39 Books: 2005

Four years later, browsing in Waterstones, I picked a book from a table and read "What will we do to disappear?" – the epigram to Enrique Vila-Matas's novel Montano's Malady. It's a line taken from Maurice Blanchot's Infinite Conversation, so I had to buy it. Later that year, when as part of the Warwick Prize for Writing jury I championed the novel, another member complained that it was "writing about writing". Instead of correcting this to writing about not writing, I responded rather weakly by saying that writing is as much a part of life as anything else. I should have pointed out it was also part of the title for the prize.

Placing writing in the foreground is the reason why Vila-Matas has not won a literary prize in this country while winning almost every one on the European mainland, because literary prizes in this country are routinely awarded to happy recyclers, genre jugglers, barkers for bookshops, and handed to them by prize juries invariably loaded with centrist dullards who display their literary perspicacity to the world (well, The Guardian) by pointing to an author's genitals. British literature cannot and will not open the wound of the negative.

Anyway, this year's choice is not about writing but giving up writing. The narrator, Marcelo, says he wrote one book and then stopped writing until he began keeping a notebook of writers who stopped writing; "writers of the No", those who who, like Bartleby the Scrivener, develop "the negative impulse or attraction towards nothingness".

The incongruity of Enrique Vila-Matas writing about not writing is, of course, that he himself has never stopped writing. He has followed Marguerite Duras' advice given to him as a young man: "You must write, don’t do anything but write", advice she received from Raymond Queneau. However, the incongruity may be deceptive. In following the advice, Vila-Matas becomes a Bartleby himself, a copyist, but he is unusual in that he seeks a way out by witnessing himself acting within the history of the novel. He is aware that each generation has to find for itself the possibility of literature, hence the complaints from budding prize jury members, such as this reviewer who thinks the book should not be called a novel and "more like literary criticism". By writing about the condition of the copyist, he opens onto that empty space, that silence on the other side of writing into which Bartlebys disappear. One becomes a real writer by not writing, by not being "like" in Alice Oswald's sense. 

"It is well known that God keeps quiet, is a master of silence, hears all the pianos in the world, is a consummate writer of the No, and for that reason He is transcendent."

Vila-Matas' unofficial trilogy of Bartleby & Co, Montano's Malady, and Dublinesque may constitute a negative theology of literature, something of which I knew nothing in 2005 and only a little more now, though of course knowledge in this field is of questionable value.