This is turning to be a big year for posthumousness. Stieg Larsson’s Millennium trilogy is stealing millions of hours of his readers’ lives. Previously unpublished (and in some cases, unfinished) works of Agatha Christie, Carl Jung, Graham Greene, Kurt Vonnegut, Vladimir Nobakov and many others are in various stages of publishing. Every week literature sections of newspapers are churning out essays on the anticipation of scholars and the vituperation of critics. Posthumous publishing is a touchy issue. Few writers leave precise instructions about what should be done — destroy! –with their unfinished works after their demise. Nobakov wanted The Original of Laura to be burnt but his “visionary” son, bless him, let it until recently rot in a Swiss vault. Franz Kafka expressedly wished for all his unpublished literary wealth to be burnt unread but his literary executor Max Brod disrespected it and thanks to him we have The Trial.
On one side are the literary scholars who are eager to discover the next Metamorphosis in another dead writer’s hard drives. On the other side are the sympathetic critics who champion the cause of preserving the greatness of the dead. I, I am just eager to disrespect the dead.
I perceive two misinterpretations — greatness and death.
Elizabeth Gilbert in her TED Talk on creativity said that we confuse “showing genius” with “being genius”. Just like we confuse “judging an act” with “judging an actor”. It may be out of fantasy or of convenience that a writer of several works of genius is called a genius, but it should not be interpreted as if he or she were a blessed soul born with a truckload of talent even if some may really have. As William Zinsser wrote in his book On Writing Well nobody becomes Tom Wolfe in a fortnight, not even Tom Wolfe. So if the unfinished manuscripts of a Kafka or the rough books of a Fermat are available, why not allow the rest of the world to access them and let us get a feel of the drudgery of alchemy? It could throw some new light on the person or on the profession or on the universe.
Whether it is for the fear of death or of guilt, people strive to respect the dead, especially the dead’s wishes. I once again say that the dead stay dumb. Those alive don’t need to follow the dead’s wishes, especially if they can’t benefit the greater good of mankind. If a YSR’s whim was to reset all debts of the “poor” to zero, his successors need not should not follow it after his death, especially when the debt of the state is threatening the salaries of government officials. The afore-mentioned critics should realize that a thousand asinine novels by Mark Twain can’t erode the sheen off his Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer. Did the later Star Wars prequels spoil the earlier Star Wars sequels? Not today after the greatness of the works has been established for eternity. Do you really think Nobakov will turn in his grave if he finds that we could be reading the shuffled cards of The Original of Laura? You know the phrase is figurative, right?
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Death calls for a re-reading of an author’s works to find any profundity. Ordinary phrases/concepts/ideas from the author have a second chance before thrown into the bin. And yes, dead authors are more marketable than living ones. It is even better if he has died leaving some unfinished manuscripts, even half-burnt will do. Such is the romanticism associated with death. So, we tend to re-examine the dead. Even exhuming files from their hard drive is out of curiosity and economics. Another posthumous but important author’s publication is “The First Man” by Albert Camus. The unfinished manuscript was extracted from the mangled remains of his car which met with an accident leading to his death.
By the way Kafka’s manuscripts (finished and also unfinished I think) are available online at http://www.kafka.org/index.php?manuscripts . I am not sure about availability of Fermat’s rough note books, where he scribbled most of the theorems in margins.