I'm nearing the end of Kafka on the Shore and I'm trying to gather my thoughts about it. Its one of those books which is almost overflowing - so much in it that you can't or don't or won't take it all in the first time you read it.
Taking a moment between chapters in Kafka on the Shore, I flicked through the Folio Society edition of Anton Chekhov's letters (Chekhov: A Life in Letters, trans., and ed., Gordon McVay, London: The Folio Society, 1994) and came across this letter from early 1887 pp 36-37:
I don't know who is right: Homer, Shakespeare, Lope de Vega, the ancients as a whole, who were not afraid to rummage in the 'dung-heap' but who remained morally much more stable than we are, or modern writers who are prim on paper but cold and cynical in their spiritual and personal life? ... Journalists, lawyers and doctors, who are initiated into all the mysteries of human sin, are not renowned for their immorality; and realist writers are in most cases more moral that archimandrites...
Literature is accepted as an art form because it portrays life as it really is. Its aim is absolute and honest truth...
To a chemist nothing in the world is impure. A writer must be just as objective as a chemist - he must reject everyday subjectivity and realise that dung-heaps play a very honorable role in a landscape , while evil passions are just as much a feature of life as are good ones ...
No police force is competent to judge literature ... However hard you try, you won't come up with a better police force for literature than literary criticism and the author's own conscience ...
The final part seemed to be particularly prevalent at the moment with Orhan Pamuk being released and PEN lodging a complaint against Yahoo following imprisonment of the Chinese poet Shi Tao. Yahoo handed over private emails from Shi Tao's email account to the Chinese government and now he's serving a 10 year prison sentence. There are a few articles in yesterday's Guardian giving more details.
But I'm not sure that I agree with Chekhov that literary criticism is the best 'police force' for literature. Surely after 'the author's own conscience...' the best judge of literature is its readership? ...
And talking about readership, I notice Professor Lisa Jardine has been researching the effects of literature upon the nation's readership again. Last time it was the Women's Watershed Fiction, this time around its the same thing for men with the Men's Milestone Fiction. Naturally everyone is going to be getting all hot and bothered about the fact that there is only one woman writer amongst the men's top 20 most life changing/life saving/influential/inspirational etc books. However I think the titles of the two research projects are much more interesting - men get a milestone and women have a watershed: milestone sounds a bit tiring. What do you think?
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