About failure in general – and the doubts which first found full expression in the nineteenth century, questioning the wisdom of progress, its intellectual and spiritual roots in the Enlightenment, and its inevitability, the future project of progress – failure really got going in the twentieth century, after the First World War of course, and onwards, through the rise of fascism, the Holocaust, the Terrors and the Gulags, postwar to the coups in Iran and Chile and what the CIA call the ‘backdrafts’ afterwards, and on via the two Iraq and previous and current Afghanistan Wars up to the present day. And now, facing the 2020’s and beyond…
Then about the failure in particular of writers of literature – see my September post – from Melville’s Bartleby The Scrivener (1856) down to the present day.
And about the failure of writers to read, and under what kind of compulsion are we (both to write and to read) to scribble and to decipher, suffering avoidant behaviour , since it would be worse not to, a ghostly Death State, akin to being locked up in an Asylum for all our years, the stopping of time.
…Back at the Booker, it all goes along amusingly enough; Self himself playing the royal jester to the crowd, lifting his book Umbrella as if he has just won the FA Cup, but more to show its primary function raised above our heads – to give shade.
Until for a moment the shade slips (and we stare blinking at the dangerous sun) “But No!…” Deborah Orr, who is married to Will Self, gave her own account of his winning the Booker Prize in Saturday’s Guardian; his compulsion to write against the terror of the abyss of failure (his previous book – a turkey); her falling ill with breast cancer, and undergoing treatment, lying in bed all day “passively letting chemotherapy drugs get on with attacking cancer cells”, while at the same time Self is working away upstairs.
And more that “I would prefer not to” – in Bartleby style whether as writer and reader -prefer not to write about or read. And as well for myself, since I have still not bought myself a copy of Umbrella, only looked at the covers and browsed through the first pages in a bookshop again yesterday, feeling under the compulsion of being a dutiful reader and intending to do so, but having failed so far, not until I have at least finished this bundle of writing ECHO EFECTS.