P's intentions? WAS Re: Walk this way

[Doug Millison]

At 7:14 PM +1100 8/8/02, jbor wrote:
>on 7/8/02 10:34 AM, Doug Millison at pynchonoid at yahoo.com wrote:
>
>> I'm satisfied that Pynchon is several steps ahead of
>> his readers.
>
>Isn't this just a fancy way of saying that, in your opinion, Pynchon writes
>deliberately unintelligible fiction, or more accurately, an admission that
>you don't understand his work?

Not at all.  I think P writes in a way that a wide audience can understand
-- far more than some of his academic critics might give him credit for,
even college sophomores can get it.  His work speaks to many people on many
different levels.


>
>I disagree strongly with any method of interpretation which relies on the
>conceit that Pynchon writes with the intention of not being understood by
>his readers.


I don't pretned to know  P's intentions.  But I don't think any critic can
"get ahead" of him -- he wrote the book, his critics come later, none of
them have the insight into the text that Pynchon had, and none of them ever
will.  That's not to say that the critics don't have interesting things to
say, because sometimes they do.  But I don't think they'll get to the
bottom of what P wrote, and I don't think they'll ever get anything like a
"comprehensive" understanding of his texts.  Do you disagree?