vv (7): archetypal alligators

[Terrance]

1935 
 The Works Progress Administration is a lifeline for New
 Yorkers | Hard-hit by the Depression, Harlem is the
 scene of rioting | The nation's first public housing
 project opens at Avenue A and East 3rd Street | A
 seven-foot alligator is hauled out of an East 123rd Street
 manhole - fodder for decades of New York City sewer
 stories | George and Ira Gershwin's opera Porgy and
 Bess opens 

Otto Sell wrote:
> 
> Of course we don't need any labels to, as you like to put it, "to devote
> ourselves to the beauty of pynchon's prose" - but this is exactly what I am
> not - a simple devotee of an invisible author somewhere up on a throne high
> in the literary skies. That's not what I'm after, but I let another guy
> (John Dewey) do the work:
> 
> "It is quite possible to enjoy flowers in their colored form and delicate
> fragrance without knowing anything about plants theoretically. But if one
> sets out to *understand* (D's emphasis) the flowering of plants, he is
> committed to finding out something about the interactions of soil, air,
> water
> and sunlight that condition the growth of plants. ("Art as Experience, 1934,
> Perigee 1980, p. 4)
> (and he repeats it a few pages later):
> 
> "Flowers can be enjoyed without knowing about the interactions of soil, air,
> moisture, and seeds of which they are the result. But they cannot be
> *understood* (D's emphasis) without taking just these interactions into
> account--and theory is a matter of understanding. Theory is concerned with
> discovering the nature of the production of works of art and of their
> enjoyment in perception."
> (ibid, p. 12)
> 
> Means to me that my reading fun comes not only from reading what he has
> written but from trying to understand *how* he has done it. And in this I
> truly consider postmodernism as inevitable.

Right, I would consider not Postmodernism but Theory,
Postmodernism being one such. 

I think Dewey would agree. 


In  Dewey's terms, your Experience of the Text, or
the Flowers, is at once an esthetic one, an intellectual 
one, and a practical one. Experience is  distinguished
as dominantly practical, or intellectual, or emotional or
esthetic because of the interest or purpose that initiate
and control them. 


When I look at a flower or a painting or read GR, or even
look
into a microscope or out through a telescope, and my
interest and purpose is esthetic, in other words, my intent
is to have a distinctively esthetic experience, the
practical, theoretical, intellectual, emotional, namely the
characteristics that may dominate in other kinds of
Experiences, are subdued. 

On the other hand, according to Dewey, those characteristics
that are subdued or subordinated during esthetic
Experiences, say, while 
looking at the flowers to find a disease, dominate during
esthetic
Experiences.