“That is part of the beauty of all literature. You discover that your longings are universal longings, that you’re not lonely and isolated from anyone. You belong.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald
There was a time when literary culture grew out of solitude, from people reading profoundly, observing quietly, reflecting inwardly, and penning down because the thoughts, ideas, and emotions became a passion too heavy and vibrant to keep to oneself, demanding a way out into the world and translating that internal momentum into reality, where silence was no longer an option.
And then there is an era where people like to wear books like perfume, a timeline where literature somewhere ceases to be merely a private intimacy between human thoughts and language, and transforms into an act of posture, costume, and theatre. Where to be literary often becomes a beautiful performance drawn out of the compulsive urge to seem to belong.
From being able to suffer elegantly, speak in fragments that resemble poetry, romanticize loneliness beneath amber lighting, transform pain into prose; to becoming a curated artifact that replaces experience with performance, quotes poets about love while remaining emotionally unavailable in real life, cultivate intellectual depth publicly but are afraid to display vulnerability privately, literature seems to become an art of decoration rather than the artform of transformation. In the urgency of appearing profound, an individual forgets to feel profoundly. Wearing fashionable detached intelligence and carrying irony as a permanent armour, there’s always the dire need to appear sophisticated. Nonchalant about how aesthetically pleasing one’s personal narrative appears to be from the outside, people feel the compulsion to constantly quote their own lives as an exemplary achievement. Social media has helped perfect this theatre, where every author is a character first, every bookshelf has a personality statement, and every highlighted paragraph becomes evidence of sensitivity. The urge is no longer to write, but to appear as someone who belongs among writers. The distinction matters!
As a peculiar phenomenon in contemporary literary spaces, people are increasingly imitating writers not because they are compelled by their work, driven by a love of language, thoughts, or expression, but because literary identity has become a personal validation and a socially desirable aspect for them. Staging intellectualism, keeping books as accessories, carrying quotations as costumes, it is an act of social approval and inclusion rather than an art to be nurtured privately before presenting the literary work to the world. Decorative conversations with references that appear less as insight and more as passwords into cultural circles, the performance overrides the actual work.
While real writing rarely tends to announce itself with such desperation, often arriving awkwardly, carrying uncertainty and roughness of genuine observation, the performance of being literary sounds as though they are auditioning for the role of writer, where the sentences arrive overdressed and eager to impress even before they have anything real to communicate.
Performances, however polished, rarely survive the silence that real writing requires! Elegant imitation lacks sincerity and honesty, whereas writers who endure are non-ornamental, who saw clearly and wrote without disguise. A healthy literary culture builds around people who are genuinely trying to understand life, and not the ones desperately attempting to resemble writers. Literature, after all, was never meant to be an exclusive club of gestures and references but was meant to deepen human attention and connection. The moment there is more focus on appearing literary rather than actual writing, literature begins to thin out with a lack of exploration about life and reality, and more of a performance of refinement.
Despite all this artificiality, something genuinely survives because even performative literature can accidentally lead someone toward truth. A poem quoted for attention, a book purchased only to seem intelligent, or trying to appear literary, may accidentally make someone confess something real or unexpectedly discover a transformative narrative. Or maybe, sometimes, imitation becomes initiation! Pretending to be thoughtful might teach a person how to think, because performance cracks, and through the fracture, authentic feelings seep in. As a paradox of literature, even insincerity could guide us toward sincerity! After all, human beings perform nothing but versions of themselves, as a continuous act of searching for language large enough to contain their loneliness. And perhaps, loneliness is at the centre of all literature! The desire to be understood across impossible distances, across centuries, and across silence. Isn’t literary expression simply a person whispering into darkness, hoping someone else will whisper back: I get it…I have felt this too.
And hence, true literature survives beyond performances, permeating beneath images and beyond sophistication, underneath curated melancholy, and intellectual fashion, touching the trembling interior aspects of life we desperately try to disguise. True writing emerges when a writer allows language to change them, one who reads not to decorate identity but to dismantle it. One who is willing to encounter uncomfortable truths without trying to turn them into aesthetic content. The greatest writings make us less certain of who we are, and perhaps that is the final distance between literature and the performance of literature. Whereas the former deepens the self, the latter merely displays it!
Despite everything, the performance continues….and still, somewhere in the darkness of night where immersive living canvas swallow colors and reawakens the senses, when the performance ends, the audience disappears, and the solitary writer pens down not for appearance or identity or intellectual theatre, but to desperately feel less alone…in that private moment, literature becomes sacred again!
About the Columnist
An HR-turned-Author, proud winner of ‘Top 50 Indian Icon Awards 2025’, Columnist, TEDx Speaker, Speaker (IITs, IIMs), The Times of India Write India Winner, Jyoti Jha has authored, edited, and translated several books in both English and Hindi. Awarded ‘Vidya Vachaspati’ and ‘Dr Shanti Jain Smriti Samman’, ‘Iconic Authors’, ‘Savitribai Phule Raashtriya Samman’, Judge at IITBHU (Kashiyatra), she has conducted Writing Workshops at IITs and NITs. She is the Chief Coordinator, Let’s Inspire Bihar’s Literary Chapter, and Sr Editor, Today Magazine. Known for her bestselling novella ‘Aanandi’, her writings have been featured and published in international anthologies, prominent media houses, prestigious literary magazines, and journals. Her poem has been appreciated by the Karnataka Sahitya Parishad. To help raise awareness at the very core of a caring society, her latest book, ‘Spectrum and Beyond’, is on autism.
