Found this on Gawker.Com. Good stuff. If you’re a writer, think of it as “Why WRITE Fiction in a Bad World?”
And, yes, for all practical purposes there’s no reason for all of who write to be crying and feeling guilty because let’s face it. There’s nothing all that special about our planet’s current circumstances. Hasn’t it always been this way?
By MORTEN HØI JENSEN
n 1932, Samuel Beckett paid a visit to the Paris apartment of Walter Lowenfels, an American poet and member of the Communist Party. Sunk in a corner of the living room, looking like “a forest ranger in a Western,” Beckett listened forbearingly as Lowenfels lurched into passionate speech about the need for anonymity in the arts and the terrible material conditions of society. Increasingly frustrated by the silence of his guest, Lowenfels suddenly exclaimed: “You sit there saying nothing while the world is going to pieces. What do you want? What do you want to do?” To which Beckett offered the languid response: “Walter, all I want to do is sit on my ass and fart and think of Dante.”
Beckett’s remark is flippant and was clearly intended to be. (Flippancy in the face of humorless self-importance being always funny). But it is seriously flippant, by which I mean that it contains an implied challenge to the question posed, as if to say: What of it? What exactly is wrong with wanting to read Dante even as the world is falling to pieces?
I thought of Beckett’s quip this past Friday when a number of writers came far less flippantly to the defense of fiction in response to a now-deleted tweet from Miami Herald investigative reporter Julie K. Brown. “So I’m going to get slammed for this,” she said, “but I have to ask how can you be obsessed by fiction – yes “we” get how important it is – but at a time like this? I’m reading history books about how the fuck it came to this.” As she later clarified, “a time like this” referred to the unfolding horrors of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
I have no desire to “slam” Brown any more than she already has been; in fact, I would go so far as to say that the instinct to question the reading of fiction in troubled times is, on some level, an understandable, if clumsy, expression of frustration and powerlessness….