Common Knowledge

COLUMNS

PUBLISH AND PERISH

Djaimilia Pereira de Almeida

The state of mind of those who write for the public may be analogous to one’s
mood at a family dinner party after paying a visit to the hairdresser’s. No one
“gets” our new haircut; all the reviews discourage us, though we repeat to our-
selves that there is no way the family could have understood and that their opinion,
anyway, does not matter. The opinions of our families are always both important
and irrelevant to us, and this ambivalence in itself almost defines what a family is.
In the lives of many of us, the act of publishing is defined as a way of express-
ing our indifference to the possibility of not being understood, an attitude that
in some contexts is taken to be a form of courage. We tend to think in this way
about obscure and angry authors but, often, about more pious spirits too. Incom-
prehension may be cultivated, and its attainment should therefore not be taken
as a sign that the author is alone but, rather, as a sign that she wants to be. It is
like explaining our new haircut to a cousin: her indifference to its beauty and the
energy wasted in trying to win her over (using explanations as inadequate to the
haircut as a paraphrase is to a poem) do not upset our self-­confidence but do com-
prise an example of what it is to care for someone. The sentiment toward others of
the person who writes for others has an affinity with the complaisance one feels
toward cousins at a family dinner party and an affinity too, a more important
one, with the personal story behind our amiability, a particular instance of a very
general story, in which being understood does not seem to be decisive.
For this reason, the aim of writing for others may lead us to the same

Common Knowledge 22:2

DOI 10.1215/0961754X-3464768
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benefits we gain from writing for ourselves — to the same mutual incompre-

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hension that we already experience internally, we and our inner cousin or inner
reader — which makes publishing a rather unimportant endeavor. The likelihood

Publish and Per ish

of being misunderstood discourages neither aspiring nor experienced writers.
The improbability of being understood, although it tends to come as a revelation,
seems to be a brute fact about human life. The act of publishing is the human
equivalent to a bear’s exit from a cave. We boldly put our head outside the cave
but are still only bears, and this animal life event goes unnoticed. Writers may be
bold and bellicose, but to publish is entirely benign. Authors all, doubtless, have

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Almeida
odious motives; they are the muse of every aspiring writer. It is not the writers’
intentions that are benign but the act of publishing, which as such does not seem
affected by anyone’s particular ambitions.
The formal demand to present oneself is intelligible only in the context in
which human mutual incomprehension is apprehensible. The demand signals
no more than membership in the human species. The act of publishing, then,
is one of a general variety of not very emphatic human acts. Our gregariousness
signals that we have company, though the company may consist solely of our
self, and so it is not the effects of publishing our writing, but the general scale of
human action, against which the character of the act should be assessed. Nothing
changes when a book is published, except in the sense in which, after a battle that
changed nothing, we now find scattered arms and legs on the battlefield.
The naïveté of writers who declare they do not care about the public is a
distraction from an available form of courage. The form of courage most funda-
mental to the act of writing is not that of indifference toward the public but that
of not fearing to be understood (as obscure, angry, and pious authors alike have
acknowledged). The fear of being understood perfectly well is perhaps the main
fear of the person who arrives direct from the hairdresser’s to the family dinner
party. What can be infernal in human gregariousness, of which the family as an
institution is the perfect embodiment, is the possibility that others will, rather
than will not, understand us. We tend to confuse understanding with a form of
harm, as if it were not a fundamental condition of human companionship.
Our limitations in understanding our own lives reveal the possibility that
the same opacity one feels in relation to one’s own endeavors permeates what one
writes. This opacity is one of the consolations for our ignorance about the destiny
of our writing and for our ignorance of our own way in life. The hope is in others,
after all. It does not consist in their “getting” what we wrote but in the possibility
that they may rescue what we say good-bye to in ourselves as we live our lives.
Readers are like battle companions who, after the explosion, pick up our arm or
leg on the other side of the hill.
To publish is in this sense a performative form of perishing: we do not per-
ish from writing, though it is through our writings that we disappear. We perish

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because we cannot escape our own style. If style were seen as a way of dealing
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with being on our own, of getting away with being the person one is turning into,
the picture of writing as a struggle between companionship and isolation would
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be better apprehended.
In academic circles, we often hear that one either publishes or perishes.
The absurdity of this notion does not stem from the weight that moralists give to
quality over quantity. Rather, perishing is the only serious way of publishing. The
reasons for saying that we perish for not publishing are not professional or, more
generally, social reasons but the private reason that it is hard to survive the daily
life of self-­censorship and self-­mortification of those who abstain from publish-
ing. It is only in a nonfigural sense that one either publishes or perishes.
We can surrender optimistically to the idea that what we leave behind,
while we live and write, is still a part of us, through belief in a continuity of iden-
tity and spirit in which we recognize ourselves. One can learn to cherish the con-
tinuity that one calls either “I” or “style.” We can find some consolation as well
in the “vision” of our writings, which amounts to a succession of passing diseases
that, in the end, is all that is left of us. There is a chance, moreover, that all that
remains of us is the record of those diseases and not their outcomes, the diseases
themselves being the outcome. That we cannot escape our own style is, neverthe-
less, fundamental to our good-bye to what we are: the good-bye of someone who
loses an arm or a leg, rather than that of someone who grows.
Despite the experience of those who do not publish — a genuine form of
human suffering, in many cases, and not a form of professional humiliation — the
only way of publishing is perishing, because it is a means of dignifying the dis-
continuity of one’s self. This way of perishing is open to those who publish as
well as those who do not. But there are other, less demanding ways of perishing.
Feeling lost is relative to the difficulty of the way in which one chooses to perish.
Although we do not always experience it as a choice, being scrupulous about the
way one chooses to perish — a choice we go through many times, as if all alone
in the dark — is a great human privilege, the ethical enrichment of a natural end.

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