2 May /14

Graphomaniac

Of course, the blog also takes up words by special request. Feel free to make your request.

This is why Word of the Day today looks at a relatively rare word which describes a passion for writing. It brings together the Greek grapho (writing) and the Latin mania (mental disorder). Its first use was in 1827 in a satirical magazine put together by medical students in Edinburgh. Its title says it all – we write to make sure almost NOONE will understand it. University Coterie; being violent ebullitions of graphomaniacs, affected by cacoethes scribendi, and famae, sacra fames. And its main idea was to joke about their professors at the university. Ironically one of the main references to this work today is under the website forgottenbooks.org. Today we have Facebook for this.

There are two key men in the area of graphomania – Nordau and Kundera.

Max Nordau was born as a Hungarian Jew who naturally wrote in German and who co-founded the World Zionist Organisation. His most famous work is a work called Entartung which was translated into English as Degeneration in 1892. There he defines those who practised the graphomania as “those semi-insane persons who feel a strong impulse to write” and the writer “having nothing to write about except his own mental and moral ailments”. These people like Nietzsche or Wagner were artists who were contributing to the moral downfall of the generation, also with a strong anti-semi Semitic element and warned of a pending human catastrophe. He was right and ironically the Nazis took up his words to ban “degenerate” art – i.e. almost all art that was modern, but particularly art that was non-German or Jewish.

There is also Milan Kundera who in his The Book of Laughter and Forgetting writes extensively about obsessive writing. It occurs when people are affluent enough to have time for useless activities, where people are isolated and where social change does not occur. He jokes that in France a country where virtually nothing happens there are 21 times more writers than in Israel. In this book, a graphomaniac wants to be read by many. The consequence is that if there are many graphomanics, no-one reads anything at all!