A Little Note Actually About Structure and When Books Appear

Photo by Liga Kalnina on Scopio

In a very simplistic sense, structure can be considered as an organising principle (among many other things, of course). In the case of the Book of Disquiet, the organising principle is linked to the activities of assembly and curation (verbs) - in that specific case tasks that occurred decades after the author’s death, and that can never resolve into a definitive outcome, they can never be completed, and they can never be undertaken with anything like objectivity. The substance of the raw material - 25,000 loose fragments, a number of which are practically illegible and only a portion of which are dated - denies these three conditions and much besides.

There is something deeply comforting in this, in the contemplation of both the task and the ‘finished’ product of the task. Contemplating assembling the constituent parts of a similar work from scratch - writing the very fragments that could lead to such a challenge, over a lifetime or shorter period - feels liberating, inspiring and stimulating to the imagination.

What is an artistic work? Is it ever complete? Well, certainly it can be finished; however, I suspect it is never complete, even when ‘completed’ by the artist. Marguerite Duras said:

“I don’t know what a book is. No one knows. But we know when there is one”.

I have that on a sign pinned up in my bedroom. I note that she said, simply, ‘book’, rather than ‘written work’. The point is to make a book, not something as ill-defined or ephemeral as a ‘written work’, which could be argued as having existence independent of its form, assembly, binding, commitment to paper. No, this fight is about books. It is called the ‘Book of Disquiet’, after all - not ‘Ideas of Disquiet’, ‘Thoughts on Disquiet’, or even ‘Meditations on Disquiet’, as the consolidation of the fragments into a book is a precondition of its transformation into existence in the absence of any other relevant organising principle.

I have been published more than a hundred and fifty times, in Australian and foreign publications. Articles, reviews and essays ranging from 500 words to several thousand, nothing longer than that. Nevertheless, the publication itch is satisfied, it is thoroughly scratched.

My personal project, the nascent topic of this blog, is the writing of a book. Publication is not a condition of its existence or its success: it is nothing so fragile or contingent. It is tough, stubborn and resilient, impervious to both my frequent attentions and my equally frequent neglect. The work will exist as a book, or not exist, regardless of whether it is published, in or after my lifetime. As Duras has said - I, too, don’t know what the book is, but I will know when there is one.

There is not one yet.