ritual embeddings, festive rants

Life as it is? It is always shoulded, is it not?

In the Assistens Kirkegård, a cemetery in Copenhagen, a monument to the Russian writer has been raised (Dostojevskij Monument Unveiled in Copenhagen) and they have a facebook page. Hence the repost by an FB friend of something who shared their post from a year ago, in which Dostoevsky describes a quote from Don Quixote, itself a metafictonal work, and then the quote.

Now I do not have a lot of time for the racist writer of candle-burners (only posh peeps could afford them to read into the long winter nights), going on and on about some internal state of some tedious chap who has chosen to do the wrong thing for no apparent reason (I have met people who say this stuff is of comedic value, but I can’t see it, but then I am not a posh Russian aristocrat punching down on these lower upper middle upper lower types). On and on it goes. Apparently its part of the turn to psychology in literature, if so I can see that this is where fiction/story-telling/literature began to turn into the dreck that the good stuff should show some sort of pilgrim progress where there is some psychological growth. Save me.

The key word there, and here, is should.

What should literature do? It should save us from those who cannot be saved. Anything else is a fantasy, all modern literature which uses this plot device of psychological change is pure fantasy which does not know its name.

And they they lived happily ever after, that what we should…. —why can’t we name this urge?

Life as it is? It is always shoulded, is it not?