| “There are, of course, countless literary...

12th May 2015

“There are, of course, countless literary instances of books-within-books, or of characters knowing that they are being written about; these stretch back at least to the time of Cervantes. Ian McEwan is a master contemporary practitioner of the device: his novels Atonement and Sweet Tooth both describe a writer at work on a book that, in a final twist (major spoiler ahead), turns out to be the very work we are reading. It’s slick literary legerdemain, and one that ultimately leaves the author with the upper hand over the hapless reader.

But the literary conceit I’m referring to here is different. It can be thought of as an X-ray, or a negative, of the book-within-a-book device. In Writing About Not Writing Something Else, the author details the existence of another novel — one that, for the most part, hasn’t been completed and perhaps never will. The emphasis is on a shadowy absence, like a dictionary to a language that doesn’t exist. In this sense, the act of writing about not writing has a direct relation to the reader, not a self-referential one. The author, who struggles and fails to produce, doesn’t have the upper hand here. The reader — entrusted with the entire frustrating process — does.”

Writing About Not Writing by Ruth Margalit