Walk this way

[Terrance]

Doug's argument was junk, he's looking for a fight, dragging this old
scrap book out of the basement, but the distinction between critic and
reader is hardly an artificial one. While Doug's ridiculous "even
Sophomore can it" is junk, there is clearly a difference between a
professional reader/critic and most readers. 
What is this difference? 

There was a time, not too long ago, when literary theory was
  replete with references to "the informed reader," "the
  competent reader," the ideal reader," and so on. All of
  these suggest a certain distinction, some would say, a
  downright condescension toward, the ordinary reader. The
  ordinary reader, as I choose to think of him, is a guy like
  me. I have a certain passion for literature, but I devote
  only a part of life's brief span to reading--doing so, not as
  a professional but for personal satisfaction. The
  distinction between me or the ordinary reader, and the
  professional reader or critic is a vague and wavering one,
  but a distinction nonetheless. Some, especially those that
  have been hit hard over the head with the idea, will not be
  comfortable even with my referring to myself as an ordinary
  reader. 

Is there some irony in the fact that many that argue against
  such distinctions  may have abandoned all common sense to the
nonsense,
  political nonsense mostly, peddled by the current academic
  elite? 

Whenever I hear or read the term New Criticism, I am
  sure that hegemony and T.S. Eliot are sure to follow. How
  did the critic become such a "despot" in the first place?
  Well that's a long story, forces unseen, both social and
  intellectual, strange and personal, political and
  reciprocal, but at some point it became such a given, and
  included writers as well as critics, so that no one seemed
  too confused when in 1976, Saul Bellow gave his Nobel Prize
  lecture and claimed that writers had "developed a marked
  contempt for the average reader and the bourgeois mass." 

But recently, the critics, for the most part, get most of the
  blame. The same folks that paint T.S. Eliot and other New
  Critics with there noses up in the stacks of dust old British 
libraries wouldn't dream of doing the same to Joyce (yes I know Joyce
was Irish and TS only a Yank in Catholic costume), who of course loaded
up his books with
  personal and esoteric metaphor and symbol, saying he would
  keep the critics busy for a long time, while he cooperated
  with his friends in writing explanations and explications of
  the extra-ordinary and complicated schemas that had guided
  his writing of Ulysses and Finnegan's Wake. Of course,
  Joyce's way of writing was innovative, he pushed the envelope, but did
not, as each
  some critics would have it,  killing the
  old and creating the new out of a dead novel. 

 The obscurity of Joyce was part of his innovation, for some of his
  imitators it may have become their essence, a one trick
  ponies. 


They say time loves a hero, but only time will tell.
  Some guy with little feet said that. In any event, music is
  a useful analogy here. There can be many performances of a
  particular piece of music, maybe as many as there are performers, but
when I 
play it, halting, mechanical, sentimental, I don't  win any prizes, but
when
my Luz, a  brilliant musician, technically perfect, plays Mozart, she
wins prizes. 

She's a pro and I'm not. 

Should our admiration for Luz, a brilliant musician,  denigrate my
humbler effort? Should my fingers be broken, my piano smashed and tossed
on the fire?

  There is some value in my performance isn't there? But
  commonsense says there is a difference between what I play
  and what my Luz plays. But Luz cannot play for me, she can't come into
my body and
  mind and make me play like her. Likewise, no one
  can read for anyone else. 

But this doesn't make Luz or a the music teacher or critic an elitist.
The teacher of Shakespeare is not an elitist by nature of being a
teacher, is she? The
professional Pynchon critic is not an elitist by nature of
being a professional critic. 

There is some pedagogical
pathology, some strange hypocrisy in all this, isn't there?
Now some will say, but the elitist critic claims privilege, he says,
Milton's Lycidas
**means this** and not what you say it means, but again, common
  sense sets limits. We have only one poem to consider, Milton
  wrote it, people have been reading it for years, some
  interpretations are quite different from others, but no
  serious critic would publish an essay that claims that
  Milton's Lycidas is about his own brother. One can read
  Lycidas and say it is about
  one's brother, but this doesn't make it so. It doesn't make
  that personal reading of Lycidas worthless or wrong, but
  ordinary and personal.  The critic will know the history,
  the biography, the allusions, the politics, the technical
  and traditional poetics, etc...& so on....
 and his reading will be a professional, not an ordinary one, his
published essays will
  not be personal, he will not say GR is about my trip to
  France, although he may include his personal, even intimate,
  one might say embryonic reading experience in his public
  thesis. Some readings of GR are simply better than others,
  and there is nothing elitist about it. It's simply common
  sense.