“Toute l’écriture est de la cochonnerie. Les gens qui sortent du vague pour essayer de préciser quoi que ce soit de ce qui se passe dans leur pensée, sont des cochons. Toute la gent littéraire est cochonne, et spécialement celle de ce temps-ci.”
— Antonin Artaud
I walk by accident into one of London’s über-bookstores to be taken over by a very familiar type of sadness — as a child I used to feel this way when thinking about the cosmos and my own insignificant place in it. This is London’s biggest bookshop: 6.5 km of shelves, the website proudly tells us, as if this particular length and not another were a reason to rejoice. Book after book after book thrown into this worded jungle — a hoard that could be a waking counterpart to a Borgesian wet dream. Fiction books and books on writing fiction. Photography and art books and books on photography and art. And so on: most forms of expression and myriad words of meta-dialogue, some of them even justified or at least nicely edited and with colourful covers. Nothing escapes this total library: no corner of the universe or the mind is left unaccounted for. It is a hideous totality for it is an ordered totality, filtered through the minds of who knows how many marketing specialists; it is effective as a selling platform but it is a desert of anonymity for the diminished names on the shelves1. Were I ever to be asked for a writing tip, something born out of this experience would be my choice: walk into any gigantic bookshop and think whether you can face being one more name lost in this desert of words. If that ideal situation proves too much to bear do something else with your time (it is of course highly likely that if you go around asking for writing tips you will never make it on print).
The futility of writing is something I face up to every time I set pen on paper or hand to keyboard. Why am I doing this? My compulsion to write does not occlude the uselessness of filling pages with words. I know that what I do is pointless, one more message in a bottle in a moment when everyone else around me is also casting messages adrift.
Walking into a gigantic bookshop is a shock not because it is in this place that I realise the pointlessness of writing but because it is here that I realise the promiscuity of this endeavour. I am not even original in my inability to engage in a useful compulsion. No compulsive behaviour is ever original: some spend hours with their pants down before a computer screen; others write page after page. We might as well spend our time with the former: masturbation is much more fun, less harmful to oneself and others, and certainly less of a hurdle in our race towards some form of success, however faint this success might be. Writing is the best way of failing at something. I know because I fail every day. Terry Malloy’s oft-quoted lament—“I coulda been a contender”—makes sense only for endeavours that are not failed from their seminal moment. Writing does not even leave room for a good old-fashioned lament.
In case you have never bumped into Borges’ ‘The Library of Babel,’ in this fantastic story the gifted Argentine reactionary flirts with the Shangri-La of any bibliophile, a never-ending library:
“The world (which some call the Library) is made up of an unknown, or perhaps unlimited, number of hexagonal galleries… The layout of every floor is identical. Twenty-five long shelves, five on each side, fill all the sides but one…”
Being the Library/world (note Borges’ selective use of capitals) monumental or even infinite the logical implication is the existence of a monumental or even infinite number of books:
“… the library is complete… its shelves hold all possible permutations of the twenty-odd symbols (a number which, although vast, is not infinite) or, in effect everything that can be expressed in all languages — a history of the future down to the last details, the autobiographies of the archangels, a true catalogue of the Library, thousands and thousands of false ones, a proof of the falseness of these catalogues, a proof of the falseness of the true catalogue…”
In other words, even if the Library had no end, the possible combinations of twenty-two symbols would be exhausted at some point. Whether if the Library is infinite or indefinite, what is contained in the library is beyond our decidedly limited grasp and therefore seemingly chaotic. But the Library is ‘periodical,’ he adds, and:
“If an eternal traveller were to cross it in any direction, he would discover after centuries that the same volumes were repeated in the same random order. This, when it occurred, would be an order — the Order.”2
Everything possible within those twenty-two symbols is contained and accessible in the chaotic order of the Library. Interestingly, it is exactly this perfection which results in humanity’s perdition. The realisation that everything that could be written has already been written annuls humanity, renders it phantasmal. Borges then goes on to narrate an apocalyptical situation in which this saturation of the written word drives men to suicide.
Being more of a writer than a reader3 I cannot empathise with the plight of those haunted by this universe where everything than can be read is already there. For them it is about not finding the chosen book, or finding always the same, or finding defective versions of the ideal book. For me and others it is about filling the page with redundant, anonymous, always defective words.
Writers are either optimistic or seriously stupid — perhaps a combination of both. Yet I believe that it is not stupidity or the need for attention that moves us but the ‘virtual shelves.’ It is the promise of the shelves that are yet to be that keeps us going. Borges’ monumental library is an idea that works to the point where there are only 22 symbols (plus 3 punctuation marks) to combine eternally. The eternal return of these symbols guarantees that in time and space all the possible combinations are reached. But if the Library is indefinite or infinite, could not we propose the existence of an indefinite or infinite number of different systems or symbols, ever proliferating, mutating, and in that way giving birth constantly to new volumes written in new languages? What would the Library be like in this always evolving situation? This would be a universe that is always incomplete, always proliferating, always creating new universes. Not the world as a Library but the library as a World.
This Library/World is full of volumes that are yet to be written, that could be written in a certain system of symbols but might end up written in another or not at all. We write in the real world and the real world constantly beats our imagination.
Even in the most cluttered of libraries there are gaps between the volumes where virtual masterpieces breathe. We go after those gaps, selfish that we are. We might never be noticed but it is impossible to run out of words. The problem is then not that of the exhaustion of combinations but of the impossibility of exhausting them4.
Our age is signalled by the written word. Distractions notwithstanding the internet is the closest we will ever get to Borges’ Library. Like the characters in this tale we can find our way or get lost in this universe. Of course we always choose the second option.
But most importantly, whatever we do online, the very mechanics of the internet demand that we become writers to navigate it, or at least that we become typists. If the invention of the press could be said to have democratised reading, the internet — and digital technology — could be said to have democratised writing. It has also contributed to its banalisation. This is not a conservative cry of despair but a simple observation: our contemporary moment demands that we write our thoughts live, for an audience of equally verbose producers. We can afford this lightheartedness because, with everyone involved in equally solipsistic writerly practices: nobody is really listening.
Social media is where most of our writing takes place today. I have no doubts that it can be used to produce a particular form of literature, and on a daily basis I see people making, or attempting to make, art one post at a time. Publishers should be compiling this publicly available material and editing contemporary collections — they would even be spared their already meagre royalty payments. And writers would be better off either closing their self-promoting social media operations or just dedicating solely to them.
After all what happens in social media stays in social media5. The amount of time required to sustain these practices, and the way these practices actually kidnap a potential audience, who much rather spend their time reading telegraphic witticisms, actually make writing even less justifiable. Writing in 2015 you are not in a better position to be less anonymous that if you had been writing in the 16th century. Perhaps you are in a worse position. Should we go back to the 16th century then? Not really: few people die of a cold in 2015, regardless of how many books they read.
Whether we set pen to paper every day or not, whether we make a name with the written word or not, whether the shelves are empty or full, whether the Library or the library, life goes on around us. People keep living and dying and having much more interesting things to do with their time. Writing is useless and impossible to justify in a reasonable way. It is something to do. A way to spend one’s time. Something to love and hate. Something to dedicate one’s life, regardless of the always certain failure6.
Including mine.
Translated by Norman Thomas Di Giovanni.
I realise this topic has been debated by Authors Online™ a lot these days (in 2022). I’ll leave this important discussion to these modern day sages.
On the other hand, I am tempted to claim that there is no better masterpiece than the one that will never be written. Or as Walter Benjamin puts it: “The work is the death mask of its conception.” There is no better library than that one made of never-written works, in the mind of the writer.
Put simply: social media is a lousy way of promoting work. The illusion that social media might help us leave the ocean of anonymity — by generating readers — is easily countered when we realise that on Twitter, to name one platform, only 1 percent or under of those engaging with the content of a tweet directing elsewhere actually click on a link (see Derek Thompson, ‘The Unbearable Lightness of Tweeting’). Whether those who click on the link actually read all the way to the end or not is something impossible to tell as of 2015. Whether they understand what they read or not we will never know.
Big déjà vu when seeing this arrive in my inbox just now. I read your original Gorse essay a few years ago and wrote a very long response which ended up being the first chapter of a book (I called "Acts of Translation") which I consigned to the bottom of the desk drawer out of respect for my fellow reader+writers.
Another of the side effects of reading your essay all those years ago is that I resolved to start reading my fellow writers of the virtual and give up trying to be noticed, allowing myself to sink ever further into delicious anonymity and obscurity. The result of this focus on reading what others write and post on platforms such as this is that I've become part of a small, but vibrant community of writer+readers. So who knows what will happen in the world when bottled messages are tossed into the open sea? Thank you for writing, even if it seems pointless.
Here's an excerpt from my book that will never be forced unwanted onto the world which was written in response to "On the futility of writing":
Maybe we aren’t listening to each other, but whose fault is that? Not listening is a curable defect. If we aren’t listening to each other, it’s because we are so caught up in wanting others to listen to us — read what I’ve written! Please click on this link I’ve just posted on Twitter that will take you to the incredible blog post I’ve just written about a subject that is really very important to me. Please, look at me, read me, I want to be seen. I’ll even take my clothes off, if that will help. We writers are natural exhibitionists anyway. On second thought, at my age it’s probably best if I remain clothed. [“...a body as flabby as his prose,” quipped one critic] Is anybody out there? As desperate as this might sound, a possible solution for our collective invisibility is to stop engaging in self-promotion, stop curating our witty online personas, and invest some time in actually reading what we (the writers of the virtual) are writing. Our challenge, an opportunity even, is to see the internet as the Borgesian Library and the internet as the Barthesian writerly text which is there for us to read (and even add to if we want). If we want to make virtual literature relevant, we have to be willing to read it. We have to start listening to each other. And it’s possible that we already are.
I am grateful you wrote this (and the irony is that it’s in writing, no?). It did sound familiar—thanks for taking me back to the ancient* Gorse essay.
Have you read Zadie Smith’s essay “Something to Do” from her lockdown collection Intimations? I am glad she is self-aware to acknowledge that were she not Zadie Smith who is known, her lock down essays would be liked by three on subtack. And nada on Twitter. Anyway, it’s a great essay on this writing life and the absurdity of thinking it’s important.
I teach. With all my heart and creativity. Literature. But reading, first. In a very broken system.
And reading/ listening to her read her essay over the summer and then this, I am so relieved. Writing? Who knows? I do it when I absolutely can’t help it. The Twitter discipline gods be damned. But it does matter to plant seeds of literacy. I am grateful to have a vocation that is teaching despite my attempts to resist it.
My niece is 5 and learning to read and I swear every time she is able to connect two words to a larger meaning her eyes light up as if it’s magic she has witnessed.
No one listens and no one reads. The world has been running by those, good and bad, who do, since eternity.
*yesterday is ancient in online times.