Reasearch v Experience : Two Ways to Think about Fiction

Having recently read (and posted on) James Joyce and David Foster Wallace, let me propose a axis by which to examine and understand fiction: We can group fiction writers into one of two categories: those who writer from personal observation and experience and those who write from research and learning. Most writers fall into the first category, but many of the greatest and most ambitious fall into the second: DF Wallace certainly, and let's add Pynchon, Powers, Vollman, to name a few contemporary writers. You can start thinking about where writers fall on this continuum, and then a few crazy things start to happen. First of all, you'd think that the "researchers" are writers who don't want to are unable to reveal elements about their lives - they would never be ones to write a memoir - but things fall apart. Pynchon's novels are hardly confessionals, but what about Vollman, with all of his dogged research - don't we end up with a vivid picture of him as a writer as well? Then on the other extreme, whose writing has been more personally revealing that Salinger's? Yet he famously absented himself from the public eye. So it's really more a matter of style and predilection. Some great writers, like Roth and Updike and Bellow, draw extensively, again and again, from their personal experiences. Others, never. And yet: one mark of the truly great, the geniuses of the world, is that the rise above the continuum and do both at the same time: Melville's personal narrative of a whaling voyage combined with all of the world's knowledge about whales, Joyce's acute personal memories of Dublin plus the entire corpus of English literary style and reference, and others like Thomas Mann, who evolved more toward the research spectrum later in his career or Proust, who made his own life the subject of the most exquisite and diligent research - he turned the continuum inside out, so to speak.