Harvard Advocate Staff

Étienne Balibar is a French philosopher. As a student of Louis Althusser, he coauthored the influential *Reading Capital*. His extensive writings have analyzed the nation-state, race, citizenship, identity and, most recently, the problem of political violence. Balibar is a visiting Professor at Columbia University’s Institute for Comparative Literature and Society. *The Harvard Advocate*’s Art Editor, Brad Bolman, sat down with Balibar on the occasion of his lecture, “Violence, Civility, and Politics Revisited,” at Harvard’s Mahindra Humanities Center on November 5, 2014.



*I was wondering if you could speak about your work through the lens of possession. You often write about citizenship, which is a matter of being possessed by a nation or government, but also in terms of possessing rights, country and space.*





This year, Verso published* Identity and Difference: John Locke and The Invention of Consciousness*, a commentary on John Locke’s* An Essay on Human Understanding*. This essay is a classic, an absolutely fundamental reference for discussions about personal identity. I’ve always had, perhaps a very continental idea, that a philosopher’s metaphysics or epistemology and his politics and political philosophy must have very intimate and intrinsic relations. That’s the case for anybody from Plato to Spinoza. I found analogies between [Locke’s] theory of personal identity and his political theory, where individual liberty is famously based on the notion of self-ownership, which he called “propriety in one’s person.” So on one side, he has a basic notion of “possessive individualism.” And on the other side, a theory of autonomy and conscious identity where the only basis for an assignation of identity is the consciousness that an individual has that his thoughts, memories, etc. are really his and not somebody else’s.







*For Locke, then, individual identity is fundamentally a matter of asserting one’s control over one’s thoughts. How does he explain this process? *





How do I know that I am myself, and not you? That’s because my thoughts are *mine* and your thoughts are *not* mine. And I can also be sure that my thoughts are not yours, you are not owning my thoughts—owning is an extremely interesting category. On the other side, you have the idea that one’s individual, social and political autonomy comes from the fact that something is, so to speak, inalienable. So it’s “propriety in one’s person,” which Locke develops by using a formula that was central during the English Revolution, one by which English revolutionaries, including such radicals as the Levelers and so on, would claim they were independent from the state. It’s the formula that “propriety in one’s person” is one’s life, liberty, and estate, a very interesting formula which resonates with *habeas corpus* and a number of issues.





*Because in the latter example, at least, it is a matter of maintaining ownership of one’s own person against a sovereign power.*





Yes. And to continue with your theme of *Possession*, something interferes, so to speak, an extremely long and bizarre part of Locke’s chapter [which] is devoted to counterfactuals—cases in which the criterion that he proposes yields results that are counterintuitive from the point of view of what most people think to be the identity of a person. Cases in which there are multi- ple personalities or split identities, including an extraordinary passage which seems to directly anticipate and foreground [Robert Louis] Stevenson’s famous novel* Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde*. It’s a question of somebody who does something—he calls the two personalities the Night-Man and the Day-Man, and the Day-Man, not by chance, is an honest man, while the Night-Man is a criminal—and the question is whether the night man, who has absolutely no memory of the crimes that were committed during the night by his alias, should be held responsible for these actions. The logical answer is no.





*Because they are different men to some degree. The parallel with Stevenson is fascinating.*





Then there are other cases which are more similar to problems of possession, precisely, or *invasion*, I would say, of one’s identity by somebody else’s thoughts or powers, which are not cases of *split* identity but cases, so to speak, of *fused* identities. So Locke invents a mythical example. He says, “What if I could find among my memories the thoughts of somebody who has lived centuries ago?” or “What if Plato?”—that’s wonderful because it seems to anticipate [Jacques] Derrida—





*And particularly his essay “Plato’s Pharmacy,” perhaps also his use of “specters” and “haunting” to describe the function of speech and memory.*





Yes, of course. So he says, “What if Plato did not simply interpret or transmit Socrates’ thoughts, but actually had Socrates’ thoughts in his mind?” I find this extraordinary because, though I’m not superstitious myself, I think what we learn from psychoanalysis and other deep psychology theories, etc, is the fact that after all it’s not so easy to distinguish sometimes between your own thoughts and others that have been somehow adopted. So it appeared to me that Locke was a key figure to investigate in the classical era, and at a moment when philosophers of his kind are supposed to be pure rationalists, if you like, in fact a whole array of questions involving the two sides of this relationship: membership, on one side, or relationship to others; and possession, or property, or appropriation and belonging on the other side.





Now I’ve also reached the moment when I want to say something about not only individualism, but the construction of the abstract individual who is supposed to be the bearer, one would say, of rights—and that includes rights to possess and to acquire, in Marxist terminology, the bourgeois “Discourse of Modernity.” This combines two sides of the problem: Why is it necessary to be able to possess rights and things, but also knowledge, etc., to become a normal or a full member of the civic community? And how can we understand that the kind of legal and social normalcy or normative framework that was progressively built in Europe, and therefore in the world during the classical age, especially in England and France and the United States, has a very strict correlation between membership in a civic community, on the one hand, and being a bearer, being defined, I would say, as a universal person by one’s capacity to possess and acquire, again, not only things, but one’s self, one’s labor force, one’s knowledge?





*To be this subject that constantly seeks to possess and master both itself and everything around it. *





Of course this is fascinating in many respects: first, it involves that you accept very strong constraints, I would say, or logical axioms both concerning community and concerning individuality. And then it is also interesting because, as classical theorists knew, there are limits. At some point you reach a limit where it’s no longer reasonable to have this absolute right. Intellectual property is an obvious example. Philosophers like Kant and Fichte wrote seminal essays on how to define intellectual property and secure the rights of one individual over his thoughts, his work. What is it that you exactly own? What is it that ought to be protected? What is it that should not and could not be defined as an object of absolute individual appropriation without catastrophic consequences? Is it your thoughts? Is it your words? Is it your style when you write something? And so on. Where does it cease to be rational?





And of course these things are, today—I’m not an expert on that, but legal theorists and others are permanently concerned with it not only because new technologies profoundly modify the ways in which thoughts are shared but for that reason also invented or appropriated—subjectively, the relationship of individuals to their own ideas is changing rapidly. If you’re on a chat on your computer, there are words and ideas that flow permanently and circulate among different persons. It’s an incredible acceleration which in earlier times would take much more time and, so to speak, give you the time to identify with your thoughts, etc.





And then there are the pathological limits, I would say. It was of course on purpose that I used the formula that what classical philosophers and, in fact, the law itself characterized as this correlation between possessive individuality and civic membership is a sort of normalized vision or representation of the human. I’m not contesting that we need normalized forms, except they’re not exactly the same in all cultures and that’s an important point. What transgresses the limits of normality is, in some cases, not only as important or interesting as the normal itself, but it is also something where it’s not only a question of rights that individuals have, but it’s also a question of what kinds of constraints and, in some cases, *violent* constraints they’re subjected to and they can exert on each other.





*There was one moment in your lecture yesterday when you spoke about “cruelty” very close to the beginning. You mentioned the way it stretches or challenges the difference between subject and object and the form of “violence” that might exist between those two categories. The two examples that you gave of objects, and violence done to or by objects, were “Art” and the “Museum,” and I thought you were maybe referencing Steven Miller’s *War After Death—





It’s a beautiful book. It’s a wonderful book.





*I thought of the Buddhas— *





—of Bamiyan, yes.





*And so I wondered if you could develop this idea further, in terms of how you think about violence and the object in relation to art, and perhaps the museum, in particular, which I thought was an interesting example— *





Not only was it quick, but it was provocative and perhaps reached the limits of absurdity because I simplified [Miller’s] presentation enormously. Because his presentation involves some considerations on not only the question of death, but the way in which you apply the adjective “dead,” which could trace back to our previous discussion, and because the criterion of something being *living* or being *dead* suddenly plays a role in every discussion of possessing, appropriating, mastering, and so on. But of course “dead” has two different meanings in our languages: either it’s the result of the action of killing, so what is dead is what used to be alive, or dead means it’s not alive because it was never alive. So you say that this table was a *dead* object which apparently doesn’t mean the same thing as “I’m sorry you asked about my father’s health, but he’s dead.” You know?





Some things are dead because they died, but others are dead because they never lived. Now the interesting thing is that progressively you discover there are all sorts of important objects which are in a dubious or intermediary situation between these two poles. And we are used to saying “This is a metaphoric use of the term.” But first, again, if you move to another environment, things become rapidly, extremely different. So of course our rational—and I have to say Eurocentric and colonial—way of looking at things easily pushes into *superstition*, *fetishism*, etc. every idea that statues or objects are alive or dead. But we have our own fetishism, as Marx perfectly well knew and others explained.





*The “queer” agency and life granted to the commodity. *





And art finds itself in a strategic situation also because we think that art, I mean we speak of “live” performances, the fact that painting, writing, taking pictures, etc. are activities which either bring to life or create life, so to speak, or, on the contrary, kill, in a sense, their objects. That’s again metaphoric. In a famous passage the poet Mallarmé explained that the word, in a sense, kills the object. You see anthropologists today who pay great attention and respect to the idea very broadly shared and accepted among Native American Indians, for example, whose religious or cultural objects have been taken in one way or another and transformed into a museum object—that they have been *killed*. You can extend that and say they are in a cage, or have been killed, or have been held hostage.





And then, if you admit that life has a symbolic dimension and art is an essential discourse or practice to reveal that symbolic dimension, you no longer find it extraordinary or absurd to extend and take seriously such categories as imprisoning, or enclosing, or killing, etc. to cultural objects. There are moments in which we are all angry and we think that the museum is sordid—while it can be beautiful, it can be extremely refined and scholarly—but some artists would say, “My works were not made to be put in a room, in a museum. They were made to circulate.” Which in fact of course leads to another form of appropriation and possession. 

*In his new novel, *Harvard Square*, André Aciman revisits the place he called home as a Harvard Ph.D. student in the 1970s and ‘80s. On April 26, 2013, during one of his physical returns to the Square, *The Harvard Advocate’s* fiction editor emeritus, Patrick Lauppe, sat down with Aciman for an original interview. An Egyptian-American memoirist and novelist, Aciman has written numerous works of fiction and nonfiction, including *Out of Egypt, Call Me by Your Name, and Eight White Nights*. His most recent novel, *Harvard Square*, was released in April. Here is the transcript of *The Harvard Advocate’s* conversation with him:*



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*    You mentioned in your book that Harvard Square is a much different place than it was back in the 1970s, so could you elaborate on some of those differences and what you think they reflect?*



    It used to have a lot of oldish stores. Sometimes almost bric-a-brac stores. Now, they are very much mall stores. All the stores are nice, chic, and expensive. In the old days, it was more rundown. You had a sense that age had caught up with Harvard, especially in the area around Mount Auburn, which was really dilapidated at times. Now, it’s perfect. The old post office disappeared. It had a bad smell. Now there’s a new post office and it’s absolutely lovely.



*    You received your Ph.D from Harvard in the 1970s, in Comparative Literature. Could you perhaps elaborate on the importance of that degree and of studying Comparative Literature on your career? And how that’s influenced your writing?*



    I started in ’73, but by 1980 I was disenchanted. I never finished in the ‘70s. I taught a lot. I taught in all kinds of places. I taught a lot at Harvard and had fantastic undergrads. But at some point in time I got so disenchanted that I abandoned the Ph.D and went to work for brokerage firms and moved to New York, where I worked in advertising. Then, eventually, I decided to come back to my Ph.D. I had done all the research for it, so the writing was easy. I wrote the Ph.D dissertation in six months. Having an advanced degree, in my case, allowed me to get a job at Princeton, which eventually led to Bard College, and then to the Graduate Center in New York. So having been a grad student at Harvard worked out very well for me in the end. 



    *So you mentioned this disenchantment. One thing that I found particularly interesting and resonant about the main character of Harvard Square, the narrator, is his constant ambivalence toward graduate school and the prospect of academia. He seems to think it’s his perfect place, or the place that’s made for him, but at the same time, there’s **an antipathy toward it.*



    Yeah, it’s a love-hate relationship, if you want to put it in those bleak terms. I came to Harvard not because of Harvard, actually. I came to Harvard because I wanted to study literature. And Harvard and Johns Hopkins and NYU had accepted me, but Harvard gave me more money. So I went to the money; that was the simple answer. Also, I liked Cambridge. It was different from New York, which I knew. I had no idea that studying literature meant that you would end up almost hating it by virtue of what they did to it. In other words, the professionalization of the personal loves of literature, the loves of books, was such that it almost took the soul out of it. So I needed to get away. And having come back to my graduate work a few years after leaving helped a great deal. Writing a dissertation in New York in an environment that was entirely metropolitan, totally divorced of anything academic, was very helpful for me.



    *Why do you think so?*



    Because staying in an academic mode was stultifying and choking me; I couldn’t stand that anymore. And you can see this in the book. Cambridge was extremely hospitable to anything having to do with books, but only if you discuss books in very specific terms. Not in the terms that I wanted to discuss books. So I had to learn to discuss books in a professional manner, which I’m very grateful to. At the same time, being away from Harvard allowed me to rediscover that love of books that I used to have, and that I’ve now made my profession. In fact, it allows me to say things, when I write book reviews for instance, that are extremely pointed in that they are written by a man who is very belletristic but who knows how to discuss literature on an academic level. You find that most people who are academics today do the academic side, but they don’t really know how to handle the belletristic aspect of it, which means finding out whether something is good or bad, beautiful or stupid. Everything is interesting, as you know when you study cultural studies. Everything is interesting. But that’s not the point of literature. Some of it is very good; some of it is just interesting. And I’ve always been committed to finding out how you pass on the love of literature unadulterated, in a highly professional manner.



*    What were the terms in which you wanted to discuss literature originally that clashed with the professional mode?*



*    *I remember being interviewed by the chair of the department, and I saying, “I want to write about the Byronic hero.” I was all into Byron and I was interested in the Byronic hero, not realizing that the Byronic hero is a platitude of the first order. And he looked at me with a pensive look, almost jaundiced, and I said, “Well, what’s wrong with that?” So I went back home and thought, “Okay, well, let’s think again.” Then, I had a teacher called Edward Said who was very smart, although I have lots of problems with Edward Said. I always thought that there was something unfinished [about his approach]. He got the stuff. He *got* it, but he didn’t know how to discuss literature *qua* literature. It was always qua something else. I always thought that was really cheating students and cheating the task of a man of literature. You have to discuss it as literature. What is it that makes it *good*? There’s no other way to explain it. So I was ultimately disenchanted. But I needed to be exposed to this in order to be able to speak about the things that mattered to me in such a way that at least I could give them a greater degree of depth and meaning than they had when I came here wanting to write about the Byronic hero.



    *How did you make the transition between academic writing and an academic context to writing your own memoir and writing your own novels? I feel like that’s often a difficult transition to make.*



    It is. It’s very difficult. Let me tell you what some of the difficulties are. First of all, your colleagues. They hate you. If you write a book that flops, they love you. But if you write a book that’s very successful, as* Out of Egypt* was, in its time, it really made them very envious. That’s the only thing I can say. Here’s a book that’s actually almost a bestseller, and it’s written by somebody who’s decided, as I had when I was at Princeton, that I was not going to write an academic book. I was going to put all my eggs in this book called *Out of Egypt*. I had to make a decision. It was almost suicidal, because I knew what the price was going to be. They were not going to give me tenure. It’s that simple. They didn’t give me tenure, and that was their revenge. Of course, then they became my friends. It was good that they didn’t give me tenure, because I would have choked to death at Princeton. I was very glad that I came back to New York. This was a place for me. New York is a very hospitable place for people who are many things, not just one thing. But that’s only one aspect of the answer you’re looking for.

    Academic writing is fundamentally dead. You can make it interesting; you can make it fun. But it’s dull. Some people cheat this by writing magazine articles. That’s a way of writing as an academic for the popular reader or the mainstream reader, who’s educated, by the way. That’s the only way you can do it. Nobody really cares about three jargon words strung together in a title. Nobody wants that. I just think everybody should be discouraged from doing that. But writing a memoir, or writing a piece of fiction, as a person who is trained in literature, presents new problems and fantastic opportunities. You begin by writing for the classroom. You write stuff that’s deep and complicated because it’s going to be taught in such a way that students are going to discuss it in this and that way, and they’re going to see the symbolism and the patterns and the message. That’s a vow to demolition. You’re destroying yourself by doing that. You also have to step back and say, I’m writing something that is obeying the conventions of fiction, but it may not be fiction. It will sound like fiction. It is going to have some intellectual component that’s never, and should never, be visible, because if it’s visible, then it’s trite and stupid. So it has to be there because it matters. It matters to the writer. Me. But it must not be visible, so there’s never, in anything that I write, I hope, a message or an ideology or something that you can string together and say, “*This* is what the problem is.” I make certain that you never get that.



*    How do you go about hiding the seams, then?*



    It’s not a question of hiding the seams, as much as it is the concept of making sure that you tell a story, and that the story always has prevalence. If I was writing *Oedipus Tyrannus*, I would write it exactly as Sophocles did. There is no message in *Oedipus*. What is the message? Don’t kill your father and don’t marry your mother? There’s no message. Oh, you want to discuss faith. Well, we can do that for a while. Basically, you can’t extract a meaning. One of the ways in which I do that is by thinking of plot, but it has to be plot that’s internalized, because otherwise it’s just story à la anybody. It has to be a story that matters to the narrator. It has to be a story that derives of an experience that has already been thought about and does not need to articulate its meaning because its meaning is in plain sight.



    *The story, in *Harvard Square*, revolves around the interactions between the narrator and the character Kalaj. I found this to be a satisfying center for the novel, similar to the center of many novels.* The Great Gatsby* comes to mind, in which a passive narrator comes into relief through interaction with a dynamic and controversial character. How did you come to realize that that was the kind of dynamic you wanted to develop here and that was what you wanted to use as your vehicle for themes like exile?*



    I was fascinated by someone who claimed he had no regrets. He didn’t understand regret. He was always moving forward, almost scuttling and falling apart most of the time. There was no going back. There was always going forward. I was temperamentally more thoughtful, more meditative as a person. So I would look back, or at least not step forward that far ahead. I was interested in the contrast. I was interested in his [Kalaj’s] success with women. How does someone sleep with a different woman every single night? I want that! Or at least I did want that at some point. I found that he had his feet on the ground, whereas my head was always in the clouds. I was a student of literature. He was a student of *life*. I’ve always envied that. I’ve always felt like I didn’t get life very well. I understood people. In fact, the way I study him is the result of how he taught me to study people. I’m constantly reading how he reads me, but I got that by watching him read so many other people. He’s always reading people, always sizing them up. And he was always sizing them up because he was after something that was fundamentally authentic. He didn’t trust people, and he couldn’t trust anyone, partially because he was paranoid, but partly because it was something about people, that they were always making a compromise with the way things are, and he never did. Not out of heroism: he just didn’t know how to.



    *Do you think this way of looking at people that you’re referring to has taught you how to characterize and make the characters come off the page?*



*    *No, because there’s no craft there. I do have a very jaundiced view of humanity. I never trust anybody, and I always suspect that somebody has, not just some hidden motive, but they themselves are lying to themselves. Half the time I spend talking to people, I’m telling them that they’re not seeing what is happening to them because they’re not willing to see how things are. This ability to see what is actually going on, and articulating what the dynamic is between them and others, them and life, and them and other people is a craft that allows you to understand human beings.



    *You talk about Kalaj as if he were based on a real person. Is that the case?*



*    *Yes.



    *You began your career with a memoir, but this is characterized as a novel. Can you explain?*



     I don’t understand the difference. Because I don’t think there’s any difference between a memoir and a novel. There’s an article I just wrote in *The New York Times* that says more than what I can say here. You move the furniture around to make the story gel. In order to have meaning, you need to have a chronology. Sometimes, something happened way later that should have happened far earlier. If you refashion the order of events, then your story begins to make sense. It resonates with meaning. Ultimately, that’s what counts: the meaning of the story. So yes, sometimes something happens in January as opposed to March and you shift them around and suddenly everything makes sense, because all that needed to change was not the events, but the weather. So, in essence, for me, memoir is a novel. It reads like a novel; it’s supposed to read like a novel. It has the fun of a novel. It basically means that the facts are all real that have been taken from your life, but the order has been changed, or let’s say some things have been removed because they were of no importance. For example, in the memoir, I removed my brother because he really didn’t make any difference. He was a part of my life, but he didn’t really matter as far as the story was concerned. In fact, the story makes more sense without him.



*    You’ve spent many years studying and teaching Proust. I know that Proust is someone who toed the line between novel and memoir.*



    Totally. Rousseau did too; he lied about his own life.



     *Very convincingly.*



     Very convincingly! So did Montaigne. One does that, all the time. We’re not in a court of law. We’re not on trial. We’re telling a story that matters to us. The way I phrased it in my article was: because I’m more interested in the person I am today, thinking of these events, than the person that I was then. I don’t care about myself thirty years ago, forty years ago. He’s not that interesting. But I am interesting to myself right now, and if I’m delving into the person I was forty years ago, it’s because of who I am today. I couldn’t have written that story when I was your age.



    *One parallel I found in *Out of Egypt* and *Harvard Square* is between the characters Kalaj and Uncle Vili. They had a very similar energy as characters. Could you remark on that kind of character? Earlier you said that’s the kind of character that has no regrets.*



    I consider myself a bookish person, i.e. withdrawn, dysfunctional: whatever you want to call it. I’m not on planet Earth; I’m somewhere else. I’m constantly faking being on planet Earth in order to survive on planet Earth. That’s all it is. There are some people who belong to Earth and are committed to Earth and to life and they love it. I envy them. I couldn’t really envy them that much because I would die if I had to be them, but I envy their commitment to risk, to challenge, to the boldness with which they throw themselves into life. The fundamental characters in all my works have always been the Vili type and the Kalaj type. Of course there’s also a character called Oliver, who’s totally in the present. And there’s a woman called Clara in one of my novels: She’d go up to you and shake your hand and say, “I’m Clara. Who are you?” I love people like that. I’m not like that. But I think the contrast is important because it is a contrast between literature and what I consider the opposite of literature: life. I don’t think one has anything to do with the other. Many people will disagree with me. I think art and life are two separate departments, and one imitates the other; that’s about it. But life could care less about literature. Literature is envious of life. People who can’t read don’t care about reading. They’re not losing anything, as far as they’re concerned.



    *I **mentioned exile earlier. I think one of the most interesting parts of the book is watching the narrator navigate his feelings of belonging to the two or perhaps even three nations—counting France—between which he’s divided. Could you remark on that theme?*



    They’re both exiles. Exile is not just a condition of being without a home. It also means that you’re outside your body, too. Your home allows you to have an identity. If you’re not in your home, if you’re not living in a place with which you’ve grown to identify yourself, even if you hate it, then you yourself are in question. You are not in your body. I cannot explain it any other way. So you were brought up in the states, I take it?



    *Yes, California.*



    So you’re totally grounded. You may feel you have some issues with California, with the States: You’re angry at this and that, you disagree with this and that. But, fundamentally, you’re American: This is where you belong. This is where your home is going to be, unless you choose otherwise. When you don’t have the choice, you’re displaced; you’re like a plant that has no roots. You don’t even know if you’re a plant any longer. You’re faking being alive. Basically, they cut your arm off, and then they send you away, and so you’re a body without an arm and you manage to live without an arm. Except, there’s a mistake in the metaphor: You are just the arm. The body stayed behind. You are just an arm trying to do the work of a whole body, and you can’t. I’m sorry that I’m piling on the metaphors, but it’s the only way to do it. So you are deracinated. 

    What I was interested in doing [in* Harvard Square*] without trying to be too sententious about it was to show two different versions of exile. One basically has a ticket in. He can become a student at Harvard. He can become an American eventually. He can have a professional life. He can belong somewhere given his interests. The other person has no ticket. He has no free pass anywhere. He’s just here freeloading, as it were. And eventually he’s going to lose all he’s got. Both of them, however, feel that they don’t belong here. One feels that America is a strange country. It’s not really his home. The other feels that Americans belong to a different order of mankind. Mankind comes in many versions; not just cultures. Versions. So you have two people who don’t belong here, and who have this imaginary home in France. They know it’s imaginary, because one escaped it and the other doesn’t really want to go there because he knows he wouldn’t really belong there anyway. So they’re all free-floating in this place called Cambridge, where they don’t feel welcomed or at home.

George Saunders is the author of two novellas and four short story collections, including *Civil War Land in Bad Decline* (1996) and his most recent work, *Tenth of December* (2013). A New York Times bestselling author and the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and MacArthur “Genius Grant,” his career has been met with both popular and critical success. He now teaches creative writing at Syracuse University’s MFA program. This fall, *Advocate* Features Board member Warner James Wood conducted this interview over email. It has been edited for concision and clarity.



* *



*Alright, George, let’s get you warmed up: If the zombie apocalypse started right now, what skill would you bring to the table to save the human race? Would you be a guy I’d want on my zombie-defense team?*



* *



Earnest, respectful negotiation. So no, you don’t want me on your team. My understanding of zombies is that they pretty much plow right past the “earnest respectful negotiation” phase.



* *



*Good to know. Now, I’ve read a few interviews in preparation for this one, and interviewers seem to always ask how an author developed her voice or style over her career. To spare you from that one, how did you develop your approach to answering interview questions over your career? You’ve had quite a few.*



 



Practice, practice.



* *



*Fair. Let’s jump right into it, then. How was 7th grade for you? Were you the bully or the bullied? The class clown or the scholar?*



 



I was neither bully nor bullied. I’d say I was part clown, part scholar. I had a lot of comic impulses but too much respect for (fear of) authority to be a full-out clown. The big incident that year was that I inadvertently pulled out a chair on a nun, who went down in a heap. It was a complete accident but afterward I learned something valuable and not-so-great about myself: I immediately stopped saying it was an accident as soon as I saw how much respect I was getting by going along with the popular assumption that I’d done it on purpose.



* *



*Very funny. In fact, your work is full of jokes. One of my favorites comes from *The Brief and Frightening Reign of Phil*, where you describe the President’s Palace as “decorated with paintings of various types of animals the President liked to eat, served on plates, although in the paintings the animals were still alive and had all their fur on and looked a little panicked.” Tell me, does your mother find you funny?*



 



Occasionally, yes. She always did, God love her. Actually, it’s funny you should mention her, because one of the reasons I’m a writer is that when I was young I got addicted to what we might call “approval from females.” I had two sisters, and the aforementioned mother, and a lot of girl cousins and aunts, and was the only boy on my mom’s (Texas) side of the family for a pretty long time—and I think I picked up some sort of urge-to-entertain from that arrangement. And both sides of my family are very funny—it’s kind of part of the package, on both sides, that you learn to play along and participate.



I don’t tend to think in terms of jokes, per se—that’s too much pressure. For me it’s more useful to think of trying to really be in whatever fictive moment I’m in, as concept-free as possible—that way, if there is a joke (or an opportunity for a deepening move, or a nice description) I’ll be there to receive it, so to speak. And this is a process of simultaneously “imagining” the moment and inhabiting the actual sentence—looking to see if there’s some detail of the imagined world that you missed while, in the same instant, feeling around in the sentence to see if there’s some way to make it tighter/better/more unique. Sometimes a funny bit is the response—but I find it more useful to not try and steer my work toward funniness—or toward anything, really. There’s energy in any bit of prose and that energy is actually telling you where to go. Or, as I heard Stuart Dybek say once, “The story is always talking to you; you just have to listen.”



 



*“Imagining” is definitely a strong suit for you. With many of your stories, I’d say you’re in the business of world-making. Sometimes these worlds are theme parks, sometimes kooky offices. What are some of your favorite “created worlds” you’ve either been to or read? Where did the fascination with these originate?*



 



It’s really more a technique than an interest. Something happens to my prose when I set a story in one of those places. My natural sincerity and sentimentality and my minimalist prose instincts get cross-purposed in a productive way.



 



I do like those places though—I had a really wonderful day at Six Flags over Texas when I was about ten, and never forgot it—that particular delight of being somewhere that is simultaneously artificial and gorgeous. So maybe there’s some relation between my affection for those places and my prose—just that, when I “make” such a place, I get a little thrill that is not unlike the thrill I first got all those years ago, seeing some mechanical fish in an artificial pond. But honestly, my feeling is that a writer is maybe more akin to an athlete or musician than he is to a critic—the point is, if something works, you do it—and the reasons why it works are maybe not so essential.



 



*Since you brought up music, there’s a picture of you online where you’re rocking’80s-style long hair and a guitar. I’ve always heard that timing is the most important part of comedy. Has music influenced your rhythm?*



 



I’d imagine so, though I’d be hard-pressed to articulate just how. One thing playing music (or listening to it, for that matter) does is make you aware of the fact that it’s not just what you say, but how you say it. The other beneficial thing about playing music, especially playing live, is that when you’re doing that, there’s no confusion about your purpose. You’re supposed to provide pleasure. Being smart, “advancing a theme,” sneaking in a message—none of that gets you much. I had a big breakthrough in my writing around the time of my first book, and that was the essence of it: (finally) remembering to allow myself to be entertaining again. And I’m sure all those years of playing music helped me make that jump.



 



*But you do a great job of sneaking. I’ll be reading one of your stories and rolling with the funny business, and the next thing I know I’ve been stabbed in some emotional underbelly and have arrived at some semblance of morality. Not everyone can get there without seeming sentimental, and you do it without me even noticing it’s happening. Do jokes operate in your stories to etch away at your readers’ fortification so you can stick them where it hurts? Or why else pepper such dark stories with comedy?*



 



I don’t have a theory on this, honestly. To me it’s something like riding a bike. If you feel that you’re leaning right, you adjust left. It’s an intuitive thing that happens when I imagine my reader—I’ll be reading along while editing and just feel, you know, “Ugh, too serious” (or too sentimental, or cloying, or preachy—whatever) and then adjust accordingly. Some of this happens along what we might call high/low lines—if I find I’m writing sincerely and earnestly, and have gotten the bang from that (that is, this ideal reader is with me, and feeling the bang with me) and then I feel that, however, we might be inching out on to the thin ice of Too Much of That Shit, I’ll drop into a lower register and seek the humor, as a sort of pressure-release valve. That way, you have it both ways—you get the high/elevated/sincere feeling, and just when the reader is about to look askance at you for going over the top (being too overt in your heart-string-pulling), you recognize that, back it down—and in the process win an extra iota of readerly trust. It might be akin to a conversation, really, especially with someone you’ve just met. You are, in a sense, demonstrating range—showing that you can go high and go low, and at the same time demonstrating an awareness of, and respect for, your reader, by being acutely attentive to where she actually is at any given moment. You’re in conversation—it’s not a lecture, not (merely) a (tone-deaf, audience-ignoring) performance.



* *



*How do you know when you’ve reached “Too Much of That Shit”? When a joke’s gone flat? And I’m not taking “Practice, practice” for an answer this time.*



 



My main revision thing is just to try and clear my mind of what I thought about the piece yesterday and go through it the way a first-time reader would. That first reader is approximately me if I hadn’t read it a zillion times already—it’s actually a kind of simulation of that guy—a simulation I’m running in my mind. And I just watch him. When his energy drops or his resistance comes up, I edit accordingly. So at a bad joke (or at a less-good repetition of an earlier joke) I’ll see the reading energy drop just a tad. That’s the sign that a cut is in order. (Or an adjustment.) That’s it, really. Just see what that inner reader is feeling, adjust. Make the changes that this process calls for, reprint, clear the mind—read it all again. Rinse, lather, repeat, for like ten months. Or however long it takes for that reader to be pleased, start to finish.



 



*Do you have a particular reader whose “inner feeling” you trust for advice? Or are you a door-closed kind of writer?*



 



My wife reads all of my stuff before it goes out, but I really try to have things in order before I give it to her. I don’t like having a lot of readers because ceding authority to a reader feels to me like a form of taking one’s hands off the wheel. And I find that I am easily swayed by the opinions of others. So if someone reads something and goes, “Oh, I like this part,” that makes it hard for me to cut it later—which might be necessary to get to the highest version of the story. Likewise, if somebody doesn’t like a part, that sort of kills it for me. And it might just be that more revision is needed before that bit gets up to speed. So for all of these reasons, I really, really like to maintain control of a piece for as long as I can.



 



*Did there come a time in your writing life when the blank page stopped being so frightening?*



 



Yes, and honestly it was when I learned to revise. If you are confident in your ability to convert shit to gold, or at least tin foil, then there’s nothing to worry about. You just go ahead and—well, let’s divert from that metaphor. You just type and type, knowing that it’s all conditional and temporary and that you can form it into something interesting by going back over it again and again. I love this idea that your first draft is NOT YOU. It’s just “of” you. It’s “for you”—to work with. Who you are as a writer is much more about your method of (and courage in) revision. (And this is also true of your 100th draft— it’s still not you, but only of you.)



 



*I’d love to hear about how you get into a story. One of my favorite writers, Amy Hempel, says to start at the point of most contentment, the most satisfying moment, instead of the most jeopardy. Your stories are typically short and alive from the first sentence; is that a product of revision or do your drafts begin that way as well?*



 



She’s one of my favorites too—a total master. I think I usually end up cutting a bunch of stuff and finding the opening that way—that is, sort of backing into it. I try not to get too obsessed about making a big wonderful opening. Too much pressure. I just want to get in there and get started, knowing that the story’s going to earn its keep, really, with what happens in the middle and the end anyway. (If we think of a story as a series of meaningful events that produce the next meaningful event, then the first big sign of progress for me on a given story is when I dimly perceive what those events are, or what the first few are—and then the beginning is usually the minimum thing I have to do to make the first meaningful event happen.)



    So mostly I just throw some scraps down and start working with those. Kind of like a guy who shows up for an important social event and sneaks in the side door, knowing that the success or failure of the event doesn’t depend on his fancy entrance. So often there’ll be some long intro stuff that I’m very proud of, and that I think is just essential to the meaning of the story, that winds up proving inessential and gets cut. Always a happy moment.



* *



*How about the flip-side—what are your thoughts on endings? Many of your stories seem to end in the worst possible ways. As in, I’ll find myself thinking, How can this get any worse? And then it does. Way worse. Then it ends. Do you ever feel an urge to throw your character a bone once in a while?*



 



I think I’m throwing them a bone all the time, by paying really close attention to them—trying to give them the widest scope of action I can. This tendency you’re talking about—the piling on of worsening circumstances—is not really an attitude toward character, but toward story—for some reason, I get more heat when I think of my pieces as lab experiments. If we want to learn about “love,” then we have to test it. So those turns in the plot are ways of turning up the heat.

    There are, of course, lots of ideas about endings, and each writer winds up discovering his own, by just trying to accomplish some, you know? Some that don’t stink. So I don’t have a big theory on endings—each story should produce its own ending, unique to itself and hopefully new in some way. But my current understanding of (my) stories is that each part should serve to crank things up, even up to the very last phrase or sentence—the heat keeps going up. Which is another way of saying that the rhetorical basis of the story is understood (by writer and reader) and is exhausted—we go through all of its rooms, so to speak. Things get more complicated, the various moral hallways are investigated and closed-down, until there is one stretch of hallway left, and we run down it and…I don’t know. Burst through the wall? But a story has an essential underlogic that is really what it’s about. So I don’t care at all about whether that process entails a “happy” or “sad” ending for the character. I want the ending to be happy for the story—that is, I want the ending to use up and actualize all of the energy it has been creating along the way.

    So, for example, a story like “Puppy” in the new book might qualify as one where things get worse. But the ending there felt, to me, sort of happy, in the sense that the internal logic of the story has been honored, and in honoring it, the story made a sort of interesting machine, wherein two well-intentioned people, who both love their kids, have produced this unintended and negative consequence. And if it’s working for the reader, she should feel: Yes, it is sometimes thus. And it is sometimes thus, I think—our love for others and our excellent intentions are sometimes insufficient, and sometimes this is even unbeknownst to us as we act. So a certain light gets thrown off, at that realization—and that’s happy.



 



*Great. Let’s segue a bit. I’ve read that you were a geophysicist in college, and at a reading in Cambridge (at the Brattle Theatre last spring) you talked about how you did some of your favorite writing on-the-job at oil companies. Who were you reading back in your geophysicist days? When did you decide to start writing things down?*



 



When I was a geophysics student I was reading a lot of Ayn Rand and Kahlil Gibran, and just starting to read more serious literature, most of it from the 1920s and 1930s: Hemingway, Steinbeck, Thomas Wolfe, Dos Passos, Faulkner. Then when I went overseas I had lots of reading time (I worked four weeks on and two weeks off at an oil camp in Sumatra) so I started branching out, sort of haphazardly.

The day before I came back to the crew I would go to a bookstore in Singapore and just load whatever I could fit in one suitcase. So it might be Herman Hesse and Dostoevsky and Mailer…just whoever I’d come across that I’d heard of. Sort of hit-or-miss. I started writing at that point. At night you had a choice: Go get wrecked in our little “bar” (a thatched hut a stone’s throw from the office) or go off and do something on your own. There wasn’t much to do—there were big lizards in the woods and now and then a tiger would be spotted. So I would read, or sometimes go back over to the office and write early attempts at stories—which, of course, were mostly just thinly veiled accounts of whatever trip I’d been on last, with a clever “frame”—usually some old fading guy in a senior home “remembering” his brilliant youth in Asia, when he’d worked on an oil crew in Sumatra, etc. etc.



* *



*As a scientist myself, I have noticed there seems to be a stigma within writing circles against those less well-versed in literature. You seem to have taken a rather distinctive path to where you are now. Did an interdisciplinary approach help? Hurt? How about your time in the work world?*



 



I think it helped and hurt. Not having had the same formative influences, exactly, as my peers, I tend to come at things from an odd angle, which can sometimes be good. The travel I did (and the type of travel it was) maybe ramped up a certain tendency I had anyway, which was to think of fiction as fundamentally a moral-ethical endeavor—a way of understanding the world better and figuring out how to live in it appropriately. My travel also politicized me pretty early, in a real visceral way. I was basically an affable earth-raper, and learned about things like imperialism and oppression and the queasy smashing power of capital by being part of a group that was (affably) doing these things. So my background got me into some strange and interesting places I wouldn’t have been allowed into otherwise, and allowed me to be there naturally, i.e., without that distortion of behavior that a known journalist in the room causes.

    On the other hand, I find I’m a little under-confident in my writing, which has to do, I think, with my sketchy reading and critical background—I got a late start in general, and am still trying to come to grips with longer forms.



 



*I promised myself I wouldn’t ask, because I don’t think I’ve read a single interview where you were not asked, “Is a NOVEL in the works?” So, no, I’m not going to ask that. But since you mention your coming to grips with longer forms, why do you think we care so much about your writing a novel? In our sound-bite generation obsessed with Tweets and lists, wouldn’t you think we’d be partial to the short forms over the long?*



 



I don’t know—I think I’d be wary of that “we” pronoun. Seems reasonable to me that people would enjoy Twitter and so on and also be able to switch gears and go off and read Ulysses. I think people do things like that all the time. Our minds are really good at making boundaries and conceiving of different modes of activity, I think. The same guy “reads Tacitus” and then seconds later begins to “play badminton, in comical shorts.”

    As for whether I’ll write a novel—I think it’s a natural and understandable question—even flattering. I’ve had that same impulse when reading short-story writers I like—to want to see, more directly stated, their “world-view” and have the pleasure of seeing a world created over many pages and so on. But the thing is, when I start out to write something, I’m not “deciding” anything. I’m just trying to see if I can get something going. So many times, I’ve had something that was long—even novel-length—suddenly inform me that it was not a novel after all, by being boring. I think the questions, “Why the short story?” or “Will there be a novel?” both embody a certain misunderstanding of the process by which a work of fiction gets generated—or at least how it gets generated by me.

    That said, I think the story form is very sophisticated and takes some indoctrination. A casual reader might find his expectations of “a story” more directly satisfied by a conventional, novel-length, realistic work. It “feels” like life, or like the stories we tell about life. (“That guy? Started out poor, got rich, married a beautiful girl, had it all, then got greedy, lost it all.”) The story is, I think, a more specialized and compressed and exaggerated form. It’s about a certain moment coming to fruition. It doesn’t care so much about “how things turn out”—but rather about “what just happened?” Just as a certain experience in poetry is necessary to understand really great poetry, a person reading a story is well-served by having read a bunch of others and having cultivated a sense of what a story does uniquely.



 



*Do you have any predictions for the fate of the short story once us Tweeters are out of our universities and into the world? Will they come more so into focus?*



 



I don’t think it’s gone out of focus or fashion. It’s always been a more niche form, I think—but a particularly American one and you can’t drop into any decade without finding amazing story writers working in it. What happens, I think, in the media, is very similar to what you see in fashion magazines: the world is doing what the world does, but the magazine proclaims that “Skirts are back!” or “The Return of Red” or whatever. Also—I mean, the Twitter generation is out in the world, already, and they are also reading fiction, long and short—so I don’t know. I run into brilliant young readers all the time, who are fully engaged in real life and e-life and reading life, and are actively engaged in trying to sort all of that out, in order to live in the way that makes the most sense of them.

    Along these lines, the one thing I have observed (in myself) is that, the more I’m on-line and texting and so on, the less well I am able to process big complex blocks of text. I know this because I resisted having a smartphone for a pretty long time, then dove in and went overboard, and could absolutely see, over those first few months, the diminishment in my reading capabilities. I definitely got more distractible, was skimming ahead, more easily bored, etc. etc. So I’m trying to watch that. It’s a commonplace that working on screens rewires the brain, and I am just thinking that I’d prefer to retain my ability to track complexity in prose, and am trying to adjust my habits accordingly.



 



*Do you ever feel pressure (from readers, from publishers) to write in a different form? You’re someone who has been very successful exclusively writing short fiction—what you think about the state of the art form?*



 



I’ve never been pressured at all about this, honestly. I did OK with a first book of stories and so from then it’s just been perfectly fine for me to write whatever I liked. Now, that’s a good position to be in, and it’s helped immeasurably that I have a great agent (Esther Newberg at ICM)—she understands me first and foremost as an artist, and trusts me to make those sorts of calls. But basically I think a writer, especially a new writer, has to be very frank and strict with herself (while also being joyful!) and cast aside all of “should” and “must” and “preferable to” statements and do what she wants. That’s where the power is. What gets you excited, what sort of writing leads you into confusing and rich places, and so on.

    Now and then I feel some pressure from myself to write a novel, but that pressure is just the desire to fully inhabit what talent I have before I kick off. So due diligence might require, every few years, reopening the novel door—just saying to myself: Any interest there? Or, in the middle of a story, if I feel some sense that it might want to be longer, allowing that attempt. Just see if it works. There are particular charms that a novel presents, and it would be fun to get to do some of that—to be able to write text that is not so slavishly bound to functionality as my model of the short story requires. But again—that desire might be real AND the result might stink—in which case, it would have to be discarded.

    I guess what I’m saying generally here is that, in my experience, we can formulate a lot of questions about craft and aesthetics and what writers should and shouldn’t do and so on—but the bottom-line is the creation of some sort of undeniable text—something that calls up something intense and non-trivial in the reader, and engages her at the deepest level—is the one and only job. And a writer can’t choose what, of the many things she can do, might produce such an effect. That is, actually, “the apprenticeship” or “finding one’s voice” or whatever we want to call it: that process of finding out what you can do, at that given time, that will produce an undeniable energy.



 



*Alright, let’s call this the home stretch. It’s “career” time. As both a writer and a teacher of writing, I’m curious as to how you feel about the institutionalization of creative writing. It seems like everywhere a young writer looks points toward academia, first as a student, then as a teacher. I’m not extremely knowledgeable about the history of creative-writing-as-career, besides it not being one and then being one and now being one only in the face of the university system. Do you think this is healthy for the arts? What’s the role of the writer as we become increasingly dependent on the institution?*



 



It’s a really good question. I always tell young writers that there are two big roaming falsehoods that have really picked up power in the last ten years: (1) If you want to be a writer, you have to have an MFA, and (2) If you get an MFA, you will be a writer. Both are false as hell. Part of me longs for the days when getting an MFA was, for friends and family, sort of a head-scratcher, as in “What IS that? Why would you want it? Isn’t it going to screw up your life?”

Now, as you suggest, it’s assumed that writing is a career (rather than a vocation) and I think that’s wrong. Demonstrably wrong, when you look at how many MFA grads there are every year (lots) and how many books are published (few). And beyond that, look at how many published books are daring and important and beloved. It’s as hard now to be an essential and original writer as it ever was—but maybe we’re obfuscating that fact with all of this false-hope-giving professionalism. One thing I’ve noticed is that there seems to have been a shift in how young writers feel about being writers—from “I know it’s nuts but I just HAVE to try it or I’ll die,” to “Well, I guess I’ll go ahead and consent to being an author, by getting a master’s in it, since I pretty much wouldn’t mind having a book out someday, which would be pretty cool, I guess, to do that for a job.” I don’t see this at Syracuse, but more when I go around to undergrad programs—this idea that one becomes a writer by dutifully trodding a certain professional path, at which time the system plops out some Recognition. Now, having said that, I’ll rush around to the other side of the table and say that, if someone is really burning to try the artistic path, the MFA world is a wonderful way to do that, so that, later in life, you won’t feel like you chickened out. There’s certainly no harm, and potentially a lot of benefit, in spending two or three years closely reading texts and writing and revising your own with the help of a community. And there’s benefit to doing that, even if you never publish a word—your mind has been sharpened and you’ve become a more spacious human being.



 



*Continuing a bit from that, we’ve all read or heard your address to Syracuse grads last spring. What advice would you give to young writers, particularly recent grads or future recent grads, when they’re faced with what my parents would call “real-world” jobs vs. finding ways to devote time to the craft?*



 



I think the main thing is to try and void out that distinction. We all have to earn a living. And that’s often how we find our material anyway—by wading out into the real world and seeing what’s beautiful about it and what’s sinister and so on. So I’d say the main thing is this: if you think of yourself as writer, you are one. If you think, “This thing I’m doing is part of my writing life”—then it is. Whatever a person is doing, she’s living, and if she’s doing that living with her eyes and heart open, then, I’d say, potentially, she is feeding her artistic life. There is, of course (always) the issue of time—how in the world does a young person put in all the hours she needs to put in, to foster the necessary breakthroughs and find out who she is, artistically, AND, at the same time, provide for herself? To which I would say: Yes, right, exactly. That is the issue. Everyone has had to face it. So I don’t think the goal is to avoid the slog so that one “can write.” My experience was that it was only when I was chest-deep in the slog that I came to understand what I was supposed to be writing about. But here’s another argument for the MFA program, and also a thought of when a person might want to try it. If you are out there working and writing, and making steady progress, each story better than the previous one, new technical problems presenting and being solved—maybe you don’t need to go back to school (yet. Or at all). But if it starts to feel that you’ve hit a plateau—you have plenty to say, but are frustrated in your ability to say it, and your stories aren’t getting better the way they used to get better, and they all seem to stall out at the same point, or manifest the same problem—then maybe that would argue for a few years of dedicated writing. But you wouldn’t want to cash in that chip too early, I think—I’ve seen young writers who hadn’t quite lived enough come to our program, and then they’re frustrated—they have the chops but nothing to subjugate those chops too, so to speak. But every writer is different, and, of course, has to decide for herself—and even that (the way she makes that decision) is part and parcel of the artist she is.



 



*Alright, last question. You have said in past interviews that you hoped your newest book,Tenth of December, would be your most expansive work to date. You went on to say that you aimed to reach readers with this collection that you had not yet reached with the others. I’m always fascinated by writers’ intention for readership. There’s a theory on writers that says they invariably come from a formative experience where language meant power, and the greater the readership, the greater the power. Others might say they want a more expansive audience because what they have to say is important, political. Some I assume just want more money. Will you tell me a little about how you perceive your readership, and how that perception may have changed since your earlier works?*



 



Well, basically, when I’m on my deathbed, I want to feel that, in my life, I was daring—that I’d gone as far as I could in the direction of making whatever beauty I could manage to make. That I’d swung for the fences. Now, I’ve noticed that my work isn’t for everyone. That might be because the masses are too lowly to get me (ha) OR it might be that I am unconsciously writing in a way that excludes people, out of insecurity. So when I say I want to reach a larger audience, what I mean is: I want to write at the top of my register. I want to be brave. I want to tap into that part of me that is genuine and curious and thinks well of my audience. Of course, I also want to avoid blundering into the sentimental or banal. Basically, I want to find a way to be maximally communicative—and that is going to contain two vectors, basically: (1) how many people read it and (2) how deep it is. I once saw Frank Conroy draw his big arc on the chalkboard and at one end writer “W” (for Writer) and at the other “R” (for Reader). He said that every writer is somewhere on that arc—more attuned to the Reader (at the extreme end would be someone bending over backwards to be accessible and liked) or more attuned to the Writer (at that extreme end would be a writer so deeply internal that he didn’t care if his work was unintelligible). Conroy’s point was that the writer has a part to play in placing himself on that arc. Part of it is disposition, part of it is will. I think I am in the process of trying to move myself slightly in the direction of the “R”—because I have an instinct that my best writing will result from that attempt.

    For me, this is an ongoing journey that started—well, even during the first book. I had figured out how to write dark, minimal, somewhat cartoonish stories that moved along pretty quickly and were (to my surprise) coming closer to expressing my real and urgent feelings than anything I’d ever done before. But to do that, I was deliberately clipping off certain modalities. (That might actually be a good working definition of making art: “clipping off certain modalities.”) So in the next book, I tried to edge up a little closer to the cliff: put more of the physical world in there, experiment with pitching the prose a little higher, be o.k. with more ambiguity, etc., etc.

    I think that’s what writing is, essentially: trying to modify one’s approach so that more light is given off. And we do this by constantly interrogating our own stuff. Too sentimental? Still truthful? Am I properly respecting the real darkness of the world? How about its luminosity? Is the prose getting more full? Am I getting it right about human cruelty? Human kindness? Etc., etc.

    I’m actually not all that concerned about audience, per se—but am very interested in learning to write with my full humanity. That is: learning to resist my instinctive fealty to certain moves that got me through the door in the first place. This involves—well, it involves the basic faith that beyond those moves are...other moves. And those might even be deeper.

    The goal, I think, is freedom. Freedom from our fear of failure, freedom from mere habit, freedom from the urge to protect oneself. Having actually done something in writing can make a kind of prison for the writer. He might start to think that way (the way he just did it) is the only way to do it. He could start to associate his artistic self with that one methodology, and thereby limit and freeze himself: a nightmare. The goal is to keep freeing yourself up to go in whatever direction feels most interesting and urgent.

 



On October 25, 2012, The Harvard Advocate conducted an original interview with English novelist and critic Martin Amis. Amis has published numerous novels and collections of non-fiction, including *The Rachel Papers*, *Money*, and *London Fields*. His most recent book, *Lionel Asbo: State of England*, was released earlier this year. The following is a transcript of that conversation.



*



*Your recent book *Lionel Asbo: State of England* features Lionel Asbo, who is embraced and thrown into the press machine almost arbitrarily. This theme of the contemporary celebrity is some- thing that you’ve dealt with quite frequently. I’m wondering about your own celebrity status—what does it mean for you to have become such a public celebrity figure?*



It’s part of the job. If it were a profession in which you worked behind the scenes and became what you did invisibly, then that would be very nice in a way, but I have to compete for attention with millions of other sources of interest. So it’s sort of just part of the job. But some things about it are nice. It doesn’t really affect your daily life and in England there’s certainly no question of becoming like Lionel where you’re recognized and encouraged everywhere you go. The literary novel is not real fame.



*A lot of your writing is really about combating the mindlessness of the celebrity culture. What do you think then (particularly given your rela- tionship to the late Christopher Hitchens) of the corollary which is the public intellectual—do you feel like there’s a sense of obligation or a moral imperative to be able to comment on politics and talk about, you know, terrorism and the current elections? Do you think that’s a role you occupy?*



Well I suppose that for intellectual men that’s what you are—you lose the temptation and not the obligation to comment on what you see around you. He certainly liked conflict and I find I have not so much a taste for that. But I do surprise myself sometimes by having some.



*And it becomes a bit of a public furor in terms of how the press responds to these things ...*



Well it’s different in America. In England you’re not supposed to comment on these things. Your status there is more of a pact indulged. But here, where the role of the novelist is not resented, there seems to be fair comment and you’re not con- demned for sort of joining in these debates.?



*In general do you feel like you have more freedom in America? You’ve spent a lot of time in the States, because your father was lecturing at Princeton, for example, and it’s figured in a lot of your fiction. How is the author positioned differently in America, do you think?*



Well they certainly are, yes. And I think there’s a straightforward explanation for that. I think that America’s a young country that came together two and half centuries ago, and was curious to know whether it was a real country or just a col- lection of immigrants. And subconsciously un- derstood that writers would play a role in telling them what America was. In England—there’s never been any questions about what England is. It’s the country of Chaucer and Shakespeare. Its history is so much longer than that of America and all those questions have long been settled, if indeed they were ever asked.



*Your most recent novel is subtitled “A State of England.” Would you consider it in the same tradition as that of Chaucer and Shakespeare, or do you see as kind of a redefinition of what England is?*



Well it still is and always will be the country of Shakespeare. That’s its greatest distinction. But it’s certainly come a long way from then, let’s put it that way. And it’s in the process of a long decline. I don’t see any way of pretending that’s not true. And decline would take various forms, and one of them is triviality.



*I’m interested in going back to what you said about youth and the particularly the youth of America. You seem to really value innocence and freshness and fresh experience. And you’ve spoken in previous interviews about the “mental rabble of the wised-up world.” In that sense, how do you see the world in terms of its youth or innocence or its cynicism or not—do you feel that we can ever go back to that state of innocence?*



You can’t recapture lost innocence. And I don’t see any means of doing that. It would be silly to try, I think. But that doesn’t mean that one embraces pessimism. I just read Steven Pinker’s book *The Better Angels of our Nature: Why **Violence has Declined*, and it does change the picture and makes it very difficult for people who say that we are launched on a descent and, in fact, all the indicators are that the world has be- come more self-controlled, more civilized, more empathetic than it’s ever been before—despite the horrors of the first half of the twentieth century. All the indicators are down.



*To go off tangentially, from this idea of youth, you once said in an interview that every adolescent is a writer. This can be reflected in increased workshops and in creative writing programs across the country. Do you have any thoughts about the cultivation of writers? Should it be a collective activity? Should some people not become writers?*



Well, it can’t be a cooperative activity. Writing is about solitude. To be a writer you have to not only have an enormous appetite for solitude, but you have to be in some sense most alive when alone. I think that’s why, for instance, dramatic arts is probably much lower-level than fiction and poetry—because it is collaborative. I couldn’t imagine any compromise on having total say. The novelist is in a godlike relation to what he creates. He’s omnipotent, omniscient —he’s autocratic. But I think any show of interesting writing—above all, reading is one of those—can only be a good thing. And it’s interesting, in Steven Pinker’s book, one of the reasons for the decline in violence over the last several centuries is the invention of printing and the rise of the novel. And he says that the mass reading public does in fact learn to find perspective and a protective where he doesn’t much like. But that’s what fiction must to some extent do, it’s still empathy, because you’re asking the readers to see things from a different point of view.



*Related to your own literary education, what did you read when young and when you were in college?*



I read comic books until disgracefully late in my teenage years. I came to reading in my late teens. And, you know, you read and you read and every now and then you pick up a writer and you think, this writer is talking to me in a way the others aren’t. And that happened to me with Saul Bellow, most memorably, and that’s what I hope happens when younger readers pick me up. That they will think, here is someone who seems to speak to me more easily than the others. And I will want to read everything they write. And that kind of particular bond of the reader.



*You’ve been called “fiction’s angriest writer,” with parallels ranging from James Joyce to Tom Wolfe. What novelistic function do you see in this anger, as well as in the comedy that also comes up in your novels—in general, the hyperbolic language so ubiquitous in your writing?*



The word function, it doesn’t—a novel begins in a kind of dream like state. You have an idea of what it’s going to be. And then it becomes a huge sort of wrestling match to make that happen. You draw conclusions from what you’ve already written, but in the actual process you don’t think in those terms. You just say it again and again, every sentence, in your head, until it sounds right, and you do that for every paragraph and for every page. Once the idea takes, it becomes a question of craft and hard work.



*Could you talk some more about your thinking process as you begin a novel, its gestation stages, and then how you move from that to the final product?*



The key is that a novel has to begin with some strange frisson, a shiver or throb, and you think, “This is a novel I can write,” and you do need to have that. And it’s a very peculiar feeling. And then it can be sort of hardly anything. It could be derisory what this premonitory shiver gives you. Maybe just a situation, maybe just a single character. Then you start writing and see what happens. And usually you have an idea of the beginning, an idea of the end, and an idea of something that happens mid-way through. And that’s probably all you’ve got as you start. So it’s a journey without a map but with a kind of destination. And then it’s a huge exercise in trial and error and multiple decisions, multiple decisions on every page, until you get close to your kind of platonic ideal of what the novel could have been when it first struck you. But it’s an incremental process. It’s brick upon brick.



*To what you extent do you find that autobiographical elements play into this process of crafting a novel? To what extent is an autobiographical element, for example, part of that initial shiver?*



Some novelists do go quite close to life, Philip Roth as well as Saul Bellow. But if you put a real character in a novel they will look very strange, out of place. What you have to do is change the person so that they fit the novel. I put Christopher Hitchens in a novel, my last one, and he went in quite easily, but I had to give him a toss a few times, I had to change what had to be changed. But that was quite rare for me. I think little segments of your life, you consult—you come to a character and you say, “Who is this like?” You fixate on someone you have known, maybe not at all well, for how they look, and someone else for how they talk, and you cannibalize your acquaintances and friends and people you just pass on the street, and you cobble them together that way. But it can be a help to have a real-life model, although I wouldn’t—the thing about fiction is freedom, and a real person will make demands of you that aren’t really right for fiction where you’ve got to be free.



*In terms of fiction and the novel in contemporary culture, do you have any thoughts on what now is the place of the novel? Do you think it could play a different role than it has in the past? And where could it be going? What new direc- tions could the novel be taking?*



Well, I wouldn’t know about them because I don’t read my youngers. And the only contemporaries I read are pretty much my friends. Because to read the latest book by the 25-year-old sensation seems to me a very uneconomical way of using your time. I would say that the novel has responded to modernity, to the most recent stretch of modernity, by becoming much more streamlined and dynamic. Because the pace of history seems to speed up and seems just as important to us, whether or not it actually has. And things are moving too fast now for the kind of long essays, the meditative novel that was popular couple of generations ago. Life is too fast for that now and novelists, being modern people, have resorted to that. I imagine the novel wil go on getting streamlined. The arrow of propulsion will get sharper.



*Speaking of the arrow of propulsion, do you feel like you’re getting sharper and sharper?*



It’s a tradeoff. Your musical abilities get more limited by your craft gets better and you know what goes where. You can modulate and you can ... this concept of earning what you write becomes clearer to you: you can’t just put the words on the page without going through a process that involves pleasure and also some pain. And you have to write it, you can’t just state it. So the technical side gets easier. The inspirational side gets more difficult.



*You did say once in an interview about your father, that there’s a fear that older writers can have of younger writers, a fear that the younger writers might have a better sense of the contemporary –*



Well, yes, I think that’s inevitable and maybe as a result you will set your stuff in the recent past. It would be very undignified to try to keep up with the new. You have to let it go at a certain point and say, I do what I do, and I’m not going to just go and find out what everyone’s up to, stick to your own milieu, your own area.



*We’ve talked about young writers and older writers. You wrote some of your first novels when you were in your 20s—how would you contrast your first novels to what you’re doing now?*



Well I can’t read my early stuff ... I mean, I can see it’s lively and all that, it’s surprising but technically it’s embarrassing. The novels of mine that I like most are the most recent ones.



*Over the past few years you’ve talked a lot about growing old, about mortality, and about the distastefulness in that. And yet more recently, after the death of your dear friend Christopher Hitchens, you’ve spoken more about the gift of life. How would you say your philosophy on life has evolved over the past few years?*



Well, as I said when you arrive, when you start communing with yourself in your teenage years, you start to keep notes and diaries and become self-aware, and the world looks like a—you’re saying hello to the world. And then after a certain point in your life you find that you’re beginning to say goodbye. And that has a certain kind of poignancy and things do look precious when you’re absolutely sure that you’re not going to be around for that much longer. They say that age gives nothing back ... but I think it does.