Lately reading Enrique Vila-Matas’s novel Bartleby & Co., written in the form of a narrator’s diaristic notes — “a book of footnotes commenting on an invisible text” — on a subject of growing interest to me: writers who do not write. Whose attitude toward writing is that of Melville’s Bartleby the scrivener: they would prefer not to. “We all know the Bartlebys,” writes the narrator, “they are beings inhabited by a profound denial of the world.” Some of these writers write for a while and then stop. Some choose to stop writing; others simply cannot continue. Some never write at all. Some attempt to provide reasons for not writing, and some don’t bother. Suicides don’t count, the narrator stipulates, though he allows a few exceptions. Most of the writers he includes are real (Salinger, Rimbaud, Hölderlin, Joubert); a few aren’t. He refers to these writers’ works, and their lack of works, as the literature of the No.

Oh, I don’t know how important it is that I say this or something else. Saying is inventing. Be it false or certain. We invent nothing, we think we are inventing when in fact all we are doing is stammering out the lesson, the remains of some homework learnt and forgotten, life without tears, just as we weep over it. And to hell with it.