Walk this way

[Monica Belevan]

Searching for a definitive reading and a definitive understanding of a text 
would demand a supremely limited mind, a natural talent for minimalization 
to apotheosic degrees.

An educated reader is not categorically better than a layman, but the what 
sets a professional reader from a lay one is to a great extent a fairly 
consensual distinction and arguably no more than who has a more ingrained 
habit of sleeping under what type of covers.

Some use bedsheets, some use paperbags, and others hardbacks.

But good readings are those that can be shared nonwithstanding these 
preconceptions, as a professional you have to be able to bridge distances in 
order to communicate your insights, and as a lay reader you are afforded a 
big pair of yodeler´s pants to grow into--that´s why I feel these group 
readings are a terrific essay in reading and hypertextuality. The fact is 
both the professional and the lay reader can work efficiently towards 
complementing each other´s readings--the first has the means to reinvent 
ends, and the other, very significantly, lacks a corset.

Eventually, there´s so much seed left to pick, that one can fix oneself a 
buffet of very assorted grain.

If you let me into your oatmeal I´ll parry my wheat.
--Monica

>From: Terrance <lycidas2 at earthlink.net>
>To: pynchon-l at waste.org
>Subject: Re: Walk this way
>Date: Fri, 09 Aug 2002 09:32:46 -0400
>
>
>
>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.




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