"If you like to read, sometimes it's interesting just to go and see what the reality is, of the word, of the seedy or not so seedy fiction writer, the drunk or sober poet... Sometimes you can go looking for illumination"
About this Quote
Brodkey is needling the tidy fantasy that books arrive in the world scrubbed clean of bodies. He starts with the readerly impulse - curiosity about "the reality" behind the word - then immediately muddies it: the writer might be "seedy or not so seedy", the poet "drunk or sober". The point is not to gossip; its to admit that literature is haunted by its makers, and readers sometimes want to test the magic trick by looking under the table.
The pairing of moral and behavioral toggles (seedy/not, drunk/sober) reads like a smirk at our crude categories. We pretend we want art, but we keep circling the artist as evidence: Was the work earned? Is it authentic? Is the voice "real"? Brodkey frames this as "interesting", not virtuous, which is his subtle honesty. He doesn't dress up voyeurism as scholarship; he just observes the pull.
"Illumination" lands as both promise and bait. Go looking for the author in the flesh and you might get insight - or just a harsher light that flattens the work into biography. Coming from Brodkey, a writer whose own life and illness became part of his public narrative, the line carries a wary self-awareness: the author-as-spectacle can be a shortcut to meaning, but it can also become the meaning.
The sentence meanders the way curiosity does, with ellipses doing the work of temptation. Brodkey suggests that reading is already a kind of stalking across surfaces; sometimes you want to push past the page, not to debunk the word, but to see what kind of human weather produced it.
The pairing of moral and behavioral toggles (seedy/not, drunk/sober) reads like a smirk at our crude categories. We pretend we want art, but we keep circling the artist as evidence: Was the work earned? Is it authentic? Is the voice "real"? Brodkey frames this as "interesting", not virtuous, which is his subtle honesty. He doesn't dress up voyeurism as scholarship; he just observes the pull.
"Illumination" lands as both promise and bait. Go looking for the author in the flesh and you might get insight - or just a harsher light that flattens the work into biography. Coming from Brodkey, a writer whose own life and illness became part of his public narrative, the line carries a wary self-awareness: the author-as-spectacle can be a shortcut to meaning, but it can also become the meaning.
The sentence meanders the way curiosity does, with ellipses doing the work of temptation. Brodkey suggests that reading is already a kind of stalking across surfaces; sometimes you want to push past the page, not to debunk the word, but to see what kind of human weather produced it.
Quote Details
| Topic | Writing |
|---|---|
| Source | Help us find the source |
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