Writing originally simply developed by creating images made of scenes on a cavern wall: chases and often, as they call them, pornographics drawings. The purpose was primarily ceremonial or magical, and when a work is separated from the magic function it losts its all vitality. Furthermore, when a tribe begins to make puppets for tourists, it's all ended. This is what best-sellers are doing - whole entire valleys plenty of puppets and shark-tooth. This could even making money, but it's not magical at all. I know Dalì says that genius is gauged by gold, and i agree that artists should be paid at least like plumbers.
Journalism is nearest to writing's magical roots than lots of fiction. And at least some operator in this area - people like the latest Hearst and Henry Luce - certainly saw much clearly and consciousness journalism like a bewitch act realized to cause determinate effects. And technology is magical technology: in case of newspapers and magazines mainly black magic. They knock pins in somebody's imagine and then show it to milion people. You can see how it's easy, if you're a paper master, put in it fake stories: it happened and continuously happen - expecially the Time to tell the truth.
Starting on being a week early, they literally write news before its happen; that explains why they publish so many false assertion that they could have to step off afterwards. And so you got a retraction from them - but how many people do read a retraction as compared with those who read the wrong tale? You have always heard it: there was a tell around and it said that some hippies in an LSD trip went blind after fixing the sun. Then there was a turndown - the story was a fib. But there was more people that read the new than people that read the retraction so the anecdote is still believed.
William Randolph Hearst had two rules for San Simeon guests: first, whoever housed in there must appear for dinner no matter wich condition he or she is. This is so understandable - otherwise people would stay getting drunken in their room and imitating his manners, and he would lose his control on circumstances. It's the old Army game of Summon Up. And rule number two: nobody can pronounce the DEATH word in the presence of Mr. Hearst. There is a very good magical reason for this command: Mr. Hearst was playing the death part. Play the death part means you have always to be able to affect on others, but they can't never be allowed to affect on you. One comes down clothed as skeleton and the old coul lose his status.
So what's the difference between Mr. Hearst and a novel's writer? I mean a real writer, like Beckett, Genet, Joyce, Hemingway, Conrad, Fitzgerald, Kafka...straightway we have a distinction: can you imagine a writer or an artist who would be scared hearing the DEATH word? For sure I can't. A writer that can't hear that word is not a writer. This can stand just for a fact: he want to portray death but he's not sure about his credentials, as a fake policeman doesn't feel to se a genuine one. Another distinction is liability. Genet says that a writer take the fearful tote of liability for characters he created. They are his own creatures and he's responsabile for them. As opposite to journalists that don't have any kind of responsability. Let them go to hijack an airplane, to kill five women in Arizone, to assassinate the President, and then what happen to them? Who cares? A capital attitude question.