Bad Writing

Writing today is excrement, and apparently convention has an appropriate diet. The essence of it is something of a stacatto presentation of ideas that smack very faintly of an attempted spirit of Hemingway, but unfortunately the one spirit that drank himself to oblivion, not the one that reinvented writing. Unlike prior to the 20th century, which was overwrought with a violent use of adjectives and adverbs, today's writers have entirely forgotten how to use such things; what is left is an oftentimes failed wit without sufficient explanation, no psychological depth, a sea of dialogue whose fish are helplessly dying, all clouded in words and word-phrases that a moderately educated American would use -- that is to say, something utterly boring and without inspiration or passion. Of all the writers alive today, of all the endless novels I have half-hopefully looked through, there is only one that comes to mind as being worthy, one that has rescued the present by holding with him a remnant of the past: Milan Kundera. His very name seems to the American to symbolize the obscurity the air of which his writing style breathes, and so much the worse for that, and so much the worse for this: his writing seems to a lazy subjectivity to be hedging the line of didactic philosophical thought, but nevertheless his Unbearable Lightness of Being, a work that centers on the Nietzschean idea of eternal recurrance, is considered a contemporary classic, and like all classics, it is beginning to be forgotten. His present work I have heard nothing exciting about; he is the Czech reflection of his American counterpart, John Updike, who also has written masterpieces, who also has his genius obscured by a skyline of bad writing, sustained by very bad readers, very superficial emotional quips, and who seems to have melted under the pressure to be great without effort, rather than eternally noble with effort.

Two things this writing-community needs to regain its composure and actually entail the possibility of nesting a luminary in its midst: darkness and poetic prose. The incarnations I am thinking of go no further than Kafka and Nabokov, the former who was dark but conservative to the point of being poetic only in retrospect, the latter whose poetic beauty shone through every single word he wrote but nevertheless wrote on shaded grounds -- grounds with psychological darkness but without a darkness of environment that gave his characters the inability to fully reach the light of humanity. With Kafka one perceives the dark matter of one's soul that one would otherwise choose to neglect, sees and perpetuates the stare until he is exorcised of the demons Kafka masterfully brings to light; with Nabokov one sees everything from the commonplace to the particularly depraved through the lens of immaculate presentation, and one thereby learns to see the world, even in its nasty and decadent aspects, as something with roots, something that has a source, something that can be given greater attention and hence from which can be stolen detail -- for it is, after all, the details in life that ultimately make one thing different from another, memorable in contrast with another. Detail is why a man or a woman you have fallen for is not a body snatched at random from a pool of 6 billion that satisfies your desires for the simple sake of expedience.

The problem goes back to our revulsion for language, our ignorance of its capacity; our age has become too scientific, too positivistic, too statistical to ever play according to the rules of unbounded expression, and this all goes back to our education, where even the literature books are filled to the brim with superfluous historical information over the writer whose work seems to take a backseat. It would not be inappropriate to sit down an English major whose paths cross with yours and ask him a simple question: why this and not history? At least history is interesting because it has a broader context, because it contains information that transcends fact, information that is capable of edifying, not to mention information that is actually useful in making one appear interesting. This is not to say that the lives of the writers are boring, but only that without a little freedom given to the reader to actually enjoy his work, the writer becomes an abstraction, someone without blood, without spirit, without passion -- someone terribly like the person reading, and this can't help but be repugnant. Words become interesting only as soon as they magnify an experience penned by the author; without this they are only in the way. And authors today do have fascinating experiences; they only lack a flashlight with which to make them seen.

Goodnight.