Walk this way

[Tim Strzechowski]

I question the importance of "get[ting] it."
How necessary is it for the reader (critic/student/whatever) to "get it"
when reading any text?
Is not "getting it" a mark of deficiency on the reader's part?
Can a writer produce a work that makes perfect sense to him/herself, yet no
readers "get it," and still be called a writer who isn't being esoteric?
If I produce a literary work that raises more questions than offers answers
(like, say, biblical text), is there really anything to "get" in the first
place, other than the questions raised?

I cannot help but harken back to John Gardner's _The Resurrection_, a
wonderful book that is a challenging to "get" as anything else we might
consider. But I question whether "get[ting] it" is the a. questions raised,
b. insights offered, c. worth the trouble of differentiating.


"jbor" <jbor at bigpond.com> and 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.
>
>