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It’s the unknown in oneself, one’s head, one’s body. Writing is not even a reflection, but a kind of faculty one has, that exists to one side of oneself, parallel to oneself: another person who appears and comes forward, invisible, gifted with thought and anger, and who sometimes, through his own actions, risks losing his life.
If one had any idea what one was going to write, before doing it, before writing, one would never write. It wouldn’t be worth it anymore.
Writing is trying to know beforehand what one would write if one wrote, which one never knows until afterward; that is the most dangerous question one could ever ask oneself. But it’s also the most widespread.
Writing comes like the wind. It’s naked, it’s made of ink, it’s the thing written, and it passes like nothing else passes in life, nothing more, except life itself.
I would like to ask the people reading these lines to help me with a project I’ve had for three years, since they announced the closing of the Renault factories in Billancourt. It would be to record the first and last names of all the women and all the men who spent their entire lives in that national, world-renowned factory. Since the beginning of the century, since the founding of the Renault factories in Boulogne-Billancourt.
It would be an exhaustive list, with no commentary whatsoever.
We should reach a figure the size of a large capital holding. No text could counterbalance the fact of that number, of working for Renault, the total punishment, life.
Why should we do what I’m asking?
To see what that would make in all, a wall full of proletariat.
Here, history would be that number: the truth is that number.
The proletariat in the most obvious innocence, that of the number.
The person who writes books must always be enveloped by a separation from others. That is one kind of solitude. It is the solitude of the author, of writing. To begin with, one must ask oneself what the silence surrounding one is—with practically every step one takes in a house, at every moment of the day, in every kind of light, whether light from outside or from lamps lit in daytime. This real, corporeal solitude becomes the inviolable silence of writing. I’ve never spoken of this to anyone. By the time of my first solitude, I had already discovered that what I had to do was write. I’d already gotten confirmation of this from Raymond Queneau. The only judgment Raymond Queneau ever pronounced was this sentence: “Do nothing but write.”
Writing was the only thing that populated my life and made it magic. I did it. Writing never left me.