SLSL "TSR" - frogs, Levine, Buttercup

[pynchonoid]

Dave,

Thanks for  Aristophanes' The Frogs excerpts, I was
meaning to get to that, and you saved me the trouble.

Speaking of idiosyncratic reader-response
intepretations forcing the text to fit a preconceived
notion, reading a chorus of live frogs in the midst of
blooming nature as symbolizing "death" seems a gloomy
stretch, even by mid-20th-century existential
standards.  Here it's the people who seem or are dead
or who, in later Pynchon works, worship death and
death's avatars (Blicero a good example)-- Levine and
those corpses reminiscent of the corpses Pynchon will
pile up like Auschwitz firewood for Benny Profane (the
character Levine seems most likely to morph into) in
V. -- while nature lives on despite the human assault,
as Pynchon shows again and again in the works that
will follow "The Small Rain."

Judging from what she's doing when first encountered
in "TSR" Buttercup might be seen as an early version
of the doughnut dolly who will party with Bodine and
his Merck cocaine in GR. With her car, she resembles
Rachel in V.  I'm not sure how Buttercup becomes a
racist because of her accent, that seems another
reader-response leap, but she does seem to display a
certain amount of familiar-sounding sophomoric
condescencion, she looks down on the town, it's a mess
anyway why shouldn't the storm blow it away seems to
be the attitude, not the sort of proto-fascist
politics that Dugan expresses.  If she's a local girl
(and Pynchon got the accent wrong, as he says he did
in the Intro), she's just tired of the local action
and ready for the wider world suggested by college
life and the soldiers; if she's a transplanted
Virginian, I expect that small-town Louisiana pales by
comparison.  

More on Buttercup coming up -- Charles Hollander made
the Buttercup-Gilbert&Sullivan connection in a Pynchon
Notes article a dozen years ago, of course, but it's
nice to see somebody acknowledging that now...

-Doug



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