I’m not even modest. I don’t think writing something called The Work is very modest, is it? Giving it that title. Anyway, the idea was to kill myself at the end of it. When it’s done. When The Work is done. When everything is, like corrected, like in that Bernhard book.
Which is total bad faith, because I know it can never be done. You can’t just correct the fault when you are the fault and writing The Work only compounds the fault.
The Work appals me. Every sentence is appalling. And then I have to write more sentences to correct those. And more sentences still.
The Work! It’s even got a stupid, pompous name. Calling anything The anything.
I couldn’t think of anything better. Like, sub-sub Thomas Bernhard. Bernhard without the gorgeous music and spiralling sentences.
The Work, I called it. Everything was about the Work. I used write night and day. Or edit. It was mostly about editing.
And what was it about, the work?
It was supposed to be some absolute statement. To be an absolute book, totally incomparable. Like Lautreamont’s Maldoror, if you know that.
I don’t know anything about Lotry-what-not’s anything.
It was supposed to say everything through a kind of inversion. By saying the opposite. I don’t know …
And did you ever finish it?
I’m still trying to write it now.
So you can kill yourself after? How melodramatic.
It was cheating, because I knew I’d never finish. And that I’d never write anything perfect. Or that was even any good.
The Work's a very, very late work of philosophical literature. Long after the literary boat has sailed. And sunk.
Sounds like it’s part of some forgotten literary avant-garde. That played out in another country a long time ago.
Woah – Robert Pinget in the house! Make some noise for Nathalie Sarraute! Don’t tell me you actually read that stuff? Butor and co. And actually enjoy it?
I like the idea of it.
They only read those things in France. And only because they have to. Because they’re made to. To pass their exams, or whatever. Made to do their avant garde duties. Made to eat their avant garde greens. Like some literary nationalism thing. And then they have to go back to watching Canal+, or whatever.
No one else reads them. Not even in translation. The French ministry of culture funds all the translations, but no one ever buys them. There are entire warehouses full of unsold Helene Cixous translations.
You just want to join the long line of crap British imitators of French literary stuff.
Just like you’re part of the long line of pathetic imitation German philosophers.
That’s our fate, right? Total irrelevance. Irrelevance times irrelevance. Irrelevance to fucking infinity.
Work in Progress 