À propos de battery-writers and talking-cricket-writers

 

The following thoughts come from a recent reading, but of course, this last reading only opened the Pandora's box that was inside me.

I happened to read a story by an American writer,  whom I didn't know and who reminds me a lot of another American writer, Elizabeth Strout, who I read a lot for a certain amount of time when I was trying to tone down, to make smoother, my too abrasive style.

I liked her story, I liked her style: fluffy, soft, sweet, melancholic and enveloping, encircling, enframing... But like the majority of anodyne writers is incapable to go beyond the surface in such a way that possibly can sometimes disturb or at least move the still water of many people's sentiments but doesn't upset at all, doesn't hurt, doesn't produce an inner crisis for which you are led to review, criticize and inspect, your vision of the world.

It's kind of the common feature of those I call battery writers, like battery hens.

Writers should goad their societies on, they should be supposed to be the talking crickets of the democracies in which they live in, be questioners of the conscience of those societies. If a writer doesn't do this, what kind of writer is he? A barker, an entertainer, a titillater maybe, but not a writer.

Writers, in the sense that I support, have always been the fruit of a society where there is no democracy, or freedom, where dictatorship owns their liberty and conscience. 

South American writers are the clearest example of this. Difficult to find one of them where is lacking a political and civil conscience in their stories.

Absurdly and paradoxically, dictatorship, which should be considered an abnormal state for society, is the best nourishing moment for generating literature capable of a strong impact on the civilian consciences, while during democracy, which is reckoned as a normal state of our societies, only weak or rubbish literature is produced ad infinitum.

------
Follow me on Substack