SPHERE to Eternity

[Doug Millison]

rj, you fail to address the fact that, over a period of months and in an
apparently endless series of posts, onlist and off, you set yourself up as
judge and jury and condemn Hollander's work as worthless, with knee-jerk
predictability. Offlist, what your innuendo has been even more outrageous.
Protest with your usual "Internet free speech" jeremiad as you must, but I
personally must say I object to your use of Pynchon-L to smear the
reputation of a respected Pynchon scholar.

And the fact remains, Hollander has yet to try to invalidate your own
approaches to Pynchon's work, and certainly hasn't had anything bad to say
about you here on Pynchon-L. In fact, his general approach, in his
articles, is merely to draw the reader's attention to aspects of Pynchon's
work that haven't been explored by other critics. I have yet to come away
from one of his articles -- and I've read everything he's published, I
believe -- with the idea that he's saying he has the final word on
Pynchon's work. He's following up leads in the text and seeing where they
go, then sharing the results of his research with the rest of us.  Has
Pynchon in fact seeded his fiction with clues that we can follow to
construct a "second story" that amazes and delights?  Maybe he hasn't.
Maybe he has.  I still wonder how you can know with such certainty what
Pynchon is or isn't doing -- whence your unique insight and authority?
Hollander, and other critics who pay attention to Pynchon's allusions,
present some evidence that I think is worth considering.  Your insistence
that Hollander claims unique insight, to have the "truth" is just a straw
man.

I can only assume that there's something in the historical-political
readings that Hollander offers that really disturbs you, to the point that
you have to go to the extreme of besmirching his reputation with a series
of absurd offlist allegations (which you have circulated to several
Pynchon-L regulars) and twisting yourself up like a contortionist to deny a
method (following a character name to an extra-textual source) that you
yourself used in your own response to Hollander's essay about Pynchon's
possible reference to Thelonious Monk in V.

The rest of your assertions would be laughable if they weren't so firmly
contradicted by so much of what you've posted. Of course Pynchon's work
remains, at heart, mysterious -- it's art, after all, serious students
differ in their opinions as to what it might mean, books and articles
continue to pour from presses in an attempt to explain and more fully
understand what Pynchon does. Everybody's response to art is valid, sure,
no argument there. And, undeniably, some responses offer more to chew on
than others. If it's elitist to recognize genius (on the part of Pynchon,
on the part of some of his critics) among us, so be it. (But, I'm not
holding my breath until a pomo literary theorist wins the Nobel Prize for
literature, sorry 'bout that.)  Pynchon's writing does, despite your
denial, reflect erudition  beyond that which is possessed by many if not
most readers, and the fact remains that specialists in particular areas do
find their expertise rewarded when they study Pynchon. Which is not to say
that general readers like me can't enjoy and fully engage with the work --
as great novelists generally do, Pynchon includes between the covers of his
novels everything we need to have a thoroughly satisfying experience
reading them (indeed, he winds up explaining, later, most of the parts that
seem bewildering earlier in the books), but for those who want to dig, he
provides rich territory to explore. If you don't see a dichotomy between
general readers and specialists, so be it; call everybody a "general
reader" if you wish, that doesn't mean that specialists and experts don't
in fact exist, and your assertion rings rather false in the light of your
off-list report on your own specialized academic literary studies -- PhD.
in literature, isn't it?-- and your own ringing, elitist denunciations of
critical approaches you can't appreciate.

Most unfortunate is your persistence in labeling critical approaches you
don't like as "using the text to justify our own preconceptions and
assumptions" or, worse, suggesting that some critics are just listening to
" voices in our [their] own heads" which amounts to calling crazy somebody
you don't agree with -- I'd be very careful about making those sorts of
allegations if I were you, certainly if I were spreading around the kind of
unhinged nonsense you've been circulating offlist where your wild
accusations ultimately reflect only upon yourself, of course.  For somebody
who claims to pitch a big tent, you sure do seem to want to leave a lot of
Pynchon readers out in the cold. It makes your lip service to
egalitarianism rather obvious, and pathetic.  (We're all capable critics,
but, of course, we need your, rj's, help to disinguish and discard the real
phonies.) That's unfortunate, because you have, in among the diatribes,
shared some penetrating and enlightening insights here on Pynchon-L.



d  o  u  g    m  i  l  l  i  s  o  n
http://www.millison.com
http://www.online-journalist.com