SPHERE to Eternity

[rj]

dm
> 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.

this is not true.

> 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.

this is not true.

> 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. 

This is Mr Hollander's concluding statement in the article on Theolonius
Monk:

"We see, then, that McClintic Sphere is not a one-to-one stand-in for
Ornette Coleman, and how and why Pynchon means Sphere to signify
Thelonious Monk and his mistress, the Baroness. We see how Pynchon's use
of irony and camouflage will mislead readers lacking the trained, or
magic, eye."

> 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.  

Yes, he's offering his interpretations.

> 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?

doug, you misread me.

> 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.

doug, you misread me. My point here is that Mr Hollander is claiming
that readers who do not share his interpretation are "lacking" something
-- he uses this word specifically. Readings other than the one he is
proposing are decided to be the result of "misdirection" on the author's
part.

> 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.

this is not true. doug, you misread me.

> The rest of your assertions would be laughable if they weren't so firmly
> contradicted by so much of what you've posted. 

This might be your opinion. I see no such contradictions.

>  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. 

Yes.

> 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. 

I do not consider myself to be an elitist, nor, I think, on the evidence
of his texts, does Mr P.

> (But, I'm not
> holding my breath until a pomo literary theorist wins the Nobel Prize for
> literature, sorry 'bout that.) 

There would seem to be little hope of Mr P receiving this particular
award.(See 354.7up) The Nobel for *Literature*, that is.

> 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. 

And as Mr P points out in the *Slow Learner* introduction as regards his
grasp of "entropy", critics have often over-estimated his expertise in
certain areas. In other words, they have over-interpreted the texts. 

> 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. 

Yes.

> 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.

doug, you misread me. I have made no "ringing, elitist denunciations".

> 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.  

doug, you misread, both the substance and tone of my comments.

> 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.)

doug, it's a discussion list.

>  That's unfortunate, because you have, in among the diatribes,
> shared some penetrating and enlightening insights here on Pynchon-L.