Names in AtD - Frank

[alice wellintown]

Ah, Matt C is juss joshing wit us. You ever heard of that novel or that
author? I sure as hell aint never heard of him or it. Frank Norris, man.
Now don't tell me that you aint heard of Norris.


On Mon, May 6, 2013 at 3:07 PM, Bekah <bekah0176 at sbcglobal.net> wrote:

> I think MC answered his own question -   "…. then there is Frank, a very
> common name."     Frank is just a totally common name back then - and he
> was the common guy amongst the western Traverses and  Fresnos and Kindreds.
>  He didn't go east like Kit or become a card-shark like Reef.    Frank is
> the one who has a goodly chunk of the Western episodes - the cowboy
> good-guy who avenges Webb's death and sticks around the southwest from
> Denver to central Mexico.
>
> Bekah
> who feels a reread coming on -  (LOVE that book)
>
> On May 6, 2013, at 2:58 AM, Ruth Flatscher <ruflatsch at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > well, Frank actually does have a very literal meaning, too... at least
> in English.
> > Haven't got around AtD yet, so I don't know whether it fits the
> character or has a rather sarcastic effect.
> > cheers,
> > R
> >
> > ps - btw, PKDick also has a protagonist named Frank in "The Man in the
> High Castle"...
> >
> >
> > On 6 May 2013 11:50, Matthew Cissell <macissell at yahoo.es> wrote:
> > 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
> >
> >
> >
> > --
> > Mag. Ruth Flatscher
> > Department of Systematic and Evolutionary Botany, University of Vienna
> > Institute of Botany, University of Innsbruck
>
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://waste.org/pipermail/pynchon-l/attachments/20130506/68c30543/attachment.html>