T o write about something is to kill it,
like imprisoning a butterfly in a killing-bottle and slowly watching it die,
with the greedy anticipation of seeing it pinned on board. Actually, it isn’t
anything as sensational as that. But the process, the very fact that
impressions are milked of their aesthetic and literary connotations by
freeze-drying them and wrapped carefully in cling wrap, changes their original
properties; by trying to confine them, we can only maul them beyond
recognition, so in fact, what we capture becomes something we didn’t want to
capture. However, by employing the royal plural ‘we’, I’m only attempting to
gain approbation for something that I personally perceive as my failing. In
composing this anecdote, I’m in fact embodying the process, each word that I’m
using is a further blow driven in the carcass. I don’t recognise it myself.
When writing about the failure of writing
becomes a literary topos available to everybody like shops selling toothpaste,
it does not retain its anxiety, does it? It becomes formalised, structuralised
into a conventional form through which aspiring writers are expected to express
their ballyhoo. Like elegies, pastoral or otherwise, which have served to
structure the unwieldy emotion of grief, the ‘meta’ approach has dwarfed all
efforts to interrogate a deeper sense of lack in language.
To tell the truth, if assessed critically,
every incident in life possesses the ability to be transformed into the talking
point of a literary circle. But whether we want to inflict such violence on our
impressions is a choice that rests with us alone.
No comments:
Post a Comment