«Writers on Writing » has, for many years, been a well-established genre in the larger body of works on literary life. The scope of these works is amazingly open and broad, ranging from professional advice (“follow me if you want to become a writer”) to speculations on the meaning and use of literature, not just individually but socially and politically (“what is literature good for and why do people and society need it?”). Some voices strike a different tone, however. Jorge Luis Borges prefers to evoke his reading rather than his writing – see for instance his famous poems “A Reader” or “Readers”. Flaubert remains silent, or only expresses himself in private, letting his books speak for themselves – and thus we know, but only through the non-programmed publication of his correspondence with Louise Colet, that Madame Bovary is a book about… nothing. And Marcel Proust tells it all but only by showing through the fictional representation of three artists (Vinteuil the composer, Elstir the painter, Bergotte the writer) in Remembrance of Things Past.

The Belgian poet, novelist, critic, and specialist of script writing, Luc Dellisse, makes a very original contribution to this world of literature on literature in his new book Le Temps de l’écrivain (The Time of the Writer, my translation), shying away from the public dimension of writing, that is literature as a profession, and trying to come as closely as possible to the existential aspect of it. Literature not as a social or intellectual “posture”, a way of self-fashioning within the literary field, but as a way of coping with life through and with the help of writing: who am I given the fact that I write instead of doing something else and what is the connection between my life, myself, and the act of writing? Although the differences in style and tone are huge, this may be what Le Temps de l’écrivain has in common with for instance Franz Kafka’s Diaries.

Le Temps de l’écrivain addresses these questions without any pathos (a word not to be confused with passion, the latter very present!). This is not a book about therapeutic writing, writer’s block, social prestige or the lack of it in contemporary society, anxiety of influence (all issues that are certainly hinted at, but always at the background). Instead, one finds here a sober yet passionate reflection on the fact that an individual continues to write and finds in this writing one of the keys of his life and, regardless of the strong social pressures on what writers are expected to write and to do in a world that has ceased to put literature on a pedestal, to the extent that in quite some circles literature itself is no longer considered relevant (one certainly remembers the sobering words of C.P. Snow in this Two Cultures conference, where he quotes a scientist saying that books are only good to stabilize a wobbly table).

Dellisse’s writing is anything but compulsive or monomaniacal. A well-published and critically acclaimed author, and member of the Belgian Academy, he likes to engage with all kinds of readers in all kinds of circumstances, to share his expertise with students and colleagues, to collaborate with other artists, always in very deliberate and well-considered ways. However, in this book it is the naked fact of writing, the decision as well as the effort to transform ideas, feelings, experiences into sentences (Dellisse has fascinating things to say on the difference between words and sentences, more particularly on the danger of insisting too much on words and not enough on sentences) that is at the heart of the author’s self-reflection. He does not dissimulate the often extreme loneliness of this act, permanently torn between sprint and long-distance with never any guarantee of success. Yet the aspect he systematically foregrounds is that of joy: the joy of finding the right way to express thoughts and sensations, memories, projects and dreams, the joy of putting things together in order to produce an unforeseen creation that is sharper, wittier, more condensed than what we usually say, feel or think, the joy to establish bridges between writing and other passions such as admiration, awe, love, and speed. Luc Dellisse is, among other genres, a specialist of microfiction, typically blurring the boundaries between novella and flash fiction, a feature that also characterizes most of his poetry and even his criticism of scriptwriting in cinema, where he excels in surprising yet always perfectly faithful summaries, remediating the movie intrigue into a new story. The current book equally performs this genre bending, but here in the domain of autobiographical criticism, permanently attracted by the mystery of the literary epiphany and the careful need to actually construct the outburst of such an event.

Le Temps de l’écrivain is an outstanding mix of intellectual clarity and rhythm and pace of style. In these pages, the prose of Luc Dellisse progressively morphs into something else than just another study on writing by writers. It becomes a both modest and ambitious self-portrait mirroring the life of all those who dare go to the extreme of their passion. In this regard, there is no longer a fundamental difference between those who read and those who write, a human and intellectual solidarity that the author rightfully stresses in this book.