How the prospect of publication can paralyze the writing process ‹ Literary Hub

The dream is to write a book that will also be a tonic: not a course of study, but a method of treatment. “I am starting a new book in order to have a companion,” wrote Hervé Guibert, “someone with whom I can talk, eat, sleep, dream and have nightmares, the only friend whose company I can bear at the moment.” He had read The Pillow Book by Sei Shōnagon in the country. Shivering from the cold, he bit into a biscuit that was far too salty.

Article continues after ad

I copied his words and emailed them to you, including his parenthetical words: “(To live with a book, even if you don’t write it, is quite wonderful.)” This is what we were looking for, the overall wonderful. I wrote to you about a method of writing: make notes on index cards and put them in a shoebox. When the box is full, the book is finished. This method seemed comforting to me. We were looking for a method of writing that was less like writing and more like living. I really want to write my next book like that, I wrote to you, as notes that can record anything: a compleat or commonplace book, a companion text. It would be a manual, I wrote. The book you always have to hand. A circadian practice, a gentle addiction. You would live with this dream text as if it were a daily drug. You would stay up with it—or it would stay up with you—as you stay up with the dying.

“That’s the devilish thing about prose, it’s never finished,” said Flaubert, cooling his cheeks with the palms of his hands and then cooling them on the iron knobs of the tall andirons. But we were not afraid of the devilish; on the contrary, we wanted it. I, for example, was inspired by Aimé Césaire, who wrote at least three versions of his Notebook of a return to the homeland between 1939 and 1947. Eternal magic: a never-ending book. A persistent delirium of rotting straw, obsessive bells and rain. You too, you wrote, were fascinated by impossible projects, by books that are never written and books that never end. You wrote to me about the 19th century tradition of deathbed memories, a book dictated by the last pillow. It was utopian, diabolical, ideal.

Before, I wrote to you, the Internet seemed to me to promise endless scrolling. And then there were the social connections that branched out across space. But then I became disgusted with my name. Now I feel more than ever the desire for an endless text. That is the only solution to the problem of literature. Only when a book is finished and published does it enter the realm of the name. If you never finished a text, you would never end up there, in what I, perhaps with a touch of hysteria, called the blood-soaked arena the publishing world. The best book, I wrote, would be the one that lasts a lifetime. At some point, you would simply leave it behind.

I realized that there was a tyranny of identity that all writers experienced, and that there was a second tyranny reserved for those who had representative bodies.

I think we were almost numbed to publishing. It drove us into retreat. But we tried to be generous with our younger selves, those who thought it impossible to ever be published, for whom publishing was the only thing, the consuming desire. Back then, I confessed, when no one paid attention to my writing, I habitually drew attention to myself. Looking back, that seemed low, shameful. I’m trying to say, I wrote to you, that I am not above all that. I still felt caught up in it: the name, the skin, the color, the gender expression, the cultural practice I called the sideshow of diversitythe question of whether confession is a source of radical power or a trap that keeps one trapped in one’s own carcass; the question of whether it is actually shameful to draw attention to one’s race and gender in literary discussions or whether it is really shameful to omit these things; and the possibility that the idea of ​​literature as a privileged spiritual ground is romantic, reactionary, dangerous and stupid.

Your friend wanted to plan a book party for you; you said you wanted a book funeral instead. Bury the book. Throw it away. The public suffers. You wrote to me that Goethe left the court and fled to Italy, shifting his existence and his writing out of people’s sight, traveling under a false name to pay tribute to the author of Werther. There he would learn to draw, he would learn to write again at last, hear the half-silent groans of the spirits. Rilke hid behind his poems, then he tried to hide his poems behind his hair, his hands, or some opaque object. He obscured the passages with his breath. He made himself small, he hid as children hide, he let out a short and happy cry. “Only an angel,” he wrote to himself and to us, “would have been allowed to look for you. But then, when you looked up cautiously, there was no doubt that they had seen you all along, everyone in that hateful, hollow, peering hall: you, you, you, and nothing but you.”

I realized that there was a tyranny of identity that all writers experienced, and that there was a second tyranny reserved for those who had representative bodies: the role models. Exemplary: serving as a desirable model; characteristic of its kind; serving as a warning or deterrent.

Being asked to speak or write as a representative of a category is a grief. It was as if I was mourning something. I wondered what I was mourning, what I was missing, as I walked through the fluorescent lights of the conference with my name tag and paper cup. I realized it was the writing.

__________________________________

Extract from Opacity: About writing and life as a writer from Sofia Samatar. CCopyright © 2024. Reprinted with permission of Soft skull Press.