The death of literature is great business
The other day I was inside a half-crowded bus in São Paulo around 11 pm; the driver was speeding like a madman, the passengers frightened; on a curve he ran a tire over the sidewalk, the whole bus shook, I saw an old lady praying.
Then the bus slammed to a stop at a traffic light, and after regaining my balance I looked out the window and saw a car with two occupants, both wearing seat belts. I remembered that wearing a seat belt is mandatory. On the bus, however, you must go rattling along at high speed, possibly standing, without a belt or any other kind of safety apparatus.
I started wondering: if the bus I was on crashed into a pole, who would be held responsible? The driver, you idiot – OK, the driver, but the driver died in the accident, so whose fault is it? Inevitably, responsibility for the case would end up in the hands of some faceless entity: the bus company, the automotive industry, the government, Brazil, society, God, the devil, humankind etc.
Now, if a private car got wrapped around a pole, the blame would fall entirely on the person driving, end of story. The system washed its hands of this case from the very start, with traffic laws, mandatory insurance, mandatory seat belts, campaigns against alcohol consumption… The apparatus is built to keep drivers from wrapping their cars around poles and, at the same time, to transfer the entire responsibility for an eventual accident onto an individual with a face.
Bus passengers, on the other hand — a public service — are the system’s responsibility. The implementation of seat belts on public buses would be material evidence that the system is flawed – the bus may crash, fasten this belt so you are not hurled out to your death.
When you get on a bus and see no seat belts on the seats, at some level, maybe deep down, you think or feel: if there are no belts, riding the bus must be safe; they wouldn’t make buses without belts if buses were dangerous. Nothing to worry about, for all of this has already been considered on your behalf. Never mind the fact that you don’t want to think about the possibility of your bus having an accident.
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Thousands of fathers and mothers all over Brazil must be celebrating the possible passage of the Menino Bernardo Law. The media, as always, rushed to find a slogan-name for the bill, which in the papers and gossip shows became the Spanking Law, with the charismatic couple Calheiros and Xuxa in tow.
The greatest relief emanating from this law is not the possible extinction of physical punishment of children, but the transfer of responsibility from parents to the system. It is a ready-made answer to a complicated question: should I or should I not hit my child?
If the law becomes reality, the answer is: you must not hit, because it is a crime. And if you lose control, pray it is not in public, or that your child is not holding a camera. An alternative is to raise a child who won’t think of suing you one day.
The story of the Menino Bernardo Law is being sold as a dilemma between hitting or not hitting children, but that is merely a distraction: you will no longer have the freedom to hold that doubt, and that is what matters in this story.
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The other day I was with a vegan friend; he was analyzing a package of chocolate-flavored wafer cookies. After a detailed reading of the ingredients, he celebrated: no products of animal origin! I can eat this!
I took the package to look and, indeed, there was no ingredient of animal origin, but there was a list of enigmatic substances. I started laughing at my friend, but he interrupted me to say the following: they wouldn’t use these substances if they were harmful; they wouldn’t even let this product reach the shelves.
I consider the consumption of industrialized food the most selfless profession of faith in the system. You have no idea what those substances are, but you eat, because you believe that someone (usually designated by the word “they”) verified that they could be consumed by society without problems.
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In the Romero Britto text I was criticized for 1) writing an unnecessarily long text and 2) using a fake news story, namely the UnBritto app for Google Glass. To that I can only say that I am indeed a prolix writer, and that the fact that the news was fake has no relevance to the purpose of the text.
After all, who owns a Google Glass? At the same time, the news is not about an app, but about the perception of art and high culture of a whole market segment (law number zero of the Internet: if you can see it, it’s meant for you). What matters about the fake news is that it be propagated, to make money for someone. Eventually someone will notice it was fake, but none of it sticks; the Internet remembers everything but is excellent at forgetting everything.
I am not a betting man, but if I were, I would bet that the people who made that kind of criticism consume texts and “news” on the Internet. Which automatically means these people see a lot of ads. But I don’t click on the ads! – it doesn’t matter; media and advertising define the average intellect of the people you live with, work with, share space with etc.
The text below is about how to write well; I found it on Twitter. I translated three items, they come after the image:
Knowledge & inspiration wrapped up into one memo via David Ogilvy – How to Write #OgilvyCannes #Inspire #CannesLions pic.twitter.com/gDZ0VKs3lL
— Ogilvy & Mather (@Ogilvy) June 11, 2014
3. Use short words, short sentences and short paragraphs.
4. Never use jargon words like reconceptualize, demassification, attitudinally, judgmentally. They are hallmarks of a pretentious ass.
5. Never write more than two pages on any subject.
Do you know where you find words like reconceptualize? In art texts (fine arts, “Art with a capital A”). Its cousins, by the way — recontextualize, resignify etc — are very frequent in the literature of contemporary art. Hence, mediation at art exhibitions. I usually run away from the people who work in the educational programs of museums and galleries, but they are often people I know, and we end up talking about anything but art.
However, that memo is about how to write good advertising copy. Those are formulas for the literature of advertising and marketing. This kind of literature is persuasive; it exists to induce the reader (spectator) to make value judgments, of the kind: this product is better than that one. It is the kind of literature that allows the following phenomenon:
As the literature of advertising is predominant, the discussion of “good art” versus “bad art” owes something to this kind of thinking. That is why a puppet who writes for Veja magazine wrote a ridiculous text about “modern art” (I will go deeper into this in the next text).
Although I myself am not a great appreciator of some modalities of art, I am completely in favor of the unconditional freedom of creation, the freedom to call whatever it may be art. I am in favor of an art created not merely to sell, to be better than another, but simply because free creation is our best chance of renewing human thought — whether in art, philosophy, literature etc.
The great problem faced by literature (and by art) nowadays is that it demands a posture from the reader, a stance, an attitude: reading is not a passive act. But people’s thinking is being broken by the literature of advertising, which walks hand in hand with the literature of soap operas, TV series, best-sellers etc. In all these cases, the route has already been entirely thought out by someone else; there is a defined ending, a goal, a guiding thread that leads all consumers to the same conclusion, so that this product (be it a book, film, series etc) can then be discussed and give rise to other products.
That is why the classics of literature will be less and less read (and what to say of poetry?), and contemporary art will increasingly need mediators and educational programs. Both literature and art require a stance from those who consume them, but people want someone else to take that stance for them.
I am sure that anyone who enjoys a good soap opera, full of schemes and interpersonal dramas, would love to read The Brothers Karamazov. However, one must face a brick of hundreds of pages, with no defined ending, whose conclusions depend solely on the reader’s interpretation; who wants to read Dostoevsky now?
The gravest aspect of all this is that the whole system is shaped so that people will not want to take on responsibilities, and that is why the death of literature is great business; without it, one can sell many more trilogies and franchises and sausages, and make comparisons of the “good art” and “bad art” kind.
Measuring art in those terms is the fruit of the literature of advertising, and in that sense something very important is lost: art is not for finding out who draws better, writes better, dances better or clucks better. Art is for living better. And I copied this last paragraph from someone, but I won’t say who, to entertain the fake hunters.