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I derive a real joy from thinking about this, so thank you. I’ll pick up the Invention of Solitude straight away. On the subject of the advantage to solitude in engaging with literature, a distinction can be made between the beam of white light and everything after the prism. Reading literary fiction, in particular, is edifying, and the result of this experience is the feeling that it is full of nuance and could be understood to a greater degree. Reading books on criticism will tease out some of the frequencies, but the full spectrum becomes realized when the private act of reading is put into conversation with another’s private act of reading. Novels of once seemingly enjoyed a network effect of sorts. They had the capacity to be private and public experiences. I can tel you, too, that engaging more and more with reading, and less therefore with the other cultural mediums available to us, means that one has fewer people with which to connect. A retreat into literature was in my case the result of reading waste and trivia into the alternatives that the culture encouraged. It is this loneliness that may be the primary problem in need of a solution. I read the mfa article linked above. In general, mfas seem to do what Rome did to Christianity. It routinized it to such an extent that it largely denuded it of its most radical capacity. For me, the most vital aspect of literature, the one that is, in Bottom’s own terms, bottomless, is the constitution of characters that go just beyond understanding. The tilt that occurs when a character demonstrates its reflexivity, its comprehension of the moments it experiences, is a profound beauty, even Bodhisattvian. When you treat the process of writing like it is prescriptive, the writer is unlikely to realize that what they are creating is a notion unto itself. So, the publishing industry is staffed with people that have lost the capacity to recognize writing’s purpose. They instead have come to recognize a collection of shorthand cheats and the feedback loop draws the whole structure away from meaningful production. It merely produces. |