How we use and abuse the word genius. - By Ron Rosenbaum - Slate Magazine

[Robin Landseadel]

On Sep 9, 2009, at 1:11 PM, Paul Di Filippo wrote:

> Pynchon as an example.....
>
> http://www.slate.com/id/2227801

  . . . and a rather bad one at that:

	I have my own strong feelings about the question of genius in
	literature. I've always felt that if we look at the past century,
	Nabokov was a game-changer, as the academic phrase has it.
	Nabokov showed there is a place you can go, a place that the
	alchemy of words can transport reader and writer to, that no one
	had gone before. And Nabokov went there, with ease, in Lolita
	and Pale Fire. So it's hard to call any other writer in the past
	century a genius of the same order. Which in part accounts for
	my ambivalence about the decision to publish, against his
	wishes, an unfinished draft of his last incomplete work, The
	Original of Laura: No one was more aware than he of when a
	work of his had reached its zenith of genius. He didn't feel this
	one had. Perhaps, though, we'll learn some valuable lessons
	about the degrees of ascent to genius. Is it all or nothing?

	I'd say the only work of genius in the past half-century to come
	close may have been Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49. (Gravity's
	Rainbow was to be his Ulysses but turned out to be his
	Finnegans mistake.)

	Maybe genius must give the feeling of effortlessness as well as
	utter confidence and transcendence. Ulysses and Gravity's
	Rainbow both show the palpable sweaty strain to become
	encyclopedic works of genius: Always screaming across the
	sky: "This is a work of genius!"