Wayne Koestenbaum at Paris Review Daily: No More Tasks, I Say

"The Writer's Obligation" is a new piece on the tasks of writing from Wayne Koestenbaum, published at Paris Review Daily. "Susan Sontag once praised a maxim by the painter Manet, who said that in art 'you must constantly remain the master and do as you please. No tasks! No, no tasks!' I often quote Sontag quoting Manet. Writing is a terrible task." Yet:

...It is also, sometimes, a pleasure, but it is more often a task. The arduousness of the task, and the succulence of the pleasure, are coiled together. For Sontag, writing must have often been a task, and she was often fleeing the task, even in her own writing. It’s possible to read any of her sentences as a round-trip flight between pleasure and task. The flight grows marmoreal—hardened into its pose—and that state of stillness-in-motion (a modernist ideal) is her finished sentence. “Mastery,” as Sontag, quoting Manet, constructs it, is a matter of fleeing task; we flee the task to become the master. Mastery, a dubious concept, needn’t be our lodestar; we can flee task not in search of mastery but in search of circumvolutionisation. More on circumvolutionisation in a minute.

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“No more masks! No more mythologies!” So goes the passionate cry uttered in Muriel Rukeyser’s “The Poem as Mask.” No more tasks, I say, crossbreeding Rukeyser’s phrase with Sontag’s (or Manet’s) “No tasks!” Mask and task are two nouns—two behaviors—I love. From Oscar Wilde come masks; from the Marquis de Sade, and from Yahweh, come tasks. After Eden, masks and tasks. In Eden, we had neither. Literature—the respite of the fallen—is the process of making do with mask and task, diverting ourselves with tasks that mask our disenfranchisement... 

Read on here.