SLSL "TSR" - frogs, Levine, Buttercup

[jbor]

on 1/12/02 4:47 AM, pynchonoid at pynchonoid at yahoo.com wrote:

> Aristophanes' The Frogs excerpts

I had a pet frog when I was a kid. It was green. I named it "Frog" and kept
it in a shoebox with holes punched in the top. When I showed it to a
neighbour lady she warned me that it would give me warts. Is that relevant
to this text?

I wonder what is seen as the connection between Aristophanes' play and the
scene in the story? There's no obvious allusion to the play in the text that
I can detect.

Re. "little Buttercup", in the 'Intro' Pynchon notes:

    ... My specific problem in the barroom scene is not only that I have
    a Louisiana girl talking in Tidewater diphthongs imperfectly heard
    to begin with, but worse, that I insist on making it an element of
    plot - it makes a difference to Levine, and therefore to what happens
    in the story. (p.5)

On their date Levine suddenly becomes aware that "she had a slight Rebel
accent". After her dismissive comment about Creole Levine asks her to say
"out" and she says "oot", and Levine says "Ah" (49). This explicitly relates
back to Dugan, who "pronounced 'out' like 'oot'", which "irritated Levine".
Dugan, from Virginia, believed "that the NAACP was a Communist cabal
dedicated to the 100% intermarriage of the White and Negro races, and that
the Virginia gentleman was in reality the Übermensch*, come at last,
prevented from fulfilling his high destiny only by the malevolent plotting
of the New York Jews." (29) He's a racist. Buttercup similarly dismisses the
people of Creole as inferior to those at the college, and has no compassion
for their deaths:

      "You mean better them than the college," he said.
      "Why sure," she grinned. (49)

Picking up on Pynchon's reflections and criticisms in the 'Intro' in writing
about Pynchon's work, as most critics writing after the publication of _SL_
also have, not only does he err in attributing a common (inaccurate) accent
to people from Virginia and Louisiana, he seems (or Levine does, at least)
to be making a rather sweeping generalisation about "Southern" attitudes as
well. This is the "element of plot" Pynchon is referring to in the 'Intro' I
think.

> Charles Hollander made
> the Buttercup-Gilbert&Sullivan connection in a Pynchon
> Notes article a dozen years ago, of course,

Actually, Pynchon made that connection in his story.

And, no offence to the man himself intended, Hollander mistakes Levine for
"the narrator":

> we
> should note that he gave Levine, this "almost me"
> character, the first name Nathan.

Pynchon:

      At the heart of the story, most crucial and worrisome, is the
    defective way in which my narrator, almost but not quite me, deals
    with the subject of death. (p. 5)

best