Begin to write – really write – and you can’t stop. Begin – but to write what? Perhaps only to evoke the taste of madeleine on your tongue that first awoke your desire to write. But does that taste exist anymore outside the writing itself? Does it stand above writing in some vital way, as a mountain emerges rocky and snow-capped from the jungle?
The time before I wrote, you could say. The time before I disappeared into writing. Dim memory, but a memory now owed to writing; the mountain top the jungle has enclosed. Look back and you see a sea of words through which there runs a path of churning water – your story, the story you want to tell. But a story that is only a perturbation of the surface of the sea; a path of glistening light that will come to disappear. A path that you’re not sure is even a path, so transient is its appearance -light rocking on the waves.
Isn’t as if you’d written nothing before? As if, like Honda at the end of The Sea of Fertility, nothing that you remembered ever happened. A dry sea, a sea of dust on the surface of the moon – the story you told was nothing but that. And now it’s blowing away, one particle after another. Were you ever here? Did the events of which you wanted to write ever happen? The story wanted you; telling wanted you; but only to disturb the surface of language. Only to let a disturbance pass across the waves like a rumour.
A half-friend of mine married a woman who became a witch and left him. A man visiting our house became a kleptomaniac and proudly displayed in his house the items he had stolen from ours. A lad burnt his nipples away after pouring petrol on his chest and lighting a match. The headless stone saint in the garden, and you and I sitting beside it, a ‘cigarette break’, though I never smoked …
Reading Richard Ford, I remember that great dream I had as a child to narrate a whole day, every part of it. To remember, by narration, what everyone said and did and what I said and did, all of it part of that great indifferent murmuring of the everyday that spread everywhere, from home to home and school to school.
To keep a diary – later: wasn’t it to discover the way language loomed behind everything, obvious, omnipresent? That just as sure as the everyday that seemed to disperse everything – nothing had any weight; as a child I imagined a million children as a thousand times the thousand who sat in assembly – language would lose memory rather than keep it.
Writing was not the prayer that held what happened as between its praying palms. Open palms instead, dandelion clocks blowing off into the afternoon.
Richard Ford. The American page is as wide as the sky, I tell myself. As wide as the whole of American life. You need a book this big not to contain it, but to show it in its dispersal. To let memory, telling sacrifice itself to language telling itself. For isn’t that what returns in these books despite everything else?
Language tells of itself. Language murmurs and laughs by itself, despite everything told, despite everything the story it’s supposed to tell. And that despite or because of its great excess of detail. That because and despite of the concreteness of the details The Sportswriter and the other books remember. The great profusion, the American page where details gives unto detail, where plot is incidental, where things happen like life happens – contingently and without plan.
300 pages into The Lay of the Land, there is old Wade again. We’d met him hundreds of pages ago in another book, in the first of the trilogy. Why does he pop up again now? No why here. Because of some reason or another. His son, says the narrator, had given him a ticket for speeding. And now Wade and he meet up to go to watch demolitions.
Sometimes, as I read I remember what J.G. Ballard said recently: there have been no universal literary classics since Catch-22; no absolute must-reads. The time of literature is over. He’s probably right, and I always wonder who could have a taste for Richard Ford except me, who likes books in which nothing in particular happens, and the prose just rolls on without reason.
And then I think this kind of book comes after something, or before – that it is the dispersing of the path that a ship runs behind it in the water. The dispersal of literature, of everything that literature has been, of all ‘universal classics.’ In some way, writing has attained itself through literature. Has come to itself, but blindly and unknowing, forgetting everything and dispersing it all like the sower of Van Gogh’s great paintings.
All that was told will be untold, and the groove literature left in language will be smoothed over. Language will again be the shining sea across which no path passes. And now I think of Zarathustra’s last men, who have discovered happiness and blink. And of the way they reappear in Kojeve and Fukuyama: last men, capable of everything and of nothing in particular. Whose life is the life of termites and not human beings …
The deeds of the world are slowly disappearing. The suburbs will spread everywhere, and the life of us all will be written on the American page. And all writing henceforward will concern the ordinary, the everyday. There will be nothing of which to write but that. And language, meanwhile, will turn over like a sleeper. And all of literature will have been part of its dream. And everything we’ve done, likewise. And when it awakens, it will face us without a face and look at us with no eyes and speak in great long words that will be our words unravelled.
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