“The problems that seem to me to define the writer’s task at this moment (to the extent that he has chosen them as his problems) are not of a kind that make for ease of communication, for work that rushes toward the reader with out-flung arms – rather, they’re the reverse. Let me cite three such difficulties that I take to be important, all having to do with language. First, there is art’s own project, since Mallarme, of restoring freshness to a much handled-language, essentially an effort toward finding a language in which art is possible at all. This remains a ground theme, as potent, problematically, as it was a century ago. Secondly, there is the political and social contamination of language by its use in manipulation of various kinds over time and the effort to find what might be called a ‘clean’ language, problems associated with Roland Barthes of Writing Degree Zero but also discussed by Lukacs and others. Finally, there is the pressure on language from contemporary culture in the broadest sense – I mean our devouring commercial culture – which results in a double impoverishment: the theft of complexity from the reader, theft of the reader from the writer.”
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