It is a question generally reviled and ridiculed by narrators. Denigrated as cliche, and perhaps also because it’s awkward, because it tends to come first in the interviews and comes across as routine and even silly, although there’s something about it that can throw the interviewee off balance for a while, especially when it is formulated in such a way that: “Where did the idea for your book come from?”
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The idea? This concept can cause the atmosphere between the interviewer and the interviewee to become difficult immediately. However, I’ve found for some time that the question actually has a great depth charge, for in fact, like asking where ideas come from, or what an idea is, or where writing itself comes from, it’s an activity of unknowable origin.
It was Siri Hustvedt who got me to see the question differently when she said that the narrators were upset when they saw that the question wasn’t topical or routine, but rather unanswerable. It is? As much as the answer to the question of what an idea is. For Plutarch, an idea was intrinsically immaterial. Perhaps this would explain that on the few times I have felt myself in full ecstasy while writing, the sudden emergence of a most auspicious idea of an incorporeal nature seemed to me to come from without, so external and alien that I have even Realizing I can’t understand it, seek it beyond the insane computer as if I could glimpse the fleeting smoke of a muse’s silhouette among inconstant shapes.
I know someone who, faced with a blurry appearance of this style, calmed down by telling himself it all came out of nowhere, period. And another who, seeing an unexpected idea in his writing, preferred to believe that it arose from his brain tissue and from the text he was writing.
Now, if we dare to assume that the unexpected idea came from outside, where do we think it came from? It is the question of questions. Should we think that the idea comes from an imperceptible place, transformed into an angel with a trumpet blowing the phrase that allows us to move forward in the text?
If we accept that it is difficult to know where an idea comes from, it will not seem so strange to us that the question catapults the novelist being questioned in the direction of philosophy and excites him so much that he finally refuses to go after it seek dark origins of everything. I have since It is known that in our time, the word “image”, in contrast to the word “thought”, not only triumphs, but also calms every inhabitant of the society of the spectacle.
Finally, I think of Roland Barthes, who was asked why he wrote: “Because writing is decentered speech, the individual, the person, and does a work whose origin is not recognizable.”
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