Move it On

I am incapable of the leap into fiction, that much is true. How would I begin? What story could I tell? I learn from Appelfeld and Coetzee the importance of details; the novel must proceed by way of details and observations minutely recorded. This shouldn’t stall the novel (Handke’s No Man’s Bay); isn’t Kafka the master of minutae that moves the story on. There must be movement – plot, incident. Coetzee’s Michael K. moves. Appelfeld’s Bartfuss moves; so does Handke’s Sorger – and the world through which they pass, and their passing, is minutely rendered.

It is true I lack the patience for such rendering. Always the leap into abstraction, as if the world could reveal itself at a stroke, all at once. Always the leap into reflection; description becomes treatise – and not even that: pseudo-philosophy, pseudo-musing anchored in nothing and speaking of nothing. What could I write, assuming I could write something? For what is my non-talent, my obduracy fitted? What I write always bears with it the circumstances of its genesis. The occasional: I cannot exclude the room in which I write, the view from the window. Thereby I remain at the threshold of fiction, unable to begin. But isn’t there a way of carrying the threshold itself into fiction? Isn’t there a way of fictionalising the non-beginning?

I would like to write fiction; I sit down at my desk and my keyboard and the back yard is outside, as disappointing as always. I sit down to write – but I remain on the threshold without crossing it. I am here – but where am I? At the beginning, trying to begin, and unable to advance beyond the beginning. At least Handke can write of the natural world, I tell myself. At least he has the attentiveness and the vocabulary. What patience he must have! But I am impatient; I want to write in grand gestures – to reflect without letting the cogwheel of the plot engages with its material.

Move it on, I tell myself. Begin. But it as though I am fascinated by the act of beginning. To pass across the threshold is an effort too far. Here I am – but where am I? Beginning, not beginning.