Tuesday, February 26, 2008

A reader's guide to the unwritten

"The realisation that, at best, writers could only hope to dress old words new and recreate what was already there led to a spate of literary eclipses. Hofmannstahl's Lord Chandos, who renounces literature because language cannot "penetrate the innermost core of things", epitomises this mute mutiny instigated (in real life) by Rimbaud. Wittgenstein would later insist that the most important part of his work was the one he had not written, presumably because it lay beyond his coda to the Tractatus: "Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent."

Keeping shtoom and tuning in to the roar on the other side of silence was a soft option. Dostoevsky's Kirilov - who attempts to defeat God by desiring his own humanity and therefore his own mortality and death - heralded a wave of phantom scribes. Forced to recognise that divine ex nihilo creation was beyond their grasp, writers such as Marcel Schwob came to the conclusion that the urge to destroy was also a creative urge - and perhaps the only truly human one."

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