Guardian publishes edited version of P's 1984 intro

[Paul Nightingale]

Mutualcode wrote: "Or maybe, how we- each of us- come to accept 'the
final draft.' 
Which suggests, of course, that originally room 101 is vacant."

There is no final draft, of course. There is one abandoned by its
nominal author/parent, ie published, as it were orphaned and taken
up/adopted by a succession of strangers who don't understand its
idiosyncratic behaviour. Rejecting the idea of finality, Pynchon rejects
all attempts at closure. He insists that Orwell understood contemporary
events as "first drafts of a terrible future" - an interesting choice of
metaphor.

He also includes Orwell's own view that "every book is a failure" -
presumably because it never turns out the way you want. Woolf said
something about it never being as good as it is now, "inside my head":
nonsense, of course, because 'it' isn't there, she only thinks it is.
Pynchon's own retrospective account of authorship, the SL Intro, laments
the way his writing turned out: the parent who despairs of his children
and, in the process, says more about himself than he does about them.
This for Pynchon is the point, I think. The stories as published haven't
changed of course; but Pynchon himself has turned into someone who isn't
the guy he used to think he knew. In both essays (1984 and SL Intro)
Pynchon investigates 'authorship' as something that, allegedly,
'belongs' to a named individual but is, in truth, rather more elusive.