#158

“It is strange, the morbid inclination we have to derive satisfaction from the fact (generally false and always irrelevant) that a work of art is traceable to a “true story”. Is it because we begin to respect ourselves more when we learn that the writer, just like ourselves, was not clever enough to make up a story himself? Or is something added to the poor strength or our imagination when we know that a tangible fact is at the base of the “fiction” we mysteriously despise? Or taken all in all, have we here that adoration of the truth which makes little children ask the story-teller “Did it really happen?”” (Nabokov, 1961: 40).

NABOKOV, Vladimir (1961). Nikolai Gogol. New York: New Directions.

#156

“We are speaking here of literature as spiritual prostitution; prostitution because, to write it, one must serve. One must ingratiate oneself, pay court, display oneself, show off one's stylistic muscles, make confession, confide in the reader, render unto him what one holds most dear, compete for his attention, keep alive his interest – in a word, one has to suck up to, wheedle, and wait upon, one has to sell oneself” (id, 114).

#155

“Literature always is parasitic on the mind of the reader. Love, a tree, a park, a sigh, an earache – the reader understands, because the reader has experienced it. It is possible, of course, with a book to rearrange the furniture inside a reader's head, but only to the extent that there is some furniture there already, before the reading” (id, 71).

#154

“The writing of a novel is a from of the loss of creative liberty... In turn, the reviewing of books is a servitude still less noble. Of the writer one can at least say that he enslaved himself – by the theme selected. The critic is in a worse position: as the convict is chained to his wheelbarrow, so the reviewer is chained to the work reviewed. The writer looses his freedom in his ow book, the critic in another's” (Lem, 1999: 3).

LEM, Stanislaw (1999). A Perfect Vacuum. Translation by Michael Kandel. Evanston: Northwestern University Press.

#153

“There are two basic contexts in which a work of art may be placed: either in the history of its nation (we call this the small context), or else in the supranational history of its art (the large context). We are accustomed to seeing music quite naturally in the large context: knowing what language Orlando de Lassus or Bach spoke matters little to a musicologist, but because a novel is bound up with its language, in nearly every university in the world it is studied almost exclusively in the small, national context. Europe has not managed to view its literature as historical unit, and I continue to insist that this is an irreparable intellectual loss. Because, if we consider just the history of the novel, it was to Rabelais that Laurence Sterne was reacting, it was Sterne who set off Diderot, it was from Cervantes that Fielding drew constant inspiration, it was against Fielding that Stendhal measured himself, it was Flaubert's tradition living on in Joyce, it was through this reflection on Joyce that Hermann Broch developed his own poetics of the novel, and it was Kafka who showed García Márquez the possibility of departing from tradition to “write another way”” (Kundera, 2007: 35).

KUNDERA, Milan (2007). The Curtain: An Essay In Seven Parts. Translation by Linda Asher. London: Faber And Faber.