MDMD & ted-crit: The unreadable in pursuit of the unlikely

[Paul Nightingale]

Thankyou, Doug. Haven't read M&D recently, so I'm a bit vague on the detail
later on. Hope to finish soon. However, I must challenge your carefree
dismissal of the unreadable. This often - and please correct me if I
misrepresent you here - means criticism that highlights a theoretical
approach or the importance of theorising. It is, of course, impossible to
adopt an approach that doesn't depend on theory of one kind or another: some
theories, however, are acceptable because they hide themselves away, are
implicit, don't draw attention to themselves.

Hence in literary studies we have the so-called 'personal response' theory,
according to which it's possible to explain a text, in terms of what it
means to you the reader, without recourse to fancy theories that are
extraneous to the text. Personally I find this obscurantist, a good example
of jargon celebrated for its own sake; not coincidentally, I often find the
results unreadable because deceitful. The personal here is a construct. I
would also call this theory unlikely, given that we all live in the real
world and are probably not unique as individuals: by this I mean we can only
make sense of our experiences through language we share with others, not
that there aren't aspects of our experience that we don't share with others.

When I introduced myself to the p-list so many weeks ago (and what a
fun-packed time it has been - I mean that sincerely, folks) I agreed that
the group reading should go ahead. I said that reading was a political act,
and reading M&D is not a distraction from current events. However, I have a
problem with the view that Pynchon 'tells us anything useful about the
present state of affairs': I have already stated my view that he doesn't
write how-to books for people who wish to say war is bad. That would
constitute the unreadable if he chose to spin out it out for several hundred
pages; it is also unlikely (although not impossible, I suppose I have to
remain optimistic on this) that anyone who needs to be converted would
bother reading beyond the first line of page one. Writing how-to books,
therefore, would be preaching to the converted. If this is all we want, or
expect, from Pynchon - why bother?

But he does mention "the eleventh of September" - by which time, "the
Assignments are chang'd" (p74). Creepy or what?