Closing the curtain on The Frogs (spoilers below)

The Frogs concludes with quite a twist.

Early in the play, Dionysus states clearly that he is going to Hades to free Euripides. But in the end it is Aeschylus whom the god brings back to advise Athens and guide her choral games.

After the contests between Euripides and Aeschylus, why Dionysus made the choice he did is clear.

For starters, this sequence takes up most of the play. It also includes the literal weighing in a scale of each's poetic wit. As you might guess, the play maintains its comedic strain throughout this poetic competition. Aeschylus' demonstrating that many of Euripides' prologues can be concluded with the sentence "Lost his bottle of oil," also damns the deity's initial pick.

The shifting of Dionysus' choice from Euripides to Aeschylus also reflects Aristophanes' own conservative philosophy. Presented with an older, more august Aeschylus it should be obvious that the younger, shallower Euripides won't be going back to the land of the living with Dionysus. Yet, because of his constant waffling and his stated interest in Euripides, Dionysus' final choice still came as a surprise to me.

If you have interest in (ancient Greek) drama, definitely do give The Frogs a read.

Although, even at the end of the play, I'm not so sure about its title. Why was it called The Frogs if a group of them have only a small role near the beginning of the play? Because it's about rescuing a dramatist and poet (someone intricately tied with public presentations) are those frogs supposed to be identified with the audience and vice versa?

Near Flyting in The Frogs

Though the farce remains, The Frogs has taken a serious turn. The contest between Euripides and Aeschylus for the position of greatest tragedian has commenced, and it's brought the play's tone some gravity.

If it weren't for the measured arguments, the two poets could be said to be flyting. But there's just too much order and decorum present for that to be the sort of argument at this play's center.

So, what the contest has come down to so far is that Aeschylus brought honour and nobility to the stage. In turn, his works inspired people to act similarly. On the other hand, however, it is argued that Euripides has corrupted people in featuring corruption in his plays.

That's not to say that the heat of the poets' argument is entirely serious. Part of the jab against Euripides is that he helped to usher in a period wherein people are unfit, lazy, and selfish. To illustrate this point, [] mentions a portly man participating in the Athenian Pentathalon and lagging behind the rest. The imagery used here is a sort of proto-slapstick.

Also, Dionysus is supposed to be the moderator and judge of this debate, but is switching back and forth between the two with every point. There's some humour in a god being so indecisive, even if it is a god associated with passion rather than reason.

In a way then, the farce detected earlier in the play continues through the debate section. It is, however, of a much quieter sort.

Figuring out The Frogs

I finally understand what makes The Frogs so special. It's a farce.

The idea of Dionysus going to the underworld in the middle of a celebration of the tragic form while he himself is the god honoured at this celebration is altogether overwhelming. The situation it puts forth is nothing short of what you get in a comedy like It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World.

On top of that, Euripides has challenged Aeschylus for the honour of sitting beside Hades at the feast, and Dionysus is sure to be entangled in the contest.

What's got me chuckling though, is the enthusiasm I read in scenes like the one between Xanthias and Aeacus. These two slaves bond over learning their masters' foibles and betraying them behind their backs and it's all worth a good guffaw.

What had me close to outright laughter, is the scene where Dionysus and Xanthias keep switching clothes between knocks, as Dionysus tries to avoid the trouble that seems to be happening within Hades' hall.

Along with coming to enjoy the plays comedy more, I also find myself appreciating B.B. Rogers' translation anew. I know very little about ancient Greek poetry aside from its having lines longer than most English poetry. But Rogers manages to move the Chorus' rhyming sections into English with some skill, even while keeping the lines long.

It's definitely growing on me, this play.

What does comedy plus time equal?

Something that's tragic a few millennia ago is likely still something considered tragic. War tearing a family apart (either directly or indirectly), for example, was a terrible thing in ancient Greece and is a terrible thing now. 

Comedy, on the other hand, does not have such a long shelf life. Especially referential comedy. This fact is painfully obvious in Aristophanes' The Frogs.

Twenty pages into the play (about half way through the mystic bands' procession for Iacchus (a.k.a. Dionysus)), almost all of the jokes have been references to other plays or playwrights. If we still had copies of the latter and full biographies of the former, maybe these jokes would still work. But most of them miss their mark entirely.

That said, I can see where a few of these referential jokes are going and do get a smirk out of them, but for the most part they're lost on me.

However, one style of joke that never seems to get old is the laugh at the audience's expense. I'm reading this play in its "Digireads.com Classic" edition (a few minor typos make this text's being in the public domain quite clear), so the joke in question is on page 21. It runs thusly:

"DIONYSUS: [asking his slave about the spirits the ferryman Charon says inhabit the perimeter of the lake of the damned.]: But tell me, did you see the parricides and perjured folk he mentioned? 

XANTHIAS: Didn't you? 

DIONYSUS: Poseidon, yes. Why look! (pointing to the audience.) I see them now."

Reading it didn't get me to chuckle, but I did crack what I imagine is a wry smile.

Hopefully I'll find something that's got even more kick left in it over the next sixty pages, and get a really good laugh.

Closing off the Sourcery

For all of the tedium I find in Pratchett's busting out excellent fantasy concepts (certainly the stuff of symphonic metal lyricists' sweetest dreams) but then making fun of them, he writes an excellent ending. Especially when he says goodbye to one of his recurring characters. At least, I imagine that this is the last book featuring Rincewind, since he winds up staying in the Dungeon Dimensions, after all.

Another thing that struck me while wrapping up with Sourcery, is that Pratchett's style makes two things apparent: that he has a background in journalism, and that he really knows how to show things. The first comes from his judiciously brief rambling descriptions, and the second comes from his books' chapter-less organization.

Without the form of blocks meant to be coherent unto themselves, Pratchett is far more free to dance around the perspectives of a plethora of characters than authors who have definite jumps in their story where they leave one character's head and go into another.

Pratchett uses his lack of chapters to great effect, as each one demands that you re-focus your attention on the events of the book. That's not to say that he always shows and rarely tells, but for at least the first few lines of each new section, all he offers is a setting or character trait with which to ground yourself. Writing like this also makes scenes like those between three of the four horsepeople of the Apocralypse apparently come out of nowhere, making them even odder than their content suggests they'll be. And there is a great deal of charm in this.

However, I don't have another Pratchett to read for quite a while, so that charm (and its attendant frustation of full fantasy potential) will just have to glow like an ember in my memory.

With a Wink and a Nudge

Sourcery continues along it's way, going about wrapping up the story as most early Pratchett novels do. There's the moment of reflection, and realization, and then the final confrontation. Rincewind's just realized that he is in fact a wizard, and now has to do something about it before magic causes reality to go entirely out of whack.

Although I'm not quite there yet, in the end, what's kept me from unabashedly enjoying Sourcery is its self-awareness. Rather than making fun of fantasy without being aware that it's doing so, almost all of the passages of exposition or where the narrator delves into a characters thoughts, there's some winking nudge at the genre's mainstays. This is fine, and the whole thing's well-written, but it's just not what I'm after in a fantasy novel.

Just as an amazing video game offers an entirely different world to explore and interact with, one of my major criteria for an excellent fantasy novel (or series) is one that creates such a world. The Discworld is indeed clever, but it's just too tuned into its own purpose.

At any rate, the section where Conina, Nijel, and Creosote are travelling to Ankh-Morpork in the genie's lamp thanks to the fractal properties of reality is simply mind-blowing. In fact, the magic of the Discworld in general is quite possibly the best non-distinct system I've come across.

So, though the ending's still a mystery, Sourcery certainly has some merits.

Pratchett's Preference?

One of the major things that makes Terry Pratchett such a pleasure to read is his playfulness with fantasy tropes. The character who aspires to be a stereotypical barbarian is just a waif and grocer's son. The daughter of the greatest barbarian ever aspires to be a hairdresser though blood lust pounds through her veins whenever men and sharp things share proximity. Wizards roost when they've beaten some lesser mage, building a tower to fortify themselves.

Even if you haven't widely read the fantasy genre and aren't intimately familiar with its tropes, he inverts and alters them enough that it's possible to work backwards to them. In that way, Pratchett does the fantasy genre a great service, and manages to entertain while being a kind of inside out Coles Notes for an entire sort of literature.

But, as fun as his books can be to read, it seems that his plots suffered a bit in his earlier books. Maybe it isn't portrayed grandly enough - the failure to make epic an inevitable mage war being yet another of his inversions - but the story of Sourcery just doesn't hum or glow. It's as though fantasy is simply Pratchett's chosen vehicle for some teasing criticism of a literary genre and nothing more. He hits the necessary notes, and includes the essential movements, but as a whole Sourcery just doesn't feel fantasy-like enough.

Yet.

With another 1/5 of the book to go, there could be an upset, but as I remember this lingering feeling that the fantasy elements of Pratchett's work were merely a vessel being what cooled my enthusiasm for him years ago, I'm about as optimistic as a plastic bottle is likely to shatter.

Too Few Characters?

My reading pace has slowed down from a sprint to a stroll lately, but Sourcery sags in the middle.

Things are happening, and events are being put into motion,  but it's all happening at what seems to be a snail's pace. The best reason that I can come up with for this is that Pratchett doesn't have enough perspective characters in the book to work with to advance things along varied strings. Or, at the very least, he doesn't mix up the order of perspective characters very well in this book.

Generally speaking, Sourcery flows something like this: Rincewind and Conina, the Wizards, the general populace, and repeat. Later Pratchett books are bristling with characters, each as sharp as the last, who all contribute their own bit to the overall plot. The sort of plodding onwards that Sourcery delivers, though, falls short of what I expect from Pratchett.

Still, the jokes and asides are entertaining and interesting, so I'm willing to press onwards. Even if Rincewind and Conina's plot is taking far too long to fully develop.

Speaking of References

Wow, two rather obscure references in such a short space. In my last entry about Sourcery, I wondered about the problem of authors dating themselves and their work when they use referential comedy, but the last section that I read gives me reason to reconsider.

Why?

Well, if what's referenced is missed by most readers, then it becomes a sort of byword for those in the know. So, if Terry Pratchett still gets read 50, 100, or 500 years from now, the reference to your stock Bond villain might become something that draws a cult following. Or, that tickles only a certain groups of readers.

This state of affairs would not be unlike the references in the section where Rincewind and Conina meet the Seriph. This introduction to this section (pretty much all of it) makes almost excessive reference to the medieval Middle Eastern guild of assassins known as the hashishin. Building on that is a reference to Coleridge's poem "Kublai Khan" in the Seriph's question to Conina about her dulcimer proficiency.

Getting back to Pratchett

Returning to Terry Pratchett's Discworld series after years away is like getting back to an old, cheerfully witty friend after a long separation. Every few pages of Sourcery yield a smile, and although it's one of the early entries in the series, it's still a solid read. Honestly, I don't see what people have against the adventures of Rincewind. Even if, as all authors do, Pratchett improved with age and experience, the imagery, metaphors, and plot still entertain and even frolic across the imagination.

Perhaps, though, things will go south once Ankh-Morpork is left. Assuming, of course, that Rincewind, Conina, and the Archchancellor's hat actually manage to set out for Klatch before Coin the Sourcer grows bored with Unseen University and stalks them in an inevitable quest to retrieve the hat. Being quasi-possessed by the spirit of your dead father will drive you to things like that, after all.