The Writer Inside Me

Every man should have a fair-sized cemetery in which to bury the faults of his friends—

                                                                                    Henry Adams 

Anna Kornbluh has written a book worth reading (‘Immediacy, Or The Style of Too Late Capitalism’, Verso Books, 2024) in which she examines the pressure of representation in the present. “There is a general sense that people have no time for art, that we can’t afford the slowness of thinking that representation demands.” Anna’s opened up a real can of worms, to which I’ll return later.

Meantime, I think—am I the latest writer of contemporary fiction to become exhausted by the use of the first-person narrator? Yes, quite possibly.

I’ve recently noticed my tendency to look at more and more art, rather than less and less, but in circumstances that are private rather than public. The museum experience I once sought out and even enjoyed is now reduced, while my own personal voyages inside my studio have greatly expanded into realms I couldn’t have imagined—experimental proto-realist fiction, the paintings of Old Masters and of men and women known to be abstract expressionists, the bedrock poets, ancient aphorists such as Marcus Aurelius—opening up a kind of new world in which I allow myself to take my time with my experience, examining the kinds of things I’m truly interested in.

Reading, seeing, including looking at art and watching TV, listening to music, now have a kind of new order in my mind in which each category seems to express what Anna Kornbluh describes as ‘the crisis of futurity’. To paraphrase: the ‘immediacy’ to which she refers when encountering, for instance, a work of art, is now completely, indissolubly, linked with one’s personal experience, seemingly cut off from appreciating or even acknowledging another person’s experience.

 As a writer of fiction, I find Anna Kornbluh’s assessment of the incredible rise of first-person narration (and the sale of memoirs having ‘increased 400 percent in this century relative to the previous one’) to be quite disturbing. Reading Kornbluh , I’ve changed my mind, committing myself to pursuing yet another writing project—writing in the old-fashioned third-person from now on.