SLSL "TSR" - frogs, Levine, Buttercup

[William Zantzinger]

--- jbor <jbor at bigpond.com> wrote:
> 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?

Only if you believe that _JR_ could be a tale about my
first savings account at The First National Bank Of
New York. Obviously, _ JR_ is not about my account. 

However, this kind of extreme subjectivism or reader
response Freudianism is quite different from either
deconstruction or inter-textual reading. While M&W
fall into the Freudian trap, the inter-textual reader
need not. 

> 
> 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.





> 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.


An obvious connection? 

1. Obvious because the author intended it and makes it
obvious (sometimes the author is slick, subtle,
tricky, playful. Young authors attempting to show off
are usually too transparent)
For example, Pynchon makes sure we get the allusions
to Eliot and Hemingway. 


2. Obvious because of some shared cultural event or   
trend at the time the book was published or set. 

The Little Buttercup connects the text to G&S as Paul
explained. In this example, there is both an obvious
and intentional authorial allusion to another text and
there is the event or trend (the fact that G&S had
become a LF on college campuses at the time). 

3. Obvious because of some event or trend common to
current readers (regardless of when the fiction being
read was written or the time in which it is set)
causes readers to make an obvious connection in the
text to the event they have experienced in common. For
example, during the Vietnam era,  American students
read All Quite On The Western Front and made all sorts
of obvious connections in the text to their shared
experiences. 
Immediately after 9-11 I opened and read Thucydides. 
I was not surprised that his text was and has been
alluded to by authors discussing the 9-11 tragedy. 

4. Readers can make an obvious connection with other
texts. Even if Pynchon never read Dickens readers and
groups of  readers can make an obvious connection
between texts, say Bleakhouse and GR.

(a) thematic connection
(b) symbolic, lingusitic connection
(c) device 
(d) (comedy, parody, etc.) 


While Pynchon may not have inteded any connection or
allusion to the play Frogs in M&D, a reader can make
the connection based on all of the above--a,b,c,d. 


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