As a character says in Jean-Luc Godard's intellectual, political and aesthetic resistance movie Eloge de l'amour: there is no pleasure in life, one can enjoy only existence. Life just happens, out there. Existence can be enjoyed only in the way one might enjoy waiting on a cold platform for a delayed train, or, indeed, waiting for Eloge de l'amour to end in order to make use of its sublimity; that is, to think of it, to speak of it, to wonder about it; that is, to do nothing.

It's the same with the other works of art I rate above all others: I don't enjoy them, even if that's the term I might reach for at first. The pleasure I get from them is always imminent and always passed. It is something else I get; what is it? My first thought is that it is inspiration. But towards what? It is not knowledge or certainty: one can go to science, philosophy and religion for those. The knowledge and certainty offered by art is noise. The rest is silence.

Inspiration might also be called help: that is, evidence of an escape from the confines of singular existence; the promise of a conclusive communication; but not in the form of inebriation. To be overwhelmed in a reverie of thrills, laughter, intrigue, beauty or horror, is only to be soaked in promises that never materialise and only reinforce a deception. In the end, it is not pleasure but pain. The pain is eased only with more and more injections of illusions and promises. The display of paraphernalia is familiar: the half-broken spines of nineteenth century narrative classics, the latest Booker Prize winner, this year's Great American Novel, the rows of fashionable novels and irrelevant biographies, something by Alain de Botton. One becomes a consumer. The silence is drowned out. Such is popular culture.

In an essay in an obscure volume of essays on James Joyce published in 1990, the Irish novelist John Banville approaches the silence. It's an essay that has stuck in my mind as I have never worked out whether I agree with him or not. He begins with a long quotation from Nietzsche about how each great phenomenon "especially in the domain of art" is "succeeded by degeneration" (entry 158 of Human, All Too Human). This isn't the issue as there is a consensus that this is indeed a time of degeneration after the great phenomenon of Modernism. There are no giants like Joyce at work today. Banville expresses this in filial love and admiration for Joyce and in the anxiety of a survivor. How can one begin in the shadow of such achievement? (He makes no reference to Beckett's greater work.)

He goes on to explain his main thesis: that there are two types of great works. The first is one from which one can learn - Banville calls them "strugglers, the self-conscious ones, the sentimental, in Schiller's sense of the word." He says their work is "to some extent exoskeletal, in that one can see … the processes by which the work was produced." He includes Beethoven and Henry James in this category.

"And then" he says "there are the artists who are of no use to the tyro, from whom one learns nothing." He suggests, almost at randon, four names: Virgil, Vermeer, Mozart and, of course, James Joyce. "The greatness, or part of the greatness, of an Aenied, of a View of Delft, of a Don Giovanni, of a Ulysses, rests in the fact that they are, in an essential way, closed. By this I do not mean to say that these works of art are difficult, or obscure - what could be more limpid than the light that hovers over Delft? - but that they are mysterious at their core." [His emphasis]

"Great art" he continues "does not 'reveal' itself to us, does not open outward to our needs; on the contrary, it is great precisely because it is closed against us."

I share this conviction because it speaks of my experience with works other than those on Banville's list. Why else this constant need to re-read The Divine Comedy, Thomas Bernhard's The Loser, the essays of Maurice Blanchot, the poems of Paul Celan and Wallace Stevens, to listen to the songs of Bill Callahan and Bonnie 'Prince' Billy, and to look at the paintings of Caspar David Friedrich, Cy Twombly and Andrzej Jackowski, and the later films of Jean-Luc Godard?

Banville's conclusion is that the closure of the work enables the world to exist in itself and not as an instrument: "the making of art is a process in which the artist concentrates on the object with such force, with such ferocity of attention, that the object takes on an unearthly - no, an earthly glow." By perishing in the work, the world rises up within it, making it strange to us. "This is not such a mystical, not such a high-falutin process as it may seem, this interiorisation of things, this taking into us of the world, of all that stuff out there which is not ourselves. It happens all the time, continuously, in art. And its result is a different order of understanding, which <i>allows</i> the thing its thereness, its outsideness, its absolute otherness. Such understanding is wholly individualistic, yet profoundly democratic. Every thing has its own place, its own space, which it inhabits utterly. This process of incorporation, I hold, is a process of style. Has North America ever existed so intensely … as it does in the pages of Lolita?"

My pursuit, then, it seems, is for a style; to bring life to existence, or vice versa. But that brings me back to Nietzsche's observation of degeneration. In the wake of greatness, he says, "all vainer natures" seek "extreme imitation" or attempt to outdo the greater talents. For sure, almost everything new that I write or read - even the supposedly radical artists - seems derivative, vain, false, even deceitful. Nothing seems to have a necessary existance.

I see this as a good thing.

Let's begin again, from here: degeneration.

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