It’s strange how the event one remembers attaches itself to the moments surrounding it, which without it would have been lost, since they don’t contain anything memorable. Yet those are the moments we live our lives in, while those we remember, which we construct our identities around, are often the exceptions. That is why what Proust called involuntary memories are so powerful—what a smell, such as that of wet asphalt on a foggy autumn evening, or a taste, such as that of cold boiled mackerel and a cucumber slice soaked in vinegar, can reawaken is completely unprocessed, time appears in an almost raw state, beyond the control of thought and memory, connected with life as it was actually lived. For me as for most people, the primary catalyst for this kind of memory is music. During this particular period, on those particular nights, I was listening to Wings and their album Back to the Egg. I still occasionally play that album now, not because it’s so good but because that particular time is encapsulated in it, and especially A Wizard of Earthsea: the atmosphere of that book, that music, and that period of my life are inextricably interwoven within me. And I think that what that mood represented, the place it created within me, is one of the most important reasons that I later began to write. I wanted to enter that space again.
But what kind of a book is it, which not only left a deep mark on me but also gathers around itself a wreath of memories from an otherwise memoryless time?
A Wizard of Earthsea is a fairy tale. It is set in a world of islands and seas, during premodern times; people travel by horse and by ship. There are wizards there, so magic is possible, but not for everyone. Every thing, every animal, and every human being has a true name, outside of language, linked to what it really is. The art of magic is connected with these names: if one knows the name one can control the thing, the animal, the person. The protagonist is a boy named Ged; he is from an outlying region, he is gifted but proud and ambitious, he impatiently seeks recognition, and when his skills are discovered and he is admitted to a school of wizardry, his boasting and self-assertiveness drive him to cross the border into the land of the dead, to prove his worth to the others. He almost dies, falls into a coma and barely pulls through, but a creature, a kind of spirit or demon, enters the world because of this. He senses its coldness, hides from it, flees from it, farther and farther away, and knows that he cannot become free of it until he has come to know its true name. Toward the end of the book, when the spirit has come very near and intends either to take Ged over or to destroy him, he suddenly realizes that it bears his own name.
It may seem infantile to bring up a children’s book in an essay about why I write, a regressive elevation of something that might have an effect on a ten-year-old, but which has no value in adult life, other than as nostalgia, or in other words, a form of homesickness.
Why don’t I write instead about the influence of Ulysses, whose virtually inexhaustible insights and praxises may suffice for an entire long life of writing? Or about Anne Carson’s poems or Vanessa Baird’s pictures, both of which open up mythological space in present time to dizzying effect, in ways as true as they are unfathomable?
A Wizard of Earthsea is a children’s book, but the feelings it evoked in me are not exclusive to childhood, for unlike our thoughts, our emotions do not change in the course of a life, at least not in a fundamental way: joy is the same to a ten-year-old as to a seventy-year-old, as are grief, anger, jealousy, loathing, and enthusiasm. All the books I read as a child brought out feelings in me, but they dealt with a world out there, which I left as soon as I closed the covers. This book related to feelings that concerned me, the person I was and the world I lived in. It opened the way for a kind of unreflecting, emotion-driven thoughts, something I had never experienced before; they were new to me and almost shockingly powerful.
I didn’t know that I had a strong need to be seen, I didn’t know that such a thing as a desire to be seen even existed at all. That everything I did came to have a life beyond me, essentially other than the person I was, yet still inexorably tied to me, this I had already experienced, but I had never thought about it, it remained unarticulated within me. Reading didn’t articulate it for me, it didn’t make me start thinking about it, but it let me feel it. It gave my feelings a form and a direction. It was an awakening, but it took place, as it were, inside a book, and even though it was painful, it also felt good, perhaps precisely because it didn’t have any external consequences but remained inside me.
This emotion-based way of thinking and understanding is unique to literature, or to certain kinds of literature, and although I lost sight of it for many years, while I was studying literature and literary theory and believed that only the cerebral had any value, that insight could be gained only through reflection, it never left me—I read Ulysses and admired it tremendously, but it was “The Dead” that really left a mark on me, and when I read Dostoevsky’s The Idiot it wasn’t my thought that was set alight but my feelings.
Thoughts and feelings are not mutually exclusive, of course; it is precisely the opposite that occurs in reading, as I experienced for the first time when I read Ursula K. Le Guin’s children’s classic: they are brought together. Reading is a different way of thinking.
That’s how it was: literature was a hiding place for me, and at the same time a place where I became visible. And this, an outside place where what is inside becomes visible, is still what literature is to me. Literature and art, along with religion, are the only places I know of that are capable of establishing such an outside. Politics is inside, journalism is inside, scientific research and academic theses are inside, philosophy and social science, in fact every discipline I can think of is inside, and with the technological avalanche of recent years, tying together different parts of reality in a vast here and now, the reasons to write have not necessarily become more numerous, but they have definitely become more acute.
I would be lying, however, if I said that this is why I write. Obviously, I write for personal reasons, having to do with my private life, and these reasons are banal. I also write for existential reasons, concerning what it means to be, and these reasons are or can easily be perceived as being pretentious. And I write for social reasons, in that I am part of a linguistic and cultural community in which literary texts, be it poems, essays, short stories, plays, or novels, serve an important function, one that is increasingly downplayed or no longer fully acknowledged, but which as I see it is nevertheless essential.
The problem with an essay like this is that if I take on the first role and discuss my private reasons for writing, which have to do with wanting to be seen, wanting to be someone, with ambition and desire for success, I will come off as self-centered, shallow, and more than a little stupid, while if I focus on the other two roles, the existential side of writing and the function of writing in society, I will seem conceited, self-important, and perhaps also megalomaniac.
But as it happens, writing is precisely about disregarding how something seems in the eyes of others, it is precisely about freeing oneself from all kinds of judgments and from posturing and positioning. Writing is about making something accessible, allowing something to reveal itself.
Whatever it is that reveals itself may well be something already known, for there is hardly anything uncharted in the human psyche or in the world anymore, but it has to show itself unguardedly, with a kind of trust. It’s like with the hedgehogs here in the garden: there are two of them, and if I want to see them as they are by themselves, I have to sit perfectly still in a chair and wait until dusk, when they emerge from their hiding place, and if I don’t move then, they sometimes come all the way up to me, and I see not only their rotund, bristly bodies, their black eyes and black snouts, but also their way of being present in the world, their slow snuffling and shuffling, their cautiousness which at times turns into excitement and greed, even that of a slow nature. They don’t see me, I see them.
The opposite can happen too, that crossing the yard in the darkness I inadvertently kick one of them so that it cu
rls up into a ball and rolls along the flagstones.
The first method, sitting still and waiting for them to come out and become accessible to my gaze, is the novel’s way of thinking, while the other, inadvertently stumbling over one of them in the dark and giving it a kick, is the logic of poems or short prose. In both cases it happens inadvertently—it doesn’t matter whether it is the writer or what he is writing about that comes along inadvertently. Thoughts are the enemy of the inadvertent, for if one thinks about how something will seem to others, if one thinks about whether something is important or good enough, if one begins to calculate and to pretend, then it is no longer inadvertent and accessible as itself, but only as what we have made it into.
The thought of what others will think, of whether this is any good or not, all criticism and self-criticism, all reflection and judgment must be put aside for trust to develop. In this sense, writing must be open and innocent. But in order for something within this openness and innocence to emerge and become accessible, there have to be limitations, and this is what we call form.
The odd thing about form is that it makes it possible to say certain things but not others.
A couple of years ago I wrote three books of short pieces, most of them one or two pages long. All of them are about things or phenomena, most of them physical and material. I set myself some simple rules: each text should have as its subject one word, a thing, or a phenomenon, each should be about one page long, and each should be written in one continuous movement, one sitting. These rules had the effect that certain connections emerged that I hadn’t thought of or seen before. For example, the way we automatically arrange the things around us in hierarchies, assigning more value and significance to some things than to others, in an order so fixed that it never occurs to us to challenge it, as we do with established social and political orders and hierarchies, and yet the first kind of order is just as arbitrary. Or the connections between the body and its surroundings, how teeth resemble small stones and the mouth a cave, how the tongue is attached to the floor of the mouth like a mollusk to its shell, how the moist orifices of the body are to the surrounding skin as wetlands are to adjacent dry areas. Described thus, segmented into smaller parts, the material and objectlike aspect of the body becomes apparent and its similarity to other objects obvious, which for me, as I sat there writing, created a new connection to reality, in the sense that the trail running between me and reality took a new direction. That my identity, the person I am to myself, is interwoven with the world of things in such a way that it is impossible to say where one begins and the other ends, while my body is in a sense itself a thing, as finite as things and as limited, but also just as open, for water runs not only down through the soil, but also down the gullet, and the air that fills every room also fills the lungs, to say nothing of all the plants and animals we ingest and expel again when we have absorbed everything in them we can use—and one day the body too will take the final step into the world of things, becoming a thing among other things, like a fallen leaf, a stick, a mound, and go on existing as separate elements of a mute reality.
It was form that allowed this insight to emerge, it was form that allowed it to be seen, it was form that made it possible to say. The rudiments of it already existed in my mind but were neither articulated nor meaningful; meaning came with form.
As important as what form allows a writer to say is what it doesn’t let him say. If one describes a particular town on a particular day, following the characters’ thoughts practically minute by minute, all superstructures vanish, the arches of history and tradition disappear, leaving behind merely bits and fragments in between elements of the personal past and the ever-present impressions of the surroundings, the streetscape, the office, the beach, the bed. The difference between life as it really unfolds, always in the moment, and the overarching context we interpret it in but never live in will be revealed. If every chapter of this book is written differently, employing different strategies, for example one in the form of news journalism, another formed as a catechism, a third as a stream of consciousness, the relative nature of the way we understand ourselves and others will be emphasized, at the same time creating a sense that material life is something that goes on irrepressibly regardless of the forms of language, and fundamentally independent of them: the optic may change, but not what it is looking at. So if one lets the characters’ movements on this particular day correspond structurally to the movements of an antique text, the tensions between that which always remains the same, the unchanging element of human nature, and that which changes, the culture, our gaze, will be intensified even further. All these possible interpretations of the world, all these layers of reality, are made possible through form, almost independent of what the characters are thinking, feeling, or happen to be doing.
I read Ulysses for the first time when I was twenty-one and studying at the university, I was supposed to write a paper about it. I didn’t understand very much, for the simple reason that I lacked that overall grasp of literature, philosophy, and history that Joyce lets go of in the novel. I saw only chaos and complexity, a lack of coherence and references to things I had no idea about. I am still not a fully fledged reader of Joyce, but precisely the way the moment dissolves connections, and how they are reestablished in different ways through the use of different styles, has been important to me over the past twenty years, if not directly in my own writing, then in my understanding of what it means to write about reality, and the extent to which one’s worldview is inherent in the form. When I was nineteen and just beginning to write in earnest, I knew nothing about form—I knew what I liked, but not why I liked it—and I remember that mentally I set up two opposite extremes. On one side there was Hunger by Knut Hamsun, which I found fantastic, and on the other side, at the opposite end of the scale, there was Milan Kundera and his novels, perhaps especially The Unbearable Lightness of Being, which I felt an instinctive aversion to and didn’t want to write about. (As if I could have written about it had I wanted to!) Now I understand what attracted me to Hamsun’s form and put me off Kundera’s, it had to do with closeness and presence—Hamsun follows his protagonist so closely that there is no plot, no construction of character, everything centers on him and what he sees, and it is as if Hamsun thereby describes the world as it comes into being, as it emerges for the main character. The world becomes the present, the world becomes the here and now, and this renders a dramatic storyline perfectly unnecessary, for the intensity of the present is such that everything becomes important and interesting. Kundera, on the other hand, uses an omniscient narrator who does as he pleases with his characters, placing them in various situations like a puppeteer, at a great distance from them, and the illusion of reality is constantly being broken. Kundera is a writer of ideas, a master of superstructure, and as an essayist he has no peer in contemporary letters. That I instinctively distanced myself from his form and literary strategies was partly because empathy was such an important part of my reading experience, and partly, I think, because I myself was so removed from the world, I was never really in it—perhaps because I had once benefited from protecting myself against it, and had never come out of my defensive position—and in literature I had found a way in. That is why presence and closeness were always what I sought there.
The lesson I learned from the form of Hunger, which I still consider an exceptional novel, and which surpasses Joyce’s work in many respects, is a simple one: life is unpredictable, full of tensions and an almost unbearable intensity, anything can happen at any time, but the expectations we have, based on presumptions and prior knowledge, take the excitement out of daily life rather as plot structure and the construction of character can do in classical novels and films. We are not vulnerable, we are safe, we live in a secure and predictable space. Novels and films, news and reportages protect us by confirming this.
The discrepancy between the reality I lived in and the literature I was writing at a certain point led me to throw in my cards
and try something new. I wanted to get close to reality, and the genre with which I felt the greatest affinity at the time was the diary. What would happen if I combined the diary’s closeness to the self and urge for reflection with the realist step-by-step novel? The rules I set myself now were exceptionally simple. I would write only about things that had actually happened, and I would write about them as I remembered them, without doing research or amending my memory to conform to other versions. I also had to write a certain number of pages every day, first five, later ten, and toward the end up to twenty. In that way I simply wouldn’t have time to think, to plan or to calculate, I would have to go with whatever appeared on the screen in front of me. This method came about because I had set out to write about myself, and since we know more about ourselves than about any other subject, it seemed important to avoid the established versions and to seek instead the complexity that lies beneath our self-insight and self-image and which can be accessed only by not thinking about how our thoughts and feelings will seem to others, how it will look, who I am if I think and feel these things.
This form made it possible to see how closely interwoven the “I” is with the “we,” how language, culture, and our collective notions course through us, how common even our most secret and solitary emotions are. I hadn’t realized that before, nor did I expect to as I set out to write these books, for then my idea was to write about the most private of matters, that which was only my own, while what the form I had chosen enabled me to say turned out in the end to be the very opposite.
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