On the internet, ‘humiliating’ is necessary – 01/10/2024 – Sérgio Rodrigues

The internet is that hyperbolic place where no one argues, opposes, debates with another person — everyone “humiliates” the opponent. Or, of course, you are “humiliated” by him, depending on which sector of the virtual stands you are in.

I’ve been thinking about this tendency to exaggerate expression, which I almost call hysteria — and perhaps I should, if not for fear of sounding… hysterical.

Of course, Everyone’s Big Conversation inaugurated in this century by the digital revolution did not invent the mania of shouting about any nonsense. The mismatch in tone between expression and fact is as old as language.

It can even be used to obtain interesting artistic effects, such as when the tone falls short of the drama of the fact — what in English is called “understatement” and which the French-Algerian Albert Camus turns into an epigraph for an era at the beginning of “The Foreigner”: “Today, mom died. Or maybe yesterday, I don’t know exactly.”

The opposite case, in which the tone tries to heat up a reality that is at best lukewarm with red-hot words, is more likely to be found in common language than in art — unless irony comes into play, of course.

Everything indicates that this is an all-too-human sin. From innocent hyperbole like “thirsty” and “hunger blue” to the “humiliation” and “destruction” that surround any clash of opinions on the internet, it is possible that there is a continuous line.

However, there may be something more. The idea came to me while reading a delicious book that came out last year in Brazil, called “Correio Literário” (Âyiné). The same name as the column in a Polish weekly newspaper in which the poet Wislawa Szymborska (1923-2012) gave advice to readers who sent her manuscripts for evaluation.

“It’s not the first time — it’s probably been seven hundred and eighty-nine times — that we’ve warned that the use of exaggerated terms weakens the whole thing or produces an effect totally unwanted by the author,” she says in response to a poor guy.

“In your narrative, apparently apocalyptic things occur: someone ‘smashes’ the doorknob with his hand, although instead it should just say that he squeezed the doorknob hard. The train, of course, shoots ‘like crazy’ — Does this mean that we will soon have a catastrophe? Nothing, we soon discover that he arrives at the station and, moreover, late.”

Don’t stop there. The exaggeration demands ever greater doses: “The wind ‘blows furiously’, someone feels ‘hell’ inside them, the girl at the station is standing ‘like a statue of pain’, and, to be even more terrible, it is a statue ‘struck by lightning'”.

Wislawa delays the coup de grace with which (ahem) he humiliates the exalted consultant: “And then it turns out that everyone is alive, walking, eating, starting a family and absolutely nothing happened.”

Okay, but what does the “humiliation” that goes around the internet, even fighting straws, have to do with this? It’s a hypothesis: if exaggeration of tone is a common trap for those starting to write literature, perhaps it’s also something that the scribe with a billion heads who inhabits the networks will overcome when he learns to write?

After all, in historical terms, the species has barely started babbling its first memes. You need to give it some time. It remains to be seen if there is time, on this planet that is racing like crazy towards annihilation, feeling hell inside itself, as if it had been struck by lightning. What humiliation!

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