I received this letter not too long ago. I'd like to tell you who from, but the person only let me put it up here, if I didn't. Nevertheless, I will tell you that it's one I treasure.
Dear Jennifer,
I often struggle with the issue of the "point" of literature, because I live amongst friends who find that frivolous reading is for the ones who have plenty of time on their hands, but also those who seem to find no joy in reading, and instead find their time better spent on other things, which I of course would not judge them for, each to his own, right? It, however, most of the time, feels like an attack to me, and I often have to stand to defend literature, reading, and why I write these frivolous things.
Literature of course includes fiction, and non-fiction, but it is the writing I enjoy most, fiction, that I find hard to stand up for sometimes. It sort of melts away when beings of the practical real world talk about it. Fiction, apparently is useless. And the insides of me rise up fiercely in the desire to defend it because, I have found fiction to be important, to me.
David Foster Wallace said once that “Fiction’s about what it is to be a fucking human being." He says, “Fiction is one of the few experiences where loneliness can be both confronted and relieved. Drugs, movies where stuff blows up, loud parties -- all these chase away loneliness by making me forget my name's Dave and I live in a one-by-one box of bone no other party can penetrate or know. Fiction, poetry, music, really deep serious sex, and, in various ways, religion -- these are the places (for me) where loneliness is countenanced, stared down, transfigured, treated.”
I often ask him, how, and why? I mean I believe him, I do, and I feel him, but I need a reason. What is it about fiction, about good literature that would like he says, help people confront loneliness, what about it makes it so human?
I suppose, as much as Wallace was a writer, I believe he agonised over the things he could not express, and his world suffocated him, and pushed him over the edge. The inability to express, to speak to the masses, to convince them of the things he believes in so deeply. The inability to get across the ideals, and communicate, express, the things he sees, that nobody else does.
Then I met David Grossman, and when we first met, through his words, the thing he communicated to me was this, "I write and the world does not close in on me. It does not grow smaller. it moves in the direction of what is open, future, possible." And as I explored his writings I found a depth that, if Wallace had waited, and learnt and matured, he would have understood, and received. If Wallace gave himself a chance.
But through Grossman I did find some answers to the questions I, and Wallace raised in me, why fiction matters, or more like why it matters for me to write fiction?
"I write," he says, "I feel the many possibilities that exist in every human situation, and I feel my capacity to choose among them...I write and I feel the correct and accurate use of words act like a medicine. It purifies the air I breathe, removes the pollutants and frustrates the schemes of language defrauders and language rapists."
And then, last night when I had the time again before bed to listen to what he has to say further he told me something I have yet to digest further, but his words. In this particular essay Individual language and Mass language made sense and I will share some excerpts with you to see if you feel them too.
"With wondrous ease we create the necessary mechanisms to separate ourselves from the suffering of others. Intellectually and emotionally we manage to detach the causal relationship between, for example, our economic affluence and in the stated and prosperous Western countries - and the poverty of others,"
"It is convenient for us, where the burden of personal responsibility is concerned, to become part of a crowd, a faceless crowd with no identity, seemingly free from responsibility and absolved of blame. Perhaps it is only in this global reality where so much of our life is lived in a mass destruction, that we can be so indifferent to mass destruction,"
"At which moment do I become part of the faceless crowd, the masses?..I become part of the masses when I give up the right to think and formulate my own words, in my own language, instead accepting automatically and uncritically the formulations and language that others dictate. I become the masses when I stop formulating my own choices and the moral compromises I make. When I stop articulating over and over again with fresh new words each time words that have not yet eroded in me not yet congealed in me, which I cannot ignore or defend myself against, and which force me to face the decisions I have made, and to pay the price for them. The masses as we know, cannot exist without mass language - a language that will consolidate the multitude and spur it on to act in a certain way, formulating justifications for its acts and simplifying the moral and emotional contradictions it may encounter. In other words, the language of the masses is a language intended to liberate the individual from responsibility of his own actions, to temporarily sever his private, individual judgment form his sound logic and natural sense of justice,"
And this paragraph, sitting there I found was the answer to the question Wallace raised. What makes fiction so much about being a "fucking human being"?
"Literature has no influential representatives in the centers of power, and I find it difficult to believe that literature can change it, but it can offer different ways to live in it. To live with an internal rhythm and an internal continuity that fulfill our emotional and spiritual needs far more than what is violently imposed upon us by the external systems. I know that when I read a good book, I experience internal clarification: my sense of uniqueness as a person grows lucid. The measures precise voice that reaches me from the outsides animates voices within me, some of which may have been mute until this other voice, this particular book came and woke them,"
"A good book, and there are not many because literature too is subject to the seductions of mass media, individualises and extracts the single reader out of the masses. It gives him an opportunity to feel how spiritual contents, memories and existential possibilities can float up and rise from within him from unfamiliar places and they are his alone...the result of his most intimate refinements. And in the mass culture of daily life, in the overall pollution of our consciousness, it is so difficult for these soulful contents to emerge from the inner depths and be animated."
"The secret is that literature can repeatedly redeem for us the tragedy of the one from the statistics of the millions. The one about whom the story is written, and the one who reads the story."
You, dear Jenn, are one of the few writers with that potential of speaking to the individual, in an individual language, as Grossman talks about. I guess we can try and do things differently, write differently, to immerse ourselves in language and speak clearly, to the inner depths of one.
I hope I can be that kind of writer, because that is the only reason to write, is it not?
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