The Sub-Editor - Intervention

INTERVENTION

So, what does it mean to lock oneself away?

And, then, how should that story be told? How do you write of boredom and loneliness? How do fill a page with unfilled and unfulfilled hours?

If, as Larkin states, one must be true to the experience, what precisely is the terrain of that experience?

Perhaps 'to write' is to map experience, but a map is not equivalent to the territory it describes. It remains a highly contrived set of rules and signifiers that allows uncharted land to be conceptualised. It doesn't come close to what it means to move - the body and the soul - through space and time.

Georges Perec's character, Bartlebooth, 'hardly goes out, he scarcely leaves his study all day'. And, Smautf, another of Perec's inventions, 'stays for long periods each day in his bedroom. He tries to make some little progress with his arithmetic; for relaxation he does crosswords, reads detective novels which Madame Orlowska lends him, and spends hours stroking the white cat, which purrs whilst massaging the old man's knees with its claws'.

There is comfort in these descriptions of solitude; perhaps because they describe what the characters do, rather than what they're thinking or feeling.

Our character does not have the advantage of an omniscient narrator. That's why I've decided to intervene. He has locked himself away - he 'hardly goes out', he holes up in his bedroom for 'long periods each day'.

He blogs when he can find the energy but, already, the process - the effort - of arranging his thoughts requires a distance that removes him from the chaos of his emotions.

And, he wonders where the truth might lie: in his words or his silence?