A Personal Anthology
Delighted to have taken part in Jonathan Gibbs’ A Personal Anthology series a couple of months ago:
Every true work of literature re-asks the question of what it means to tell a story. In doing so, it moves towards what cannot be spoken; something that lies beyond it, an impossible, shimmering thing. This is why the work of literature, when one encounters it, is always a surprise. It is also why it is a rarity. For support in this claim, we might ask the two great European critics of the previous century: “all great works of literature establish a genre or dissolve one” (Walter Benjamin), “Let us suppose that literature begins at the moment when literature becomes a question” (Maurice Blanchot). More immediate, much closer to the bone, than this however is simply that those works which move towards this darkness between word and world, whose mediation we call experience and whose terrain the imagination roves over but ever fails to grasp, they are the place where literature, in all its deadness, comes closest to life.
