Elena Ferrante, The Story of the Lost Child
Electronics seems so clean and yet it dirties, dirties tremendously, and it obliges you to leave yourself everywhere as if you were shitting and peeing on yourself continuously: I want to leave nothing. My favourite key is the one that deletes.
[See John Cage.]
An extract from my review of Agustín Fernández Mallo‘s Nocilla Dream appears on the back cover of Nocilla Experience (Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2016).
By juxtaposing fiction with non-fiction … the author has created a hybrid genre that mirrors our networked lives, allowing us to inhabit its interstitial spaces. A physician as well as an artist, Mallo can spot a mermaid’s tail in a neutron monitor; estrange theorems into pure poetry.
Virginia Woolf, The Voyage Out (1915)
‘There never will be a book, because someone else has written it for him,’ said Mr Pepper with considerable acidity. ‘That comes of putting things off, and collecting fossils, and sticking Norman arches on one’s pigsties.’
‘I confess I sympathize,’ said Ridley with a melancholy sigh. ‘I have a weakness for people who can’t begin.’
Roland Barthes, “Pre-Novels,” Essays and Interviews Volume 3
Every time someone ventures the idea that there is a crisis of the novel, a critic with the good health of our Literature at heart can be found to reply that the novel has never been in such fine fettle, since an enormous number of them are being published. But this is to conceive the crisis in excessively quantitative terms; it is a phenomenon that in no way precludes proliferation. . . .
. . . This is, perhaps, what is happening today with the novel, if you will concede that most of the creditable and original works currently being published are problematical novels in which the fiction is accompanied by a questioning of the basic categories of novelistic creation, as though, since the ideal novel — the innocent novel — is now impossible, literature had principally to say how it is running from itself and killing itself — in short, how it is rejecting itself.
In France this began with Proust. Throughout his enormous oeuvre, Proust is always about to write. He has the traditional literary act in his sights, but he constantly puts it off and it is at the end of this period of expectation, an expectation he never meets, that the work has been constructed in spite of itself. It was the waiting itself that formed the substance of a work whose suspended nature was enough to set the writer speaking.
The most conscious forms of novel-writing today are all part of this Proustian movement by which the writer sets his novel going before our eyes and then consigns it to silence at a point when, a hundred years earlier, he would have barely begun to speak.
[See Witold Gombrowicz.]
Deborah Levy, “Deborah Levy: ‘I Have Grown to Love My Writing Shed in Every Season,” The Guardian (Guardian Review) 1 October 2016
When I begin writing a novel, I usually know where I want to get to, I just don’t know how to get there. I plan a route and follow my directions. Sometimes this works well. Yet, it’s when I detour from the map and get lost that the writing starts to open its eyes. In case you think I like getting lost, I should tell you that I resist it with all my will. This is always a futile battle. Eventually I surrender to the unknown route, write for a few hours and take a look at the new view.
My current writing mantra is a quote by EM Forster: “We must be willing to let go of the life we have planned, so as to have the life that is waiting for us.” This applies to the life of a novel as well as any other kind of life. Come to think of it, the life that is waiting for us might be worse than the life we have planned.
Roland Barthes, Empire of Signs
Writing is after all, in its way a satori: satori (the Zen occurence) is a more or less powerful (though in no way solemn) seism which causes knowledge, or the subject, to vacillate: it creates a space devoid of speech. And it is also a space devoid of speech that constitues writing.
Roland Barthes, “Answers,” Essays and Interviews Volume 5
What I have written about is something I cannot now speak about. . . . The only kind of interview one might at a pinch defend would be one in which the author were called upon to state what he cannot write.
My review of Stuart Jeffries‘ Grand Hotel Abyss: The Lives of the Frankfurt School is in Saturday’s Irish Times.
… It is this embrace of negativity that is so bracing to some and frustrating to others, even within the school. During the 1960s student protests, change was deemed possible by Marcuse, who embodied a sunnier, Californian take on critical theory. The institute’s “late ethos” is likewise predicated on the feasibility of “ameliorating the conditions of capitalism and liberal democracy”. Yet Café Marx, as it used to be called derisively, remains tainted by Georg Lukács’s quip that these representatives of the chattering classes — branded traitors by Brecht — had holed themselves up in a beautiful hotel “equipped with every comfort, on the edge of an abyss, of nothingness, of absurdity”. There is a great deal of wisdom, however, in Adorno’s suspicion of revolutionary students’ “aversion to introspection”, which he had already observed in the dark days of Nazism. “I established a theoretical model of thought,” he told an interviewer in 1969. “How could I have suspected that people would want to implement it with Molotov cocktails!” There is also a great deal of hope in his belief that “whoever thinks offers resistance”.
At its best the Frankfurt School was always a think tank — in the armoured-fighting-vehicle sense of the word.
Roland Barthes, “An Interview with Jacques Chancel (Radioscopie),” Essays and Interviews Volume 5
I was alluding to the fact that writing today is an expenditure for nothing, an ‘unconditional expenditure’, as Georges Bataille would say … It’s a sort of perverse activity which, in a sense, has no purpose, cannot enter into any knind of accounting and always goes beyond the practical tasks we may ask of it..
No doubt writing’s part of social exchange. When you write books and have them published, it’s all part of a publishing market and belongs to a particular economy. But, in writing, there’s always something additional which goes beyond questions of economic return and it is the pour rien, the ‘for nothing’ that defines the ‘bliss of writing’ and is, therefore, a perversion.
Roland Barthes, “An Interview with Jacques Chancel (Radioscopie),” Essays and Interviews Volume 5
I said that you can say this because we live in a cultural world where there’s a ‘superego’ — a pressure that makes us feel obliged to read certain books, so that we’d feel guilty if we hadn’t. I simply wanted to push back against that pressure and explain that we very often know books without having read them — there’s a sort of cultural osmosis that happens.
[See Umberto Eco.]
ANDREW GALLIX 