Things we repeat
Or maybe the appropriate question would be, “What if I run out of new things to say?”
This possibility has been haunting me these past few weeks, for no particular reason other than trying to keep this space going. It’s this nagging feeling that I might be running out of new things to say, and that this is happening against the background of too many of us saying too much of the same, in too many places, with too much frequency. Words are limited, and new combinations of said words are limited too — logic dictates that new ideas will run out at some point. How much more can I say with the limited arsenal of contemporary English, without repeating myself or someone else? Compelled to travel this trodden path, is saying anything, just for the sake of saying something, worthwhile at all? Are we (writers) condemned to repetition, and therefore there’s little point in worrying about running out of new things to say? Is this something that we just need to accept?1 Even the impression that “everything has already been said” is so old that by now it has become one more literary cliché.
This is where philosophers beat writers. As writers we work with language as ready-made material, while philosophers2 create new concepts and concoct new languages, thus expanding the field of what is possible. How ridiculous it is to work with language without turning language into something unique! How cowardly! There are of course exceptions to this rule, authors who do create new languages,3 but I don’t have it in me to do this. My weakness as a writer, especially as one who writes in a second language, stems from a desire to be understood.
Any writer who desires to be understood becomes a slave to the medium.
Genre as a tool for taming literature
Or maybe the problem isn’t language per se, but the need to wedge one’s writing into a certain genre, in order to be properly understood. Genres facilitate communication but they do so by cutting literature’s legs, in order to stop it from escaping to unknown places.
Genres are the aisles of a giant supermarket, where products are put on display according to marketing principles that have little to do with writing as a practice. In aisle number one you can find romantic fiction, in aisle number two you can find YA, in aisle number three — in-between the political biographies and the books about London — you can find memoirs, and at the end of aisle number four, stuck between the toilet paper and the deodorants you can find literary fiction. Why do writers surrender to genres and write within these constraints, if it isn’t to better offer themselves to this supermarket? To offer themselves properly. To offer themselves as things.
The best book ever written would be indifferent to genre distinctions. The best book ever written would resist classification. The best book the world has ever read would be impossible to tame, and it would be impossible to sell. Alas, the best book ever written might only exist as an unclassifiable and unwritten project — a handful of draft pages in someone’s imagination.
A book as pure possibility.
Industrial noise
In the past few years, since most literary discourse moved online, industry and literature have become synonyms. There’s now a wide array of loud industry grifters trying to influence what books should be like, succeeding in their radical fetishisation of sameness and safe mediocrity. Some of these grifters claim connections, or know-how, or experience in their beloved industry. But none of these grifters can produce a single paragraph that doesn’t stink.4
The loudness of these voices, along with the death of actual criticism — that is, the transformation of the critic into a book marketer — are the main reasons why most conventional literature today fails to excite any discerning reader. This is literature as a conveyor belt that churns out the same book, with a different title, every single time, while we are told that all these books need to be celebrated, for the sole reason that they are books and not something else. And if we don’t clap for this mediocrity, then we are snobs! Maybe we need to reclaim this word, snob, at least until the grifting is brought to an end by AI or some other mediocrity-replacement technology.
All this considered, it’d be hard not to feel deflated. It’s tempting to put the pen away, put away the books, and do something else, watch another true crime documentary on Netflix, or just go for a walk in nature, safe from literary considerations. And yet… And yet, I get the feeling that there are things happening that I’m missing, just because — despite my disdain — I’m distracted by the mountain of literary crap obscuring the sun before me. I’m missing not only exciting texts, but exciting and different ways to write, with total freedom, without considerations. Perhaps the wise option would be to force ourselves to stop listening to all the noise. To stop listening to all the noise, in order to do whatever we want to do when we sit down to put words on a page. To search for whimsical ideas we don’t need others to understand properly. To enjoy being misunderstood and misread. But more importantly, to enjoy the silence, and in this peace, continue to search for the unexpected in unexpected places.5
Maybe to write has always been to write what has already been written, hoping for the new in this repetition? The Eternal Return of Sameness with a pinch of Difference…
I think here of “philosopher” in the way understood by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari in What is Philosophy. D&G (not Dolce & Gabbana) argue that philosophy is a creative activity, and that philosophers not merely analyse but create new concepts to address specific problems or dimensions of thought. Most of what we understand as “philosophy” is for D&G actually “history of philosophy”.
Burroughs, Joyce, Cortázar, to name just three.
A thought inspired by current world events (summer 2024)… Say what you want about football punditry, but at least most pundits were at one point actual footballers. How did we get to a situation in which people who can’t write two intelligent sentences get to tell others how to write theirs?
In a bid to do exactly this, I have recently been approaching odd non-fiction books and pamphlets as examples of “creative writing”. To name just five of the titles that have filled me with joy: Modern Propensities: or, an Essay on the Art of Strangling, anonymous, 1791; The Life of Joseph Balsamo, Commonly Called Count Cagliostro. Containing the Singular and Uncommon Adventures of That Extraordinary Personage, Alessandro di Cagliostro (Apostolic Chamber, translator), 1791; The Seeress of Prevorst. Being Revelations Concerning the Inner-life of Man, and the Inter-diffusion of a World of Spirits in the One We Inhabit, Justinus Kerner (Catherine Crowe, translator), 1845; The Future of London, Edward Carter, 1962; Buildings at Risk in Hackney, Hackney Society, 1987. Even the aforementioned D&G (not Dolce & Gabbana) can be read creatively. I recommend their Mille plateaux (1980). There is a good English translation by Brian Massumi (A Thousand Plateaus, 1987), but in order to read it creatively I would recommend you read it in its original language, since it’s always better not to depend on anyone’s approximation (translation). If you can’t read French, then better — you’ll read it even more creatively. As always, in other words, the possibility of making literature interesting lies with the reader — as Roland Barthes famously said, “Fuck the author.” Or something to that effect…
I wrote essays, musings, blog posts (whatever you wish to call them)—words—regularly from 2009 to 2011 or maybe even 2013 or thereabouts on my personal blog. And I was astounded by the drive, the relentless drive, to write. There was no end to words and re-readings. Because I was always trying to understand and be understood.
And then life just happened TO me. When life happens TO, one is just holding onto a board and riding the waves of being alive. oh I wrote and published etc. but it wasn’t the same. I wasn’t directly being fed from some source.
and then I just didn’t have the desire to write (at least those essays) because I understood so much from a space beyond language.
But now language has become a mine field. There’s a challenge! So, maybe, I will write on my blog again.
RE the noise of publishing.
Hello from last day here in Ireland where I had budgeted to buy all the hype I hear about via the Twat. And found myself instead buying children’s books for my nieces, books not available in the U.S. even via Amazon, for proficient/ advanced readers, books not lacking in imagination.
I am so sad about the state of publishing.
I am sick and tired of my shelf of books I haven’t finished.
I am sick of blurbs.
I am sick of reviews about the person instead of the book.
I am tired of everyone having taken some mass hallucinogen and not realizing how everything sounds the same, it’s poorly edited, and so over the nose self-conscious about its characters’ politics.
Just tell me a story. If it’s good, it can’t help but be political because we are an idiot species.
Oh I did read one book while staying at a friend’s. Yellowface. 2023 hype. True to the hype. Couldn’t put it down. The tone very much reads like a What’s App thread among writers, and at best a 200 page Twitter thread. But couldn’t put it down. The audience is definitely those familiar with the industry and those who are current or former “users” of Twatter. Very clever. I recommend.
It also has me considering leaving X for good. I already use it minimally, but maybe that’s too much too.
So a comment on this nice piece : Often its forgotten today that literature does not consist of ideas, opinions, narratives, theses, objects of/to dispute “objects of intellectual use” etcetera: but of language, that it has nothing other than language. This is sometimes forgotten when people write on literature, even on the science of literature. Further then : It seems to me that if one forgets this then this causes the idea that reading something in the original language is better than reading a translation and yet we know this makes no sense - a few example its surely clear that Marx’s Capital is more important and more read in English than in German, the reference you make to Deleuze and Guattari easily as good in English, and equally interesting as philosophy. as in the original French - should I go on? The science of literature, as literary modernists and hyper-modernists point out refuses both authorship and creativity because of the necessity of accepting that literature is nothing other than language…