Our feelings about the frog fossil
Above you see an artist’s representation of what the prehistoric Devil Frog, freshly discovered in fossil form, may have looked like. In the foreground is its smaller cousin, the Malagasy frog.
What I like so much about this rendering isn’t the impressive size of the Devil Frog, although I’m sure that if I ever came up against a frog the size of a basketball I would take notice. No, it’s the human psychology underlying this illustration. Good art always tells a story, knowingly or not. Bad art just sits there. One of the games I play with my students is to ask, “What happened just before this scene?” Because scenes are extensions of character, and these characters did something before this scene. In the above illustration, it looks to me like the smaller frog has just rounded a corner and screeched to a halt before colliding with serious trouble. The Devil Frog, or Beelzebufo ampinga, meanwhile, wears a sanguine expression, the sort recognizable by every littler guy all over the world. From the brow ridge to the faint jowly smile, that is an anthropomorphosized expression. Did the artist put it there intentionally, or was it discovered after creation? In my experience of my own writing and that of my students, I don’t know any more. Did Kafka intentionally set out to illuminate in his body of work the 20th century’s bureaucracy of death and degradation, or is it the fortunate byproduct of what he happened to be writing anyway? No matter what the adherents of formalism thought, there’s no separating the creator from the creation, the subtext from the context, or the figment of fossilized frog from the artist rendering it.
February 19th, 2008 at 7:28 pm
I did not place any anthropomorphic significance on the picture until after I read Lee’s piece.
When I saw the picture my first thought was “what a big frog!” Next i noted that the picture was out of character for a scientific discovery. Most scientific articles just have a black outline of the subject with another outline of a common place item to show scale. Rather boring.
This picture shows much more creativity than what I would have expected from a scientific discovery.
Paul
February 20th, 2008 at 10:59 am
Oh, I thought it was an illustration about the recent writers’ strike. See, the little frog has a pencil, and that pencil is down (“Pencils down!”, the slogan of the strike), whereas the big frog is fat and kind of ugly but wears beautiful skin/clothes. Yep, that’s what I thought, allrightee.