Against Narcissus: On Murdoch and Miller.

Waterhouse's Echo and NarcissusI can never read Henry Miller or Iris Murdoch without wanting to throw their books in the corner followed by a loud fuck off. All writers like this reveal, with their ever decreasing circles of intrigue and destructive behaviour, is their own egocentrism, whose ultimate and inevitable pay-off can only be a solipsistic fart of arriving back where you started. It doesn't matter what it is, and it should hardly be visible, but you need to find some ethical motivation for why you're writing, or there won't be any beauty, just ugliness. It is of course tempting to confuse ugliness with seriousness, just as it is with pessimism or cynicism. But immersing oneself in squalor is just as reductive as drowning oneself in kittens; it's just a different register of self-absorption. Capote complained that Kerouac's work wasn't writing, it was just typing, which can seem the case. But at least Kerouac was trying to do something real by writing fiction that emulated the actuality of lived existence with all its ebb and flow. I know which I'd rather read about.