¶ On coherence. In the final year of my degree in English and Philosophy, the weekly lectures in logic took place at nine o’clock each Friday morning. I turned up on the first Friday, and never went again. I told myself it was because the lecturer in question was a right-wing Catholic – who wasn’t, in the philosophy department? – with especially vile opinions, but in truth I was just too shiftless to rise in time, at seven. I even failed to make the remedial logic classes the department was forced to run in the third term. Consequently I failed the topic outright and botched my degree to the extent of missing out on a scholarship for my MA in English. I was capable only of interesting myself in subjects I was already interested in; as often with students of oddly variable achievement, a practiced scorn concealed, but badly, my selective failure of nerve.

But one also simply cannot help being oneself: I was and remain quite incapable of mounting in writing a reasoned and coherent argument, never mind describing to myself, as the study of logic required, the parts and processes, more or less persuasive, of that argument. Instead there was, is, language itself and a repertoire of stylistic choices. When I could be bothered, I was a pretty good student, and mostly because, or so I thought, I had devised a scheme for composing my undergraduate essays. I thought that every essay should have what I called (privately) its particular ‘guiding metaphor’. The study and interpretation of a given work of literature was a matter, I imagined, of discovering the metaphor by which it could be described or (so as to distinguish myself, if only a little, from the available critical literature) redescribed. Once I had found this metaphor – sometimes it was obvious, but I preferred it when not – then the essay would in some real sense write itself, the figure unfolding and fulfilling its promise.

My method was not original – if method it was. I had cobbled it together from my aesthetically skewed reading of Barthes and Derrida and one or two of the American critics most closely associated with them. In truth, however, my approach had little to do with semiotics or structuralism, post-structuralism or deconstruction, at least as they were conceived in those days (the late eighties and early nineties) as methods to be applied, more or less rigorously. I was more inclined to an ancillary tendency these critics shared: a habit of claiming that some force, usually a little unlikely, was at work in the text or other cultural object under discussion. Derrida and the concept of pharmakon (poison and cure) in Plato, Deleuze and the dendritic (tree-shaped) logic that he says governs western thought – when you got down to it, the most committed adherents of these writers’ work refused to accept that these were metaphors at all: they were somehow ‘immanent’ in thought itself, or in things themselves. I don’t think this is transparent nonsense – concepts have their being, after all – but I do, and did then, think that these are essentially metaphors, like most of what passes for metaphysics: or so my highly selective reading of Nietzsche had taught me to say.

I remember, a few years later, making the mistake of saying to some fellow graduate students that I thought Deleuze’s ‘rhizome’ (an unruly botanical-metaphysical counter to dendritic order and hierarchy) was a beautiful metaphor for thinking about the fiction of Virginia Woolf and in particular the competing mental styles of Mr and Mrs Ramsay in To the Lighthouse: the one committed to straight lines, the other to skewed paths, diversions, lacunae. My friends rounded on me straight away for my naivety and the crudeness of my comprehension: the rhizome was emphatically not a metaphor. But it seemed to me that it was far more interesting as a metaphor, to be deployed with a certain lightness, pushed playfully as far as it will go and then given up, than as a metaphysical entity to be pursued over the six hundred pages of Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus. By that stage I was convinced that criticism (and perhaps writing in general) should consist of a sensitive but dauntless search for the most productive or provocative metaphors in the material to hand. And I still think that this is what writing is, still feel that an account of the world that fails to draw from it all its figural potential is therefore incomplete. Which is not to say that I always find the guiding metaphor myself; sometimes the object in front of me – text, image, place or person – will not yield the comparison that seems to open things up, to make thought and writing flow. Then you have simply written something: perfectly serviceable, perhaps, informative and otherwise inventive – at the level of its structure, for example, or your word choices. But you will have failed to find the element – when all is said and done, it may be obvious only to the writer – that secretly governs the whole. You will have failed as it were to write while writing. Which latter trick seems to me to be a definition of the essay, or essayism.