Category: Notes

What can be said about the study of literary theory is the same as what can be said about the study of stylistics: both contribute and are valuable to the writer who takes his work seriously. They provide him with the means to creatively express whatever he may wish to say. But they will not help him find something to say. Nor will they make his themes more interesting. Nor do they constitute an essential field of study. The study of grammar, indeed, is fundamental and should not be neglected. A true writer who has mastered it, however, can very well produce great works while remaining completely unaware of the subject matter of those stimulating but overrated disciplines. In fact, that is what all writers did until the 20th century.

A literary genius is he who manages to capture and express, in his own way, the inner nature of things. He is the author whose work, upon first reading, evokes that sense of rediscovery Lavelle speaks of, which seems to shed a new light on something we already knew but that lay hidden within us. Then, through that unique and memorable expression, we definitively claim it as our own. Only the truly great can provide this kind of experience.

There is no salvation for the reader who, upon first encountering Dostoevsky, is not filled with the highest admiration for this man who, in desperate circumstances, grasped and managed to express much of what lies deepest within the human soul, with unparalleled intensity and originality. Nothing can be expected of anyone who, faced with this unique and obvious artistic achievement, does not turn away forever from the sterility of that kind of criticism which regards form as the true hallmark of high literature. Anyone who is more impressed by this or that narrative technique, by this or that rhetorical device, by this or that structural organization of the text, than by the exceedingly rare insight of true genius, deserves nothing but compassion.