The beautiful and silent literary belief, the intimate and timid suffering, the solitary resignation… none of that seems to exist. What does exist and abound is unbridled vanity, the infamous gregarious instinct united with the need for validation by others. There is the imposition of one’s own world view, the demand for agreement, the intolerance of dissent, the certainty and pride of one’s own distinction. Impose, repel, demand are the common verbs—never intransitive, always requiring a personal complement. Sometimes it seems that literature does a disservice to the understanding of the objective world.
Tag: literature
What Distinguishes an Artist Is the Strength and Multiplicity of His Manifestations
What distinguishes an artist is the strength and multiplicity of his manifestations. Creativity is nothing but the ability to present multiple ideas with potency. This is why every great artist, as he develops, tends to variety and excess, and gradually becomes more radical in his manifestations. In general, they end up being cut down from this earth before they are satisfied. But there are also those who retire into silence after being convinced that they have said, to the last word, what they had to say.
Melancholy…
Melancholy, so frequent in artists, raw material of almost all poetic work, classified by Poe as “the most legitimate of all the poetical tones,” seems strange to my nature. I fall into melancholy, if I may put it that way, only when I am distracted by everyday issues. Taking melancholy, of course, with sadness among its manifestations. If taken as a general disenchantment—which does not necessarily result in sadness—then I am as close to it as a brother. Affliction, psychological torture, endless mental conflict: these are as natural to me as day and night. I do not know where this psychological disposition comes from, but through sadness I do not feel united to any of the great poets.
Serious Art Does Not Deliver Pleasure to the Artist
Serious art does not deliver pleasure to the artist. To say that is to repeat the obvious… Kafka is the model of the serious artist: Kafka, the writer who burned almost everything he wrote and who lived as a complete anonymous. What did art give him? Nothing, but affliction. Anyone who thinks art delivers any kind of contentment is completely unaware of it. The artist works for dozens of hours: he creates the work. And then, what does he do? or even: what good does the work do him? At first, serious art does not sell—and it is an insult to think that it is made to sell;—then, it is a joke to imagine someone like Kafka satisfied or contented by glimpsing what he has birthed. Kafka certainly reread his works, which is why he burned them. A serious work, once created, repulses the artist; once created, it has to disappear from his field of vision. For the rest, there is what art delivers: endless hours of bitterness and a final disgusting judgment. Like Kafka, it is to leave unpublished the work of a lifetime and to order in a will: “Burn everything that is left of me!”.