It is impressive to note how easily writers of the last two centuries would go to jail if they published today what they published a few decades ago. They would be fiercely persecuted, fiercely censored, and, unless saved by a very rare confluence of factors, would be prevented from writing and publishing. Dead, however, with a few exceptions, they remain tolerated, if not ignored. This highlights both the hysterical and authoritarian character of this century, and it has become more than ever preferable to remain anonymous.
Category: Notes
Information Warfare
What makes information warfare even more abominable than that waged on battlefields is the absence of any war code. Consequently, anything is allowed. What is astonishing is the number of those who have not yet realized that there is, in fact, a war going on in this field. This is mostly because none of those who fight fiercely has published, as protocol demands, a declaration of war. So that those who innocently stand in their way are attacked by a total violence that has no scruple to destroy and admits no amnesty. To crush the adversary, and to do so by any means available, preferably sneakily, so that the aggression will not be identified or, at the very least, it will be impossible to identify the aggressor. It is a war that, in short, has added infamy to pure violence.
Less the Man Than His State of Nerves
Style, says Brodsky, is less the man than his state of nerves. Very well observed! And it is possible to go a step further by saying that there is, in every writer, the man who lives and the man who writes—or, in other words, the man who thinks and the man who acts. Style is, to a great extent, the emotional and psychological effect triggered by the act of writing. The moralist is bitter because it is precisely bitterness that fills him when he writes about what he writes about. Likewise a grandiose style reveals a sense of grandeur. The poet is a feigner, says a verse by Pessoa—but only to a certain extent. Invariably, one can only express what one can feel.
What the Reader Seeks
Brodsky says something extremely true: what the reader seeks in literature is to read about himself. This justifies, on the reader’s part, literary preferences; on the writer’s part, it justifies his success or rejection. If we identify success with popularity, the most successful author will be the most popular, and it is easy to see that to be so, he will have to come closer than the others to the reality of the common individual. What the reader seeks, in short, is a book that could have been written by himself. And that says it all.