Regardless of the line adopted, the critic’s judgment of a literary work will always be conditioned by the strength with which it has penetrated and imprinted itself on his mind. Therefore, the elements he identifies, such as the cohesiveness of the plot, the truthfulness of the characters, the beauty of the expression, the relevance of the themes addressed, all of this is as if they prove to be as effective as they make the work memorable, and consequently change or enrich the critic’s own understanding of reality. Valuing novelty, then, is justified because novelty shines a new light on the mind. As long as the critic continues to judge along these lines, he will be making a criticism that may be subjective, perhaps unfair, but always authentic. On the other hand, taking the opposite route will always be a waste and a deviation from his function.
Tag: literature
When We Overcome Our Fear of Death…
When we overcome our fear of death and look at it with benevolence, the lines we write are filled with new value. If we ignore it, we can be deluded and adopt a false purpose for writing; we can forget the true value of letters. But if we face it, if we accept it and even come to appreciate it, the act of writing takes on something transcendent, and we see the work as the noblest thing we can do.
It Is Hard to Imagine the European…
From Brazil, it is hard to imagine the European literary environment of the 19th century, in which it was not only possible to make some money from literature, but also to make a living from fiction. Just imagining a payment, any payment, priced by the number of pages written, is something that makes the brain freeze. Less absurd than imagining a publisher paying something for literature is thinking about the act of creation invaded by thoughts such as: “I’ll charge so much per page”, “I’ll offer the work to this and that publisher”, “I need to finish the book to get paid”… And this as a rule! experienced by practically all authors! Then the thought flies to the economic aspects: this work was sold for so much, that one for so much, this author sold so many works a year, that one so many, and so on. And to think of the authors who made up Brazilian literature, financing their own work, publishing out of a mixture of duty and love, and never counting on the possibility of earning a living from literature. The contrast is brutal!
The Shock I Suffered After First Reading…
The shock I suffered after first reading Crime and Punishment, probably the most decisive of my entire life, was largely due to the realization that what Dostoevsky did in Crime and Punishment was unlike anything I had ever witnessed, both in and out of literature, and to the realization of the immense nobility of this attempt. Doing something like that, I concluded, justifies and dignifies an existence. And what Dostoevsky and some other authors do is so different that today, more than a decade on from that first impression, I realize that time has done nothing but reinforce it. A book like Crime and Punishment will never emerge from the pen of someone who simply wants to tell a story. That is why it is so natural for me to read Joseph Frank’s lines revealing that, after a dramatic combination of circumstances, Dostoevsky wrote to his brother saying that, from that moment on, the aim of his life would be to study the meaning of life and man. Without this conscious resolution, he would never have been able to come close to what he did.