The Death of the Great Writer
In a recently published book, La Mort du grand écrivain, Henri Raczymow maintains there are no longer any “great writers” because democracy and the marketplace are incompatible with the model of the intellectual mentor, as represented by figures like Voltaire, Zola, Gide, or Sartre, and will ultimately prove the death of literature. Although his book refers only to France, it is evident that his conclusions, if they stand, hold true for all modern societies.
Raczymow’s argument is coherent. It takes as its starting point a verifiable premise: that in our day there is not a single figure with the stature of a writer like Victor Hugo, who radiated a prestige and authority that transcended his circle of readers as well as solely artistic matters and made him an embodiment of public consciousness, an archetype whose ideas, opinions, way of life, gestures, and obsessions served as the model of behavior for a vast sector of society. What living writer today inspires the fervent devotion that made provincial youths vow to die for Hugo, as reported by Valéry?
According to Raczymow, for a cult like that of the “great writer” to flourish, literature must take on a sacred, magical aura and play the role of religion, something which, he says, began to happen during the Enlightenment, when the iconoclastic philosophers, after dispatching God and the saints, left a void that the republic had to fill with secular heroes. Writers and artists were the prophets, mystics, and supermen of a new society educated in the belief that the arts and letters had the answer to everything and could express, through their best practitioners, the noblest impulses of the human spirit. This atmosphere and these beliefs fostered careers that were like religious crusades, embarked on with devotion, fanaticism, and nearly superhuman ambition. From this would come the literary accomplishments of great creators like Flaubert, Proust, Balzac, and Baudelaire, who, although very different from one another, shared the conviction (also shared by their readers) that they were working for posterity and that if their oeuvre outlived them, it would serve to enrich humanity, or, as Rimbaud said, to “change life,” and would justify their existence long after their deaths.
Why are no contemporary writers spurred on as their predecessors were by the promise of immortality? Because all have become convinced that literature isn’t eternal but perishable and that books are written, published, read (sometimes), and then vanish forever. This isn’t an expression of faith, like the one that made literature a supreme and timeless undertaking and a pantheon of incorruptible titles, but a crude objective reality: today books aren’t passports to the eternal but slaves of the present (“Of the here and now,” says Raczymow). Those who write them have been ejected from the Olympus where they were enthroned, safe from the contingencies of mediocre life, and leveled with the “clotted city masses” of democracy who so revolted the aristocratic Rubens—and also Flaubert, for whom the democratic dream consisted of “elevating the worker to the same level of bêtise as the petit bourgeois.”
Two mechanisms of democratic society have contributed to the desanctification of literature, making it a purely industrial product. One is sociological and cultural. The leveling out of citizens, the extinction of elites, the establishment of tolerance—the right to “difference and indifference”—and the subsequent development of individualism and narcissism have abolished our interest in the past and our preoccupation with the future, centering our attention on the present and turning the satisfaction of our immediate needs into our primary goal. Victim of this presentism has been the realm of the sacred, an alternate reality that no longer has any reason to exist when a community, whether satisfied or dissatisfied, accepts the world it lives in as the only possible one and renounces the “alterity” of which literary creations are token and sustenance. In a society like this there may be books, but literature is dead.
The other mechanism is economic. “There is no democracy, alas, apart from that of the market,” says Raczymow. In other words, the book, stripped of its status as religious or mythical object, becomes a mere good at the mercy of the frenetic ups and downs—the iron law—of supply and demand, according to which “the book is a product and one product eliminates another, even one by the same writer.” The effect of the vortex in which no book comes to rest, all passing through and none returning, is the banalization of literature, since it counts now only as a product for immediate consumption, an ephemeral entertainment, or a source of information that expires as soon as it appears.
Of course, the great instrument of democracy is the television, not the book. It diverts and distracts leveled-out society, administering to us the doses of humor, emotion, sex, and sentiment that we require in order not to be bored. The small screen has managed to fulfill the outsize ambition that always burned in the heart of literature and that literature never satisfied: to reach everyone, to make all of society partake of its “creations.” In the “kingdom of narcissistic play,” books have become entirely dispensable, though that doesn’t mean they’ll disappear. They’ll continue to proliferate, but they will be emptied of their former substance and will enjoy the precarious and fleeting existence of novelties, jumbled together and interchangeable on the chaotic sea where all a work’s merits are decided by its publicity campaign or the theatrical talents of its author. Democracy and the marketplace have engineered another twist: now that there is no public opinion but just a public, it is the writer-stars—those who know how to make the most of the audiovisual media, the mediagenic—who give prestige to books, and not vice versa, as was true in the past. As a result, we have reached a level of grim degradation best anticipated by Tocqueville: the era of writers who “prefer success to glory.”
Although I don’t entirely share Raczymow’s pessimistic view of the fate of literature, I read his book with much interest, because it seems to me that he puts his finger on an often overlooked problem: the new role our modern, open society has imposed on the writer. It is true that the mandarin writer no longer has a place in today’s world. Figures like Sartre in France or Ortega y Gasset and Unamuno in their time, or Octavio Paz, served as guides and teachers on all the important issues and filled a void that only the “great writer” seemed capable of filling, whether because few others participated in public life, because democracy was nonexistent, or because literature had a mythical prestige. In a free society, the influence that a writer exerts—sometimes profitably—over submissive societies is useless: the complexity and multiplicity of the problems make him talk nonsense if he tries to give his opinion on everything. His opinion and positions may be very well thought out, but not necessarily better thought out than those of anyone else—scientists, professionals, technicians—and in any case, his opinions must be judged on their own merits and not approved merely because they come from someone who writes well. This desanctification of the persona of the writer doesn’t seem a bad thing to me; on the contrary, it puts things in their proper place, since, in truth, someone talented at literary creation and capable of writing good novels or beautiful poems isn’t necessarily also generally discerning.
Nor do I believe that we should rend our clothes because, as Raczymow says, in modern democratic society the novel must above all “divert” and “entertain” to justify its existence. Haven’t the works of literature that we most admire always done exactly that—books like Don Quixote or War and Peace or The Human Condition that we read over and over again and that each time hypnotize us just as they did the first time? It’s true that in an open society with multiple mechanisms for the display and debate of the problems and aspirations of social groups, literature must be entertaining above all or it will simply cease to exist. But amusement and entertainment are not incompatible with intellectual rigor, imaginative audacity, the free flight of fantasy, or elegant expression.
Instead of falling into depression and considering himself an obsolete being rejected by modernity, today’s writer should feel stimulated by the formidable challenge of creating a literature worthy of our times and able to reach the vast potential public that awaits it, now that, thanks to democracy and the marketplace, so many human beings know how to read and can buy books, something that was never the case in the past when literature was, in effect, a religion and the writer a little god to whom “the immense minorities” rendered tribute and adoration. The curtain has undoubtedly fallen on those pontificating and narcissistic writers; but the show can go on if their successors contrive to be less pretentious and very amusing.