There are two emotions that are very important in fiction and are often disregarded : anxiety and embarrassment. They are both a twofold phenomenon: there can be textual embarrassment and anxiety, and authorial embarrassment and anxiety. When embarrassment is feared or experienced, it is a sure index that something important is going on: something unaddressed and unacknowledged in the very node of the text or the unconscious. Embarrassment is a recognition of excess, a lack of confidence about one’s own authorial competence, a frisson in the face of cultural shock. Embarrassment always displays itself via mixed or chaotic discourses, in the language of the text or the mind. The best examples I can think of are Lawrence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy or Cervantes’ Don Quixote: disquieting, unpredictable, doubled. Quixotic, in fact. You never find embarrassment in realistic texts, and that can be instanced by the meticulous consonance of discourses within them.

Anxiety is something else. It is the worm at the heart of some texts and some writers. I would say that anxiety is a powerful driver of creativity, more so than embarrassment, as it is based upon fear. And anxiety is potent because there is never any resolution in sight. Once one fear has been dealt with, another one steps briskly in. I would say that Kafka, Ovid, Proust and Joyce are writers whom one cannot understand without seeing that anxiety binds them all. Anxiety-writers are uncannily alert to the vicissitudes of change, and they know that one transformation can succeed another in dizzying array. They fear the loss of the self. They fear the wilful appendage, they fear the weather, they fear the frog in the throat, the new wrinkle. And that’s what makes them what they are.

It changed my whole mental landscape when I realised that I was like that too. Even in  my academic writing, what preoccupied me was the motor of change: what made certain genres appear at certain times, what determined  patterns of cultural transmission, what secret code was inscribed within the work of art (and how to find it out). There is an automatic correlation between personality types and the art they produce. I am a worrier, and that carried over into everything I made. Everyone has the same fears, I suppose: ageing, loss, death. But with the anxious artist, as I said,  one fear succeeds the other in rapid succession. And one possible solution too: “this may work!” they say. And then “oh! perhaps not!”  So the most common form for such writers is the episodic one. The picaresque is their mode. Not for them the grand sweeping narrative (like those of Tolstoy or George Eliot). Those do not provide enough hostages to fortune.

How to proceed? Well, by embracing one’s productive neuroses, and trying to erase or minimise one’s unproductive ones. That is to say, by trying to make every new tic or twitch  (whether in the body or in the text) turn out for the best: to be more funny, more inventive more risk-taking. The anxiety-text is like a rollercoaster: it’s no good expecting it to be like the Big Wheel  or the Tunnel of Love. People, welcome to the land of Bumpy Rides!