Doing this or that is useless.
Not doing anything is useless.
but between doing and not doing,
better the uselessness of not doing.

(The Unconfessing Artist. Catchall Museum, 1975, João
Cabral de Melo Neto [tr. Richard Zenith], adulterated)

1. Against what is commonly believed, the passage of time in no way is obliged to reveal any great author or for that matter any reasonably good author. The rule was applicable to the past, which uncovered so many extraordinary authors, and to the next one hundred or thousand years, which may never see another one, in the same way they may see hundreds of them. If great authors appeared or were to appear with regularity, this is a matter of contingency, not of necessity or of the logical consequence of an ever-increasing quantitative set of writings.

2. Anthologies of promising authors or new launches of contemporary writers do not cease to appear, regardless of the quality. Some are young, others are famous, others yet are simply friends of the publisher: the stakes are low. For that very reason, nothing really suffices as publication criteria, and what gets published usually helps to obscure the obvious perception that there’s nothing of relevance being written, nor is there any indication that such relevance may be discovered once again in the domain of literature.

3. There doesn’t seem to be anything of relevance being written—that’s the most probable reason for that abyss, that sea of writings.

4. The apparent necessity for the emergence of great authors is, in the best of cases, perhaps only one reaction to the situation of radical contingency we live in. Nothing guarantees, on the other hand, that in the future we will read a new great author, in spite of all the ones that existed before. Even in spite of the friendly possibility that, in a boundless world, some recent writer may rise up and walk amid a world of monkeys, there’s a good chance one of them may suddenly mutate and evolve into a human.

5. A chance, even a good one, is not a necessity, but rather, merely a projected average of events. In sum, a great author is the incalculable result of a set of circumstances and unexpected occurrences, but there is no guarantee the conditions of his or her existence will ever repeat themselves.

6. The supposed necessity, now formulated as a relatively poor chance, appears rather like a psychological effect primarily associated to a usual market strategy that pretends to launch new “definitive” products every day. That said, it is true that no crime against nature is being committed when one perceives that few Brazilian writers have emerged in the last 30 years that could be labeled “serious authors.”

7. Now, in the worst of cases, new publications as well as those by new authors –except for few and rare instances—emerge from the effective belief that they indeed have the qualities of a great author. Clearly, there’s not much to be done in such cases. One, for instance, could try to badmouth the anthology or authors in question, but there’s not the slightest chance that they will feel personally attacked by a dishonest, grumpy critic. One or two (the better among them), with a fair amount of luck, will stop writing, but the absolute majority –at least as long as they remain unsuccessful—will try only to increase the complicity and camaraderie they share (cf. Leopardi, Pensieri: il mondo è una lega di birbanti contro gli uomini da bene).

8. If they were to ask me what I picture when defining the seriousness of a writer, what first comes to mind is precisely the idea of someone who attempts to resist the vulgarizing popularization of writing. I think of someone who admits, even against an innermost desire and a most stubborn will, that nothing at all forces him or her to write, except a logical fallacy understood as a false imperative of culture.

9. That being so, the serious writer must think it through and through before starting to write. Preferably, as consequence of having seriously thought about the matter,  he or she will feel inclined not to do it. It’s not surprising, from this perspective, that a serious thinker such as Giorgio Agamben would imagine that Bartleby, the scrivener that refuses to write, would be the best example of a writer who is aware of his contingency and does not abuse his condition doing what would be better left undone. This means that the more he could be a writer potentially, the less he could be so in practice, on account of the absolute modesty of becoming only a proofreader and copier of a mountain of other writings --already produced—lacking any sense or motive except for that of grinding one’s own bureaucratic  writing machine.

10. But we need not achieve Bartleby nor the superior intelligence that created him, he being the character of highly improbable masterpiece. If writing is not essential, some amount of self-criticism would do no harm to an aspiring writer or a professional writer. On the contrary, it would do tremendous good to him and to us. Luis Antonio Verney, a man not lacking in brilliance, insisted that an aspiring writer was perhaps more useful, or less irrelevant, working rigorously on another project more suited to his talents, which would be just as useful to the common good.

11. If writing is not essential, we must absolutely agree with Horace when he tells us that it is not reasonable to rescue from the well the writers who would have the good sense to jump in, feigning either inspiration or insanity. It is simply not civil to save writers from a premature death.

12. Personally, due to my incorrigible Catholic background, I would suggest to the aspiring young to have a well  in the vicinity, try their luck at copyediting, or as translators of a text by a reputedly superior writer  from another era and place (even if in this case, most probably, they would end up dragging him or her into the mediocrity that they live in), or even, as last resort –but really only as last resort--, to suck up to someone who will give them some freelance writing jobs on the culture page of a newspaper  or with a mainstream publisher.

13. Whichever one of those modest activities—however not base, for only to suck up to someone is ignoble, although not as much as to write dirty (cf Bernardo Soares on the horror of the flaws in a badly written page)—beyond so many other truly mediocre activities we can imagine, are worth much more than to write, whether in public or in personal terms. At least, these are activities that will surely be less irritating to others who’ll be obligated (by a sense of politeness or a Christian feeling) to read so much written irrelevance.  But to stop writing, above all, will (would) be a great relief to the aspiring writer himself, who would be rid of the burden of feigning a talent he or she lacks and of having to constantly be exposed to the criticism of some evil detractor.

14. In sum, it’s useless to try masking the facts—writing is, in general, simply to let oneself be carried away by the tide of under-literate commonplaces. It means to announce more quickly one’s own inexistence, one’s unavoidable death as an author. Publish and Perish, as Marjorie Perloff aptly put it.

15. Paradoxically, a way to postpone the simple understanding of the absolute non-necessity of writing is to humbly pretend that writing is precisely just one more activity among others, and that the writer, a simple soul, is simply a common individual, regardless of how coquettish he or she may appear in gestures or mannerisms.

16. I call that specifically “pretentiousness” and not, for instance, “desire” because there is not a simple subject who would affirm that writing is simply any old thing, and who knows how to draw the obvious conclusion from that statement: that it is a silly activity, indifferent and lacking in personal or public worth, as is the case with other common activities.

17. If it was not pure arriviste pretentiousness, the writer aspiring to being a common person would have to conclude that the insertion of literature on the level of average life becomes a simple routine, an automatic behavior whose presupposition (necessary, therefore) is simply an adhesion to commonplaces. As such, it is constituted simply as a form of alienation of personal will in favor of, let’s say, a way to make a living, which, to be sure, has nothing to do with a project of artistic creation, of personal self-fashioning, or of personal or public intervention through the literature produced.

18. The result, thus, of the pretence of writing as an ordinary activity is that writing does not only not create authors, that is, creators, but rather, the contrary, it quickly subjects them to the rough and machine-like practice of reproducing the world in the shitty condition it is in.

19.The infelicitous consequence of such craft-writerly  mechanicism is a sea of writings. In such circumstances, what a sad role writers play! In order to make their image simply bad instead of odious, we would have to see them as a heap of corpses washed upon the seashore, for, as the sixteenth century writer Bernardim Ribeiro noted, the sea does not suffer dead things.

20. On those inglorious shores end up, mostly, young, promising writers, future talents. In no way should we be moved, for the same reason that Virgil chided Dante while they witnessed the suffering of the reprobate: it is simply fair. Furthermore, it does not make a difference to us: youth, novelty, and future are simply the friendly faces of the same mistake that confuses the qualifications or excellence of the status of author with the banality of what is actually written.

21. Precisely because writing is not essential can it be everything except one activity among many others. To write is an act which, to begin with, already demands an explanation: it has to reinvent its own relevance, each time anew, or otherwise be condemned to being a distorted idea of novelty: the return of the same, except made worse.

22. Each writer who is content with the condition of exercising an ordinary activity dissolves his or her life in a line that inevitably enunciates the same: what is written is simply a vile form of death.

23. That is what can be said about the authors of mediocre literature: it is the only trade that does not admit a virtuous mediocrity. Horace reappears. In other words, when it comes to literature, either one is radically good or radically inadequate.

24. When speaking of criticism, one could say the same. Far from jumping with the force and stupid candor of youth into a sea of quantity that devours it and against which one is helpless (except for not believing in a base way that banality is the ultimate fate of writing), criticism ended up dying in bed, in its sleep, and its body was gradually substituted by the simulacra that Foucault once called the pretty boys of culture.

25. The specialty of the pretty boys, in the perfect inversion that characterized the activity of the invaders of bodies, was not, evidently, criticism but rather its contrary: writing social columns.

26. Crisis here is the absolute lack of crisis. The abandonment of the crisis is the basic stuff body snatchers are made of while criticism lies asleep. They are always good people, friendly, almost always, variants of councilors or deputies without a mandate, whose professional skills are measured by the coefficient of agility that allows them to bargain for readers’ votes in the trafficking of the institutional agents of literature, that is, powerful university groups, publishing lobbies, culture supplements of major newspapers and media, literary reviews with a readership and a certain prestige, etc. The coefficient of bargaining feeds on the capacity of establishing a circle of complicity, self-protection and mutual affirmation among all participants in the said system of trafficking.

27. It is obvious that all this presupposes the adhesion, even unconsciously, to commonplaces and well-known theoretical paradigms which have now become the political imperatives and institutions of the day, which are, by definition, conservative –which brings us once more to the author as a practitioner of an ordinary activity. In that respect, what distinguishes the phony from the real critic is the ability to remain completely blind vis-à-vis everything that could reveal the profound disinterest, the immense boredom with contemporary literary practices.

28. Pretty boys are there, in the middle of the thick fog of the futureless present, frantically painting with light the shadows of dream and banality they are made of. With their colorful beacon they assure passer-bys that everything is OK, that that sea is not an abyss, that the well is not bottomless, that new great authors are appearing naturally, that new masterpieces are still being generated, and even that the literature of “our country” is fruitful and vigorous.

29. When one reaches that marvelous revelation, the system of trafficking in banalities is complete. The “whatever” writer finds his crisis-less critic. They admire each other, respect each other, love each other.

30. If the pretty boys were more than body invaders, which they deprived of all criticism, all they should or could do would be to illuminate the darkness of their own blindness, the fog of sleep, that implacable siege of the fog of boredom, ignorance, arrivisme, and inconsequence that we are subjected to when we write.

31. To write as an average activity is the zero degree of necessity and usefulness.

32. In this scenario of banal horror, but which interestingly is represented as the euphoria of creation, very few people don’t fit in. This happens because almost everybody finds, with good reason, that they can be part of the list of “great authors,” ultimately identified with the mediocrity of any activity. Of course, in those circumstances, a much harder and more desirable thing is to obtain a good job.

33. The few and far between who don’t believe in writing, that is, who don’t understand writing as a necessary and mediocre activity also understand that to practice it is only to confirm it as dying or already dead, but not to lay it to rest once and for all. To write, frequently, is simply a corpse that parades itself, a dead body that procreates and multiplies, just as humans do; which it does one hundred-fold, like God’s semen, but whose fruits simply cause sterility and emptiness to proliferate.

34. If writing is a vulgar and useless practice,  better the uselessness of not-doing (contrary to what Cabral thought, who was, on the other hand, right to do it himself).

35. For writing no motive suffices. We don’t need entertainment. We need even less fiction, aesthetics, to pretend that we are not saturated with fiction in the common field of mediocre activity. We don’t need any more activity in the Ferris wheel of life.

36. The condition of writing is crisis. Literature that is worth writing answers to the destruction of what is written or simply does not respond to anything at all.

37. The sea does not suffer dead things…

Translation: Odile Cisneros