Each week in Bookends, two writers take on questions about the world of books. This week, Dana Stevens and Benjamin Moser discuss how we view authors who die before their time.
By Dana Stevens
What would “The Trial” have read like if Kafka had put the fragments in the order he wanted them?
If by “we” you mean “I,” then yes, probably. The propensity to spin mythic tales about those figures in human history who have proved themselves most capable of, precisely, spinning mythic tales may be one of the few unchanging features of the literary landscape. Nearly 50 years after the death of the author (remember when that happened? #RIP), individual authors who died before their time retain their seemingly undeconstructable glamour. Just as a long-dead movie star can still seem to reach off the screen and pull the viewer in, an even-longer-dead author can draw the reader into the vortex of the page. But a movie star leaves behind only an image, the insubstantial imprint of a body. A writer leaves behind trails of words, which, if they’re the right words, can seem to transport us directly into the living matter of another mind (or in the case of poetry, to open our own minds to new possibilities of language).
When we mourn the early death of a writer who was just beginning to find his or her true voice, we’re also mourning, by implication, every work that author never finished, or never started. What would Franz Kafka’s “The Trial” have read like if he had put the surviving fragments in the order he wanted them, then written the connecting bits? Can you imagine Sylvia Plath’s follow-up to “Ariel” — the book she might have written if she had lived, brought up her children and eventually gotten over Ted Hughes? Would a midlife slump have slowed the breakneck momentum of John Keats, who faux-modestly wrote his fiancée, a year before his death from tuberculosis at 25, that “if I had had time I would have made myself remember’d”? Keats’s small body of lyric poetry, dismissed by many critics during his lifetime as vulgar fluff, has since ascended to the peaks of the English Romantic canon.
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