link for the above image: https://lithub.com/when-im-writing-fiction-i-cannot-read-it/

The purpose of literature is the purification of the passions, indulgence, perfection or idealization, and empowerment of the soul. Literature is proof that life is not enough. Nevertheless, the dehumanization of today’s literature is a well-known and characteristic phenomenon.

The technocracy, the scientific achievements, and the philosophy of our time are accused painfully and monotonously, with the result that man has ceased to be “the measure of all money.” In Protagoras’ phrase, “of all money in measure,” money does not mean monetary values in general, but in general, qualities, beliefs, principles, and internal constitution. In other words, the ability of each man separately to perceive in a way that is familiar to all people. Thus, we observe that the human person, with its inviolable uniqueness if one believes the latest philosophical slogans, is doomed to an end very near.

After the visual arts, literature seemed destined to be man’s last refuge and defense – this might have been true about two decades ago when the orientation of education was more philological and humanistic. However, when the need to make a complete shift and orientate the field towards the positive sciences to adapt to the positive facts of our times was proclaimed internationally, these hopes for the emergence of literature as a refuge or defense of man were reduced to a minimum. From now on, the man of the future will look elsewhere for his mental outlets. And we are already tasting the first signs.

It is the dehumanization of specific literature and the inflation of the modern market. More people are producing today than they are consuming. The literary product remains unclaimed, compressed, moldy, and pulped. No age has had fewer great writers and more written chatter. The phenomenon of a man who loses interest in his subject, which moves him aside from the center of the painting to put an empty glass or a can in his place, is not at all paradoxical.

It is a fact that a monk sets himself aside, not someone else sets him aside. Of course, this does not mean that tomorrow man will not seek his future again. Such crises sometimes look like catharsis.

Nietzsche said, “a real writer is he who is ashamed to be a man of letters.” Today the writer has become, without realizing it, a court writer, as in some other, fortunately numerous, phases of history, with the only difference being that the new court is not gathered around a ruler. They are around some faceless idols, class symbols, and idlers. From that moment on, literature suffered internal elephantiasis. The natural result was what we live in now. That is the displacement of man from the search center. Today writers have become runners of fame. Of course, each has to rely on an internal need for legitimacy. But it isn’t easy to separate the need for expression from the need for existence. And this is where the other genuine drama begins in an age of overcrowding, an age as massified as the one we live in. How to exist, take a tiny place, raise our heads above the surface, to be justified when we all live in an era with cloudy judgment and a clouded mind? It is a drama of stunned, furious, and without inner density and humanity.