re SLSL Buttercup, frogs, Hollander's article

[Doug Millison]

jbor:
>There's no obvious allusion to the play in the text
>that
>I can detect.

Aside from that prominent chorus of frogs in the story's climax, you mean?
Reading the frog chorus in "TSR" as the frog chorus in the play is funny, I
think, and I expect that a reader interested in pursuing the connection
(instead of simply dismissing it out of hand) might come up with something
illuminating.


jbor:
> This explicitly
>relates
>back to Dugan, who "pronounced 'out' like 'oot'", which "irritated
>Levine".


Got it, Buttercup and Dugan have a similar accent, with respect to at least
one word.  There remains a huge leap from accent to politics, and the story
provides nothing to justify that leap.  That Buttercup is a small-town girl
who prefers the college and these soldiers to the local people she's grown
up among  (assuming, again, that she's a local girl) makes her a member of
a rather large cohort  (millions of young people in small-town America who
wish they were just about anywhere but in that small town), and says
nothing about her attitudes about race.

Dugan, he's a piece of work.  Interesting that Pynchon puts a believer in
the Übermensch in the US Army here in his first published story -- he will
hammer that nail hard in his later works.

jbor:
> Buttercup similarly
>dismisses the
>people of Creole as inferior to those at the college, and has no
>compassion
>for their deaths

Plucking Buttercup's quote out of context might seem to lend support to
such a notion, but even then it's a stretch.  It's clear that she doesn't
like Creole much, but supporting the conclusion that she "has no compassion
for their deaths" would require much more insight into her thoughts and
feelings than Pynchon provides in this story  -- you're trying too hard to
force her into a mold. She's happy (hence "she grinned") the college was
spared, not surprising since this seems to be the place she likes best.


jbor:
>Hollander mistakes Levine
>for
>"the narrator"

As demonstrated by the quote you slected to support this absurd assertion,
Hollander is talking about Levine as a character of the story, using
Pynchon's "almost but not quite me" phrase as a descriptor for a character
who might be seen to resemble Pynchon in some respects.  I find no specific
comment about the story's narrator by Hollander in his article, your
criticism of Hollander is, once again, unwarranted, not to mention shabby,
since you have admitted yourself  in past Pynchon-L discussion threads that
you've benefited from his close reading and research.



Doug Millison - Writer/Editor/Web Editorial Consultant
http://www.Online-Journalist.com