…it’s also true that a writer’s homeland is not his tongue, or not only his tongue, but also the people he loves. And sometimes a writer’s homeland is not the people he loves but his memory. And other times a writer’s only homeland is his loyalty, and his courage. In truth, a writer’s homelands can be many, and sometimes the identity of that homeland depends a great deal on whatever he is writing at the moment. The homelands can be many, it occurs to me now, but the passport can only be one, and that passport is evidently the quality of his writing. Which does not mean writing well, because anyone can do that, but writing marvelously well, and not even that, because anyone can write marvelously well, too. What, then, is writing of quality? Well, what it has always been: knowing to stick one’s head into the dark, knowing to jump into the void, knowing that literature is basically a dangerous occupation. To run along the edge of the precipice: on one side the bottomless abyss and on the other the faces one loves, the smiling faces one loves, and books, and friends, and food. And to accept that fact, though sometimes it may weigh on us more than the flagstone that covers the remains of every dead writer. Literature, as an Andalusian folk song might say, is dangerous.
Roberto Bolaño,
The Caracas Speech
Literature as a Dangerous Occupation
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The writing with the most quality is the one where the writer has invested the most emotion. You know the saying that the novelist’s first books are always the most autobiographical? Those are always the most interesting, because the author is really speaking from themselves.
Great post.
-GD
My writing blog: http://shelleddreams.wordpress.com/
Thanks for reminding me of this passage. I’m reading the Fili and there’s something similar in Simoun’s diatribe against Basilio about language and homeland