It's a liberating idea; by this I mean, Eugenides seeks to liberate young writers from the burden of writing under the "usual constraints--of fashion, commerce, self-censorship, public, and perhaps especially, intellectual opinion."
All of the above-mentioned constraints, says Eugenides, "represent a deformation of the self":
To follow literary fashion, to write for money, to censor your true feelings and thoughts or adopt ideas because they’re popular requires a writer to suppress the very promptings that got him or her writing in the first place.
Eugenides's models his figure of the posthumous writer on Franz Kafka, who is famous for his refusal to write with an eye to publicity and fame or popularity:
When Kafka was diagnosed with tuberculosis, in Berlin, he reacted at first with a serenity amounting almost to relief. As his health deteriorated, he became more fearful: “What I have playacted is really going to happen,” he wrote in a letter to a friend. “I have not bought myself off by my writing. I died my whole life and now I will really die.”
To be Kafkaesque is
To die your whole life. Despite the morbidity, I can’t think of a better definition of the writing life. There’s something about writing that demands a leave-taking, an abandonment of the world, paradoxically, in order to see it clearly. This retreat has to be accomplished without severing the vital connection to the world, and to people, that feeds the imagination. It’s a difficult balance. And here is where these ruminations about writing touch on morality. The same constraints to writing well are also constraints to living fully. Not to be a slave to fashion or commerce, not to succumb to arid self-censorship, not to bow to popular opinion—what is all that but a description of the educated, enlightened life?
Eugenides is one of the few contemporary American writers who cares little for publicity and has an absolutely zero social media presence.
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