Pynchon: a wasted talent?

[Ya Sam]

One of the participants of the discussion points to another source, saying 
that DFW was confused with this critic, Dale Peck, who uses the expression 
"wasted talent" but he doesn't apply it directly to Pynchon. It's another 
evil article about contemporary literature. I think it was already discussed 
on the list, but still, some passages:

"Thus my sharpest barbs and my most inhospitable ad hominems tend to be 
directed at writers whom I genuinely admire, or in whom I see genuine, 
wasted talent. This is because I think of myself as a kind of mother hen, 
not so much of writers, but of the novel itself. Fiction is like dance: it's 
susceptible to the egos of its practitioners. Bad writers can't do it much 
damage, because they will simply be ignored, but a self-indulgent writer 
with a single real skill can do incalculable harm. " ...

"I will say it once and for all, straight out: it all went wrong with James 
Joyce. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is less a bildungsroman than 
the chapter-by-chapter unraveling of a talent that, if "The Dead" is any 
indication, could have been formidable, while Ulysses is nothing more than a 
hoax upon literature, a joint shenanigan of the writer and the critical 
establishment predicated on two admirable, even beautiful fallacies that 
were hopelessly contingent upon the historical circumstances that produced 
them" ...


"If you are not a novelist, you cannot imagine what it feels like to write 
such heresy. Though I normally write in the morning, I am writing this in 
the middle of the night, like a fugitive; and my hands are shaking as I 
type. The excision from the canon, or at least the demotion in status, of 
most of Joyce, half of Faulkner and Nabokov, nearly all of Gaddis, Pynchon, 
and DeLillo, not to mention the general dumping of their contemporary heirs? 
The enormity of my presumptuousness cows even me. And then there's that 
other strain, which I can hardly bear to slog through, the realists and the 
realists and the realists, too many to name, too many to contemplate, their 
rational, utilitarian platitudes rolling out endlessly like toilet paper off 
a spindle. Who am I to say these brutal things? But a piecemeal approach 
won't do anymore. The problem is too widespread within the insular literary 
and publishing world merely to pick at its edges: the entire scab must be 
ripped off. "


The link to the whole article

http://72.14.209.104/search?q=cache:GumXNpvRfRUJ:www.tnr.com/doc.mhtml%3Fpt%3DmBFc/9JGFQ4h0PgGzX4qAx%3D%3D&hl=en&gl=us&ct=clnk&cd=1





>From: "Carvill John" <johncarvill at hotmail.com>
>To: pynchon-l at waste.org
>Subject: Pynchon: a wasted talent?
>Date: Fri, 27 Oct 2006 18:52:38 +0000
>
>Silly discussion about the Pyncon Paper Dolls, and DFW's allegedly claiming 
>Pynchon to be a "wasted talent":
>
>http://www.metafilter.com/mefi/55854
>
>Made me laugh:
>
>"Paper dolls freaking rule. I'm printing him out."
>
>_________________________________________________________________
>Use your PC to make calls at very low rates 
>https://voiceoam.pcs.v2s.live.com/partnerredirect.aspx
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