That Damned Objective Reality Again

In his prose collection, Two Cities: On Exile, History, and the Imagination, poet Adam Zagajewski includes, among the more conventional essays and memoirs, a number of brief, unclassifiable pieces that blur boundaries between fiction and non-fiction, criticism and fable, essay and story. Here’s a example titled "The Two Defects of Literature":

"1. When the writer is preoccupied with only himself, his own weakness, his own life, and forgets about the objective world, the search for truth.

"2. When the writer is preoccupied with only the truth of the world, objective reality, justice, and judging people, epochs, and customs, and forgets about himself, his own weaknesses, his own life."

Neatly, wittily, Zagajewski skewers, first, the solipsists of the world, and then the propagandists. He may be overlooking a third, hybridized group – the solipsistic propagandists? – who seem so loud and ill-mannered. For them, "objective reality," especially its unhappiest face, is a reflection of some inner state, real or imagined. Thus, we have the cult of angry victims and their advocates, for whom literary art, a realm with discrete if not always well defined standards and assumptions, must seem worse than irrelevant – a particularly nettlesome reproach, perhaps.

I thought about this after I received a riot of e-mails and comments on a subject I viewed as literary and surely above mere politics, but which was contorted instantly into politics by some readers. I’m not unusually naïve, but such sputtering vehemence – sentence fragments, faulty grammar, ad hominem rants – took me by surprise and seemed to imply deep, delicious wells of self-righteous anger, more addictive than heroin.

In another brief essay, "The Untold Cynicism of Poetry," Zagajewski writes satirically of poets and their presumptuous "inner worlds," but he might speaking of those petulant, impotently anonymous readers:

"It pretends that it is interested, oh yes, very interested, in external reality. A great state is in decline? The inner world is ecstatic: it has a subject! Death appears on the horizon? The inner world – it thinks itself immortal – quivers with excitement. War ? Terrific. Suffering? Excellent. Trees? Overblown roses? Even better. Reality? Bravo. Reality is simply indispensable; if it did not exist, one would have to invent it.’