SLSL Intro: poorly written?

[MalignD at aol.com]

Tim (Dedalus):

<<Part of the problem when we use labels like "essay" and "novel" is the fact 
that both labels have seemingly clear definitions, yet we know that isn't 
always the case. Obviously, labels lose their significance as you delve 
deeper into each one. When does a Hemingway short story stop being journalism 
and start being fiction, for example?  Is _Finnegans Wake_ really a novel?  
Does Pirandello's _Six Characters in Search of an Author_ qualify as tragedy 
or comedy?  (you get the idea)

In the strictest sense of the term "essay," Pynchon certainly takes a lot of 
liberties with his Intro.  Part reads like confession, part reads like 
socio-historic analysis, part like memoir, etc.  Within any given paragraph 
... he jumps from one, say, genre to another. >> 

I'm afraid I don't quite get the idea.  This argument is hopelessly muddled.  
It argues first that the terms we use--novel, tragedy, comedy--are too 
plastic to remain "significant" used other than cursorily, then, as though 
this weren't the case, uses the term "essay"  in the "strictest sense" to 
measure the plasticity of the works the term defines, a little like measuring 
an ever-changing distance with a liquid yardstick.  (By the way:  what is the 
"strictest sense" of the word "essay"?  What definition places confession, or 
analysis or memoir out of the category?  I know of none.) 

Then this astonishing pair of sentences:  

<<Within any given paragraph (as you noted in your original post for this 
thread), he jumps from one, say, genre to another.  Consequently, I don't see 
much difference between the Intro and other works of imaginative literature 
like those of Faulkner or Joyce. >>

You'd be doing a great favor explaining how P's mixing analysis with memoir 
in his Intro makes it little different from Absalom, Absalom.

<<... what's to say "confusing the reader" isn't partly the purpose in this 
work?>>

What's to say the Intro isn't a coded message about the history of fudge? 

And--fiction, novel, comedy.