Apologia pro vita sua …

… Will Self: modernism and me | Books | The Guardian. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

I had read The Marquise of O, and while it may have been the German Romantic's suicide pact that gripped me, the novella's exposure of the far more viciously constricting social mores of the early 19th century, and Kleist's opposition to them of a restless and uncertain self-consciousness, spoke to my own sense of being fundamentally ill at ease. I had gone to university to read politics and philosophy because I was interested in them and because an early exposure to then modish literary deconstruction (while doing an English S-level) had convinced me that critiquing fictional texts was not the right direction to go in if you wanted to create them. And create them is what I most fervently wanted to do. I can be guilty of overstatement in many areas – but this is not one of them: I felt a passionate desire to write fiction from about the age of 14, and I feel it still. That this passionate desire still seems to have been – even on the cusp of publishing my 14th work of narrative prose – unconsummated is, I suspect, a function of how the modernist pathology has slowly but inexorably metastasised through my murky mind.