Regarding the publication by the Casa das Letras of Brief history of the drinkby Mark Forsyth (translated by Francisco Agarez), I would like to dedicate myself to a brief comparison between drunks and writers, since it seems to me that there is a strong correlation (as well as an important difference) between literary creation and drunks. invention.
The first point of contact is, of course, the fact that many writers and artists accumulate roles, being first-rate drunks. The list is long and an enumeration would seem like a folkloric and petty exercise in gossip, which, despite my great appreciation for folklore, gossip and pettiness, I will spare readers. In itself, this coincidence proves nothing, so it is important to delve deeper into this correlation.
In the first paragraph of the book, Forsyth confesses to “not really knowing what drunkenness is.” Given the obvious conflict between this confession and his desire to dedicate a book to the subject, the writer adds: “if writers allowed a detail as insignificant as ignorance to prevent them from writing, the bookstores would be empty.” Forsyth is right. Strange as it may seem, literary activity (both critical and creative) consists precisely of ignorant research. This discovery is not exactly original, since we already find it in the Platonic dialogue. Ionwhere Socrates forces the rhapsodic protagonist who gives the play its name to admit that when Homer writes about horses without being a coachman, or when he talks about fishing without being a fisherman, he would be talking about what he did not know and forcing the interpreters. of his work, like Ion, to comment on topics that went beyond his knowledge.
In a sense, writing a book is an activity of persuading others that we know what we are talking about when we don’t at all. If literature is a fictional reproduction of life, then a writer would necessarily have to be someone who specializes in being alive, someone who deeply understands the mystery of existence. I don’t know if you’ve ever had the opportunity to meet any writers, good or bad, but I guarantee you that’s not what happens. For a writer to boast that he understands better than the rest of us poor mortals what it means to be alive would be the same as the world high jump record holder describing himself as the person who came closest to touching his stomach on the moon. . the help of any instrument other than your body. It is an objectively true statement, but the distance to the target makes a mockery of the excellence of the feat. Now, although some teetotalers are prodigious in the sport of talking confidently about what they don’t know, writers’ greatest rivals in this regard will always be drunks and, desirably, priests when talking about sex.
Another similarity between alcoholism and literature is found in the passage from The varieties of religious experienceby William James, who is quoted in the aforementioned book by Forsyth: “The influence of alcohol on humanity is indisputably due to its power to stimulate the mystical faculties (…) For the poor and the illiterate [o álcool] It occupies the place of symphonic concerts and literature (…) Drunken consciousness is a fragment of mystical consciousness.” James suggests here that alcohol, like music and literature, would derive from our mystical side, which, once again, brings back Socrates’ discussion with Ion, where the hypothesis that inspiration is a divine possession, is That is to say, the possibility of writing is a moment about which we would have little to say because we would not be within ourselves in those moments. In this sense, it is no coincidence that in Greek mythology Dionysus was both the god of wine and theater.
Accepting this argument would immediately have two consequences. The first, and most obvious, is to justify why we all know some unfortunate person who, like a superhero, during the week is a serious person, in a suit, and on Friday nights, after five or six drinks, he constructs implausible fictional plots. , in which he is now a hero and now a villain, plots in which our eventual sobriety does not place great confidence but with which he never fails to be tremendously entertained.
Still another conclusion can be drawn from this relationship between drunkenness, literature and mysticism. If it is true that literature is a divine inspiration and if the job of writers is simply to put themselves in a position to receive from their texts “a great and current style”, as Camões says, then they cannot be held responsible for what they can do. . In fact, the idea of fiction derives precisely from this premise: the writer creates a narrator and the narrator describes the characters, but, as we all know—or should know—neither the behavior of the characters nor the opinions of the narrator are attributable to the writer. The case of Pessoa (he is also an avid consumer of narcotic substances) is, from this point of view, paradigmatic, since through his forty-seven heteronyms and what he calls “drama in people” he adds a new layer to separate the authors from the content of their work.
As we well know, the genius inventors of this fictitious layer that separates us from the content of our speech and the result of our actions were, evidently, drunks. The writers limited themselves to sophisticated statements like “Ah, I said that but I was joking, of course”, “I didn’t know what I was doing, Arnaldo, damn it” or “Anabela, for God’s sake, it didn’t mean anything to me.”
However, if drunks and writers have all these points of contact, there is an important difference between them that goes back to Mark Forsyth’s book and that derives from the duration of these mystical experiences. In the case of drunks, the border between illusion and reality is liquid and the drunk wobbles back and forth between this imaginary line. When we get drunk, our fictional construction of the world falls apart every two minutes. We tell stories that we know are lies, just as writers do, but these have no consistency, being interrupted, depending on the character of the drunk and the quality of the drink, by laughter or tears. We digress and interrupt ourselves, we oscillate between credibility and amnesia, we fill our stories with inconsistencies and we do not take a step without gravity dragging us back to the starting point, to which we cling so as not to hit our butts on the ground. Our sobs remind the audience not to take us seriously, that it’s the alcohol talking. A good writer doesn’t do that. A good writer places his feet on the cover, immerses himself in the first page and runs through the book in apnea until he reaches the back cover.
This is the big problem with Brief history of the drink. Throughout the book, Forsyth describes the relationship of various civilizations (Roman, Egyptian, Aztec, etc.) with drinking, thus showing both the omnipresence and importance of drinking for the construction of practically all forms of community organization that they have existed. . In chapter eighteen, for example, the London writer presents a sensible, interesting and non-Manichean description of the causes and effects of Prohibition in the United States.
However, like a good drunk, a bad liar or a mediocre writer, Mark Forsyth breaks the fictional illusion every ten lines with a joke that among English writers we define as wit and in Portuguese as funny. There’s nothing more irritating than critics who frown every time a writer tries to make his audience laugh. I’m not far from suggesting that Forsyth’s problem is trying to be funny. I’m suggesting that the problem is that you can’t. The problem is that the joke serves no purpose other than to mock readers who thought they were going to learn something from the book before them or who are excited by the scenarios opened up by the text’s suggestions, whose expectations are invariably disappointed.
The jokes that splash Brief history of the drink They are only there to seduce the reader. They are there to subject the content of the book to the charm of its creator, as if the work were an obstacle that Forsyth wants to remove from the way as soon as possible, so that we can imagine ourselves as his companions for an evening. of drinking that continues into the night. Throughout the pages of Brief history of the drinkWe often feel like the teetotal friend, forced to sit through a monumental binge with dry lips and then guide everyone safely home.
Source: Observadora
