From Opacities: On Writing and the Writing Life, an improvisation on the literary canon, which was published in August by Soft Skull Press.

i.

The dream is to create a book that will be a tonic: not a course of study but a course of treatment. “I’m beginning a new book to have a companion,” wrote Hervé Guibert. He had been reading The Pillow Book of Sei Shonagon in the country. Shivering with cold, he bit into an overly salty biscuit. “Living with a book, even when one isn’t writing it, is altogether marvelous.” That’s what we are looking for, the altogether marvelous. I wrote of a method: Take notes on index cards and put them in a shoebox. When the box is full, the book is done. I would write my next book that way, as notes that take in everything: a compleat or commonplace book, a companion text. A book you keep ready to hand. You’d live with this text as with some necessary daily drug. You’d sit up with it—or it would sit up with you—as one sits up with the dying.

ii.

Among those who got fed up with form: Frantz Fanon, who declared, “I shall be derelict”; Hélène Cixous, her cry: “Writing is for you, you are for you; your body is yours, take it.” Take it, seize this writing that is your body. Its form is flesh. Its form is gesture, said Antonin Artaud, who wanted us to quit messing around with style and instead be “like victims burned at the stake, signaling through the flames.” “Write without making corrections,” said Marguerite Duras. By this time she had sailed in vain all around the Java Sea, among the Indonesian Cyclades, toward Pontianak, in the Natuna archipelago. At last she lay on the deck of her hired boat and asked that her body be taken to Singapore. For several days she lay dead on the deck.

iii.

The artist and writer Alfred Kubin was disappointed that he never illustrated any of Kafka’s novels, which touched him deeply. He met Kafka once, in Prague, in 1911, but the two spoke only of their hypochondria. On the train, Kubin had looked out the window and caught a glimpse of the high wall, black against the night sky. It was a melancholy journey. First there was the fog, which made breathing difficult, then the smoky oil lamp, enough to make a man sick. Perhaps the way to talk of writing was as a sadness of the flesh: Kubin resting his foot on his knee to trim the frayed edge of his trousers. Later, seeing Kafka’s limp arm on the table, he cried, “But you are really sick!” So the way to talk of writing was to recognize collapse.

iv.

“Every great spirit carries on in his life two works,” said Victor Hugo, “the work of the living person and the work of the phantom. . . . Whereas the living man performs the first work, the pensive phantom—at night, amid the universal silence—awakes within the man. O terror!” Terror: the hounds and the foxes yelping, darkness everywhere, nature shuddering. Yet I wanted to be the phantom awake in the night, the writer-specter.

v.

“Can one—or at least could one ever—begin to write without taking oneself for another?” asked Roland Barthes. He dreamed of copying André Gide, not only his works but his practices, his way of strolling through the world. Oh, if only he could become André Gide the way he imagined him, traveling by train, reading classics, writing his notebooks in the dining car, or better yet, the way he actually saw him, in 1939, in the gloom of a hotel bar, eating a pear and reading a book!

vi.

“Until today,” Clarice Lispector wrote, “I did not realize that you can live without writing. Little by little, the thought dawned upon me: Who knows? Perhaps I, too, might be able to live without writing.” If she could finish her account, she would go to eat and dance at the Top-Bambino. She mightily needed to distract herself. She was in search of a way of writing that was more like living. “If only I could write by carving on wood or stroking a child’s hair or strolling through the countryside,” she wrote, selecting the dress in which she looked a little thinner, “I should never have embarked upon the path of words.”