self-indulgence

[LARSSON at VAX1.Mankato.MSUS.EDU]

Feff
Jeff writes:
"So I guess that "self-indulgent" need not be a term of criticism as much as
it is a raw description.  One may admire a particular writer's
self-indulgence or not, as one chooses.  But I think most of us would agree
that where many writers are overtly and demonstrably interested in their
reader's reactions, many, like Pynchon, are not always so, but are rather
interested in pursuing, at whatever cost, the limits of their own vision.

Children, don't try this at home. "

Thanks for the clarification.  I think our problem is one of terminology
rather than substance.  It sounds like you'd agree that the LEAST self-
indulgent writer is the hack who always writes to fulfill readers'
expectations.

Maybe a more useful term is the difference that Roland Barthes suggested
between what he called the "readerly" and the "writerly" text.  In the former,
the text reaches out the to reader and functions like a window on to a world
while in the latter, the reader must reach out to the text, which functions
as words on a page--opaque not transparent.

Even Barthes, though, (peace to him) tends to make these terms dichotomous
(the zero and the one) rather than as poles of a continuum.  Many writers
fall somewhere in between in some degree of mixture of the readerly and
writerly.  Even Dickens, the most readerly of writers, can produce a work
that requires more effort like BLEAK HOUSE.  To judge from his scattered 
comments on writing, there is much that is very "old-fashioned" in Pynchon's
attituded.  What he practices, though, may be something else.

--Don Larsson, Mankato State U., MN