Christianity and Terrence

[Terrance]

Mike Weaver wrote:
> 
> Terrance:
> >since the text, according to your postmodernist
> >theory,  is only a mirror held up to the reader, are motivated by my
> >desire to find a Christian message therein.
> 
> It is a commonplace that teenagers for over 100 years have found in Jane Austen
> sweet romantic tales which rereading later in life they find not to be the case.
> That we can find in books only what we look for, that we can miss whole layers
> of meaning which our beliefs or experience cannot comprehend, has nowt to do
> with postmodernism - that "according to your postmodernist theory, is only..."
> is your dismissive tool.

No, if you read the thread this is the claim being made. Call it
postmodernism, as Otto does, or whatever you like, it's only one theory
about fiction and reading it. I happen to disagree with this theory.
It's actually not postmodernism at all (it has been called both
Subjectivism and Freudianism), but postmodernism (an abused term)  was
the term used. The theory was introduced here by Dr. Con. And Brandwaith
applied the theory to me and I complained that this was an ad hominem.
And what you are doing now, putting my name in the subject and calling
for a little humility, is also ad hominem. 

Not that I expected any less from you,  Mike Weaver. 

Those that are apply Freudian or Marxist ideology to their readings of
Pynchon books (I put you in this group Mike, please correct me if I'm in
error...but... and it would be nice if they did not spend so much time
applying these theories to any and all of us they disagree with) might
be interested in this essay (you did mention Jane Austen): 

Wayne C. Booth, "Preserving the Exemplar," Critical Inquiry 3, 3 (1972),
412.

Why do we fuss and fight over Lefty politics and the like? Well, this
has something to do with the fact that people like Mike and Doug and
others, tend to argue that we readers of P's novels **should** agree on
the texts even if we disagree about matters of detail. 

So we often read something like, 

"How could a sensitive reader of P's novels not agree that Pynchon would
say that the War in Afghanistan is evil and that the Bush administration
is a bunch of fascists?" 

When a good argument is mounted against these political rants, the
**"dismisive tool"** employed is most often the ad hominem. This has
become the bulk of the archives. 

Anyway, maintaining that readers tend to share or agree on the text and
disagree on the details is not supported by the evidence (by which I
mean the critical response to Pynchon). But we needn't agree with Dr.
Con's extreme subjectivism because the text is not a mirror held up to
the reader. 

Although the discussion of the texts tends to be carried on  among
people sharing a common cultural background, given a common time,
culture, social milieu, wherein readers have acquired, despite the
inevitable uniqueness of each reading, a language under similar
conditions (training, reading the same books) it is not the case that
all readers share similar ethical or aesthetic values. 




While, a homogenous group has the advantage of being able to communicate
easily with one another about their, to some extent, diverse individual
responses to the texts, even agreeing about which readings seem most
satisfactory, these judgments must be considered in terms of particular
linguistic, semantic, metaphysical factors appropriate 
to a particular time and place, and more importantly, more or less
coherent criteria for what constitutes an adequate reading of the texts.
Doug, when he is not fighting with Jbor or undermining his often
lopsided political readings--telling us that our milage may vary-- is
this kind of reader. And, as I have argued an hundred times, these
readers have a  unique vantage point in being close to P's age and
having the great fortune (not by any means a privileged position) to
read the novels when they were published. This kind of reading is not a
reflection of a particular reader, but is more or less generational.
These readers tend to argue that the text is the "control" or "norm" and
that since they share a common background or politics or whatever (among
readers and with the author) they take for granted that others share
their commonly held assumptions. On his better days, Doug & Co. admit
that differences may be equally acceptable given the criteria for what
constitutes an adequate reading. 

Anyway, the personality and culture brought by the reader to the text is
only one of the many limits on the reading process. As you note (or I'm
extrapolating here) it is not uncommon for a mature reader to re-read a
fiction and respond differently than she did in youth.