Reading and discussing Pynchon's texts

[jbor]

on 6/6/03 7:30 AM, Vincent A. Maeder wrote:

> The goal would be to gather the observations and POV's of others as they
> read the texts to help assess the emotional and psychological impact
> upon each individual reader of the artist's process.

It sounds a bit like the Affective Fallacy.

http://www.english.upenn.edu/~jlynch/Terms/Temp/affective.html

Or Reader Response Theory.

The problem I continue to have, and it's only a minor one, is that "the
artist's process" or "how the text works" seems to be being held up as
something finite and ultimate, when it's as much a matter of interpretation
as anything else is. Literary qualities like tone, allusiveness or irony
just don't lend themselves to scientific analysis, nor are things like
"emotional impact" quantifiable. How much is the "impact" on each reader
caused by things going on inside his or her own head, or life and times, and
how much is actually caused by the text, or "the artist's process"?

I'm not saying it's wrong or not to share your responses to the various
texts, only that claiming that it's any different to or better than
discussions which focus on the semantic content - talking in terms of "what
the text means" - is specious. When readers and critics consider and discuss
the "meaning" of a text they've gone through that whole process anyway,
absorbing the "impact", analysing the techniques, looking at the contexts of
production and reception, and so forth. If an explication of the text's
"meaning" can't be backed up by explanation of how one arrived at that
conclusion then it won't cut it.

The other point to note is that Pynchon does in fact interpret Orwell's
novel pretty much throughout the Foreword. He doesn't seem hamstrung by
those constraints which Paul N., for example, has been insisting upon here.

best