An interesting long interview by J.G. Ballard from 1974 (via Ballardian).

The whole notion, the distinction between fiction and reality, is turned on its head. The external environment now is the greatest provider of fiction. I mean, we are living inside of an enormous novel, written by the external world, [by] the worlds of advertising, mass-merchandising, politics conducted as a branch of advertising, and so on and so forth. The one node of reality left to us is inside our own heads.

He’s then asked whether this correlates to the idea of ‘inner space’ mentioned elsewhere to Ballard (and so important to other New Wave science fiction writers). He now nuances idea of interiority:

I suppose we are moving into a realm where inner space is no longer just inside our skills but is the terrain we see around us in everyday life. We are moving into a world where the elements of fiction in that world – and by that fiction I mean anything invented to serve imaginative ends, whether it is invented by an advertising agency, a politician, an airline or what have you; and these elements have now crowded out the old-fashioned elements of reality.

He is interrupted by his interviewer, but continues:

What I am saying is 20 0r 30 years ago the elements of fiction, that is politics within the consumer society or within one’s private life, occupied a much smaller space. I can’t quantify this exactly but it was sort of 50/50. But now I don’t think this is the case. I think we have seen the invasion of almost every aspect of our lives by fictions of one kind or another. We see this in people’s homes – the way they furnish their houses and apartments. Even the sort of friends they have seem to be dictated by fictions, fantasies, by standards invented by other people to serve various ends, not necessarily commerical. But we’re living more and more in a hot mix of fictions of every kind.

Now I think the writer’s job is to – he no longer needs to invent the fiction, the fiction is already there. His job is to put in the reality. The writer’s task now is to become much more analytic – he’s got to approach the subject matter, and especially the science-fiction writer because I think he’s the most important of all writers – he’s writing the true literature of the 20th century, the only important one.

Ballard now speaks of the role of the science fiction writer being analogous to a scientist – proposing hypotheses, such as that entertained in Crash, that car crashes might have some ‘beneficial role’, and applying them to the subject matter of fiction.

Putting in the reality – what does this mean? Trying to discover how people – his or her characters – might live in this new domain? Then the task of science fiction (speculative fiction) is to discover forms of individuating that are already happening. To hypothesise just as we are all hypothesising with our lives with respect to how we might live in our new world.

Literature and Artifice

I like Waggish’s comments on Gene Wolfe’s work – I admit, however, that I find his prose entrancing; I’ve reread The Book of the New Sun twice not only because I love Severian’s picaresque adventures, and thinking about the riddles Wolfe seems to set us, but because of those winding sentences – because I love the narrator’s voice. Is it right to point out that the games of the unreliable narrator are just games – that there is no reason why we are prevented from assessing the truth of what is told us?

This is what Waggish finds frustrating, and says has separated Wolfe from other genre writers who have won mainstream literary acclaim. At one point, I remember, Severian, the narrator, tells us he knows he is mad; I underlined the sentence as I read it; I thought: this is important; something will be made of this. But the end, nothing was; the fiction remains untouched by madness – how different, then, to Priest’s The Affirmation (see Mumpsimus’s remarks) which, like The Book of the New Sun, I have read three times in all.

I’ve always found Wolfe’s preface to Endangered Species (a much weaker collection than The Island of Doctor Death and Other Stories and Other Stories, as most of his later books are weak) disingenuous: his stories are just stories told around the campfire that is the sun. As Peter Wright’s thorough Attending Daedelus shows (scroll down the comments for a summary) I think quite convincingly, The Book of the New Sun and its sequel are about artifice, about fabrication. Even the hierodules are idolators, false angels imitating the Creation without being themselves creators. It takes Patera Silk of The Book of the Long Sun to come into contact with the one genuinely Outside. Severian never reaches the one called the Outsider – or not that I remember. Silk does – albeit in a series far weaker than the New Sun (I’ve never read my way through to the Short Sun books).

The Outsider, of course, is God. God beyond games, beyond the idolatry of Pas (of Typhon). And now I ask myself about Steve’s comments on the relationship between literature and genre, wondering whether genre is content to remain fictional; to construct a world, to dwell with its characters in it; for event to succeed event in a rich linearity.

There is nothing wrong with this – of course not. But there is another kind of writing – and what Steve calls literature refers for those books for whom The Outsider is not God. For whom, then, fiction gives onto the unencompassable Outside as it names language, as it names the world. ‘All works form a genre in coming into existence’, says Steve. They form a body; they take on plot and character; they offer themselves to be read. But ‘resistance to genre marks the literary’: then plotting and characterisation must themselves be at stake in the fictional work. Then fiction, artifice must be shown for what they are. The writer is an idolator, not because there is a God, or that God could name the Outside. The writer is an idolator because of that Outside, which admits only of idolatry, that will not allow for any other means of approach.

Is this what Wolfe tells us in The Urth of the New Sun, when it becomes clear that the hierodules, whose name means temple slaves, are mere artificers, following an evolutionary imperative? Is it that there is only idolatry, sham creation? Or is there a way in which the Outside can speak itself via the same artificing – that it breaks the surface of the novel, as when we understand in The Affirmation that the fiction is only idolatry, even as it is the only way to bring the Outside to speech? A resistance to genre – I wonder if Urth, otherwise so unsatisfactory, rises to this when the hierodules are revealed to be botched makers like ourselves, not gods, as Wright’s innovative and ingenious reading shows us? In the end, however, I think Waggish is right (see also his comparison between Priest to Wolfe in this earlier post): Severian may be a liar, he may be mad, but the book itself is terribly sane, remaining but a particularly lovely artifice among other idolatrous artifices.

The Last Récit

One might take Blanchot to be an altogether calmer writer than Bataille; after all, he has at his disposal a pellucidly readable style – his essays are written in the serenest French. But his fiction – and in particular, his récits – places the same clear style at the service of the most opaque of thoughts.

Who has not had the experience, reading of him, of being unable to discern what is happening in the events he reports, and especially in the second half of some of his récits, where everything becomes unclear: who is speaking?, what is happening? Still, although most of the récits are written in the first person, and it is tempting to reflect on their autobiographical origins, it may seem that Blanchot holds us apart from his life; that his fictions are like the multiple rooms the narrator of Death Sentence rents at the same time.

Rooms, spaces that must be left to cultivate an absence undisturbed even by him, the narrator – he likes to muse upon the absence in those rooms he has rented, and does not like to receive visitors in order to preserve what he can of absence in the apartment in which he is currently domiciled. Absence – now conceived as it pushes itself into experience, as it asks to be experienced as the most vehement of presents.

Blanchot’s narrators will call it cold, vast – the rooms and his corridors in his fiction seem to expand to encompass the whole universe; how is it possible even to cross such a room? how many steps will it take? But each step, too, is a step not beyond – it is the absence of movement, its paralysis, an arrest that also fascinates Blanchot and that he will let his narrators present as a dying without term.

Where is Blanchot in all of this? Is he the narrating ‘I’? Is he the one who speaks, or looks to discover himself speaking – or, beyond that, to listen to the other side of language as it speaks – the ‘it speaks’ that resounds, murmuring beyond anything you or I might say. I refer to that thickness of literary language which he often evokes – a kind of density that removes, in fiction what an author had intended to write. A literary remove – the space of literature as it simultaneously expels the author and solicits him, asking for books to write themselves from his pen, even as it burns blackly beyond him as the work, unseizable and, in its distance, free.

Let me say too quickly that it is this same distance that absents Blanchot’s récits, that seems to void them, denucleating them, drawing their reader to that point that seems to maintain itself at its distance. And that it must absent them for him, too, according to his own literary criticism – that Blanchot is certainly the author who completes his books, has them published, and refuses to publicise them in interviews, or appear in public, but that he is also the adventurer who is lost in the detour of his fiction – of a kind of literary desert, far greater than the Biblical one, that aches, vast and absent, on every page of his work.

And now imagine Blanchot, like the narrator of Death Sentence, revelling in the absenting of himself he accomplished in his fictions. Imagine him, writing another one – one more récit – and happy in that absence he has already effected, in those books that bear his name but that also tear it apart.

Who is he, the writer? Not the author who lives in the world, in an apartment in a prestigious suburb of Paris. Not the one only a few friends saw, who lived surrounded by photographs of friends, it is said, and who was gradually losing his ability to hold a pen. Blanchot the writer lives in that absence that burns in his books and comes to us in that suspension when our reading asks in vain for linear continuity, and his récits seem to fall back into a language that absents itself from all reference to the world.

From all reference – and yet, and yet … The narrator of Death Sentence says little of the events of the war. That’s not what concerns him, he says. Tiny, seemingly insignificant events impose themselves on the second part of his narrative. The first is almost a well-rounded tale; it bears upon an event that barely seems to complete itself; the death of J., the dying of J. And the second? Event links to event in an obscure, almost free-associational pattern. But there’s an urgency to the telling, a sense of movement. Something important is being communicated. Something great significance asks to be said.

If it is to do so, it is by way of reference, of the measure of some literary verisimilitude; the world of Death Sentence, though removed from us in time and space, is still our world; we can make our way across the narrative, which is composed almost entirely of concrete events and only occasionally breaks into that strange abstraction that comprises the second half of the fictions that follow.

‘Virgil, that’s Broch’, says Blanchot in his reading of The Death of Virgil. And who is the narrators of his fiction? Who writes his criticism? What speaks in his narrative? What rumbles there? The war? No – beyond the war. Beyond the world. Or an absence that devours it from within. A hovering, an incompletion – isn’t it language, somehow, that is allowed to speak? Language, and so that what is told becomes an allegory of what cannot be told, or that speaks only indirectly?

There is nothing ‘behind’ the details of the narrative. A book proceeds. Characters, plot – there is still something of these in Death Sentence. And yet what, too, speaks by way of them? What seems to cloud the clarity of speech – what great opacity, what looming cloud that obscures the sun? Blanchot, that’s Monsieur X. – that’s all we learn of the narrator’s name: X. – but as it marks what spot?

The work is freeing itself from the book. The work – the unseizable that draws after it all writers, all readers for whom literature vouchsafes itself in its remove. The work – and it burns beyond Death Sentence now. Burns – and after we put the book down, after we read the final sentence. It is over – but it is not over. There is something unreadable in reading, as Steve reflects. Books like Death Sentence (but are there many of those?) are still as though untouched by reading; they remain perpetually uninhabited – room-husks that ache with absence that is our own absence; mirrors in which we cannot see ourselves. ‘Read me’. ‘You will not read me’.

To be the Message …

Alexander Irwin’s Saints of the Impossible is a thorough, engaging book, at once sympathetic to the authors under discussion – Bataille, Weil – but also critically independent of them. I think that it is this independence that troubles me, since they are authors, as Irwin shows us, who sought not only to communicate a message, but to ‘be the message: to put into reader’s hands a text consubstantial with the writer’s own self, to live a life crafted as a vehicle of poetic, spiritual and political meaning’.

To be the message – to write, for that message to be ‘revolt’, in Weil’s case, and never, she says ‘the exercise of power’; like Bataille, she realises what Irwin calls a ‘literary sainthood’ – transmitting an attitude, a ‘style of existence, an orientation that perhaps cannot be  precisely verbalised, but whose emotional atmosphere the "addressee" absorbs (by "contagion", as Bataille would have it) though the hagiographic text’.

To write as a saint – to consecrate one’s life in writing – both writers call on their readers to do something similar; both write, then, the equivalent of Ignatious’s Spiritual Exercises. Inner Experience is a kind of self-martyrdom, a ‘written performance of the text’, as Irwin calls it, but it is essential to understand that it aims at results – at a kind of conversion of the reader that can happen only insofar as the reader in turns lives the experience the book incarnates.

How extraordinary that this book, Bataille’s first full length publication by a major publisher, comes out in the early years of the war! ‘The date on which I begin to write (September 5, 1939) is not a coincidence. I am beginning because of the events, but not in order to talk about them’: the first line of Bataille’s Guilty, which followed Inner Experience into print. What, then, does he talk about? Mystical experience, apparently – a kind of inner war (even if the notion of interiority is called into question), wherein Bataille writes ‘with my life‘, keeping open what Irwin calls ‘a laceration of consciousness’ – a ‘wound’ Bataille offers others ‘as the basis of an obscence and "intoxicating" communication’. And it is this wound that he offers as an alternative to the civilisation that has revealed itself in the real war around him. A wound – a style of living, of writing, a ‘mystico-literary self-stylisation’, as Irwin calls it, whose writing has taught him, ‘I am not a philosopher, but a saint, maybe a madman’.

A saint, a madman – it would take such a non-philosopher to show how the war was also a response to this wound (not Bataille’s, of course, but one that constitutes human existence); that what appears to be politics has, in fact, a religious and aesthetic dimension. All this Irwin explores these topics thoroughly and fair-mindedly; I read the book greedily, all at once, but I remained troubled, too by the author’s very ability to situate Bataille and Weil within a tradition.

Irwin writes of a long French tradition in which the writer is upheld as an exemplar – as ‘sacred’. The example of Pascal, for example, whose work underwent a revival in the 1920s, Iwrin tells us, particular by way of Bataille’s friend Chestov, combines literary brilliance with a quest for salvation. The post-Romantic avant-garde had comprised its own tradition of holy figures – Rimbaud, of course, as both poet and seer, but also Sade, in whose work several of Bataille’s friends were interested, as well as Poe, Baudelaire and others. At the same time, in the 20s and 30s, the Surrealists produced books like Nadja and Paris Peasant, in which they presented their own meanderings around Paris, their encounters and experiences as a kind of template of Surreal existence.

Literary self-stylisation, then, was a commonplace in the Paris in which Bataille and Weil wrote. In the same period, it was assumed quite widely, and in very disparate camps that political turbulence had spiritual roots; religious and aesthetic discourse were immediately relevant to the concerns of interwar France. Come the second world war, and Bataille’s retreat to ‘mystico-literary self-stylisation’, to a solitary written performance after a turbulent decade working alongside others in various avant-garde groups, does not seem, in this context, so surprising.

His work issues from a tradition; the revival of Pascal, the avant-garde canonisation of Sade and Rimbaud, the minutely rendered accounts of their life by prominent Surrealists – but why does this trouble me? There are writers I would like to think cannot merely be contextualised by their times, but seem to contextualise it in turn; writers who do not simply belong to history, to the great procession of events, but who send history strangely off course. Writers, then, that come at me from another angle – that are not part of the world and the account of the world I recognise.

It is as if they spoke from a higher, wilder place – that, from some promontory above the storms they write by the light of the most distant stars. And that they reach me – that their books found me, that I came across them, one after another, as stepping stones that would lead to a place behind the world, as though you could pull open a curtain and disappear. And I have felt that to read them was always secret, sacred – that their books demanded to be kept apart and away from others.

But from Irwin I understand that I am only a convert – or that what I want is to be converted, for reading to also become a kind of self-stylisation. And that I stand in a long line of those who want to be converted – reader-believers, and readers who want to believe most of all in a power of a certain kind of writing … and that, like them, I share the great naivety that there is an importance to writing beyond that of writing – that, as Bataille thought, his inner war made him the most qualified of all to understand the secrets of the outer one that raged about him.

It is difficult not to conclude that, beyond its challenge to specific forms of political oppression, Weil’s and Bataille’s cultivation of sainthood marks a virulent contestation of the human condition as such. That such a generalised feeling of outrage could surge up among people living an ‘epoch deprived of a future’ is stil perhaps understandable.

But we, who hope to have a future still before us, may judge the ‘attraction to the impossible’ celebrated by Bataille and Weil as sheer romantic hubris. We may see here an effort to cloak with exalted words what is at bottom a puerile refusal to soil one’s hands with the inevitably messy, frustrating business of merely ‘possible’ politics and ordinary, ‘unsacrificeable’ existence.

And yet, and yet … Why is it I think Bataille and Weil should be approached only by another writer-saint? Why do I dream idly of a book written at the level of their thought, their life, their writing?

Simone Weil sought to turn her life into poetry. To live – to be willing to die – as the leader of a cadre of frontline nurses in occupied territory. This was in January 1943 – arriving in London from the USA where she escaped occupied France with her parents, it is physical danger she craves, to be parachuted behind enemy lines, or to care for the wounded in the thick of battle. Instead – what disappointment! – she is found clerical work for the Free French organisation.

Still, over the next four months, she finds time to write some of the work for which she is most famous – reflecting on theology and religion, translating sections of the Upanishads, analysing Marxism; 800 pages spring forth from her pen. At the same time, she reflects on force – her abiding concern – reading advanced mathematics and physics. Alexander Irwin, from whom this account is drawn, writes:

The manuscripts show that Weil’s handwriting flowed with an almost supernatural steadiness, rapidity, and assurance in this period: page after page streaming out virtually without hesitations or corrections. She often worked around the clock, staying through the night in the office in Hill street or walking home long after the last Underground train and continuing to work in her apartment for several more hours, all the while coughing steadily and violently.

The force and substance of her life were poured in an almost literal way into the writing that filled her notebooks, in a procedure reminiscent of the transmutations and requalifications of matter and energy on which she speculated obsessively in her metaphysical texts. The physical collapse that occurred on April 15, 1943, was surprising only in having been so long in coming. Weil had written herself to the brink of death.

Weil is diagnosed with tuberculosis. Hospitalised, though refusing the treatment that might help her, she undertakes to eat only as much as those rationed in France. She dies on August 24th, 1943.

A Reading Biography

However I would tell it, my ‘reading biography’ would lead only to the point where reading fell into itself like a waterfall: where I met books whose surface lacked the left-right and top-down direction that drew the eye across the pages. It was not that my eyes stopped scanning, or that the pages stopped turning, but rather that reading was in some vital sense suspended – that meaning, as it would be born from the page, was turned into a kind of wandering, across the same pages that drew my eyes across them.

Reading and non-reading, both at once – I read, now, in response to what fascinated me in the interval into which reading, meaning seemed to plunge. It was books in which I’d find that same plunging that I sought – books as they were ringed around a waterfall, the fall of reading into itself. A reading-adventure that has continued to this day, with sudden openings – the discovery of the work of an author new to me (Ford, McCarthy) and blockages – say, my recent reading of Handke’s Crossing the Sierra de Gredos, about which I wholly concur with Steve, or the bloated circus-tent of Sebald’s Austerlitz: books gone wrong somehow – in each case, an author parodies himself; he has become grand, indulged, a prominent man of letters writing his magnum opus … What boredom! Bernhard, say always had the sense never to fall into that trap, and Blanchot never relaxed his vigilance. And think of Duras, writing all the way up to death …

Still, there is the surprise that I would never involve myself in the clash between what is called literary and what is called genre fiction (I was always a reader of science fiction) – or feel a proud vindication, seeing Ballard revered, or Dick; or Crowley receiving his due, or Wolfe (the early Wolfe, up to 1983 or so …) But also a kind of reassurance – a reading-confidence that allows me to pick up and put down a book forever whose first page I find disagreeable. Do I know what I want? I know, rather what I don’t want and can happily lead myself by my own hand past the walls of books in a bookshop.

Still, there is no question but that I should have abandoned the Handke earlier – and have given up Austerlitz almost at once. Misplaced faith – an author can go wrong, can take a wrong turn, and the worst one is into the magnum opus, the massive book, the authoratitive book, that would draw all the strands of an authorship together. Laughter: Mishima was right to make his magnum opus, if that was what it was, from four separate novels; or perhaps he’d learnt his lesson from Kyoto’s House, as I understand that book from his biographer’s accounts.

Many of my admired authors have a small pallette of concerns, of moods, of characterisation, of plot. A small palette, painting dark grey on black – but that is enough, for it is in the wearing away of plot, of character, in the exacerbation of mood that I find I can discover that kind of non-reading, the inward waterfall that draws me to its edge.

Bergman complained Tarkovsky came to make Tarkovsky films – but then the same can be said of Bergman, whose characters often have the same surname and run uneasily into one another. Bernhard writes Bernhard books, and Duras, and Blanchot … they may seem to concentrate themselves into an idiom, making themselves dense, but it is rather a wearing away that they accomplish and that is their accomplishment: idioms worn out, idioms stretched finely over nothing.

Duras characters, say, weep too much; Bernhard’s intellectuals are all exactly the same, and write the same way; and with Blanchot – like Beckett – the sense that the books, lined up, constitute one long line of research, an exercise – but in a kind of authorial disappearance. To say, ‘I’m not here’; to let writing be present, to present itself; to let language thicken and congeal there where plot and characterisation seem to wear themselves away to nothing.

A reader’s biography. Regret as I read Kundera’s The Curtain, and know the books he commends are too rich for my tastes; they show too much, these epics, these big narratives. I want the door of fiction to open only a chink; I do not want a fictional world, but only a portion thereof. Green’s Concluding, say. Echinoz’s Ravel. I don’t think much of my taste, which seems to have become obsessional. How did I lead myself into this dead end?, I ask myself. How did I come up against this closed door? But then I am glad for my obsessive’s confidence – that a bookshop, a library, is something I can navigate, that I have a faculty of judgement by which I can claim or dismiss a book, even it sometimes goes awry.

What am I looking for as I read?, I ask myself. The opposite of a mirror. A surface that refuses me. A page written as though under glass. Can I read? Am I reading? But sentences, nevertheless, that draw me with them – a kind of suspense even in the absence of intrigue. A suspended reading – not boredom, but – what? A wandering of reading in itself. A kind of plunge, Niagra’s horseshoe of water plunging, roaring. 

Dying in Death

To give life to a book – to render it vivid, exciting; to let reading rush quickly over its pages, and run breathless to its end. A book is made of words, dead things, or things that depend on a kind of death – negation, the departure from its referents. Then its life is only a simulacrum of living; its vivacity is borrowed.

The writer-virtuoso can let a fictional world quiver into life. Above the book like a hologram: a world, a plot, characters. But what of the non-virtuoso for whom nothing quivers up? What of the writer who would plunge death into a dying that never permits of the making of a fictional world?

Dying lays down in death. The words no longer speak of the world, and the book is a surface. You can read, but what is it that you read? You eyes pass over a surface, but what is it over which they pass? A frozen space; a glass. Reading suspended in reading. Reading lost in reading. Where has your attention wandered? Over what blind surface is it lost?

The Doorway

The page as a doorway. The page the gate that swings the book open. Walk with me, says the book. A rich and fleshed-out fictional world is conjured; a plot that excites you; characters about whom you care. The book is a path.

But what, now, when the doorway opens onto another door? Or is it the door that you read – the page as the door, that forbids you access? And now imagine the narrative, a fictional world, a plot, characters, that are written as against that door, who are only as real as your bright room reflected in a night-black mirror: turn off the light, and they are gone. Turn it off, and there is only the night.

Wanting-to-Say

A sentence wants to be written. Which sentence? ‘A sentence wants to be written’. What does it mean to invoke the wanting-to-say of words? ‘I would like you to write me’, say that. ‘I would like to be written’ – who speaks? Language – but as it turns from what you would want it to say. Language, now, without the ‘I’ at its centre. Unoccupied, murmuring, concerned with itself – but it asks, still to be written.

‘Write me. Let me be written, so that I can return to myself on the page’. Why does language ask for this detour? Why must it exist in order to suspend itself from existence? ‘I want to disappear. Write me so that I can disappear’.

Disappearance – there are words, to be sure. One sentence, another, that you can read, and that make sense. But is there a way of letting their meaning fall from itself? A way of turning meaning aside, of sending it on a detour? Then reading and not-reading would exist both at once.

‘Read me; but you cannot read me. Draw close to me, and I will retreat’. I would like to come close to you, say that. I would like to be able to read you. Why is it, as I read, that the page seems to turn its face away from me? Why does the page turn, gazing only into itself? ‘I am not here’, says the page. I am here and not here, both at once.

The Post-Its

‘Buy bleach’. Notes written to yourself. Notes you forgot you sent to yourself. They crossed time without you. A few days – and there they are, notes on yellow post-its, some faded, some older than a few days.

‘Buy bleach’ – did you remember to buy bleach? Did you remember to remember? Because you’ve written a second note, ‘buy bleach’. A second note on a less faded post-it.

The light falls on them there, the post-its with their bottom edges curling upwards, aslant from the window above the door. Falls and fades them like the fading of memory: did you remember to remember? Did you remember to buy bleach?

The Hallway

Catch sight of yourself in the mirrored door of the bathroom cabinet. Catch sight – there, the door opened and turned to the hallway, and you coming up the hallway (not far, a single step, a step and a half).

What did you see? A grey teeshirt, a face, and darkness behind. What time is it? Night, the depths of night. Night falling away within night. I can’t sleep. Who is it that cannot sleep?

A teeshirt and a face, unexpectedly. I am in the corridor, it’s me – it took time to see that. Coming up the corridor, one step, another – time and an interstice in time, as I forgot who it was, and who was seeing.

The Corner

In the corner of the bathroom, up to the right – the paper stripped away to plaster, and the plaster darkened from an old leak, and then the plaster too stripped away. A breeze block of some sort, and it too darkened. It’ll have to be repaired. New plaster for the corner, and then painted over.

I’m being watched from that corner, that’s what I imagine. Watched – from the wall, and from the other side of the wall. The mystery of the flat is concentrated there. The flat, falling through time, falling through me, speaks to me there in long, slow words that will not finish.

Apocalypse – when will you see things are they are? When will you be seen as you are? There before the corner. There, seen by the corner’s eye. Seen, unseen. Seen by what forgets you, and does not see.

The Fact of Language

Language cannot appear as what it is; it cannot speak itself, the fact of its own communication; it cannot reach back into its own origin. It comes in every other guise than itself – in a fiction, for example, in the form of incident, of character. But how, nevertheless, to join writing to writing? How to let a fiction speak – provisionally, hintingly – of what language is?

By doubling, in the narrative, the what-it-is of the world – for the same dissimulation rules its coming-to-appear. By affirming the erosion of the world as it would double the erosion of representational language. The origin of the world – the fact that it is, and the fact that this fact is irreducible to what is experienced – finds its correlate in the origin of language. Both origins are entwined in the passion of narrative, in the fraying of a fictional world.

What is meant by world? That contexture of relations that gather things into a meaningful whole. A contexture ordered by a sense of the possible, of the future that is possible there, even when it takes the form of a fiction. Mr Darcy can propose to Miss Bennett; it is eminently possible. Alice can shrink and grow. What of the origin of the world? The collapse of the sense of the possible, of the possible as sense. It becomes impossible even to cross a room. Can this impossibility be spoken directly in fiction? Only in terms of the possible – only as it breaks the measure of the self for whom things can be done. Narration, say. Crossing a room, say. Thus the kind of paralysis that seems to strike the narrators of Blanchot’s récits.

What is meant by language? In one sense, what enables communication; what allows things to be expressed. It overlays the possibility that governs the sense of the world. But in another, and understood as origin, it is what the first sense of language cannot communicate as its condition, as its possibility. Language, that is to say, cannot speak that it is; it cannot speak the fact of its own existence. Or if it is to do so, it is only by way of the possibility that language affords – that is, by way of that faith in sense upon which language depends.

The prose of Blanchot’s récits is clear, pellucid at the level of the phrase. But at the level of the sentence, the paragraph? Who understands what’s going on? How would you paraphrase the ‘action’ of the second half of The Last Man, or The One Who …? It is not that Blanchot abandons clarity, but he lets it speak of what is too great to communicate. And this takes the form, in his narratives, of the impossibility of action, of clear thought, of the endurance of the form of the ‘I’.

Likewise in his essays on writers. He is concerned not only with the accomplishments (and unaccomplishments) of a particular fiction, but the life of those authors who sensed the demand of the fact of language. The reading of Kafka, say, passes by way of a review of his hesitations about writing, his dreams of leaving it behind for Palestine, for marriage. The reading of Rilke of the search for the ‘proper’ death writing deprived him. These essays, like Blanchot’s fiction, speak of the origin of language – they let it speak. And in this sense, there can be no absolute generic difference between the essays and the fictions, and it should be no surprise that they eventually come together in fragmentary works.

Each time, it is a matter of the récit, of that French genre concerned retrospectively, musingly with a past event. Each time, with Blanchot’s writings, the origin of language, as it is entwined with the origin of language, of the world that takes the place of that event. The origin of language speaks by way of the origin of the world. And does it work the other way around? Isn’t there a kind of mirror play between both senses of origin, as each can only substitute for the other? It is not ultimately with reference, with the meaning-to-say with which his writings are concerned, that should be clear. Unless there is sense of reference that points to what cannot be said, and of a meaning-to-say that no longer refers back to narrator or author.

Van Velde on Painting

Painting is an eye, a blinded eye that continues to see, and sees what blinds it.

All the paintings I have made, I was compelled to make. You must never force yourself. They make you and you have no say in it.

Yes, I abandoned everything. Painting required it. It was all or nothing.

Painting is being alive. Through my painting, I beat back this world that stops us living and where we are in constant danger of being destroyed.

I paint the impossibility of painting.

In this world that destroys me, the only thing I can do is to live my weakness. That weakness is my only strength.

No country, no family, no ties. I didn’t exist anymore. I just had to press on.

All these exhibitions…. People put out their hands to you, and when you try to take them, there’s nobody there.

I do not see this world. But my hands are tied, and that’s why it frightens me.

Dead days are more numerous than live ones.

An artist’s life is all very fine and moving. But only in retrospect. In books.

I am on the side of weakness.

The artist has no role. He is absent.

Most people’s lives are governed by will-power. An artist is someone who has no will.

Painting doesn’t interest me.

What I paint is beyond painting.

I am powerless, helpless. Each time, it’s a leap in the dark. A deliberate encounter with the unknown.

When I look back at a recent painting, I can hardly bear the suffering in it.

I never try to know.

Everything I’ve painted is the revelation of a truth. And therefore inexhaustible.

I never know where I’m going.

The hardest thing is to work blind.

In the normal way, nothing is possible. But the artist creates possibilities where almost none exist.

It’s because artists are defenceless that they have such power.

Yes, he agrees, he is tending to lose all individuality.

Painting lives only through the slide towards the unknown in oneself.

My pictures are also an annihilation.

I am a watered down being.

I am a walker. When I’m not working, I have to walk. I walk so I can go on working.

Van Gogh? … He was a beacon. Not like me. I just feel my way in the dark. But I am good at feeling my way.

What is so wonderful is that all that [painting, an oeuvre, the role of the artist …] is so pointless and yet so necessary.

[On Picasso] Admittedly he was exceptionally creative and inventive. But he was a stranger to doubt [….]

Painting has to struggle to beat back this world, which cannot but assassinate the invisible.

The painter is also blind, but he needs to see.

Discouragement is an integral part of the adventure.

I am a man without a tongue.

The amazing thing is that, by keeping low, I have been able to go my own way.

Always this poverty… But I never rebelled against it. I have always known that that was my place. And anyway, I had my work.

Even failure isn’t something you can seek.

[…] I never really liked French painting. It’s often too disciplined, too elegant. It is not genuine enough. It’s as if art has got the upper hand.

I did what I did in order to be able to breathe. There is no merit in that.

When life appears, it is the unknown. But to be able to welcome the unknown, you have to be unencumbered.

So many painters and writers never stop producing, because they are afraid of not-doing.

You have to let non-working do its work.

I am held prisoner by my eyes.

Source: Juliet.

From an interview Beckett granted to a French newspaper:

– I never read philosophy.
– Why not?
– I don’t understand it.
[…]
– Why did you write your books?
– I don’t know. I’m not an intellectual. I just feel things. I invented Molloy and the rest on the day I understood how stupid I’d been. I began then to write down the things I feel.

Put Your Hand on my Forehead

Kafka says to Brod he will be content on his deathbed, providing the pain is not too great, and adds, ‘the best of what I have written is based on this capacity to die content.’ Which I interpret, remembering the bloody scenes of execution in ‘The Penal Colony’ and the banal death of The Trial, as pointing to a kind of relaxed happiness in the murder of his characters.

Their discontent mirrors his contentedness; they are his proxies, Kafka, who among all authors understands the demand of writing draws him through and beyond any tale he could tell. Let them take his place; let them die in his place – he is still alive, he lives and he suffers, but somewhere, too, he is dead; he has also brought his death to term.

In the end, of course, Kafka died a painful death. But remember the conversation slips he wrote to communicate with his friends when, towards the end, he could no longer speak.

That cannot be, that a dying man drinks.

Do you have a moment? Then lightly spray the peonies.

Mineral water – once for fun I could

Fear again and again.

A bird was in the room.

Put your hand on my forehead for a moment to give me strength.

My fantasy: now death is coming to Kafka, but slowly, so that it seems to become eternal. Did it seem, discontent, that death was as far away from him as ever? Now perhaps, it is the turn of the characters to die in his place. Wasn’t it the proofs of The Hunger Artist he was correcting on his deathbed? Perhaps death by starvation was already preferable to a dying that had lost its limit.

Now I imagine the conversation slip was written by Kafka to his characters, the ones who had always died for him.

Put your hand on my forehead for a moment to give me strength.

Die and give me strength by your death. Die and give me the limit of death. I imagine they all stand around him, his characters, woken by the coming end of their creator to assume his suffering. And then that it is what does not pass of Kafka’s passing that returns as I reread him.

I do not die content as they are brought to their deaths. Death wakes up in me; dying opens its eyes: it is as though Kafka knew he would suffer in advance: that he wrote from the discontent of dying, letting it mark itself in those stories that never came to an end. Is that why The Castle is important to me?

But what does not end in The Castle is also what fails to complete itself even in Kafka’s finished tales – this is what I tell myself, although without proof, without argument. But who will die for me? Who will put his hand on my forehead?

Erosion

No story here, write that. Nothing to begin, write that. A room – and what happens in a room? Dust floats; settles. A light shaft sometimes reaches through. Calmness. Who would disturb it by writing? Why add words to all those that have been written? To hollow them out, perhaps. To hollow them into calmness, letting them settle like motes of dust. And so will they build up a kind of reef; so will they settle the room onto the page.

Eventlessness – is that it? Or rather the sense that what has begun cannot end; that calmness is borne on the swell of an event without beginning and without end. A room adrift. Time adrift in the room. Who comes here? Who has ever lived here? Has a room ever seemed so uninhabited? No story here, write that. Nothing to tell. Untell it, then. Erode the story; hollow it out. I will not let it begin, say that. I will not let a story begin.

The Room Itself

The room itself. I am looking for it, the room inside the room. Where is it? Here; not here. Or here – and separated from this one by a single dimension. From what perspective does it watch me? From what corner of the eye will it let itself be seen?

I am falling through a room. Or is it the other way round? How long have I been here? How long has the room been unfolding through me?

I would like to cross it, the room. Would like to cross the expanse of floorboards. In a stride I could make it across. A single stride – just one, but how am I to cross?

Hollowing

The room falls into itself. Writing falls, and into itself. The monitor is on. What’s it waiting for, the blank page? What aches there, the page on the screen? What focuses itself there, at the heart of the room? What does it seek, the room, by concentrating itself into whiteness?

The monitor; the keyboard. The desk top light, the table. And the window behind them, with the red blind pulled down, nearly down. The black night like a letterbox. What do I see? This room, again, against blackness. This room filled with night.

Am I here? Am I really here? A kind of absence is pushing me aside. It begins in the centre of the room, spreading out: absence, a kind of storm. That says, you are not here. Or, you cannot approach me. As though the room itself were pushing me away.

What begins there, in the middle of the room? What spreads out to fill its corners? There is another room, away, on the other side of the glass. A bedroom – I remember it, I know how to get there. But what do I know?

The room is falling through me, say that. The room is falling through time. What was I writing a year ago? What will I be trying to write a year from now? A year, another year – what is hollowing itself out here? What, in this room, is hollowing itself out? 

The Arch

A hollow space – is that a room? A hollowing, a space that falls through you. How many rooms have I lived in? Many. No: one, just one. One room, endlessly falling.

I go from room to room. How to lose yourself in your own flat? How, over the wooden floorboards? The red blind’s almost pulled over the window. A strip of black. The night, outside. Darkness outside and the room falling. A box of light. A box of light, falling through time.

From room to room. Where are you going? What are you looking for? And what were you looking for then, all those other nights. How many nights have there been?

The monitor’s on. The screen glowing by the desklamp. There’s the work to be done, isn’t there? There’s something to get on with. But you’ve long since fallen from work. You’ve long been lost from what you should be doing.

How many years? They spread above me like an arch. One year, another – and all the same year. Hollowed out. Voided. And opened a room in the room, turning it upwards. A box upturned – to what? To the same night I see below the red blind.

Have I failed? Have I missed some clue? Am I lost in an eddy? Time lost itself here. A room got lost in itself. I wander; the room wanders. Am I a way a room is looking for itself? A way space has come alive and got lost in space?

Rooms

‘All I do is wander from room to room’ (Graham Greene in old age, from his correspondence). The evening, every evening. From room to room, lying down in there, on the other side of the bevelled glass. Reading a little. Picking a book up and putting it down. And then, leaning over the side of the bed, smoothing the wooden floor with my hand. Dust. Stray hairs.

I wander from room to room. To this room, here, by the computer, the red blind rolled down. What was it I wanted to write? What was it I wanted to say? It’s winter. It’s winter again. Last year, at this time, in this room, what was I writing? And the year before? All the years are here; all the years are present tonight.

A room falling through time. A room – this one, one of a series. There was a room before this one, and another before that. And there is the series of rooms that is this one; a room falling. A room falling through time. I will have been here before. I have not been here yet. How to inhabit this space, to live where I cannot live?

The Railway Bridge

To tell the same story, over again. To tell the same and the same of the same: in this way, telling wears itself away. It becomes valueless, issueless; it begins to lift itself from the story and say nothing. Or it is as though the story floats indifferently over itself, like a soul that has left its body. And now the story doesn’t matter; telling has outlived itself and what was told has expelled itself from the realm of narrative. A few incidents, nothing more. Some incidents, buried in writing, that remain amidst writing, that cannot be smoothed away.

Cycling through the new estates: why that image? I was unemployed, I remember that. I had an uncertain future, I remember that. I went out into the day, cycled, with no particular aim. Through the new estates, charting them, following them all the way to their edge. And then to what remained of the woodland – the brook whose banks had half dissolved; the muddy track along the field-edge. Bridleways and footpaths, that led down to the quarried river. And open lakes where the quarries once were: fenced off nature reserves. Over there, on the other side of barbed wire, wild life, kingfishers and herons. Near-still water that reflected back an indifferent sky.

No story here. Incidents without story, as though outside of themselves. Stranded events – a cyclist, the bland, wide day; the nothing-is-happening of the suburbs. Stranded life, life outside itself like the same near-still lakes spreading alongside the river. Life alongside life, ox-bow lakes and eddies, currents broken from the great flow of the city: how can narrative but break itself from the old models of continuity? How can a story but tell of what withers it as story, and places it alongside itself, an ox-bow lake, an eddy?

Through the new estates, cycling. Unemployed, off sick, one of the two. Absent from work, from life, cycling past new mothers with their prams. The omnipresence of the day, the afternoon. The vast cathedral of the sky. Later it would make me shiver. Later it would make me stay indoors. I came to fear the day, and unemployed time. Feared time without structure and journeys without aim. How old was I, then? Young enough still to retain a kind of optimism, a blindness in relation to the future. Still the hope that an estate might give unto something other than an estate, that leylines passed across the golfcourse, or that it was a barrow that rose behind the new houses. Still young – and still able to catch what happened in a story. Still young enough to believe it could be told.

Ill, unemployed – I was falling from the story; unemployed and ill, narrative lost sight of me. Whose eyes watched me? Who followed me? Writing eludes itself. The story does not move forward. The calm lakes of the nature reserve, dug out by quarrying. Birdsong; silence. But, too the greater roar of the afternoon. The sound of the day, reverberating in itself. No stories here. No narratives; one footstep does not lead to another; there’s no path along which to pass. I come to the railway bridge; I carry my bike over. Piss-smelling concrete. Graffiti. And the power station by the railway. Houses and gardens higher up, stretched along the railway. The bend of the track along which trains came roaring. Was I ill? Was I unemployed?

Tell the same story, tell it again. Tell the same non-story, the same of the same, as it places what is recounted out of the reach of the story. A cancelled day; a blank and eroded sky. Was I ill – unemployed? Unemployed and ill?

The Cyclist

Cycling through the new estates. Cycling to find their interstices, the scrappy woodland along the railway, the rivers temporarily emerging from culverts, the private road through the plantation, the golf course green beneath rotating sprinklers. What was it that eluded me? For what was I looking? But this memory is now inseparable from recounting, and the search from what is sought by writing.

Writing eludes itself – is that it? Writing loses itself in order to become real, just as it is nothing without this reality. And it is this that tells itself in every tale, or untells them, wearing them out.

I cycled through the new estates, passed the old barrows and the glade of tree stumps left by forestry. I cycled beneath an indifferent sky. And the page, too is indifferent. The whiteness of the page burns indifferently in the sky above my cycling.

The Judgement

To be sentenced – punished. To be judged and punished, but for everything to remain the same. Curious dream. Why is it I imagine the white sky to be the judge, and the judgement? Because of its indifference. Because this is the judgement: You do not matter. That is the sentence: nothing you have done matters, not at all.

A recurrent memory: cycling around the new estates. Cycling through the gaps of countryside between the new estates, light falling indifferently upon all. And the feeling of being watched, and that I could not escape. That to be watched was to be judged, the judgement falling equally upon all. How light it was, the judgement! As light as air, the gentle pressure of air.

I carry my bike over the railway bridge. The white sky that sees nothing, but that sees. That sees from a source I cannot know, a perspective I cannot access. To be watched – seen – but in blindness. To be seen by the blindness of the sky, its indifference.

And when writing opened its eyes? The same perspective, the same non-seeing. And when the page burned up through my writing? The judgement, a trial and a sentence all at once. To say, you do not matter. To say, nothing you have done has ever mattered.

White Writing

To write close to writing. To keep close. But this means, too, that you will have to write of something other than writing; a detour is required, for writing is nothing in itself. A detour: write of yourself, write stories, narrative fragments, write of this, of that – but how to let what you write come close, nonetheless to writing? How to let writing reverberate in what is written?

I am guilty, say that. I am innocent, say that. I am judged, everything written has been judged; white light falls indifferently over all of us. And white light, too, burns upwards from the page; a white writing writes within my own.

How to unwrite every word I have written? How to erase my footprints, and leave the snow pristine, trackless? Wait, wait for writing. Fall down, sleep, and send your dreams ahead. Die in the snow of writing’s indifference. Expire in the indifference of writing, its white snow-banks all around you.

Voided Sight

Writing is what looks away from you; it shows no interest. Its perspective is given from elsewhere; it sees from an angle you cannot access. Is it watching? Are its eyes open? It sees all; its eyes are open in all that is written, like light that flashes back the sky from the sea. It sees – but what does it see? What sees itself in the tide of words as it flashes light upwards and away?

The parent watches the child, but writing does not watch you. The lover’s gaze rests upon the beloved, but writing watches no one, and watches where no one has his place. I will take your place, says writing. I’m going to take your place. And so does it watch from you, by taking your place. So does it open its eyes in your own, and your eyes reflect back the sky; so do they become voided of what you might see.

Vision minus itself. Light subtracted from light. ‘I can’t see you’. – ‘But I, seer, see in you’. – ‘I can’t see you’. – ‘But I, seeing, have voided your sight’.

Trackless

To learn from what writing, from what you have written; to follow your own tracks in the snow. Until – no tracks, and no way forward. Snow without tracks, unmarked pages.

‘Was it here I disappeared?’ – ‘It was here you stopped disappearing. Here when your absence could no longer be hidden. – ‘Was it here I lost the ability to write?’ – ‘Rather that that inability spoke of writing’s own inability; that your malaise became the malaise of writing, and it spoke, rather than you’.

Writing without writing. The suspension, the droop of writing. And you fall from yourself, too. Who are you, non-writer? Who are you, unable to mark the page? But the days go forward nonetheless. Writing, without writing, continues to go forward.

‘I would like to write’. – ‘You cannot write’. – ‘I would like to begin’. – ‘But writing has already begun’.

Page-blind

Rise early each morning, prepare to write. Rise early, clear your desk and your thoughts, and begin, begin to write. But what when writing fails you? What when you cannot write a line, and the white page seems to press up against you? What when sense refuses you, and the measure of sense? But it is also writing that you meet, albeit without being able to write. It is also writing that burns beside you now, white fountain, the page within the page.

Isn’t it now that you can learn what writing is? Isn’t this the moment, the apocalypse, in which it is revealed disrobed? The page, the white page on which nothing can be written. The page without writing, and that allows no writing. What speaks, and by way of this absence? What, and by way of the absence of sense, of sense’s erosion, of writing cored out from within?

The whiteness is intolerable. The page’s white in white burns intolerably. Its indifference. Its withdrawal. A bank of snow on which you can make no impression. A pristine cloud-bank rising in the distance. You cannot mark it. Ink will not touch it.

Intolerable: have you gone snowblind? Sky-blind? What can you see except whiteness? What but the light that burned behind everything, and all along. For the page is also the sky. It is also light, light gone mad in itself, lost in itself. The page is the condition of meaning, of the opening of the world. And the going-mad of meaning, the opening that is also a closure, the too-much of bright light.

‘I can’t see’ – ‘But only now can you begin to see’. – ‘I can’t see a thing’. – ‘But only now do you see everything’. – ‘Why couldn’t I see it before?’- ‘You could see too much’. – ‘Why can I only see it now? – ‘Because you’ve given up on sight, or sight has given up on itself in you’.

To write, to make a mark: why is that impossible? A single line – why can’t you achieve that? Because writing is incapacity; writing the failure to write. It is the page-apocalypse, the pristine beginning upon which you can make no impression. And the return of that beginning, which is your non-beginning, your failure. And the billowing return of your non-beginning, the white sails that nonetheless bear writing forward.

‘I can’t begin’. – ‘But it is already beginning’. – ‘I can’t make a mark’. – ‘But writing has begun without you’.

The Page

The inability to write – how to endure it? A writer faces eternity or the lack of it each day, says Hemmingway – but how to endure it, the lack of eternity? How to endure the withdrawal of writing? ‘I’m blocked’, says the writer, ‘I can’t write a line’. So he removes himself from writing; he reads awhile, he travels. Everything but the page, the white rectangle of the page. But eventually, he’ll have to face it again.

‘I was waiting for you’, it says. ‘I lay here, waiting’. White page, the distant sky: one and the same. The absence of writing, the absence of sense that is the sky: one and the same. The same sky that watches over famine and wealth; the same that passes across battles and feastdays. The same page that is indifferent to what is written upon it, be it good or bad. The page, white rectangle, that glows with its own kind of light, that seems to illuminate itself.

‘I can’t reach you. I can’t find you’. – ‘But I’m here before you, the page’. – ‘I’ve lost you. I’m looking for you’. – ‘But I’m here right in front of you: the page’. And I know for every page I’ve written, the page is waiting. And for every page I’ve read, there will be another that refuses reading, in which I’ve lived my reader’s life. The page waits; its whiteness invades every page; its waiting aches without significance on every page.

And when I’ve tried to write? I forgot it, that’s true. Perhaps you have to forget it in order to write. The page, the absence of sense – how can you know it except via the impossibility of writing? And I think this, in the end, is why writer’s block is propitious, why it joins you to what withholds itself in writing, and not only because you cannot rise to meet it, not only because your strength has failed.

‘Stop writing. Do not try to write’. – ‘But I want to find you. I want to write.’ – ‘But you will find me only by ceasing to write. By putting your pen down. Stop writing, stop trying, and I will come close to you. Stop, and the page, the double of the day, will burn beside you’. – ‘I can’t write’. – ‘But it’s only then, in your incapacity, that writing can come close to you’. – ‘I’m blocked, I can’t write’. – ‘But it is only thus that writing rises and wraps itself around you like the day’.