Maurice Blanchot, The Infinite Conversation, 1969:
In the first place, no one dreams that works and songs could be created out of nothing. They are always given in advance, in memory’s immobile present. Who would be interested in a new and non-transmitted speech? What is important is not to tell, but to tell once again and, in this retelling, to tell again each time a first time.
From Mythology of Blue:
Mallarmé’s Un coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hasard, produced by Broodthaers, based on Mallarmé’s poem using the original lay-out design and replacing the text with blank rectangles, 1969.
Jonathan Lethem, “Jonathan Lethem on Being a Self-Conscious Writer,” The Guardian (Guardian Review) 10 March 2012
[…] To comfort the disturbed, and disturb the comfortable: what presumption, on the part of the storyteller.
Yet I’ve got no choice, for I am the disturbed I seek to comfort, and also the comfortable I seek to disturb.
What’s a novelist? I remove myself from human traffic to sit in a room alone and make up stories about human traffic that doesn’t exist. For my living I climb into and then punch my way out of the paper bag of my solipsism on a daily basis — and on the days I don’t manage to punch my way out, there is no coach who blows a whistle and tells me to remove myself from the field in favour of a better-rested substitute (“Where’s your Negative Capability today, son?”). This may, in fact, be an act on a par with painting an abstract composition in oils, titling it Giant Octopus, then hanging it on the walls of a public aquarium. All writing, no matter how avowedly naturalistic, consists of artifice, of conjuration, of the manipulation of symbols rather than the “opening of a window on to life”. We writers aren’t sculpting in DNA, or even clay or mud, but words, sentences, paragraphs, syntax, voice; materials issued by tongue or fingertips but which dissolve upon release into the atmosphere into cloud, confection, spectre.
Language, as a vehicle, is a lemon, a hot-rod painted with thrilling flames but crazily erratic to drive, riddled with bugs like innate self-consciousness, embedded metaphors and symbols, helpless intertextuality and so forth. Despite being regularly driven on prosaic errands (inter-office memos, supermarket receipts and so on), it tends to veer on its misaligned chassis into the ditch of abstraction, of dream. That’s to say, abstract paintings of a giant octopus are all we have to put on view in my city’s aquarium.
None of this disqualifies my sense of urgency at the task of making the giant octopus in my mind’s eye visible to yours. It doesn’t make the attempt any less fundamentally human, delicate, or crucial. It makes it more so. That’s because another name for the giant octopus I have in mind is negotiating selfhood in a world of other selves — the permanent trouble of being alive. Our language has no choice but to be self-conscious if it is to be conscious in the first place.
Tom McCarthy, “Tom McCarthy: My Desktop,” Guardian Books 24 November 2011
The internet being just a click away is a blessing and a curse at once: you can find out instantly which year Egypt won independence or who Persephone’s mother was, but that essential solitude you need to write gets more and more elusive…
Tom McCarthy, “Tom McCarthy: My Desktop,” Guardian Books 24 November 2011
The best definition of writing I could give would be “letting speak” — if that word “let” is understood in all its double and triple senses: to allow (something or someone else) to speak; to interrupt (hinder) the flow of speech, break language up, allowing for what’s unspoken to infiltrate its frequency; to underwrite or lease out speech. The one thing writing’s not is straight-up speaking.
Lars Iyer, Dogma 2012
Momentum: to be thrown by thought, loosed, like a stone from thought’s sling … And work, now, will not be mundane but celestial. We will work as the stars work, as the planets turn in their orbits. Our work will be as one with the slow turning of galaxies, and the steady expansion of the universe into the infinite … A work indistinguishable from inactivity, the resting of a God.
Hanif Kureishi, “The Art of Distraction,” The New York Times 18 February 2012
…If you’re writing and you get stuck, and you then make tea, while waiting for the kettle to boil the chances are good ideas will occur to you. Seeing that a sentence has to have a particular shape can’t be forced; you have to wait for your own judgment to inform you, and it usually does, in time. Some interruptions are worth having if they create a space for something to work in the fertile unconscious. Indeed, some distractions are more than useful; they might be more like realizations and can be as informative and multilayered as dreams. They might be where the excitement is. …A flighty mind might be going somewhere.
Lars Iyer, Dogma 2012
Perhaps we must be silent about fundamental matters, W. says. Perhaps there’s nothing we can say that does not immediately destroy what is most important.
Tom Cutterham, “Banter and Posthumousness,” Cherwell 21 July 2011 [interview with Lars Iyer]
The use of novels? I rather like what Ferdinand says in Godard’s Pierrot Le Fou: ‘I’ve found an idea for a novel. No longer to write about people’s lives … but only about life, life itself. What goes on between people, in space … like sound and colours. That would be something worthwhile. Joyce tried, but one must be able, ought to be able, to do better.’
Life itself, as Ferdinand sums it up, I think of as the inconsequential, the incidental, as the froth of popping bubbles left by waves on a beach. I think of friendships again — of the play of conversation, of banter. I think of the dead time in which friends say nothing in particular. I think of fruitless journeys and failed encounters. I think of every kind of disappointment.
The novel is elastic enough a form to let such ‘sound and colours’ speak. To remember ‘what goes on between people’. And it is, by virtue of its length, its open-endedness, peculiarly suited for doing so.
Tom Cutterham, “Banter and Posthumousness,” Cherwell 21 July 2011 [interview with Lars Iyer]
Literature has a kind of prestige today, it is true, but it is a fading one. The big books of our day are a kind of kitsch, and the pose of authors — serious authors — is laughable. The game’s up! The party’s over! Literature is like an ox-bow lake silting up in the sun. The river of culture has meandered elsewhere. But that’s not to say that there may not be another kind of writing, a post-literature literature, full of black laughter and a sense of its own posthumousness.
ANDREW GALLIX 