the text, the whole text and nothing but

[Menschen U. Hupokrinesthai]

"Menschen U. Hupokrinesthai" <menschenhupokrinesthai at hotmail.com> wrote:

>How interesting are the reflections and
>interpretations of old men looking back on their
>youthful productions.

C:
Yes, they are, but do they alter your perception of a work you have already 
read?
Or should they?

ME:
They can and often do.

Should they?

Why not?

If Pynchon writes about a character, say  Pig Bodine, and I read what he 
says, and if what he says alters my reading of Pig, has something happened 
that  should not have happened?  Suppose I thought Pig was a character based 
on Babe Ruth. Now suppose after reading GR, I read Pynchon's Slow Learner 
Introduction. If, after reading Pynchon's comments on Pig in the SL Intro. I 
changed by thought about Pig, if my perceptions about him were altered by 
Pynchon's SL Intro. did something happen that should not have happened?


>How important these reflections, admissions, interpretations
>prove to be may not sit well with some critical schools,
>but we can't simply dismiss them with the old cliche, the
>author is the worst interpreter of his/her own work.

C:
I don't dismiss them. Again, I find them very interesting. I'm just saying 
they should
not interfere with the experience of reading something for the first time.

ME:

I can go along with that. Good suggestion I think.
>
>He's correct, but what did other interpreters make of
>his work? How about Swift? W/O his biographical
>information, we would still be reading that he was
>a mad man and we might not be reading Part IV of GT.
>
>I could go on and on, what about Virgina Woolf?

C:
Excuse me, but I am somewhat confused: by writing the above, whose position 
are
you defending, yours or mine? (I'm not being sarcastic, this is an honest 
question.)

I understand why you are confused here. I did not myself plain.
What I am suggesting is that what is needed is  what we do here, on our 
better days, that is, a critical reading of all the texts.  If Swift was 
made out to be a madman and subjected to the prevailing psychological 
theories he was also, due to the excellent critical work, found to be 
perfectly sane, not a misanthrope, to have written Part IV of GT (the Part 
that was deemed the haranguing madness of  a man in love with his own bowls 
and in hate with his fellow man) prior to writing other works that were 
judged
works of genius and continence. So, as Doug pointed out, once the rabbits 
are out of the bag, jumping and mixing up, the critics will make new 
arguments based on the new material. It goes this way. Pynchon knows how the 
game is played and he is playing it. It is the responsibility of those that 
cite biographical information, letters and the like, to do so with great 
prudence and respect, but if Pynchon makes his private material public 
material, it is no one's interest to  keep it the private hoard of a few and 
the anti-journalistic
tirade of Doug's nemesis is not an argument I would be quick to agree with 
if I were you.


>But it is the product of a person. A person with a
>mind. There is a noetic quality to a text.
>When I read William Blake or Yeats or Pynchon,
>the more I know about how/why/what the artist thinks the
Ø more I appreciate and understand, dlight.

C:
True. But your mind interacts with the text, not with the author.

Yes, of course, but the book is the product of the mind of the author and I 
can not agree that the mind that
created a book like GR could be the worst interpreter of it.

>You are going to tell me
>that it's irrelevant that James Joyce was Irish?
Ø That Shakespeare was an actor?

C:
To a scholar it is relevant, and very much so. But is it so to the reader? 
Suppose
you hate fascism but you like Ezra Pound. When you learn that Pound actively
supported fascism, do you stop liking Ezra Pound? Or, perhaps, do you try to 
find
ways of persuading yourself not to dislike him?

Is it relevant for the reader? It can be. It depends. The author's fascism 
may not be present in his work. If a man comes to my studio to make a bronze 
of my wife and he makes it a beautiful one, should I hate it after ten years 
of loving it because I read his Obit this morning and it said that he was 
racist? I don't favor censorship of any kind. However, I do not allow my 10 
year old daughter to read Tom Swift books.

Skip the PO and the sharpened aggression, I have an erasure on my pencil, 
how about you?

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