I Do Not Suffer When Writing
Recently, El Nacional published an interview with the Venezuelan writer born in Valera, Antonieta Madrid.
When speaking of her voice the interviewer says, “It is an outrage of tenderness.” I think her voice, and more importantly her words, are more outrageous than tender. One of the questions she is asked is why she writes. She responds, “We shouldn’t waste time asking and answering that question.” It appears her activity is so opaque to her she does not know why she does it? This question is asked to observe people’s motivations for choosing their career, or job, etc…
Another of the questions she is asked is, which of our country’s problems distresses you most? Antonieta, with her delicate and tender outrage, answers: “I prefer not to talk about the country. I love it very much. It’s an intimate matter, so personal.” This does not seem to me to be the sincere attitude of a person who loves their country. If she loves it so much, why not talk about it? It’s like saying she loves her mother very much but prefers not to talk about her…
Antonieta Madrid says that nothing is achieved with bitterness. She is right. In any case, it is a way of making life more dramatic when life is already dramatic enough…
All of that besides, I would like to make some comments about her statement — “I do not suffer when writing.” In reading her statement I wondered, who suffers when writing? What would suffering when writing be like? I think you cannot suffer when writing because it is an art that allows and includes unburdening oneself, above all. To put it better will give you an example — Goethe. He was a quiet, brilliant man who tried as far as possible to not complicate his life. He was a man who, when he fell in love and things started to go a little wrong, would go on a trip to refresh his mind. When his time or period of suffering arrived he did not keep the thorn inside, but extracted it from his heart and turned it into a book, “Werther”.
Giovani Papini, when he refers to Freud in his book, GOG, says that Freud based his method on his hero Goethe. I copy verbatim what Papini writes, “The first impulse for discovering my method stems from my beloved Goethe. You know that he wrote Werther to get rid of the morbid incubation of pain: literature was catharsis for him. And what my method consists of to cure hysteria is merely to have the patient tell “all” in order to free himself from obsession; I did nothing more than force my patients to proceed as Goethe did.”
And like Goethe there have been many.
Indeed literature is, for many writers, a form of unburdening themselves. Beyond this, it is a way to seek explanations for their personality, or a way to express what they think about things — life, death, women. And when we start to analyze we realize that only those who express their way of seeing life with honesty and without fear become great. Sometimes they are not satisfied with expressing and prefer to denounce the absurdity of society, or perhaps accuse or even insult.
True writers are faithful to their ideas and their points of view, however radical they may appear, to their likes, their dislikes, and to everything their person signifies.
