Charles Bukowski sui Social Media

Citazioni e reazioni

Abstract

This essay focuses on the reactions to the circulation of aphorisms and quotes from Charles Bukowski’s work available on social media. The detractors of this trend consider themselves admirers of the novelist and essentially object that those who improperly post his sentences are people who misunderstand his poetics and anti-romantic spirit. The article reports and comments some of these reactions and analyzes the text. A central thesis of the text maintains that the critical approach of these reactions undoubtedly captures elements of truth if traced back to the poetics of the writer, but they do not capture a fundamental point: quotes and aphorisms, that circulate on social media, are specific media themselves and they lend to citation in a peculiar way. Tracing the habit of quoting an iconic character of literature to the spirit that accompanies and marks the totality of his production is misleading, because it does not allow us to understand that whoever uses the quotation in turn behaves like a producer of images and captions, and therefore like an author. Perhaps those who quote Bukowski on the web do not necessarily know all of his literature or his place in the literary field. Rather, they express their position in a virtual ethnographic community through vernacular forms of communication, suited to the digital context in which the quote takes shape, to the point of reinterpreting the original meaning of the text in a subjective key.