Why write?

Last weekend I attended the TV recording of another episode of “Literatur im Foyer”, this time with German author Alexander Kluge and sociologist Oskar Negt presenting and being interviewed on their latest books. As it turned out this was a real disappointment, an excessively dull and sorry event, which I tried my best to get at the bottom of over the course of the following days. Not that both these venerable men in their 70s had nothing profound to say, or that they were lackluster in giving their respective opinions and worthy insights, they sure lived up to any such expectations. To me it was rather the absence of something else, something that was disturbingly missing in their statements and which I was irritatingly unable to put a name to at first.

Thinking back over the discourse as it ran, I now have come to understand that what struck me as just so odd, was the acute impression that whatever they had to say, or however intelligently crafted their lines of argumentation were, they didn't seem to be working on their issues any more. For all I could tell, they figured they had come to the full of their scope of possible conclusions in writing about the human condition and affairs of grappling with the consequences of today's globalized capitalist economy and the strains and pressures that exerts and puts us under. There was something strangely but decidedly “dead” about all their efforts, more like a final word of assertion, than an inspiring fresh take on an old problem.

I'm not sure if you can follow me in this, but I would very much like to spare you any of the obsolete details and give you my preliminary conclusion to this episode instead:
I think it is right and necessary to try make a point about something in any piece of meaningful writing. But for any text to qualify as literature, something more than just one idea or point of reference is needed. There simply has to be a certain degree of ineradicable wonder, unresolved mystery and resonating amazement going along with it. If you think you know all there is to know about your topic, if you feel like you have asked all the questions and everything has revealed itself to you in plain, lucid disclosure, well, you probably shouldn't be writing about it. At least not fiction, I reckon. In my opinion, there is no point in writing fictionally about something you fully understand, or is there?