what to write at the wake →
‘So here we are, on this side of the mountain, nostalgic for the great storm-struck plateaus where our writer-ancestors once worked their magic, but knowing that we live on the lowlands. Here we are at the end of Literature and Culture, stripped, bereft, embarrassed. We are children tromping in old boots. Perhaps even Bernhard and Bolaño are too grand for us to imitate! We should study the perverse doodlers, David Shrigley and Ivan Brunetti. Their very choice of medium shows how they have embraced their doom. We should disconnect our computers and put the books out on the stoop and forget we ever learned to read or care. But for those of us who cannot escape the need to scribble and type, here are a few pointers.
‘Use an unliterary plainness. It knows the game is up, that it’s all finished. The style of The Savage Detectives is notably unliterary, almost inelegant, for all the virtuosic restlessness of its narrative voices. It has “a choking directness.” Even Bernhard, for all his grammatical convolutions, writes, finally, with a kind of pathetic obviousness, he does not gussy or adorn, but spews instead the stuff of his complaint. The abyss needs the clear steadiness of a testimony, it needs the day-after sobriety of a witness-report to remember what went before. Literature is no longer the Thing Itself, but about the vanished Thing.
‘Resist closed forms, resist masterpieces. The urge to create masterpieces is a kind of necrophilia. Writing must be open on all sides so that the draft of real life—gloomy, farcical life — can pass through it, rifling its pages. Vila-Matas says that he feels it is necessary for whoever writes a fictional text to show his hand, to allow an image of himself to appear. But it is an image of farcical lifethat shows its hand in that literature which comes after Literature. The author must give up on aping genius. Rather show the author as ape, the author as idiot. Don’t have the hubris of being the comedian. You are the straight man in this farce; the universe is the funny man. So don’t be silly, cute, crack jokes, or play coy, but allow hilarity, a cleansing painful laughter that splits your sides and your heart. Follow your own foolishness like tracks upon the sand.
‘Write about this world, whatever else you’re writing about, a world dominated by dead dreams. Mark the absence of Hope, of Belief, of Commitments, of high-flown Seriousness. Mark the past from which we are broken and the future that will destroy us. Write about a kind of hope that was once possible as Literature, as Politics, as Life, but that is no longer possible for us.
‘Mark your sense of imposture. You’re not an Author, not in the old sense. You haven’t really written a Book, not a Real Book. You’re part of no tradition, no movement, no vanguard. There’s nothing at stake for you in Literature, not really, for all your demented strutting. In addition, very few people are actually reading: mark that fact, too. No one’s reading, idiot! There are more novelists than readers. There are so many books…
‘Mark your gloom. Mark the fact that the end is nigh. The party’s over. The stars are going out, and the black sky is indifferent to you and your stupidities. You’re with Bolaño’s characters at the end of the quest, lost in the Sonora Desert, and at the end of all quests. You’re drawing stupid cartoons to pass the time in the desert. That’s it, the whole of your oeuvre: the drawing of stupid cartoons to pass the time in the desert.
‘Don’t be generous and don’t be kind. Ridicule yourself and what you do. Savage art, like the cannibal you are. Remember, only when the thing is dead, picked at by a million years of crows, gnawed at by jackals, spat upon and forgotten, can we discover that last inviolate bit of bone.’
