The dresser crab encrusts its shell with the disparate materials it finds on the ocean floor. Writing, the raw ‘to write’, clothes itself in whatever it finds. The one for whom words will not come, the beginniner who cannot begin, is like the crab without a shell. The wind that rips across her exposed body is writing. She suffers from writing in the form of non-writing.
But to write, too, is to suffer. The sinners Eden suffer because they are nude; the writer suffers from a surfeit of clothing. Every words exposes you; every sentence you encrust in your shell is a sentence too many. You suffer from non-writing in the form of writing.
Admirable, then, the ones who withhold themselves from writing even as they are sustained by its fascination. For them, to write and not to write would be the same. Admirable the oeuvre Guy Debord did not write; admirable, too, the compressed pieces to which Maurice Blanchot signed his name towards the end of his life.
Marguerite Duras was able to maintain the play of not-writing in her writing. Some say she descended into pastiche or self-indulgence in her later books. I know the opposite is true. Rewriting the stories over and again (The Man Who was Sitting in the Corridor becomes The Malady of Death, which in turn becomes Blue Eyes, Black Hair; there are several versions of The Lover) it is the infinitive ‘to write’ which repeats itself in her writing. As if the story (but there is only ever one story) frayed in its retelling and the ‘to write’ was able to speak of itself. No coincidence that in her very late years, Duras would allow herself to call a book Writing. What daring! What splendour! In that book, not-writing joins hands with writing. Writing says: I barely exist and disappears into the white spaces of the page.
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