Allow me to share an extract from Milan Kundera’s novel The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, published in 1979. The extract follows a short autobiographical description of an encounter with a taxi driver in the process of writing his autobiography.
My talk with the taxi driver gave me sudden insight into the nature of a writer’s concerns. The reason we write books is that our kids don’t give a damn. We turn to an anonymous world because our wife stops up her ears when we talk to her.
You may ask whether the taxi driver was merely a graphomaniac. Let us define our terms. A woman who writes her lover four letters a day is not a graphomaniac, she is simply a woman in love. But my friend who xeroxes his love letters so he can publish them someday – my friend is a graphomaniac. Graphomania is not a desire to write letters, diaries or family chronicles (to write for oneself or one’s immediate family); it is a desire to write books (to have a public of unknown readers). In this sense the taxi driver and Goethe share the same passion. What distinguishes Goethe from the taxi driver is the result of the passion, not the passion itself.
Graphomania (an obsession with writing books) takes on the proportions of a mass epidemic whenever a society develops to the point where it can provide three basic conditions:
- A high enough degree of general well-being to enable people to devote their energies to useless activities;
- An advanced state of social atomization and the resultant general feeling of the isolation of the individual;
- A radical absence of significant social change in the internal development of the nation (In this connection I find it symptomatic that in France, a country where nothing really happens, the percentage of writers is twenty-one times higher than in Israel. […])
But the effect transmits a kind of flashback to the cause. If general isolation causes graphomania, mass graphomania itself reinforces and aggravates the feeling of general isolation. The invention of printing originally promoted mutual understanding. In the era of graphomania the writing of books has the opposite effect: everyone surrounds himself with his own writings as with a wall of mirrors cutting off all voices from without.
And a couple of chapters later:
Two shoemakers can live together in perfect harmony (provided their shops are not on the same block.) But once they start writing books on the lot of the shoemaker, they will begin to get in each other’s way; they will start to wonder, Is one shoemaker alive when others are alive? […]
A person who writes books is either all (a single universe for himself and everyone else) or nothing. And since all will never be given to anyone, every one of us who writes books is nothing. Ignored, jealous, deeply wounded, we wish the death of our fellow man. In that respect we are all alike.
The proliferation of mass graphomania among politicians, cab drivers, women on the delivery table, mistresses, murderers, criminals, prostitutes, police chiefs, doctors, and patients proves to me that every individual without exception bears a potential writer within himself and that all mankind has every right to rush out into the streets with a cry of “We are all writers!”
The reason is that everyone has trouble accepting the fact he will disappear unheard of and unnoticed in an indifferent universe, and everyone wants to make himself into a universe of words before it’s too late.
Once the writer in every individual comes to life (and that time is not far off), we are in for an age of universal deafness and lack of understanding.