graphomania - the old blogomania?

As part of my preparation for my trip later this year I'm trying to read a few fiction books about the places I'm visiting. I've just finished The Book of Laughter and Forgetting by Milan Kundera, in advance of perusing Prague, and I stumbled across the below in Part Four: Lost Letters (Chapter 9, for the listeners at home):

I asked him what he wrote.

His life story. The story of a man who swam three days at sea, held his own against death, lost the ability to sleep, but preserved the strength to live.

"Is it for your children? A family chronicle?"

"My kids don't give a damn." He laughed bitterly. "No, I'm making a book out of it. I think it could do a lot of people a lot of good."

My talk with the taxi driver gave me sudden insight into the nature of a writer's concerns. The reason we write books is that our kids don't give a damn. We turn to an anonymous world because our wife stops up her ears when we talk to her.

You may ask whether the taxi driver was merely a graphomaniac. Let us define our terms. A woman who writes her lover four letters a day is not a graphomaniac, she is simply a woman in love. But my friend who xeroxes his love letters so he can publish them someday - my friend is a graphomaniac. Graphomania is not a desire to write letters, diaries, or family chronicles (to write for oneself or one's immediate family); it is a desire to write books (to have a public of unknown readers).

...

Graphomania (an obsession with writing books) takes on the proportions of a mass epidemic whenever a society develops to the point where it can provide three basic conditions:
1. a high enough degree of general well-being to enable people to devote their energies to useless activities;
2. an advanced state of social atomization and the resultant general feeling of the isolation of the individual;
3. a radical absence of significant social change in the internal development of the nation...

But the effect transmits a kind of flashback to the cause. If general isolation causes graphomania, mass graphomania itself reinforces and aggravates the feeling of general isolation. The invention of printing originally promoted understanding. In the era of graphomania the writing of books has the opposite effect: everyone surrounds himself with his own writings as with a wall of mirrors cutting off all voices from without.

(my emphasis)

Kundera wrote this is 1979 - replace the word "book" with "blog" and I think my point is made. It reminds me of our habit, in the NZ political blogosphere, of so often talking past each other, so rarely actually having a conversation that isn't primarily about point-scoring.* If I ever stop blogging, that will be why.

(I actually wrote all the above [well typed, in the case of Kundera's words] a couple of weeks ago, but it seems even more apt in the wake of the Mohammed cartoons.)

Tags:
- Milan Kundera
- Blogging


* Thank you though to the many commenters here who don't descend to that level, and also to Idiot/Savant of No Right Turn who I believe maintains a high standard that I certainly aspire to, even though I doubt I will ever reach it.