

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