Walk this way

[jbor]

on 9/8/02 4:04 AM, Doug Millison at millison at online-journalist.com wrote:

> 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.

Critics are readers. It's an artificial distinction distinction to try and
say otherwise.

> 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?

There seems to be a contradiction in your argument here between the "wide
audience" and "college sophomores" who do "get it", and the contention that
there's another group of readers ("critics" is your label) who aren't able
to "get to the bottom of what P wrote". There's no real difference between
"get[ting] it" and having a "'comprehensive' understanding" of a text. If
you don't have such an understanding - of a word, a phrase, a sentence, or a
whole book - then you just aren't "get[ting] it", in my opinion.

best


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.