Literature – Heterodoxia

Heterodox Dictionary, revised

HETERODOX DICTIONARY: tweet-sized apothegms that burrow deep and fester until the reader is thoroughly corrupted, wholly immune to all conventional dogma.

David Foster Wallace

At 46 years of age, David Foster Wallace hung himself in his basement.

In Waiting for Godot, two tramps, Vladimir and Estragon, kill time on an open, empty road waiting for Godot, who never comes, and who they suspect may not exist. They quarrel, make up, contemplate suicide, try to sleep, eat a carrot, and gnaw on some chicken bone. An oppressive air of desperation and panic lingers over all of their activities because nothing actually happens. The play ends where it began – it goes nowhere.

Camus

What is man, other than an individual, an isolated being thrown into an alien universe totally devoid of any inherent meaning where contingency and failure seem to be the only organizing principles?

Hemingway

According to Ernest Hemingway, we are born with a raw optimism, but as we acquire knowledge of life’s inescapable suffering and fundamental emptiness, we are irreversibly damaged. Therefore, we must avoid the pain of thinking too much or feeling too much.

Franz Kafka

The ridiculous, detached worlds Franz Kafka invented in his writings have disturbed generations of readers in profound and incomprehensible ways.

Nothing Old Fashioned

Like many artists who were inspired by his work, Paul Cézanne was contaminated with the malady of the modern condition – indeterminacy, which can be seen in his art. He agonized over his paintings, and revised many of his canvasses over a number of years, while others remained incomplete with blank spots. Even with scrupulous observation, Cézanne realized that he could never be certain about the details of what he was seeing and so he was unable to complete a decisive, definitive representation.

Mark Twain

During the final years of his life, Twain’s writings echoed a rancorous pessimism and a palpable misanthropy.

Flaubert

Gustave Flaubert’s classic of realism, Madame Bovary, signifies the beginning of a new fashion in literature.

…and Nothing besides!*

By the second half of the 19th century, scientific progress was adding to a persistent pessimism, and it was becoming more and more difficult to affirm life. The theories of Charles Darwin, for example, played an important role in discrediting more of the myths that human beings relied on. The insulting description of Homo Sapiens proposed in Origin of the Species destroyed once and for all the belief that man occupied a dignified position in the order of things and ruined the hope of cosmic purpose.

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Category: Literature