I am writing here, to first, extend my thanks to all who took time and effort to read my material in 2024—here at American Thinker and elsewhere. Those who took care and thought as commentators also deserve a writer’s expressed appreciation.
Writers are notoriously greedy for an audience, and I am no exception. Writers are also, first and foremost, those who learned their craft (or graft) through much time spent as readers.
On writers, equally noted should be the fragility of many vis-à-vis criticism. We are not writers for no reason—fragility is often our middle name and often our cause to rely on the “pen” to communicate from the heart with our fellow men, women, and children. The best writers are generally people lovers—even if they are constitutionally private.
In Victor Hugo’s probably greatest work, The Hunchback of Notre Dame, the author said:
The invention of printing is the greatest event in history. It is the mother of revolution. It is the mode of expression of humanity which is totally renewed; it is human thought stripping off one form and donning another; it is the complete and definitive change of skin of that symbolical serpent which since the days of Adam has represented intelligence.
It is Hugo’s “mode of expression of humanity” which is just as (if not more) important today—we serve not us individual readers and/or writers but as a human community with wrongs to be righted.
Many readers’ and writers’ modes now are chiefly electronic because that is the way of the current world, and follows the printing revolution in time, intent, and universal effect.
I still prefer having a book in hand—especially in bed—rather than reading one at the computer, but after writing professionally for over 40 years as my livelihood, by electronic means, I won’t complain. Our huge technological revolution first showed up at my grants’ research desk in the early 1990s (via a federal government that gave the biggest boost to the internet startup, ironically enough).
Authors don’t generally know much about their readership. So, the introduction of the reader to our work and vice versa, thanks to the internet and its many facets of give and take, intellectually and emotionally, is a great boon to us all.
Especially a boon in these past few years of resistance and revolution. Trump’s rallies were seen and heard here and around the world. Elon Musk freed Twitter, an inexpressibly powerful force, from the chains of federal and corporate domination and restored the people’s voices.
A writer now has a chance to be both heeded and corrected. A reader can speak up and be heard, as in the old days when Charles Dickens’s revolutionary novels were hawked, chapter by chapter, on broadsheets in the lanes of London.
Many credit Dickens for the humanitarian British re-write of its draconian legal system in the early years of the European Enlightenment:
Before becoming the renowned novelist we know, Dickens worked as a stenographer and journalist. It was a path that led him naturally to writing. Dickens’ adventure with writing began in his twenties. His first published work was a series of sketches under the pseudonym Boz.
His early stories were based on the life and characters he observed in London. His early works, notably ‘The Pickwick Papers’, quickly gained popularity, establishing Dickens as a renowned writer in England.
Dickens’ novel Bleak House and its common, public readership, were instrumental in reforming Britain’s High Court, which up until then only took real care of its highest class, and putatively no one else:
In piecemeal but deliberate fashion, judicial reform, structural and procedural, of all England’s courts was achieved by Parliament, due in no small part to Charles Dickens, placing him in the ranks of British legal reformers with Jeremy Bentham and William Wilberforce. Dickens’ reality shaped his fiction and his fiction, in turn, shaped reality.
We have had a slew of readers and writers in the United States who have performed, as well, a Dickensian social service to our country since its start: Theodore Dreyfus, William Penn Warren, John Steinbeck, and Emily Dickinson (through her revolutionary verse), to name just a very few.
Want to talk immigration? Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath was prophetic regarding the crises for our farmers—and our country’s backbone—today:
The narrative, which traces the migration of an Oklahoma Dust Bowl family to California and their subsequent hardships, is interspersed with prose-poem interludes that explain the wider circumstances of the world with which the protagonists contend.
Tom Joad, newly released from prison after serving a sentence for manslaughter, makes his way home, and along the way he is joined by Jim Casy, a former preacher.
The families and workers are exploited by organized business, and Steinbeck uses Christian religious imagery to press his arguments that using cropland as a source of profit for business rather than food for people causes widespread suffering and that political and spiritual unity is necessary to overcome the forces causing the dispossession of farmworkers.
Steinbeck, awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature Prize in 1962, made no bones of his revolutionary intentions as a writer:
Steinbeck plainly stated his purpose in writing The Grapes of Wrath: ‘I want to put a tag of shame on the greedy bastards who are responsible for this [the Depression and the plight of the worker].’
It was the vast readership of The Grapes of Wrath that saved Steinback’s work from the censors.
The communication between readers and writers is inchoate, but just as powerful now as it was in the early 15th century, with Gutenberg:
In 1436 Johannes Gutenberg, a German goldsmith, began designing a machine capable of producing pages of text at an incredible speed—a product that he hoped would offset losses from a failed attempt to sell metal mirrors. By 1440 Gutenberg had established the basics of his printing press including the use of a mobile, reusable set of type, and within ten years he had constructed a working prototype of the press. In 1454 Gutenberg put his press to commercial use, producing thousands of indulgences for the Church. The following year he printed his famous 42-line Bible, the first book printed on a moveable type press in the West.
Harking back to Victor Hugo, our present, computerized means of lifting the veil between writer and reader—of creating a human consensus for humanitarian ends—is the shared gift for and of readers and writers. Our inventive and technological, electronic communications genius sets an even higher bar than its sister—the invention of printing—and encourages our expectations of awesome human liberation in 2025.
Our current “mode of expression of humanity” is alive and well and ready for 2025. Readers, commentors, and writers, in an unbroken circle: go for it.
Victoria White Berger earned her dual B.A. in English and History from Duke University and her M.A. in Philosophy from the University of Missouri at St. Louis. Her Master of Philosophy thesis, “Cause and Reason in Intentional Action” is widely read internationally. Her writing can be found at American Thinker, The American Spectator, Louisiana’s Dead Pelican, and on her Substack account: https://victoriawhiteberger.substack.com/.
image, Pixabay license.
Jesus Christ is King
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