Why write, why the need to mark time by writing? Is it to reclaim time, drawing it back to yourself, retreating to an intimacy similar to that of a familiar and intimate dwelling place? Remember Beckett’s The Unnameable:
Mercier never spoke, Moran never spoke, I never spoke, I seem to speak, that’s because he says I as if he were I … perhaps it’s not he, perhaps it’s a multitude, one after another … some say you, it’s the fault of the pronouns, there is no name for me, no pronoun for me, it isn’t that either, I’m not that either, …. He, I, no matter … no, I can’t speak of anything, yet I speak.
The words I and you are the open sites through which a passing occurs. Not you passing, not me but that great passage as through prison walls. But what are those walls? The pronouns themselves. Then to write would not be to draw time back to oneself. Perhaps it is to experience the passage of time in another sense, to experience its pressure, its pressing forward, not for yourself, as if it were an experience you could keep, transmitting to others and to yourself, but because in writing you lose time, and first of all worktime, in which something useful could be done. Thus the great last sentence of The Unnameable is a sacrifice of time, time put out of use, made to pulse with what is useless in time, sheer exorbitance.
To write, you might think, is to retreat. Why write? Remember what Kafka’s hunger artist said with his last breath:
‘I always wanted you to admire my fasting’, says the hunger artist. ‘We do admire it’ says the overseer. ‘But you shouldn’t’, says the hunger artist. ‘Well then we don’t’, says the overseer. ‘But why shouldn’t we admire it?’ ‘Because I have to fast, I can’t help it.’ ‘What a fellow you are’, says the overseer, ‘and why can’t you help it?’ ‘Because I couldn’t find the food I liked’, says the hunger artist. ‘If I had found it, believe me, I should have made no fuss and stuffed myself like you or anyone else’.
The hunger artist fasts only because he could find nothing to eat. Likewise you would write because you like nothing else. What do you dislike? Ev’rything in the world by which you are separated by a pane of glass. That pane stands between you and the world. And so you write, in a room. Your life was lived in a succession of rooms. To pass through the outside would only be to seek what might be harvested inside, to pass through the world as Ulysses passes in the Odyssey back to Ith’ca, back to his home and then that place where writing could begin.
There is that minor writing which does not strive for Ulysses’s great journey through the world, contenting itself with recording what it sees from behind the glass – the world outside, the white sky, tarmac and plastic bags, the dead bird on the concrete. No longer is it a matter of personal memory. Memory does not animate what is written. There are facts: a cold morning, a white sky, a dead bird, and that’s all. This writing is the correlate of that which begins and ends by writing of what is found in the writer’s room, taking a voyage around framed pictures and plates of half-eaten toast, cold cups of tea and the fruitbowl.
But this is still to make a journey, in this case, a journey around your workroom. True, it is no longer guided by personal memory, by that great net of personal associations that Breton recommended as a route through the world. It lets the world be, one might say, just as Appelfeld might be said to give the world back to itself, to let it come to stand in its opacity, greater than us but also indifferent to us. Yes, there is the world, there where we are not. It is a blind face, a mouth which does not speak, it is not dead because it was never alive, it has no secrets because nothing is hidden.
Young children will speak to you of friend X. or friend Y. thinking you might know them. They do not yet know the vastness of the world; each person they meet must be close to ev’ryone else. There are only friends. Older children know the world is divided between friends and strangers; they are taught the danger which lurks within apparent friendliness. Still older ones know the world of concrete and tarmac but also that of grass and trees is no friend; it is neither the nourishing mother nor the tender father: it is the world, what remains of the world as it escapes the possibility of familarity: it is that mute, blind and indifferent reserve against which you can do nothing.
Older still, there is the indifferent passage of the world into which you must insert yourself. Find a place, a lodging, and be carried in its streaming. This is difficult, it is true; years stand between you and a job you might enjoy, and even when it’s yours, it might be swept away in turn. What is certain in such a world? Nothing at all. Fate is a word too strong for the world’s indifference. Now you understand the faces of others as part of the opacity. If you have children in turn, you must then protect them against that opacity as against the winds on the moor where Lear was stranded. Ev’rywhere there is indifference and it is such that, breaking yourself against the wall for the hundredth time, you will sink down in defeat and madness.
Blocked lives, stagnant lives: I think of that scene in Monster where the protagonist, Aileen Wournos tries to get a job as a secretary in the great buildings of commerce. She hasn’t the skills, the interviewers tell her over and again. She wants to look after her lover, but the world won’t permit it. She does sink down but rages in madness; it is still the madness of defeat and one without tragic grandeur. Meanwhile, there are facts: a murdered body, an abandoned car, bloodstains. She disappears into the penal institution to face another fact: the indifference of the world comes towards her in the lethal injection. She dies of the indifference of the world.
What of a writing too weak even to journey around one’s room? A writing as weak as the hunger artist as he slips into unconsciousness. Kafka was correcting the proofs of ‘The Hunger Artist’ on his deathbed. At least he had proofs and the prospect of a book that would survive him. What of those without consolation, who leave no trace in the lives of others, who will not be remembered? At least Aileen Wournos of Monster has her notoriety.
Our new economy, it is said, requires a populace educated enough to construct a ‘portfolio subjectivity’: what will carry you through your life are skills, transferable skills. With such skills you can survive short-term contracts and redundancies; they will see you through interviews. Skills, techniques: even for writing, they are necessary. But what of the barely skilled writer, the one so far from producing anything of worth he can record only what is happening in the present moment? What of the ineducable one without memory of the past or hope for the future, without the guiding hand of tradition or the hope of leaving a legacy?
Kafka and Beckett write in that space which brings us, their readers, against world’s indifference. No longer with them that technical facility which would allow them to realise a novel like other novels (remember the marvellous pillory of a conventional novel in The Unnameable: ‘They love each other, marry, … he goes to the wars, he dies at the wars, she weeps, with emotion, at having loved him, at having lost him, yep, marries again in order to love again …, he comes back, … from the wars, he didn’t die, … she goes to the station, to meet him, he dies in the train, of emotion, at the thought of seeing her again, having her again, she weeps’). This is an unsentimental writing. It does not console; it does not wring tears from the suffering of those close to death. It is a writing of facts, and if this word fact seems crude (Nietzsche: ‘facts are stupid’) it is because it is used while forgetting there is only one fact: the brute existence of the world and our brute arrival in it.
Many have said the human being is born prematurely; the infant’s head is too large, it is said, for the pelvis of the mother to contain; thus it is that a human infant is less able to survive than the infants of other species. Thus it is that a human baby needs care and devotion, a full childhood of adoration. Thus it is that the lesson of the indifference of the world is so acute for the human being and all the greater for the prolonged childhood of the middle class, through school and sixth-form and university and even into those first years of work when they will still be dependant on parental support. In truth, human life is lived prematurely, and the struggle to bring ourselves to birth is the struggle of a whole life. To have a child is to transmit the struggle and the means to struggle to another generation. So the generations are born and die.
What, then, of writing, of a life lived in a room behind a pane of glass? Outside there is work time. Outside, the time of a world bent upon the struggle against its own facticity. Work is a name for this struggle; but what does one struggle against? One day you will be unable to work. One day, the means will fail you. The weak writer knows this. He knows it in his weakness. He knows it as he fails writing by writing. Knows that non-writing is within writing and not outside it.
Kafka: ‘Nothing is granted to me, ev’rything has to be earned, not only the present and the future, but the past too – something after all which perhaps ev’ry human being has inherited, this too must be earned, it is perhaps the hardest work’. Perhaps there are bloggers too weak to write of themselves, of their lives, who write to earn back their lives, from the indifference of the world and the omnipresence of work. But perhaps they are too weak even to mark by writing the mark that witnesses their weakness. Perhaps they cannot write and have no access to the internet and not even a room or a pane of glass. They pass between the great buildings of commerce. Their wandering is blogging, if this means to mark one’s presence in time. Just as Aileen Wournos’s murders were blogging and so were the journals Beckett kept in the years of war.
