Forgotten Treasures: A Symposium

It would be easy enough, and relatively accurate, to say that literature itself is the “most neglected” art form in our overwhelmingly visual culture, though almost everything we see starts from writing of some kind and the visual media are word-dependent in ways that are more or less invisible to the cultural consumer. To talk only of the literary canon and what the elite that cares about it tends to ignore or give short weight to, at least 30 books readily come to mind.

The two I think of first are Stefan Zweig’s “Beware of Pity” and Witold Gombrowicz’s “Ferdydurke.” They could hardly be more dissimilar in sensibility, yet both are about the radical changes in consciousness wrought by World War I and the attendant collapse of the Old World Order. Zweig’s novel mainly describes the world that disappeared during this century’s first apocalypse. Gombrowicz’s addresses the queasy and doomed “modernity” that followed it. Both are important to me as narratives that demonstrate that all great stories have a posthumous quality and that as a writer, one is always a dead person whispering into the ear of the present.