Tag: literature

Although, as has been said, good literature is always more or less autobiographical, it is useless to obsessively search in its details for parallels with the author’s experience. More often than not, experiences only serve as triggers, motifs, illustrations for something that goes beyond them in the work. That is no small feat, and it is more than enough. The rest is the exploration and deepening of the possibilities that literature allows, but that life sometimes does not.

The most evident effect of the politicization of culture, the main manifestation of which is art, is the inhibition of creativity. In literature, the result is works that can do anything but surprise the reader. And that is where the problem arises: although a work does not necessarily have to stand out for its surprising nature in order to be good, predictability, when absolute, is simply intolerable. A work whose course is already predetermined by an ideology, whatever it may be, is a dead work, and the artists who voluntarily imprison themselves in this unfortunate cell are dead beforehand.

By Pío Baroja:

Los pintores —añadió Larrañaga con aire agresivo— serían los menos inteligentes de los artistas si no existieran los escultores, los músicos y los cómicos, que son la quintaesencia de lo cerril. La mayoría de ellos son unos patanes llenos de suficiencia. Nada tan aburrido como un artista. Es más ameno hablar con la portera o con un tendero de comestibles. El pintor y el bohemio, como tipos amenos, ingeniosos y espirituales, son falsificaciones de nuestra época.

There is no denying it: bohemianism has given the world half a dozen geniuses and, for every one of them, the world has produced a good few thousand imbeciles. These circles, everyone knows, are always made up of would-be artists, and sporadically welcome one or two worthy of the name. But as naturally as they visit out of curiosity, they soon leave out of disappointment. A waste of time, sterility and presumption. In these circles, art is nothing more than a pretext, just like soccer, other people’s lives or politics. The bohemian artist is a falsification.

A lot of interesting things can be learned from these modern linguistic studies, on which much of today’s philosophy is based. The problem is that, after a few dozen pages we feel strangely like we’re sailing far, far away from reality, already at a point where we cannot establish any connection with it. And so, if we take on board the argument under consideration, we get ourselves into an awful mess. The mistake is all too obvious: these authors, consciously or not, have swapped experience for language, as if the two were interchangeable, as if the former were dispensable. It is a simple mistake, but once it is made, it is very difficult to get around.