Joe Moshenska at The Guardian:
What would you prefer: to be forgotten altogether or to be remembered only because you had been wickedly parodied, skewered, by a famous writer? Saul Bellow, for example, filled his novels with richly realised but cruel renditions of people close to him and lost many friends as a result. In Humboldt’s Gift he reinvented the poet Delmore Schwartz as the dissolute and volatile Von Humboldt Fleisher – but the novel is more widely read and admired than Schwartz’s poems. A posthumous insult or a helping hand out of oblivion?
The philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz is at no risk of being forgotten – he routinely appears on lists of the greatest philosophers of his or any age – but he is unusual in that the most famous summary of his thought is taken not from his own work but from the best-known parody of him: the figure of Pangloss in Voltaire’s Candide, who proclaims, in the face of a relentless series of indignities pointlessly suffered, that “all is for the best in the best of all possible worlds”.
more here.
Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating now.