The unspoken truth of literary criticism is that, in the end, the construction of characters, the dramatic arc, the description of settings and other silliness do not matter when what is created is the isolated product of mental ingenuity. Enough with the lies! What matters in literature is the transubstantiation into letters of living, personal experiences that have been engraved in the author’s innermost being and which, as humane, deserve universal interest.
Tag: literature
The Radical Decision of Cioran
It comes to mind the radical decision of Cioran who, banishing his mother tongue from his hand and tongue, vowed never to earn a living except by penning, that is, never to betray his recognized vocation in order to earn more money in some other occupation. The result was an obvious and permanent lack of comfort, to say the least for a writer who isolated himself in a rented cubicle, supporting himself on handouts and eating in a popular restaurant, when his intellect would have allowed him infinitely greater possibilities. All this seems to suggest that we should always ask ourselves mentally before opening a book: how much did this gentleman give up to write?
The Writer Whose Life Is Involuntarily Invaded…
Despite the general recommendation, the writer whose life is involuntarily invaded and disturbed by politics has not the right, but the duty to insert politics into his literary work. This is, in short, an obligation to future generations, to whom he must pass on the flavor of his personal experience. Not to do so is to deny oneself. A political prisoner, then, even if he is against it, has lost the right to remain silent about the oppression he has suffered, and it is precisely he who has the mission of giving the lines a political flavor, because it is precisely he who has the the support of a circumstance that all the others don’t have.
More Curious Than Examples Like Baudelaire’s…
More curious than examples like Baudelaire’s, who found his aesthetic theory essay already described and practiced elsewhere, is to come across authors, coeval or not, who are similar in content and form, although they are unknown to each other. There are many examples of this, and they attest to the fact that authentic literary manifestation is more of an instinctive impulse, more associated with the particularities of experience than with proper literary study.