Names in AtD - Frank

[Mark Kohut]

Nice find. The book you cite is another I've wanted to read for a long time but......
 
Frank is, well, pretty frank in the novel, no?  We learn the bad shit strand of the Traverses through him most....that scene on the runaway
locomotive as projectile bomb where he has the vision?.....
There was a very dark novel published in the 90s called, maybe Frank's Story (cannot find)...the protagonist was a kind of American underground man, living badly and full of rhetorical bits on all the awfulness of these United States....I also thought of Celine when I read it. I do remember, I think, that Ms. Jackson was the agent (and that it had been rejected all around the town). Head Dog at the company hated it so it was just printed as they say, not "published"..didn't sell.....I believe I looked up Frank then and learned the name, because of frankness, etc. was linked with truthtelling (which is so often dark) and dirtyness.....akin to Trystero truths, i ad lib now? 
2) Shortened Frankenstein, just so to speak everyone? 
 

From: Matthew Cissell <macissell at yahoo.es>
To: "pynchon-l at waste.org" <pynchon-l at waste.org> 
Sent: Monday, May 6, 2013 4:50 AM
Subject: Names in AtD - Frank


We know that the names that TP uses are anything but inconsequential, they point to something if only we take the time to think about what. In AtD most of the Traverses have names that are less than common and would seem to have some greater value than a mere label for a character (Webb, Lake, Reef, etc) but then there is Frank, a very common name. Why?

I can't claim to have THE answer but I have an idea. First, we know that the book is composed in large part by drawing on a wide range of genres (what have been deemed "narrative clusters") and that these literary echoes are important for the book. Clearly one theme is the working class family and the social literature it belongs to.
So I looked at Raymond Williams' Writing in Society, specifically The Ragged Arsed Philanthropists. It's about the novel The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists, written by an Irishman and rejected by publishers for its ideological content, whose protagonist is named... you guessed it, Frank.

Does anybody want to add to this? Any other ideas for the name Frank?


ciao
mc otis
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