... literature is the infinite of the finite.... Yves B...

... literature is the infinite of the finite.

... Yves Berger, Bernard Fasquelle took the book (Le prenom de Dieu), a 'crazy' book, and Dedans. I published these books 'looking the other way' because I didn't think they were books.

Dedans [...] I was a little embarrassed by, aware that I hadn't written a book but a mangled 'thing'.

I was absolutely not part of [the world of prestigious iterary awards - L.I.]. There were parties and I wasn't there, I was in the hospital, out of it; I didn't see where I was headed, I saw a pit in place of my life.

Neutre was the supreme effort to dig up the secret. All I did was shift it to another grave.

Angst, to my way of thinking, but I may be wrong, is less a new direction than an attempt to conclude: I told myself, really, that if I didn't get to the root of Angst (anguish), the mortal divinity that was persecuting me, I would die, I suffered too much from repeated Angst. So I engaged it as a battle. Of course I wasn't hoping to win, the main thing in a battle is to fight it, to free oneself, in acting, from the misery of passivity. So I didn't win, but I painted its portrait.

... I can't write without feeling I am wronging all the people to whom I owe my life, and the time, to write.

... I never have any idea, either of the theme or of the object, I have only a law: head for whatever is the most frightening. To that which I cannot and do not want to write face-to-face.

As far as time, the duration goes - as I told you, I cannot write except uninterruptedly: it's impossible: hence in a trance. Otherwise I'd be sidetracked by resistances and fears. I only write red-hot, in convulsions, it's highly physical, it's exhausting, it's a gallop, I write ten hours straight, I collapse, but with paper, I don't stop, when I am too tired, I take notes in the evening, at night so as to start fresh, as if heading off to battle, at daybreak, and I do this for two months. During this time I keep in mind the book's landscape or land, its mental map, its armies, its armoires, scraps of sentences, images, dreams, its passages. But not its 'whole', not its composition. This I don't know, I discover. For the same reason, as soon as the 'book' 'ends' it withdraws like a tide, and I no longer remember anything.

from Helene Cixous, Frederic-Yves Jeannet, Encounters