Mass Graphomania

As I thought about what it means to be an author, I remembered a discussion of the idea of graphomania from the novel The Book of Laughter and Forgetting by Milan Kundera. A character in the story listens to his cab driver talk about his life, and he thinks, "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" (91).

According to Kundera, graphomania (an obsession with writing books) is bound to only grow worse in the type of society we've established. In class we talked about how the notion of "author" didn't come into being until the invention of the printing press, and the word has taken on a plethora of meanings ever since. Kundera writes, "The invention of the printing press originally promoted mutual understanding. In the era of graphomania, the writing of books had the opposite effect: everyone surrounds himself with his own writings as with a wall of mirrors cutting off all voices from without" (92).

I thought about Kundera's remarks in regards to what we read from Emerson's "The Poet," because Emerson writes so much about the value of a poet's expression. Since Emerson's ideas about the poet were so distinct and basically exclusive, he most likely wouldn't consider a man who writes because his kids don't care about him and his wife won't listen to him a poet. But is there value in other people's stories even if they fail to tap into an eternal truth? This is the passage in Kundera's novel that intrigues me the most:

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 “We are all writers!”

The reason is that everyone has trouble accepting the fact that he will disappear unheard of 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. (106).

Although he's addressing something pretty different than Emerson, I think Kundera provides good insight into the way that it has become so easy for anyone to be an "author" with the developments of the printing press and now the internet. His idea of mass graphomania results from the fact that people are so anxious to become poets or authors that they stop reading and listening. While writing offers potential for self-exploration and searching for truths of humanity, it seems there's a need for a balance with listening to other people's ideas and stories.

I'm interested in reading more about Emerson's ideas about reading. It sounds like Emerson doesn't think too highly of reading unless it inspires readers to become their own poets. But if everyone does set out on a quest to become Emerson's inspired poet, will we enter into an "age of universal deafness" toward each other? Does this idea relate at all to Emerson?

Here's an interesting article about how Kundera's graphomania appears in our society.

Kundera, Milan. The Book of Laughter and Forgetting. New York: HarperPerennial, 1994.