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I've been billing my book Failure: A Writer's Life (2013) as a catalog of literary monstrosities. On one level, it is a loosely organized collection of vignettes and convolutes. What I mean by that is that it contains small snapshots of stories in the history of literary failure, small moments that one can reflect on. And then there are these larger convolutes, which are more unruly sheaves dealing in larger concepts. Even thinking back to writing my 2006 book Ether: The Nothing That Connects Everything, I never really wrote in chapters. It was very hard for me to send out "chapters" as excerpts or samples; in Ether there are four distinct parts, but they are too long to be called chapters, I think. In Failure, the sections range from two pages to upwards of sixty pages. So the currency of this book is not the chapter but these more unconventionally sized bits.
One of the premises of this book is thinking about the unpublished and how that impacts artistic work. When I think about the unpublished, it encompasses not only unpublished literary works, stories, or poems that people write, but also the world of data- all of the things that challenge the literary and this mass of noise and text on the web-and how that affects the literary now.
One of the theoretical moves that I make early on-and this was one of those things that you find serendipitously, and you realize that it unlocks all these extremely rich associations-there was a very short 1957 essay by Marguerite Duras called, "One Out Of A Hundred Novels Makes It To Publication.'" In it, she said published literature is merely one percent of all that exists, all that is written. And the idea that the published is one percent is obviously by now, in the internet age, a quaint notion. That is a huge number compared to now, when there are so many forms o£sublitcrary and paraliterary kinds of machine writing. Duras's idea, or her suggestion, was that what's more interesting is not the world of the published, but the vast abyss of the unpublished. That black abyss is where we should be turning our attention.
If you know anything about Duras's writing itself, there is this...