BS Murthy
2025
However, as it seemed all was over bar sighing of the genuine writers, in came the internet with a formidable e-publishing space for their works as if to free the literature from the publishers’ prejudicial editorial grip and to directly deliver their e-books into the readers’ digital laps to sort them out for themselves. Laudable though this literary freedom in principle, yet in practice, so to say, the internet has wide opened the floodgates of writing, thereby enabling even those, who have no business to write, to inundate the e-book world with all sorts of imitative works. If only the aspiring writers would read Leo Tolstoy’s What is Art in which he articulated that to be qualified as an art, be it a good art or a bad art, the work must be original foremost, as otherwise, it’s just an imitation, and nothing else. What with the entry of the bloggers and the bots alike into the ever-expanding e-book arena to serve the ill-literary cause of the intruders, yet again it’s a theatre of the absurd for the destined writers. So, be it the mainstream media or the social media, in either case, the commercial pull has been inexorably pulling down the literary standards. Have any heard any author of the day say that he was influenced by the writings of Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Turgenev, Gogol, Proust, Zola, Flaubert, or Fontaine, to name a few! So, to best describe the state of the current literature, barring honourable exceptions, as an analogy, one may borrow the old computer adage – garbage in, garbage out. But yet, on balance, the democratic word in the web world is far more conducive for the survival of the genuine literature than the literary tyranny of the publishing world.
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