re P's intentions

[Doug Millison]

Couldn't agree more when "MichaelB" says that knowing about the 
artist and the artist's intentions gives "pleasure to the process of 
interpretation, as hobbies do." I'm certainly not into this Pynchon 
reading thing for the money; maybe some of the people who do make a 
for-profit career of it -- or who would like to do --  are the ones 
who get so uptight about foreclosing the amateur's pleasures, or 
maybe they're just ill-mannered cranks. It's also true that more than 
one esteemed literary critic has devoted considerable time and 
effort to understanding a favored artist's life and work, I recall as 
I look at the copy of Jean-Yves Tadie's biography, _Marcel Proust_ on 
my bookshelf (I just saw a copy of the English translation in Black 
Oak Books over in Berkeley yesterday) next to his masterful Pleiade 
edition of _A la recherche du temps perdu_, and manage to work a 
knowledge of the artist into ther appreciation of the work.  If you 
want to put the artist and the art in "different worlds, different 
galaxies, different universes" -- a proposition that seems absurd to 
me, unless you have some kind of special definition for "world," 
"galaxy," and "universe" -- go for it, but that doesn't mean that 
other readers have to follow your lead.


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