One of the questions I'm often asked is: Why write?
Well, in part, it's because, like Kafka, I think a non-writing writer risks madness [1].
But it's also because I subscribe to the (somewhat magical) belief that words have the power to protect us and can keep even death at bay.
Not avert it indefinitely, but at least stave it off until such a time as I no longer have anything further to say and, like Prospero at the end of The Tempest, voluntarily decide to jack it all in; break my laptop, burn my books, etc.
What this implies, I suppose, is that there exists an essential affinity between language and death (or literature and evil), with the latter acting as both the limit as well as the core of the former.
Those who think writing is merely about the communication of ideas or self-expression, have failed to grasp its true import: We write so as not to die ... [2]
Notes
[1] In a letter to Max Brod (5 July, 1922), Kafka wrote that "a non-writing writer is, in fact, a monster courting insanity." See Letters to Friends, Family, and Editors, trans. Richard and Clara Winston, (Schocken Books, 1977), pp. 332-335.
[2] In an interview with The New York Times (19 August, 1984), the Mexican author Carlos Fuentes said: "You start by writing so as to live, and you end up by writing so as not to die." The interview, by Nicholas Shardy, can be found online by clicking here.
One might note, however, that in an essay entitled 'Language to Infinity', Foucault credits Blanchot with the idea of writing so as not to die; trans. by Donald F. Buchard and Sherry Simon, the essay first appeared in Tel Quel (1963), pp. 44-53. This text can also be found in Michel Foucault, The Essential Works 2: Aesthetics, ed. James D. Faubion, (Penguin Books, 2000), pp. 89-101.
