Beckett. Krasznahorkai. Bernhard, Guyotat, Pessoa, Céline etc. Your name it. Any classification imposed here really should prove to be of no avail to our consensus that some writers are frankly unclassifiable. And yet, there's the rub: a particular stylistic detail, a turn of phrase, a recognizable, irreproducible way with the words, pessimism, if you want, misanthropy, perhaps you can sometimes add even Kafka here, with his labyrinthic rigmaroles nightmares.
But perhaps, the reason I incline to also add Paul Celan to this enumeration on names consists in that these writers, Kafka's boring, unaltered style notwithstanding, tend to do violence upon the very words they use to convey certain figures of dispossession and despondency. The disaster, the misery, the catastrophe is not happening only on the level of the content, but also on that of the form, as if, in the works of these writers, the two were inseparable.
I am not looking for some journalistic account of a misfortune, but rather for the way this misfortune inscribes itself on the manner of the language; it leaves a mark: it stigmatizes. The language here, it is obvious and words do little justice as evidence, cannot remain the same, cannot preserve itself as a whole; it cannot be indifferent to alterations and mutations, for it is living matter, that as such suffers transformations, and is mutilated, cut to pieces, amputated, sutured back and torn apart again.
Having said these words from above, do you know any writer that has a distinctive style in his use of language that conveys a despondent background, whether it is an internal or external one?
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