Exercício 6: Dois artigos interessantes

 Ana Filipa Leite

Li recentemente este artigo do The New York Times, Our Autofiction Fixation, em que a escritora Jessica Winter expõe o modo como supomos que muita da ficção contemporânea que lemos é baseada nas experiências pessoais dos seus autores.

É engraçado pensarmos que ao lermos desenvolvemos opiniões não apenas sobre as obras, mas também sobre quem as cria: “Some early readers of “Lolita” suspected that only someone with the mentality of a child predator could have conjured the depraved Humbert Humbert.” E as editoras, com maior ou menor sucesso (e honestidade), utilizam a dimensão autobiográfica dos romances contemporâneos nas suas estratégias de marketing.

O que para mim é mais interessante neste artigo é o modo como Winter explica que a nossa obsessão com a autoficção coloca os autores numa situação delicada:

If she is forced to confirm that her material is autobiographical, then she risks forfeiting both the privacy and the power of transfiguration that fiction promises. If she denies it, then she surrenders a badge of authenticity that she may never have wished to claim in the first place, and lays herself open to accusations that she is appropriating the pain of others.

Outro artigo fantástico é Editors: The Writer’s Natural Enemy, de George R. R. Martin, uma descrição hilariante da relação entre autor e editor. Aqui está o meu excerto preferido:

Left to their own devices, writers talk about only three things; the three most important things in the world.

They talk about money, they talk about sex, and they talk about editors.

Money and sex are things that most writers want and never get enough of. Editors are things that most writers don’t want and get all too much of. I’ve often heard writers ask other writers why there have to be editors in the world.

As it happens, I know the answer. If there were no editors in the world, writers would be very happy. They would frolic and play, and publish every word they wrote and they would have lots of money and lots of sex, since they would-be very famous and very charming having never experienced rejection. Their egos would fill up the world, their books would be everywhere, and they would mate furiously and produce lots of little writers, who would no doubt write lots of little books.