101. El repte d'escriure avui / The Challenge of Writing Today

As a response to the essay “The Prevention of Literature” which Orwell wrote in the year 1946, the author, who has first-hand knowledge of the societies governed by Putin and Trump, says that Orwell is right: totalitarianisms are lethal for literature. They drown society in lies and drive it towards schizophrenia; they destroy the concept of truth and its possibility because their doctrines, although indisputable, are unstable, incapable of providing a space for the imagination, of being able to think up new words and concepts that prevent us from being struck dumb with regard to the future. It is necessary to demand the conditions that enable people to think up what doesn’t exist.

“And yet I think this is the job of writers right now. To describe what we do not yet see, or what we see but cannot yet describe, which is a condition almost indistinguishable from not seeing.”

 

 

Authors: Masha Gessen

Related to Orwell Day