The controversial Ambrose Bierce on novelists and literary critics

The Volume X: "The Opinionator" - Book in the Public domain. 

Two short articles caught my attention reading this book. One was "The Novel", the other, "On Literary Criticism". Both are in The Opinionator section of Volume 10 of The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce. 

Ambrose Bierce wrote about many things. Some strange for his time, like the trendsetting The Devil's Dictionary. In this book lives the funniest definition of a conservative.

Conservative

(n.) A statesman who is enamoured of existing evils, as distinguished from the Liberal, who wishes to replace them with others.

The journalist, writer, and Civil War veteran was sharp and fierce. Bierce was Bierce, and always had a thing for controversy and shocking the readers. Of course, he never ran short of enemies. Often his newspaper columns got hostile reactions. 

Not even his fictional works could escape from his style. H. P. Lovecraft said that Bierce's fiction was "grim and savage". What a compliment from a master of the horror genre. 

In the two texts about novelists and critics, Bierce was not different. Our man smashed them harshly.

In "The Novel", the only novelists spared were the old Russian gang: Pushkin, Gogol, Turgenev, and Tolstoy. Well, on the last one only his early works. All because Bierce was a fan of realist fiction. 

He said that a novel is, 

…a diluted story — a story cumbered with trivialities and nonessentials. I have never seen one that could not be bettered by cutting out a half or three-quarters of it. 

And them went after the writers. 

When the story-teller is ambitious to be a philosopher there is an end to good storytelling. 

His last conclusion was that, 

Novelists are now all philosophers.

In honor to the truth, I've found that this is the case in many novels. Most are diluted stories - not to talk about the horrible soap operas and the Hispanic telenovelas with their boring and repetitive stuff.

In "On Literary Criticism", Bierce charged against the all-knowing and mighty critic with an unpleasant definition.

…is he who is best skilled in reading between the lines; in interpreting an author’s purpose; in endowing him with a 'problem' and noting his degree of skill in its solution. The author — stupid fellow! — did not write between the lines, had no purpose but to entertain, was unaware of a problem.

This made me smile. In my young years a critic "interpreted" one of my awarded videos in a very positive way. The problem was that, producing it, I didn't think about most of the ideas that his wild imagination created searching for deep concepts behind the work. I felt like he was talking about the project of somebody else. 

Yes, critics are complicated folks. And happens that nobody remembers them. I guess that's why there are no statues of critics in the parks of our cities. 

And what was Bierce's advice to would be writers? 

For them, he wrote in "To train a writer":

And it would be needful that he knows and have an ever present consciousness that this is a world of fools and rogues, blind with superstition, tormented with envy, consumed with vanity, selfish, false, cruel, cursed with illusions—frothing mad!

Harsh and dark, but wasn't Bierce right defining society? 

 

The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce are interesting reads. He edited the twelve volumes and published them between 1909 and 1912. There is a lot to learn in these books. 

The life of Ambrose Bierce ended as one of his shocking texts. His last letter from Mexico closed with this line: "As to me, I leave here tomorrow for an unknown destination." 

He never appeared again, opening the door to conjectures and theories. Still today an unsolved mystery.  

(The Volume 10 mentioned in this post is available in Amazon and many other places - the previous link is affiliate, meaning that we may receive a small commission on your purchases without additional cost to you. Thanks for your support.)