ABSTRACT
Smith had wanted his book to be ‘the record of its own odyssey’. This was impossible because it was like making a film about that particular film. Also, writing covers its own traces. The deletions, the furious pitching of screwed up paper into the bin, the papers discarded following the activity of an editing friend or (not, by any means necessarily the same thing) an editor-all that hides the process and prevents the writing being its own record. Writing, unlike speech, can be rearranged, and writers manipulate time and space. For example, Smith talks about what will happen later-though he has already written about what will happen later. This subject is full of paradoxes, and this is one of them: a text can rub its history out; but can look back into its own future.
