COL49: The beginning is the beginning is the end

[Doug Millison]

calbert
[...]that crack 
about having forgotten everything that he had learned to date 
seems hyperbolical.....


...unless the reader might choose to agree with somebody like P's college
pal when he claims that Pynchon admitted he was so "out of it" (or whatever
JS claims Pynchon said when the two of them were alone in P's Manhattan
Beach apartment in the mid-60s, nobody else present of course, and JS asked
P about the GR manuscript he saw there) he didn't know what he was writing
-- claims that JS has since amplified to minimize claims that Pynchon has
the talent that readers around the world credit him for having (JS also
gives us Chrissie quotes to the effect that JS is the better writer, P just
a pretender, or some such).  Take enough drugs and a person, even a skilled
artist, just might forget everything she knew, I suppose, or not recall what
she wrote, and the resulting masterpiece is just that New Testatment that
you finally get with a million monkeys banging on typewriters, I
suppose....although, given the consistency, and the dense intertextual
linkages from stories to novels to non-fiction, it doesn't appear that
Pynchon has forgotten anything he's done, because he keeps circling back to
link it in the next project, to develop and add layers of meaning, yes
layers of irony and uncertainty, too.  More than one great artist has been
known to deprecate her efforts, too, in some cases from a genuine humility,
sometimes to make the recognized achievement shine all the more brilliantly.
They're only human, after all.