Luis Chitarroni, The No Variations
The writer doesn’t really want to write, he wants to be; and in order to truly be, he must face up to the difficult challenge of not writing at all — not even a single line — of not theorizing, of not lifting a finger.
Elisa Giuliana, “Dark Times,” Nude Review 1 15 February 2012
…Nevertheless, I reject the assumption that this literary poverty is the symptom of an irreversible condition. After all, the ghost of the death of literature tends to appear in times of cultural uncertainty: an article by Andrew Gallix has recently appeared in The Guardian, which gives an account of those writers, critics and scholars who have decreed its death throughout the centuries.
[This issue was entitled Is Literature Dead?]
Maurice Blanchot, “Death of the Last Writer,” The Book to Come
There is, in every well-made Library, a Hell where live the books that must not be read. But there is, in each great book, another hell, a center of unreadability where the entrenched force of this language that is not a language, fresh breath of eternal rehashing, watches and waits.
Here’s an extract from my Guardian Books piece on the oulipo that went up today:
As Gabriel Josipovici argues in What Ever Happened to Modernism?, modern literature was forged out of a refusal to submit to external constraints, with the novel a “new form in which the individual could express himself precisely by throwing off the shackles that bound him to his fathers and to tradition”. The flipside of this emancipation of the writer (or privatisation of writing) was, as Walter Benjamin pointed out, isolation. No longer the mouthpiece of the Muses or society, novelists could only derive legitimacy from themselves. “Going back to the world of genres is not an option, any more than is a return to the world of the ancien régime,” writes Josipovici. The Oulipo escapes the Romantic cul-de-sac of unfettered imagination (or its Surrealist avatar, chance) by reintroducing external constraints, which are self-imposed.
Rachel Kushner, “Lipstick Traces,” Bookforum December/January 2013
I suspect the reason Lispector’s philosophical fiction has inspired such dramatic devotion is that people feel she is talking to them, about the most basic but complex human experience: consciousness, the alienating strangeness of what it is to be alive. She attempts to capture what it is to think our existence as we are in it — in the “marvelous scandal,” as Lispector puts it, of life. We are not a plain is, but an awareness of this is, which is to say totally cut off from the world by the human capacity to conceive our part in it.
Thomas Bernhard, interview, quoted by Gabriel Josipovici, “Wittgenstein’s Awkward Nephew,” New Statesman 23 January 2011
Whatever you write it’s always a catastrophe. That’s the depressing thing about the fate of a writer . . . All you deliver is a bad, ridiculous copy of what you had imagined [via].
Marcel Proust, Contre Sainte-Beuve, Bibliothèque de La Pléiade, p. 305
Great works of literature are written in a kind of foreign language.
[See Kafka.]
László Krasznahorkai and Béla Tarr, Damnation, 1988
Every story is a story of disintegration.
[Spoken by Karrer, the protagonist.]
“I want to evoke all the things that are a part of our lives, but not of our stories — the washing up, the changing of diapers, the in-between-things — and make them glow. Though a five-page description of what’s in a closet is not exactly page-turner stuff, I thought of this project as a kind of experiment in realistic prose. How far is it possible to go into detail before the novel cracks and becomes unreadable? Oh, it’s a shameful venture, no one wants to be boring or banal, but that was what I set out to do. The first book is centered on death, and it’s like bathing in triviality, and then death. When death is near, everything is meaningful, everything glows, everything is intense. The second book has the same pattern, except that the center of the book is the negation of death, i.e. falling in love. So: bathing in a sea of triviality, then love. Around love, everything is meaningful, glowing, intense. This is the structure of life: large chunks of meaninglessness. Time just passes away, nothing really happens, and then death, or love, or birth.”
– Karl Ove Knausgaard, “Bookforum Talks With Karl Ove Knausgaard” by Trevor Laurence Jockims, Bookforum 24 June 2013
ANDREW GALLIX 