Elitist Pynchon-ites?

[Terrance]

slothrop wrote:
> 
> Kai teetered:
>   ähem ... though i don't want to make my karma worse by making you
> unsubscribe
>   i can't help but disagree. to me gr (- unlike v) has nearly nothing to do
> with
>   pierrot lunaire, but a lot with katy lied ...
> 
> I'll stay somewhat calm if you're talking about the lyrics. If you are
> suggesting the musical composition is at GR level I'll have to send you some
> Xenakis or Harry Partch. Steely Dan, compositionally speaking, just isn't as
> good as the real thing.
> Dear co-Pynchon-ites.
> Why do you even attempt to compare music to literature? Sound and language
> are two completely different mediums (please pardon the truism), appealing
> to different areas of the brain. Music speaks to the "thymic" part, if I am
> not mistaken, the emotional cosmos, the psyche itself, if you will. The
> perception of sound is much more direct, almost subconscious (which is also
> true with vision, but that is another matter). Words, on the other hand,

snip
			    
			     They are hounded down to the bottom 
                             Of a bad town amid the ruins, 
                             Where they learn to fear an
angry race 
                             Of fallen kings their dark
companions. 
                             While the memory of their
southern sky 
                             Was clouded by a savage winter. 
                             Every patron saint hung on the
wall 
                             Shared the room with twenty
sinners. 



There was a time, not too long ago, when literary theory was
replete with references to "the informed reader," "the
competent reader," the ideal reader," and so on. All of
these suggest a certain distinction, some would say, a
downright condescension towards, the ordinary reader. The
ordinary reader, as I choose to think of him, is a guy like
me. I have a certain passion for literature, but I devote
only a part of life's brief span to reading-doing so, not as
a professional but for personal satisfaction. The
distinction between me, the ordinary reader, and the
professional reader or critic is a vague and wavering one,
but a distinction nonetheless. Some, especially those that
have been hit hard over the head with the idea, will not be
comfortable even with my referring to myself as an ordinary
reader. Is
there some irony in the fact that many that argue against
such distinctions
may have abandoned all common sense to the nonsense,
political nonsense mostly, peddled by the current academic
elite? Whenever I hear or read the term New Criticism, I am
sure that hegemony and T.S. Eliot are sure to follow. How
did the critic become such a "despot" in the first place?
Well that's a long story, forces unseen, both social and
intellectual, strange and personal, political and
reciprocal, but at some point it became such a given, and
included writers as well as critics, so that no one seemed
too confused when in 1976, Saul Bellow gave his Nobel Prize
lecture and claimed that writers had "developed a marked
contempt for the average reader and the bourgeois mass." But
recently, the critics, for the most part, get most of the
blame. The same folks that paint T.S. Eliot and other New
Critics with Hitler mustaches wouldn't dream of doing the
same to Joyce, who of course loaded up his books with
personal and esoteric metaphor and symbol, saying he would
keep the critics busy for a long time, while he cooperated
with his friends in writing explanations and explications of
the extra-ordinary and complicated schemas that had guided
his writing of Ulysses and Finnegan's Wake. Of course,
Joyce's way of writing was innovative, he extended the great
tradition by expansion and incorporation, not, as each
generation of critics can't seem to help themselves from
saying about each new generation's innovations, killing the
old and creating the new out of nothingness. The obscurity
of Joyce was part of his innovation, for some of his
imitators it may have become their essence, a one trick
pony. They say time loves a hero, but only time will tell.
Some guy with little feet said that. In any event, music is
a useful analogy here. There can be many performances of a
particular piece of music, maybe as many as, well, that's
another can of worms, but if I play Mozart, halting,
mechanical, sentimental, I won't win any prizes, but when
another list member here, obviously a brilliant musician,
technically perfect, plays Mozart, he wins prizes. There
once was a girl named lizas
Should our admiration for the
brilliant musician denigrate my humbler effort? Should my
fingers be broken, my piano smashed and tossed on the fire?
There is some value in my performance isn't there? But
commonsense says there is a difference between what I play
and what our brilliant list member plays. But the brilliant
player cannot play for me, he can't come into my body and
mind and control my awkward incompetence. Likewise, no one
can read for anyone else, but this doesn't make the music
teacher an elitist. The teacher of Shakespeare is not an
elitist by nature of being a teacher, is she? The
professional Pynchon critic is not an elitist by nature of
being a professional critic. There is some pedagogical
pathology, some strange hypocrisy in all this, isn't there?
Now some will say, but the
elitist critic claims privilege, he says, Milton's Lycidas
means this and not what you say it means, but again, common
sense sets limits. We have only one poem to consider, Milton
wrote it, people have been reading it for years, some
interpretations are quite different from others, but no
serious critic would publish an essay that claims that
Milton's Lycidas is about his own brother. One can read
Lycidas and say it is about
one's brother, but this doesn't make it so. It doesn't make
that personal reading of Lycidas worthless or wrong, but
ordinary and personal.  The critic will know the history,
the biography, the allusions, the politics, the technical
and traditional poetics, etc. and his reading will be a
professional, not an ordinary one, his published essays will
not be personal, he will not say GR is about my trip to
France, although he may include his personal, even intimate,
one might say embryonic reading experience in his public
thesis. Some readings of GR are simply better than others,
and there is nothing elitist about it. It's simply common
sense.

Now I have to say, I agree with Slothrop in quotes on music
in GR, the sustained conflict, the young and old and all the
other distinctions Weisenburger notes in his Companion--
Italian vs German, see pg. 205, but, this debate is quite
different from other sustained musical debates in GR, these
others
being Positive, while this debate is negative irony-German
dialectic, centripetal movement, plots against children.
I'll
lay this out in detail if you like, but I'm busy with
Pudding at the moment, so I'll need a couple-few days.