4 - Cultural Impact and the Power of Myth in Popular Public Constructions of Authorship

Summary

WRITING IN 1994 ABOUT THE EFFECT OF media profiling on authors’ social visibility, Günter Grass explained how authors can find themselves, as discrete individuals, disseminated and discussed against their best literary interests. He referred to the reception of Thomas Mann’s work, which continues to be biographically led, and explained how the author’s private diaries were finally invoked as the last word in these public debates:

Am Ende war Thomas Mann ertappt, in seinem Wesenskern gedeutet und auf den Punkt gebracht. Frech konnte eine sekundäre Findung zur Erkenntnis aufgeblasen und als Sichtblende vor das Werk des Urhebers gestellt werden … Endlich haben wir ihn im Griff … Jetzt ist er unser. Wir kennen ihn durch und durch. Wir müssen ihn nicht mehr lesen.

[In the end Thomas Mann was found out, the core of his being interpreted and summed up in a nutshell. Cheekily, a secondary invention was able to pose as true knowledge and this was drawn down like a blind over the originator’s work … We’ve finally got a hold on him … Now he’s ours. We know him through and through. We don’t have to read him anymore.]

Grass’s description of how an author is presented to the mass public in such a manner as to dispense with any need for further engagement with his or her literary work is couched in a speech that programmatically speaks out against the literary critical establishment and the German feuilleton, and bears the rather prickly title, “Über das Sekundäre aus primärer Sicht” (On the Secondary from a Primary Perspective, 1994). It came at a time in his career when Grass was feeling particularly misunderstood in both literature and politics. Indeed, it fits in with a growing sense of discomfort that persists to this day between German authors and the reviewing industry at large, and the uneasy meditations it contains about how a literary author enters into broader contemporary cultural discourse and is assigned a lasting place within it resonate far beyond either Grass’s or Mann’s personal circumstances.

It is worth focusing for a moment on this bigger picture, for in examining the ways in which authors have been ascribed wider cultural significance, it is important to distinguish between the fate of the author as a biographical individual and the fate of his or her individual literary works.