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To talk about my own work is difficult. If I must talk about it at all I would rather come at it sideways, through the work of writers I admire, through broader ideas about poetry and fiction and their place in the world.
It is a strange time; the writer is expected to be able to explain his or her work as though it were a perplexing machine supplied without an instruction manual. The question 'What is your book about?" has always puzzled me. It is about itself and if I could condense it into other words I should not have taken such care to choose the words I did. In any case, if a finished piece of work is inadequate without copious footnotes from the author, it is inadequate. I have tried to make it clear, in these essays and elsewhere, that the language of literature is not an approximate language. It is the most precise language that human beings have yet developed. The spaces it allows are not formless vistas of subjectivity, they are new territories of imagination. Unlike the language of mathematics (which I admit is beautiful), the language of literature need not be pared of emotion and association to avoid error. Human beings cannot avoid error, even the purest mathematician would accept that, and wild readings of strong texts are no commoner than the wild inferences of science. We are a speculative, subjective, changing people and each new generation considers itself more enlightened than its predecessor; a view that science both encourages and depends on.
Literature (all art) takes a different view; human nature, emotional reality is not seen as a progress from darkness to light but as a communication, with ourselves and across time, so that work entirely out of date by scientific standards is as fresh and meaningful to us as it ever was.
Whereas science outdates the past, art keeps it present. Whereas the language of science tries to eliminate error, chiefly by the use of agreed symbols carrying an agreed value, the language of literature seems to be able to contain error by being greater than it. For instance, Shakespeare has not been sunk by the weight of four hundred years of scholarly and popular interpretations, and we do not much mind if we see a poor production of our favourite play because we know that very soon we shall see a good one, perhaps even one which takes us closer into the core than we thought possible.
And what is the core? Nobody would agree, there is no such a thing as an agreed value Shakespeare. This is not because Shakespeare is less precise than a mathematical equation, it is because he is unfixed. Language is movement, and I do not mean inevitable development or deterioration, I mean that words are fleet-footed things and when right run, escape us at the place where we think we have wrestled them flat.
All good writers aspire towards such precision and movement, and the experiments that writers must make are for the sake of new frequencies of language which in turn allow new frequencies of emotion. The writer has to choose a word, every word, that is solid enough for its meaning and powered enough for its flight. The word will have to cross time, the word will have to survive assault. At certain stages of its history, the word will be a good parcel dropped among refugees. At other times it would seem a luxury, possibly a decadence. The word, to be read by male and female, young and old, to be read as high culture or original sin will have to stare back at every pair of eyes set upon it, will not wear thin through too much use. The word, every word, will have to hold ints own in the sentence, in the paragraph, in the chapter, in the book, on the bookshelf, in the library, as chanted, as whispered, as defamed, as ignored, as seized, as libelled, as sung into a hymn of praise. All this the word, every word, must withstand and escape, to tell its story, now multiple, now threadbare, wheresoever it falls. The choosing of the word is like the arming of a knight and if it seems ritualistic, obssessive, absurd, then remember that its perils and its obligations are sacred; that is, consecrated, devoted and set apart.
The language of literature is not the language of the everyday. Human beings have made it Other. One of the jobs of the writer now is to go on respecting it as Other.
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a work of my own
