Samuel Beckett, in a 1961 interview with Tom Driver, remarked: “To find a form that accommodates the mess, that is the task of the artist now.” Beckett, Joyce, and Woolf each exemplified the search for a form that gestures toward a reality beyond the limits of language. Whether there are contemporary writers equally committed to questioning and transcending these boundaries remains an unsettled question.
Where is the fiction with something serious to say, that reveals what cannot be spoken, in a world of omnipresent data and incessant noise? A certain assurance remains in the melancholic clarity of Jon Fosse, Peter Handke, Gabriel Josipovici, Friederike Mayröcker, and Gerald Murnane. Yet there is the sense that finding new forms to accommodate the mess may now be taking place elsewhere, beyond the boundaries of the printed page.
Recent immersion in Beckett’s early work, guided by Andy Wimbush’s Still: Samuel Beckett’s Quietism, reaffirms the sustaining presence of those tutelary spirits to whom one might continually return. Curiosity, however, inevitably draws attention outward, even when the returns are diminished.
Attempts to comprehend the present crisis in Ukraine have led only to a deeper recognition of the death of investigative reporting and the erosion of intelligent analysis. Reading John Calder’s The Garden of Eros, a chronicle of the post-war Paris literary scene, offered little to counteract that impression, its vitality largely dissipated beneath a veneer of gossip and recollection.
A more promising path lies in the slow approach to Wittgenstein’s lesser-known writings. Dinda L. Gorlée’s Wittgenstein’s Secret Diaries: Semiotic Writing in Cryptography offers a preliminary movement toward the forthcoming English translation of Wittgenstein’s Private Notebooks: 1914–1916, promising a renewed engagement with a writing that finds, if not a form for the mess, then at least a form for its shadows.
To find a form that accommodates the mess, that is the task of the artist now – feels even more relevant nowadays, I feel.
And I clearly am NOT in top writing form today, two ‘feels’ in one sentence!
I felt the urgency!
Yes, arguably more pressing than ever, but will it emerge in written form? Perhaps those forms are outside of writing.
“The old writer couldn’t write anymore because he’d reached the end of words and the end of what could be done with words. And then… ” WSB.
Last year, with Frank Garrett, I joined in his monthly Nietzsche reading and discussion group. More and more I felt that words or philosophy or ideology were totally inadequate when looking for, or finding that space. Sometimes in poetry it’s there. Jan Zwicky is pretty good. Particularly Lyric Philosophy and her poetry. And sometimes in haiku.
It’s been in silent movement, particularly in Nature, that I can find a form for myself that’s adequate to it. And that rarely.
I’m enjoying your Sunday posts a lot.
Thanks, Des. I’m pleased that you are enjoying these posts.
Poetry: yes sometimes, most of what passes for poetry is so awful, but Zwicky is good. Philosophy these days just writes and reads itself.
Quite agree about the appalling so-called journalism nowadays – one reason I’ve given up on watching the news as it’s little more than propaganda…
I give up periodically, but then get drawn back when faced with events of seemingly colossal consequences.