Once, it was verse that was the highest mark of literature; prose was humdrum, servile, but poetry was so lofty it had to be protected by rules and codes which made of it a monument. The novel, modest beast, was a device to render worlds, to reflect the world back to itself: no longer, like the poem, was it a mantic work, a work of divine inspiration, but a genre which answered the measure of the human being. Listen to a novelist recounting the vicissitudes of composition: ‘I wanted to say something about …’; ‘I wanted to express my experience of…’ Sober, industrious, the labour to produce a novel is analogous to that of producing things in the world: novelist as craftsworker – and if the novel has been compared to a loose, baggy monster, it is a domesticated beast, which works alongside us in making a world.
To make a world – to confirm an order – to raise great edifices on the earth: without doubt, the novel is a virtuoso’s genre: there are so many ways to celebrate our civilisation and the principles that underlie it. But the world opens itself as against a resisting force: call it earth, this movement of self-occlusion, this withdrawal within the things of which you would write and within writing itself.
Rilke: ‘Earth, is this not what you want, to be reborn invisible in us?’; Char: ‘shifting earth, horrible, exquisite’; Van Gogh: ‘I am attached to the earth’. A difficult thought: a writing which is no longer born of power, be it the power to express oneself, or to articulate a world. A weak writing if the word ‘weak’ didn’t suggest that one measure its non-power according to the measure of power. It is as though the words were made of the clay of the field or the surf on the water – of obdurate rock and the broad sky. But these are only ways of writing about a withdrawal or reserve which can in no way be understood in terms of what we call nature.
Perhaps, then, ‘earth’ is the wrong name for this reserve, suggesting an easy paganism: the sacred groves and wood-nymphs which belong to a seductive archaism. Still, it provides a useful analogy in suggesting what happens when language no longer offers itself as a medium through which the world might be represented: for it is possible to write that language becomes heavy and resistant, that words themselves become like the great blocks of granite which were assembled to make ancient monuments. But the power to utter these great, block-like words fails our writer, and even the power to write.
The power to write? Yes – the freedom to say anything and to say it in any way at all; to say everything and to say it in every way. But what is this anything and everything when compared to the experience I am trying to sketch here? Anything, everything: it is as though the author was the master of the infinite, the demiurge who can make a world. But then, by the same stroke which opens the world to him as what can be rendered on the page, the author is deposed and made to wander the same world as a stranger.
Master of the infinite? The author, now, is a wanderer in an infinite space without abode. But is it the earth in which the author is exiled – the natural realm in which he can still draw joy from the beauty of the foliage, from the birds, beasts and flowers and the great vault of the sky? But our author isn’t even the mad, blind King Lear on the moor. Space without place, time without initiative: what is left to the one who is delivered over to what we cannot call the earth?
I have already written about the fascination which can lay claim to the literary author. Today I imagine it as a half-frozen sea across which great icebergs drift. Only those icebergs are great, frozen words, as simple as ‘and’ or ‘but’, but which are hardened into a grand immensity. Simple words frozen in the distance between the writer and the work and against which the ship of meaning is wrecked and dragged under.
But even this image is too comforting. Think instead of the husks of an exploded star - of the dark, infinitely dense mass which collapses into the black hole into which all sense disappears: the secret centre of the work that unravels from within. Then the sentences of the novel are infinitely stretched as they disappear across the event horizon as one by one they fall into the darkness wherein all light disappears. And the novelist? He is strewn with his sentences like darkness across darkness, a galaxy of dark points upon darkness.