WRITING THE FICTION OF TOMORROW

by
Kaj Bernh. Genell

Copyright © Kaj B. Genell 2022


C O N T E N T


CONTENT

FOREWORD
PART ONE: On MODERN WESTERN CULTURE.p.7.

PART TWO: ABOUT
AUTHORS AND WRITING p.68



FOREWORD

"Somewhere far away, one could hear cannon fire."

( Dostojevskij)

What can be said about being an author that is both NEW and substantial? A giant mass of literature deals with books and authors, with authorship in general, and with what makes an author successful. Many people believe that becoming an earnest author results from a deliberate choice. It is not necessarily true. Many authors have become authors by choice, others by bizarre coincidence. Reflection on authors and literature as a genre survives because the problems facing an Author are both changing and timeless. In times of war, catastrophe, and disease, the reasoning about literature is not controversial and is left standing as it is. Then, as times have recovered, discussion about authors and literature can start where someone left off. Almost per definition, Authors are alone. They are also diversely alone, alone in different ways. No humans are so different from each other as Authors if you don´t consider people in mental institutions. The best way to describe the most extraordinary thing about being an author is probably to say that it is a person who has made it a habit to create psychotic episodes for himself, on paper, or in a computer file with the ending .doc. The risk of making friends with an Author is small. Authors do not themselves socialize in meetings with other authors. Often, though, such meetings occur within Authors' organizations. Books about these mass encounters of authors are few. One might fancy that there is a taut atmosphere in those meetings. One might imagine that it is much like any other meeting in an organization where competitors meet. Smiles are tense. Eyes are ogling around. A boxers association meeting is generally much more hearty than a congregation of authors. There might still be a couple of things to add. That is for sure: to be able to write the novel of Tomorrow, you need much more than economic knowledge, technical skills, and imagination. It would help if you also had a broad outlook on what is going on culturally and what has been going on for the last 200 years regarding groundbreaking novel writing. -------------------------------------------------- PART ONE:
ABOUT MODERN
WESTERN CULTURE

I

AGAINST MYTH

"Mythical indicates that which is believed but does not exist."

"We have created our myth. The myth is faith; it is passion. It is not necessary that it shall be a reality. It is a reality by the fact that it is a goad, a hope, a faith, that it is courage. Our myth is the nation; our myth is the greatness of the nation!"

( Mussolini )

A.

LITERARY fiction often succeeds in putting the individual into situations of existence, into positions of Choice, containing great dramatic tension because of the fruitful duplicity created by the fact that fiction describing reality always has a myth serving as a background. By always having a myth as fond to fiction, we might also, as Readers, be able to judge this Myth with what we experience within the hero, from what we know and experience from him. Reversely, we learn with the help of the overall Myth about the hero. The contemporary Myth is, in most cases, a false image painted by the ruling power of the Present Society. It is the false history set from the position of power, which the mighty man, the psychopath, is so able to create, and which the powerful man - i.e., the ruling class, the man IN power - is so able to fling out, most successfully faking the appearance that this Myth originates from the depths of the people, from the soul of the people and the inner depths of the man in connection with the … divine. The Myth has, throughout the ages, been given luster, implying that MYTH was the Truth of Man when in all societies, and Myth has, in reality, only – in all its parts - always just served the elite. Myth has never originated out of any depths. The "depth of the people" is itself a myth. Everything about Myth has been created to fool the servants of the actual ruler. Myth is just as false as the concept of the "people," "the soul of the people," and "the nation." In her book Short History of Myth (2003), Karen Armstrong, in the initial chapter, sets out to explain what a myth is. This chapter is deceitful. KA seems to think that we cannot live without myths and that the truth of the Myth is its "effectiveness." It is true "if it works," if "it gives us hope." This is, of course, all highly suspicious. Works for whom? Hope, at any cost whatsoever? Fiction, HOWEVER, examines – consciously or unconsciously - the current Myth. By far, the most potent means fiction has is Irony. Irony – which in many cases can also be unbeknownst to the writer - is fiction's most robust questioning tool. A society without Irony is in great danger. A community without Irony has no correlator, question, creative Negativity, Self-Consciousness, or archeology of Conscious or Unconscious. Irony is the key to knowledge about the Unconscious and the actual Hallucination and the Hallucination of our Time ( Cf. Boismont, On Hallucinations.) Hallucination is not a myth, but they have similarities. By Irony, Myth is unmasked, but Irony also brings forth more Irony. UNMASKING MYTH is – inevitably – a RISKY occupation. In that it is indeed a redefinition of reality, it is open to debate concerning WHAT IS REAL if we have no myths. Some people – if not all – will try to use this redefining to THEIR ADVANTAGE. If we do not criticize the myths – after we have proved that the Myths are instituted by mischievous rulers and bandits, oppressors, and usurpers, why should we at all discuss politics? If we talk about politics, we still have a world defined by OLD MYTHS. ”Science must begin with myths, and with the criticism of myths.” ( Karl Popper ) Even culture itself has been exploited to such magnitude that it is a fetish in itself. Redefining the world by claiming that the myths about NATIONS, NATIONAL BORDERS, NATIONAL CHARACTERS, and FOLKLORE are mostly propaganda is a prerequisite to a world where democracy can prosper as THE ONLY important means to achieve peace.

"We are choosing Ithaca, the faithful Earth, the bold, crisp thought, the clear-sighted action, generosity of the person that knows./…../ to conquer what we already own – the meager fresh crops on the fields, the short love on this earth" ( Camus, L'Homme Revolté )

DURING ALL AGES, the Conservative right wings always underlined the importance of the Mythical Domain, to enslave people under superficial bonds, to try to make a particular group of people believe that they are BETTER THAN OTHER PEOPLE, when it is beyond any doubt, that WE ARE ALL ALIKE. This is what the Anti-Myth Work is about!

HOW MYTH CAN MAGNIFY some small gang fights of almost no historical importance can be easily exemplified. One such fraud is often dealt with, but UNDER A DIFFERENT STAR, by l professors of Literature all over the Western academic world in the shape of the Homeric Question. Most Professors of Literature who hold these lectures seldom come near the crucial question – to me – about the petty scale of the whole thing and the enormous MYTHOLOGISATION OF THE ACTUAL CUDGEL FIGHT. Few people have realized that what we are dealing with in The Iliad can be compared to today's fight between gangs in the suburbs, involving boys around 14 or 15 years of age (concerning the armory one uses in The Iliad ). The most reliable source, a contemporary one, of what it all was about probably is the historian Herodotus ( d. 425 B.C.) when he informs us on the number of inhabitants of the city of Troy. This city comprised c: a 2000 inhabitants. If one takes away mothers, kids, and grandparents, not to mention all those clever guys who thought it was a BAD IDEA, that leaves us just about a couple dozen gangsters. They easily fit in the café in my neighborhood. The Trojan War was, in reality, not more than a fight of the size when guys in one house in my suburb got mad at the boys in another place because they had been too loud when they celebrated the win of the last football game, or when they had a too large engagement party for a popular girl. Any real weapons the guys with the wooden dinghy did not own. They had taken down a couple of trees to make wooden sticks from. The Pelion´s lance was the most enormous stick they had. I can assure my Reader that there are a few discussions dealing with Pelion lances in the Pentagon! The Pelion´s Lance was a tree that had grown on the mountain of Pelion, and one thought that mowing that down might scare one´s adversaries. The gang that set out to attack the “castle” of Troy bright with them a couple of horses and some rowing boats. You can see in your mind´s eye the little kids running around with turtle shells on their heads. HOMER, THIS STORY´S AUTHOR, was undoubtedly the tiny sight-impaired guy living by the drugstore at his cousin's house in the cellar with his Seeing Eye dog. ( The surviving gang members always claimed Homer was an older man to make people listen more seriously.) When it comes to ALL THE GODS in this remarkable story, they were all the elders, uncles, grandaunts and nieces and all the toothless alcoholics that the gang had left behind, but who entered their minds since they now and then felt so guilty over having left them without providers. Because they should be providers for them, you know. The granddads and uncles, who followed the gang at a distance, could not refrain from unrelenting meddling in all sorts of matters like older people used to. The primary purpose of the audacious gang leaders, like Agamemnon an Achilles, was to beat up poor little Hector, who had been ill-reputed in all neighboring areas for months. It is a GOOD STORY, thanks to the genius with the assistance dog, Homer, who used to sit under a tree during years of drought, flood, and pestilence, doing nothing. Few professors of Literature had been able to discern the scale of the events behind the story and thus missed the REAL GENIOUS of that guy with the assistance dog. I love those images he gave us about the Eos with her thousand rose fingers! The professors did miss the mythologization. During all ages, since the Denisova Man, people have made up stories like The Iliad to magnify themselves, their relatives, and their group. Feed them with myths! Even a fight about the beautiful girl next door, who ran off from Greece to Türkiye with her lover, can be made into an outstanding story, a giant epopé! But Homer´s story did not achieve what is just as crucial in Literature. It did NOT, in its main story, DEMYTHOLOGIZE. The Iliad brings delight, though, which is also a good thing. In my opinion, Demythologization is what Literature OUGHT TO BE DEALING WITH, aside from bringing delight. These two things are what this book is about. The Literature of the Future should deal with and deliver those two things. ANOTHER KIND OF MYTH is … say … the myth that the giant ship at sea has its own will. Or the car on the road, our body, or every book writes itself. The sailor does not sail it, but the ship sails by itself.

B.

THE MYTH

THE SAILING SHIP. The ship is unsinkable and sails itself. The background to all these books about fantastic ships with extraordinary powers is to be found among all the men who years and years have been living and sailing on these ships, all those who have built them, and all those who are dependent on them. The ships are also of a genial construction, meticulously put together, with thousands of parts, all with their fancy names, and all carefully tended to every hour of the day, as if the rig of the ship was part of a theology, created by many centuries of marine priests. Perhaps it is the background that makes the myth. Every sail and everything that makes sail and big one serves to make up the environmental background to all the moral problems on those giant wooden boxes under sail. The sailing vessels have been the material ground for countless people. While storms and wars pass, they keep sailing in distant waters, carrying their goods and mythology with them, tantalizing and obscure...Few people onboard these ships know that those ships are living and breathing. The ship sails by itself. Not just The Flying Dutchman, oh no! Every ship sails by itself. The men onboard are just travelers. They are mere spectators. And vessels become ships forever. And they aren´t just ships. They become mythical. ------

What is a myth? Things people make up when in need of something they do not have. One thinks that myths and legends have existed since primordial times, but that might also be a myth. Many – including, for instance, Fr. Schlegel, the German Romanticist theorist- think that Man cannot picture anything about himself without having a myth to relate to. I believe that myth is created by those who have anything to gain by making the Myth in question. Thus, the myth about the Rain god and Rain man, about the Evil man and the Man with the Evil Eye, and the Myth about the Good One, etc., are created by those – priests and kings - who figured they would have an advantage if the myth got spread among his fellow men. Thus, the myths about large ships without crew are manufactured stories and are not as strange as myths. Large ships are floating castles with traces of the HORRID and GRUESOME. They are gruesome and horrid, often because they are sailing far out at sea and because there are 20,000 yards of water under those ships. At a depth of 20,000 yards, anything is possible as well as demanding. Thousands of details are also describing those billowing enormous hotels, and Man´s situation is best described, using thousands of details, like lantern, Galley, fardage, kellick, backstay, crab, gaff, topgallant, fantail, and bobstay. The marine terminology detail is a friend of Myth. And any story onboard a ship, any tale emerging in the deep of the night under the starlit sky beneath the Southern Cross out of a quarrel between two boatswains on the deck of a giant steamer north of Ascensions, brings about – from the start – the entire myth of Man in Man´s huge inexplicable adventure on a lonely planet, thrown out into the Universe by some hidden enigmatic hand.

C. Dialogue Philosophy is not Ironic

Gertrude Stein in: What is English Literature (1935) "/…/ As I say, in the nineteenth century, what they thought was not what they said, but and this may sound like the same thing only it is not, they said what they thought ,and they were thinking about what they thought. This made the nineteenth century what it was."

IN MANY WAYS, THE ruling classes have managed to passivize the citizens of the Western Hemisphere. In Philosophy during the 20th Century, one of the most successful conservative projects was Dialogue Philosophy, which had its roots in Christianity, Kabbalah, and old humanistic tradition. It was embraced by many intellectuals and educated people in general as a way to peace and understanding. In reality, it was something of a hoax and humbug. Instead of encouraging people to read progressive Authors, which might help people uncover truths behind the enormous mass of myths blocking these, many Western European academics hailed this philosophy as something almost Messianic. It was a strictly conservative project aimed at turn people into zombies. It STARTED, though, out of pure curiosity. We all develop – it was claimed - in the beginning and later life in contact with others. The psychology and dialectics of the Other is a vast field to study. Hegel, Sartre, G.H. Mead, Benveniste, Heidegger, Mounier, Merleau-Ponty, Wittgenstein, Nietzsche, Husserl, Barthes, Buber, Ricoeur, Barth, Levinas and many many more. The philosophy of the Other is a simple and relatively common idea, and it has come forward in different ages, in different cultures, and been described in many ways. We could even call the thought of the Other as a necessary person to ourselves as "self-evident." Even if we are not in favor of regarding anything at all "self-evident,".... we still have a large branch of western philosophy that has made a big fuzz about the generalized Other. It has had a particular success and has had readers thrilled by the idea of this Other and made up a philosophy around him – or her. The whole philosophy of the Other in Europe, the very concept of "the Other" as a theoretical concept, began as a philosophy, as far as I have understood, with a journey undertaken by Fichte to Königsberg ( today´s Kaliningrad ) to visit the lectures of Kant - in the parlor at the home of Kant - and the outcome of this: a book by Fichte, supported by Kant and read by Schelling and Hegel.

The concept of THE OTHER came along with G.W.F. Hegel as a reaction to the extreme subjective idealism of Fichte as it came forth in his book, Wissenschaftslehre. The" I-I," the "Ich-Ich"-figure in Fichte´s book, the construction of reality from the "I" was inspiring Hegel. It is true that long ago, Meister Eckhart, the medieval mystic from Pays de Bas, the rebel, also in a very sensible manner, used the concept of the Other! Immanuel Kant, however ( who died in 1804) had, when he composed his theory while wandering along the small paths around Königsberg, left some space in certain parts of his Critique of pure Reason ( which was then partly revised by some ideas in the runner up: Critique of Practical Reason ). It was the problem with reality. In his great Critique, Kant could not prove the existence of reality. This was to some a significant challenge (!) .... and G. Fichte ( the older F., as we sometimes say) set out to fill the gap. Fichte has later come to be entirely overshadowed by Hegel´s obscure Phänomenologie des Geistes ( 1807 ), a book that contained many genial parts and groundbreaking ideas. We will return to this book later. That much can be said that when this overshadowing appeared, nobody dared to comment upon it, neither Schelling nor anybody else. In dialogue, we become OURSELVES, probably by being the other for the other. Or, as somebody has put it, I forgot who by being " the stranger for the Other." We cannot identify with the Other if the Other cannot identify with us. The discovery of Myself is only possible through the discovery of myself as the other for the Other. Via the absolute Other to the Real Other, according to Emmanuel Lévinás. French existentialism is partly centered around these formulas, where even proofs of the existence of the Other are contained ( Cf. Emmanuel Mounier and Jean-Paul Sartre.) and criticism of philosophies that cannot prove this Other. The history of the Other seems to begin - in intellectual terms by Hegel, then transferred to later German and French philosophy.

We might regard the lectures in France during the 1930ties by the gifted exile Russian Alexandre Kojève (1902-68), who came to France via Germany, where he had studied Hegel, as an essential landmark. J.-P. Sartre ( 1905-80) and numerous other philosophers, Jacques Lacan, the psychanalyst-philosopher, also visited these almost feisty lectures. Perhaps Sartre is most important as an initiator and inspiratory force for later French and Anglo-Saxon authors if we look upon S. today. The rigorous "existentialism" of Sartre is not an -ism defended by many people today, and Sartre himself revised his notion of absolute responsibility of choices as it is put forth in the voluminous L´étre et le Néant (1943), vividly written under the influence of amphetamine.

Martin Buber is persistent in his belief that "life is meeting people," "Leben ist Begegnung.". I do think it indicates an oversimplified view. Martin Buber has devoted a great deal of his time to this dialogical principle ( about "Wort-Paare" in Die Schriften uber das dialogische Prinzip (1954)."Spirit is Man´s answer to it´s You. Spirit is Word. Spirit is not in I, but between I and You." Martin Buber claimed that Man cannot be a true partner to himself, somebody who poses genuine questions to himself and gives honest answers. Buber asserted that everybody "kind of already knows" the answer to the question. ( Logos, p.16.) This is undoubtedly an intelligent argument from B.'s side, who set out and in several books was declaring that there are double concepts "Ich-Du" and the like, asserting that it is impossible to utter the word "I" without implying a "You." Life is lived looking for a distant You. Just because humans are inclined to lie to themselves does not mean trusting dialogue with another person would be wiser. Buber is tiresome reading, and Logos deals with completely ideal meetings between people, not with real ones. Notably, M. Buber was UN General Secretary D. Hammarskjöld's favorite philosopher. - Buber claims that S.K., true enough, is humanitarian, but still, he calls him "ananthropic."

Martin Buber humbly asserted that what he says is nothing new; it is only that he" put all together and executed" it ("gesamt gesammelt und ausgefuhrt"). Among the influences for Buber is S. Kierkegaard via F. Ebners Das Wort und die geistlichen Realitaten (1921), where the dialogic Ebner feels indebted to S.K. but saw him as a human being who did not have the capability of finding the "You" in others. The salvation is to Ebner to every person present in his own life, amid sickness and close to his death: There is only one You, and that is God.". Thus, Buber is on an anti-intellectualistic ground . Buber seeks support from speculative religious thinkers. He is also deeply involved in the mystic Chassidic tradition and has translated parts of the Old Testament. Bücher der Kündung. (Verdeutscht von Martin Buber mit Franz Rosenzweig. (1958)), (Cf. Buber´s almost hallucinatory speculation in Gog and Magog.) But THE MOST IMPORTANT QUESTION is – of course -: Why does anybody come up with such a hoax? Maybe because “dialogue philosophy” is one of the most clever means of surveillance. If everybody is urged to talk to each other, then everybody knows what you are thinking. Buber claims that truth can only emerge in a dialogue. But how has g he arrived at this conclusion? Presumable all by himself. Thus, Buber contradicts himself. If truth can only come up in a dialogue, he should not be able to invent any new philosophy by himself!

ANOTHER famous dialogic, the Russian M. Bachtin (1895-1975) - more a writer of Literary Theory than psychology – who wrote a book about dialogue, La Poetique de Dostoevsky is severely authoritarian in his idolization of D... In the philosophy of dialogue - dialogical philosophy - there is a kind of authoritarian mysticism, a superstition, a claim of the "truth," by which each of these philosophers monologically and in an authoritarian way oversimplifies human intercourse and the human condition in general. By ending up in lofty and beautiful metaphysics, they want to eradicate every doubt. I understand the dialogical genius of Dostoyevsky, but it would not be brilliant of me to admit that I do believe that Dostoyevsky is the only author with this type of technique. When this is stated about the Other and the importance of dialogue, we might return to our original doubt. Is it possible to think all alone? How is it possible for anybody to think for himself?

Emm. Lévinas - the family man, //the philosopher of the human face,// and of the concept of the //radical// Other – is an eclectic writer who has in France worked in the same field, influenced by the very same A. Kojève. ( Lecons 1933). K.'s style is clear and very enjoyable. Perhaps no modern book in existential philosophy is as obscure as Lévinas Totalité et Infinité, which also uses a lot of terminology from ancient Jewish speculative philosophy. Many abstract concepts have been evolved mystically by L., thus creating a multiy-dimensional abstract world of hocus pocus in conjunction with corrupt logic. A book that even has been translated into Chinese. We will here mention a few of the theologians who could also be said to be dialogicans: Augustine, Rudolf Otto, Emil Brunner, Tillich & Theunissen. The first of the dialogue theologians was maybe the authoritarian Tagaste-born Augustine himself in his reasoning about the "threeness" of the spirit in his book De Trinitate ( b.14-16.) - written about 416 A.D... St. Aurelius Augustinus asserts that self-knowledge is not "true" if not brought about within this kind of triangle. ( Kierkegaard, who despised Augustine , all the same has reasoning very much like Augustine´s in his (last) book, Sickness unto Death, in the famous and beautiful introduction, where he talks about Man's relation to himself and the relation to oneself as spirit, that it is, and that this "that" is the relation, and that this "that" is "posed by a third," his third has to be interpreted as God in his context. Concerning the problem of that "that,"- Ger." das Dass"- confer Th. Adorno, Philosophische Terminologie.). Another is Rudolf Otto, whose book The Holy ( Das Heilige, (1917,1936 ), in quite an extraordinary way, takes as its starting point in Imm. Kant´s famous foreword of the first edition of Critique of Practical Reason ( Kritik der Urteilskraft), where so much else of our philosophy has begun and where Otto is giving the Holy the status of a Kantian "category," i.e., he takes to widen the specter through which we can acquire knowledge about the world and - oddly enough - states that The Holy is a category in everybody´s intellect, through which we can acquire ... knowledge.
Emil Brunner (b.1889), a Swiss thinker and personalist philosopher who wrote Dogmatik I-II (1956) and Das Gebot und die Ordnungen (1932) “describes” three stages of reflection. Man travels from the bourgeoisie to the demonic, where Man wishes to enjoy his freedom without any limitations, to the "spiritual objectification" of science and art. All these three stages are what we use to name "aesthetic." In his Wahrheit als Begegnung, Truth as Meeting (1938) - more central to us here - he claims:
"Instead of the third person, within whom we know and talk about "somebody" or "something," the other person comes forth with the address of the prayer. The prayer - not the so-called assertation of faith, the formulated, theoretically organized doctrine - is the real form of faith. Just like the words of God are not a teaching, but an address - and never anything else than an address - so is neither faith a knowing of theses, yes, it is not knowledge at all, but prayer./..../ All knowledge is it-relation and hence a relation of domination. Still, faith is you-relation and hence togetherness."(p.65). Brunner also asserts that this relation to God is the primary dialogue, preceding the authentic ( in the Heideggerian sense ) dialogue with the fellow human: "By this, it should be put forward; it is not here this, that we are using a known relation, the you-relation, on the relation between the words of God and the faith. Sooner it is, that it is only in the belief of the words of God, we can have a You-relation separated from the Object-relation." thus:" The human being outside the faith can only perceive the difference between "you" and "it" in a very relative sense. He or she will always mingle togetherness and mastery - since we are sinners." ( p.66.)
The idea of the Other in God - God as the Other – constitutes the "agapéan" Ethics. The part of Christian Ethics delivered by these theologians, the agapéian Ethic ( from Gr. "agape" ), the act-agapeism is most probably founded upon the New Testament (Matth. 25:40). Agape, the love who is not looking for his, is not directed towards the Other, but towards God in the Other.( Cf. J. Fletcher, Situation Ethics, and E. Brunner, The Divine Imperative, p. 117.) On this, the whole diaconal idea is founded. ( For more about this, see P. Tillich, Systematic Theology, 1967. V. Furnich, The love Command in The New Testament, 1972, A. Nygren, Eros and Agape, K. Barth on Paulus, Letter to the Romans, Helm, Quinn, and many more.... ). We meet the philosophy of dialogue here and there, and it is often hard to find it entirely wrong. But if you are only a bit of a misanthrope, you can be inclined to say: Oh, yes, in an ideal world, and you should know that either we are all in the paradise of dialogue or we are not. Just because the dialogue describes reality as a dialogue, reality does not look exactly like that. It is speculation – pure lovely speculation—a world of fancy. If two people meet in a Dialogue, it is not necessarily true that they become wiser by conversing. Two stupid people might just as well be cementing each other's stupidity and each other´s mythical thinking by associating with each other.
The dialogues are all making a big affair of the necessity of having some relations to get some knowledge. But they forget that a severe critiqal ability is required for knowledge. You do not always get powerful critiques from the people you associate with. ( It is important to mention that not every person who deals with Dialogue is a dialogue philosopher of this kind. Many ironists have been authors of okay dialogues, like Diderot and several German Romantics.)
Nearly none of the philosophers mentioned above had an understanding of Irony. Augustine had not. Immanuel Kant had not, nor had Fichte nor Hegel. Kojève had not, nor had Sartre, nor Heidegger, nor Lévinas, nor Buber. The religious dialogicans had – almost eo ipso – no irony. Only a myth-buster can have irony. Thus, great thinkers like Kierkegaard, Dostoyevsky, and Denis Diderot – perhaps the most gifted French revolutionary thinker of 1789 - had. People who can give us new perspectives and understand the new world are almost always Authors using irony. The Dialogue Philosophy during the late to many relatively prosperous 20th century did – with its aura of “peace and understanding” - sidestep a lot of other ideologies and philosophical, religious, and psychological currents, like Marxism, Trotskyism, Sartreism, Heideggerianism, Jungianism, Freudianism, New-Christianity, Krishna movements, and Ego psychology of several sorts. -------------------------------------------- ----------

Copyright Kaj B. Genell, 2022.© Kaj B. Genell 2022. All right reserved.

From my book:Writing the fiction of Tomorrow: ( available on Amazon ).
LITERARY fiction often succeeds in putting the individual into situations of existence, into positions of Choice, containing great dramatic tension because of the fruitful duplicity created by the fact that fiction describing reality always has a myth serving as a background. By always having a myth as fond to fiction, we might also, as Readers, be able to judge this Myth with what we experience within the hero, from what we know and experience from him. Reversely, we learn with the help of the overall Myth about the hero. The contemporary Myth is, in most cases, a false image painted by the ruling power of the Present Society. It is the false history set from the position of power, which the mighty man, the psychopath, is so able to create, and which the powerful man - i.e., the ruling class, the man IN power - is so able to fling out, most successfully faking the appearance that this Myth originates from the depths of the people, from the soul of the people and the inner depths of the man in connection with the … divine. The Myth has, throughout the ages, been given luster, implying that MYTH was the Truth of Man when in all societies, and Myth has, in reality, only – in all its parts - always just served the elite. Myth has never originated out of any depths. The "depth of the people" is itself a myth. Everything about Myth has been created to fool the servants of the actual ruler. Myth is just as false as the concept of the "people," "the soul of the people," and "the nation." In her book Short History of Myth (2003), Karen Armstrong, in the initial chapter, sets out to explain what a myth is. This chapter is deceitful. KA seems to think that we cannot live without myths and that the truth of the Myth is its "effectiveness." It is true "if it works," if "it gives us hope." This is, of course, all highly suspicious. Works for whom? Hope, at any cost whatsoever? Fiction, HOWEVER, examines – consciously or unconsciously - the current Myth. By far, the most potent means fiction has is Irony. Irony – which in many cases can also be unbeknownst to the writer - is fiction's most robust questioning tool. A society without Irony is in great danger. A community without Irony has no correlator, question, creative Negativity, Self-Consciousness, or archeology of Conscious or Unconscious. Irony is the key to knowledge about the Unconscious and the actual Hallucination and the Hallucination of our Time ( Cf. Boismont, On Hallucinations.) Hallucination is not a myth, but they have similarities. By Irony, Myth is unmasked, but Irony also brings forth more Irony. UNMASKING MYTH is – inevitably – a RISKY occupation. In that it is indeed a redefinition of reality, it is open to debate concerning WHAT IS REAL if we have no myths. Some people – if not all – will try to use this redefining to THEIR ADVANTAGE. If we do not criticize the myths – after we have proved that the Myths are instituted by mischievous rulers and bandits, oppressors, and usurpers, why should we at all discuss politics? If we talk about politics, we still have a world defined by OLD MYTHS. ”Science must begin with myths, and with the criticism of myths.” ( Karl Popper ) Even culture itself has been exploited to such magnitude that it is a fetish in itself. Redefining the world by claiming that the myths about NATIONS, NATIONAL BORDERS, NATIONAL CHARACTERS, and FOLKLORE are mostly propaganda is a prerequisite to a world where democracy can prosper as THE ONLY important means to achieve peace. "We are choosing Ithaca, the faithful Earth, the bold, crisp thought, the clear-sighted action, generosity of the person that knows./…../ to conquer what we already own – the meager fresh crops on the fields, the short love on this earth" ( Camus, L'Homme Revolté ) DURING ALL AGES, the Conservative right wings always underlined the importance of the Mythical Domain, to enslave people under superficial bonds, to try to make a particular group of people believe that they are BETTER THAN OTHER PEOPLE, when it is beyond any doubt, that WE ARE ALL ALIKE. This is what the Anti-Myth Work is about! HOW MYTH CAN MAGNIFY some small gang fights of almost no historical importance can be easily exemplified. One such fraud is often dealt with, but UNDER A DIFFERENT STAR, by l professors of Literature all over the Western academic world in the shape of the Homeric Question. Most Professors of Literature who hold these lectures seldom come near the crucial question – to me – about the petty scale of the whole thing and the enormous MYTHOLOGISATION OF THE ACTUAL CUDGEL FIGHT. Few people have realized that what we are dealing with in The Iliad can be compared to today's fight between gangs in the suburbs, involving boys around 14 or 15 years of age (concerning the armory one uses in The Iliad ). The most reliable source, a contemporary one, of what it all was about probably is the historian Herodotus ( d. 425 B.C.) when he informs us on the number of inhabitants of the city of Troy. This city comprised c: a 2000 inhabitants. If one takes away mothers, kids, and grandparents, not to mention all those clever guys who thought it was a BAD IDEA, that leaves us just about a couple dozen gangsters. They easily fit in the café in my neighborhood. The Trojan War was, in reality, not more than a fight of the size when guys in one house in my suburb got mad at the boys in another place because they had been too loud when they celebrated the win of the last football game, or when they had a too large engagement party for a popular girl. Any real weapons the guys with the wooden dinghy did not own. They had taken down a couple of trees to make wooden sticks from. The Pelion´s lance was the most enormous stick they had. I can assure my Reader that there are a few discussions dealing with Pelion lances in the Pentagon! The Pelion´s Lance was a tree that had grown on the mountain of Pelion, and one thought that mowing that down might scare one´s adversaries. The gang that set out to attack the “castle” of Troy bright with them a couple of horses and some rowing boats. You can see in your mind´s eye the little kids running around with turtle shells on their heads.



ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Kaj Bernh. Genell, born in Gothenburg, Sweden, in 1944, is a Swedish Author. He became interested in Literature, Music and Figurative Art at an early age, and, in 1983, published a small book exclusively on Irony - “Ironi och Existens.” Soon after that, Genell, who had since then delved deep into the strangeness of the works of one of the creators of Modernism, Franz Kafka, wrote a whole series of papers at the University of Gothenburg related to Kafka. This would much later result in “Kafka och det Kafkaeska” (2018), an essay in Swedish on the Literary Technique of Kafka, later published in English as “Kafka – a Freudo-Structuralist Analysis” (2021). This books explains the concept of the “Kafkaesque”.
As a fiction writer, Genell set out with several books in the Swedish language, such as “Pistolen”, [ The Gun ] “Tavelstölden” [Theft of a Piece of Art ], “Tegelkrona och skönheten” [ The Beauty ] and “Höstdrama” [ Autumn Drama ].The concise thriller story “Skjuta sig fri”( 2022) [ Shooting Free ] - was also published on BooksOnDemand (BoD). Disguised behind the pseudonym “Bill Clactoe” (BoD), he published his first novel in English in 2021:” Fell´s Point,” a small crime story set in Baltimore, USA. With //The Lion´s Disease// ( Amazon Paperback+Ebook ), G. did create a psychological and philosophical comment on pandemics by describing a contemporary Odyssey to Indonesia on a Bulk Cargo Carrier. It also is available in Swedish: ”Lejonsjukan” (2021) (Amazon, Paperback+Ebook ) In 2022, in December, after – much to his surprise - having received a scholarship from Sveriges Författarfond (Swedish Authors Fund), G. published two more books in his native language, also available on Amazon, one of which was a collection of short stories called "Noveller." By editing his latest Philosophical work “Writing the Fiction of Tomorrow”, Genell elaborated in detail several of his favorite themes in order to make them applicable for Authors. In 2023, his latest novel, “Darkness,” (Amazon), is about a young man entangled in a strange murder on a beach outside Tampa, FL.


Copyright © Kaj Genell, March, 2023.