While this isn’t political in the least, I figured I’d put it up.
Modern authors (authors of the Modernist movement, which is now hella old) struggled with the implications of being born into a world where pretty much everything that could have been written the fuck about was, in fact, the fuck written about. This frightened and angered many creative persons of the day, who seemed locked in a struggle to leap screaming from the shoulders of the giants they were horrified to find they were standing on. Walt Whitman implored his readers to stop looking “through the eyes of the dead” and showed us his vision of utopia, every man and woman with a sun to themselves. Virginia Woolf speaks at length of the “constraining” forces of “convention” in her essay Modern Fiction, transforming the authors of the past into what may very well be seen as a tyrannous cabal of snooty zombies. “If the writer were a free man and not a slave,” she writes, “if he could write what he chose, not what he must, if he could base his work upon his own feeling and not upon convention, there would be no plot, no comedy, no tragedy, no love interest or catastrophe in the accepted style, not a single button sewn on as the tailors would have it.” Read the rest of this entry »
