With the modern diseases (once TB, now cancer) the romantic idea that the disease expresses the character is invariably extended to assert that the character causes the disease -- because it has not expressed itself. Passion moves inward, striking and blighting the deepest cellular recesses. |
[Perhaps this is a good thing. And potentially dangerous for a novelist. The dangers are obvious. A deadening earnestness and political self-awareness that do not meet the delight component that is a story's bottom line. Too much ideological hand-wringing. We've all sat through readings by authors whose politics we admire but whose prose cannot hold us. We are reminded of the definition of] camp ... a seriousness that fails. |