The Artist is Dead, Long Live the Artist

It’s not going to be a particularly long post today. I’m having one of those days that only come around once every couple of weeks or so where I decide to write loads and be incredibly productive, thus counterbalancing all the laziness that’s sure to follow. Today I’ve started redrafting my novel whilst dipping in and out of research for a paper I’m working on about the Booker Prize. Anyway, working on my own writing has got me thinking about all of the dead authors in the world whos unpublished manuscripts keep on getting dug up and fought over.

Kafka has been the most recent one, to my knowledge – http://bit.ly/93X4lg – his box of unpublished manuscripts have been opened and it seems they will be revealed. Which will surely leave old Franz spinning in his grave seeing as when he was alive he’d wanted them burned.

The Guardian has since re-opened the case of the lost Shelly poem – http://bit.ly/azesmn – but only tells us that no real progress has been made on a debate that has been rolling along for some four years. (A little side note, I think The Guardian’s Michael Rosen had lost his thesaurus before writing this article: ‘We can easily envisage an owner owning a manuscript while we collectively own and know the piece of literature it contains.’)

In the case of the Shelly poem, I’m pretty pissed off that the world hasn’t been allowed to read it. I’m not a huge fan of Shelly and am therefore not that desperate to read it. But that’s besides the point. I will always argue that literature is for the people. Why else would we have libraries, for example? I can’t think of many other mediums of entertainment that are, essentially, widely available for free. A few years ago Nick Hornby released a teen-novel, Slam, and copies of it were spread around Southampton on buses, trains etc in the hope that people would give it a read and just pass it on. Another great example of how the written word, in all of its shapes and sizes, is not an exclusively high-browed thing that should be locked up in professor’s libraries to be studied, analysed and never allowed to be read by the people who actually matter, the people who actually decide whether a poem is good or bad. That’s right, you and I, the people.

Anyway, that’s my rant over and done with for today. As for Kafka, I’m looking forward to reading his unpublished works if I get the opportunity but I can’t help but feel sorry for him. I guess he probably should have done a better job of keeping them hidden if he was so bothered about it. Maybe he should have bloody burned them himself. The lazy git.

CM

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