Literature encompasses the entire gamut of human emotions; However, negative feelings such as alienation, isolation, boredom or depression have long been privileged. Of course, one cannot speak, without falling into reductionism, of a sharp division between sad and happy, depressive or optimistic literature. In any case, it is undeniable that there is a bias in modern taste and prestige towards the dark and stormy, since it is assumed that these types of emotions are more in line with the discomfort of contemporary culture. In fact, the official effigy of the modern writer is engraved with the anguished face and the misanthropic gesture, since existential discontent is conceived as a warning against social manipulations around happiness and personal fulfillment.
Today’s publishing market favors self-referential genres that tend to magnify their own tribulations and agonies, and that use pessimism and victimhood as a means of capturing the attention and sometimes compassion of the public. Thus, the aspiring writer faces a panorama that makes him think that the only thing that will give value to his writing is his degree of rawness and personal despair.
However, there are also cheerful books. Books of this kind do not evade tension, conflict or suffering, but neither do they remain immersed in it, and the joy or the epiphany often arises after an intimate knowledge of the sorrow and torment. Comedy, the laughing novel, ecstatic poetry, for example, reproduce the diversity of human sentiment and, at the same time, leave a vivid sense of well-being.
There is a large genealogy of authors who support certain forms of optimism, celebration of life and connection with the world and nature. The vitalistic and smiling poetry of Safo a Wislawa Szymborska passing by Walt Whitman Y Marin Sorescu. The clairvoyant humor that comes from Aristophanes Y Luciano until Evelyn Waugh O Jorge Ibargüengoitia passing through Rabelais, Cervantes and Sterne. The curative essay spanning from Montaigne to Bertrand Russell passing by Emile chartier (Alain).
The aspiration to happiness is not anti-literary, nor is it reduced to the kitschiness of the amateur or the trickery of the makeup artist of best sellers. In fact, writing about happiness requires a series of literary devices that are far more diverse and complex than those of the easy tear. For the rest, literary experiences of communion, gratitude, and joy constitute emotional reserves for dealing with everyday troubles. Of course, this consideration about the massification of the squeaky does not concern the great and authentic pessimists who found the modern imagination, nor does it want to prescribe a merely edifying literature: the literary clinic accepts different remedies and some tonics can be bitter, others can be sweet and, the most common and restorative, are bittersweet.
AQ
– .
