Destruction

Admit it, you’ve read very little fiction for years; you’ve reread favourites, it is true, but only on occasion and always tentatively, nervously, as though you were worried you would disturb something in yourself by continuing.

When was the last time you really read, when you gave day after day to reading, when you read with abandon, with no sense of what would be useful to you, with only the horizon that reading clears before you and the urgency of reading itself carrying you through the hours? When your own future was open and vague enough to form the backdrop upon which your reading could project itself; when your cares were only of the immediate kind; and it was a matter not of your life, your vocation, finding a job or keeping one, but of tomorrow, of the weekend, or the weekend after that?

And now? Is it true that you’ve become settled enough to read? That you can begin to read fiction again because you have made a place for yourself in the world you can wager because you know it is your own? The experience of tragedy depends upon the safety of the audience; you are afraid, but not for your physical well being. Isn’t something of the same true for the sublime, at least for the sublime work of art? Then the work resembles only that theatrical performance which takes place at a distance, away from you. Reading must always take place at arm’s length.

But the books to which you are drawn, those you’ve read over the last few days (Roubaud, Josipovici, Bernhard) do not permit this distance. Then there is a kind of reading that will not allow you to escape: a response, a responsiveness to what reaches and refuses you in the work. For this refusal cannot be held at a distance; the book fascinates, which is to say, it brings you nearer to its unfolding than you can endure.

In one sense, reading is nothing; it leaves everything intact; the world, as you look up from the page, is still the world. A cloud passed over the sun; that was all. But it was as though it took forever to pass. As though, reading, you passed forever through the darkness the work inhabits. As though the sun itself that had gone dark.

This is still too vague. Approach it from another angle. Once you were an avid reader, you wanted the wondrous, the exciting, and you found books to satisfy that demand. You were drawn to genre books and then to the classics; you read until you found yourself enclosed by a small circle of books and it was though you would never leave that circle. Gone, now, was the attraction of the great names of literature; excitement and wonder were not enough; now you could only reread the books which fascinated you because of the way in which they seemed to resist reading. The circle of reading drew tighter; there were fewer works, each with a special obduracy, a stone like resistance. They stood all around you, obscure monoliths. And then it was as though the circle of reading were tightening around your neck.

What happened? What freed you? You found authors who wrote on the authors important to you. The circle widened. Then you found the authors who influenced those authors in turn: philosophers, fearsome creatures. You found yourself on the open plain: philosophy spread everywhere, in all directions. Now there was too much too read; you felt a kind of agoraphobia before this new expanse. You wanted to be enclosed, to find yourself among the great stonelike books and draw the circle of reading around you. Only now it was protection you sought; you were afraid of the infinite expanse of the philosophical library.

Now you sought protection from those mutilated books written at the edges of literature. Books whose characters have lost their way, whose plots run astray in the infinite. Books which seem to write of themselves, of the strange gratuitousness of their own existence. Books which took a detour and took the whole world on that detour. What are their names? Whisper them: Klossowski’s The Baphomet, Bataille’s Le Petit, Blanchot’s Waiting, Forgetting, Duras’s The Ravishment of Lol V. Stein, Artaud’s Collected Works.

What do you find in their pages? A fictional world which frays before you, a worldly expanse which has worn thin and through whose thin fabric you can see the whole night as though shining behind it. A world in whose mundane objects you discover the pull of that night and in whose characters you meet the force of the infinite wearing away. ‘No one here wants to be linked to any story’.

The Baphomet, Le Petit, Waiting, Forgetting: books that do not unfold events as on a stage before you. That do not conjure an imaginary world out of the air. Books in which nothing happens, books with half-characters and suspended suspense. Books in which the nothing-is-happening is happening. For nothing has happened and nothing will ever happen; all you hear is a kind of roaring, a conflagration of language. The black fire which sets fire to itself and all literature. Books that are like anti-arks, books which preserve nothing and destroy everything.

Bliss: you are scattered by these books. You read and you are scattered and so too is literature scattered. There is no longer that ray of intentionality which animates black shapes and the whiteness between them; no longer that magic through which a living world may be born from dead pages. In each of these books, literature comes to an end; a tradition is not so much completed or perfected as destroyed, over and again.

A new fear: you betray these books by returning to them. You should have left them behind as soon as you found yourself in the library of philosophy. For now you return to them armed by what you think you have learnt. Commentator, exegete, everything you write is irrelevant, words added to a movement of writing that was already complete and perfectly closed on itself.