A Light in the Darkness of Knowledge.

(11) Reentry by assault.  The writer-artist makes sure that he is in the world and that he is really by taking on the world, usually by political action and, more often than not, revolutionary.  Even if one is imprisoned by the state—especially if one is imprisoned—one can be certain of being human.  Ghosts can’t be imprisoned.  This stratagem is more available to European writers, who are taken more seriously than American writers.  The secret envy of American writers: Alexander Solzhenitsyn.  Despite their most violent attacks on the state and the establishment, nobody pays much attention to American writers, least of all the state.  To have taken on the state and defeated it, like Solzhenitsyn, is beyond the wildest dreams of the American writer.  Because the state doesn’t care.  This indifference leads to ever more frantic attempts to attract attention, like an ignored child, even to the point of depicting President Johnson and Lady Bird plotting the assassination of Kennedy with Barbara Garson’s MacBird!, or President Nixon having sex with Ethel Rosenberg and being buggered by Uncle Sam in Times Square in Robert Coover’s The Public Burning.

Still, no one pays attention.

A paradigm of this generally failed reentry option: a lonely “radical” American writer standing outside the White House gate, screaming obscenities about this fascist state, dictatorship, exploitation of minorities, suppression of freedom of speech, and so on and on—all the while being ignored by President, police, and passerby.

There are worse thing than the Gulag.

–Walker Percy, Lost in the Cosmos, page 158.

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