Kenzaburo Oe Interview

Today The Paris Review opened its interview with Kenzaburo Oe, so I decided to grab what I could. This is part of their description of Oe:

Kenzaburo Oe has devoted his life to taking certain subjects seriously—victims of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, the struggles of the people of Okinawa, the challenges of the disabled, the discipline of the scholarly life—while not appearing to take himself seriously at all. Although he is known in Japan as much for being a gadfly activist as for being one of the country’s most celebrated writers, in person Oe is more of a delightful wag. Unfailingly modest and lighthearted, he dresses in sport shirts, fidgets a great deal, and smiles easily....

Why the interest in Oe? I had never heard of him until prison. Yes, I know now he won the Nobel Prize for Literature. In prison, my friend Joel had me read A Personal Matter. This was my first Japanese writer; my first Japanese novel. A different perspective on American writing started taking root.

The quote is long since I have no idea how much will be available later:

INTERVIEWER

Do you have any wisdom to impart about the craft of writing?

OE

I am the kind of writer who rewrites and rewrites. I am very eager to correct everything. If you look at one of my manuscripts, you can see I make many changes. So one of my main literary methods is “repetition with difference.” I begin a new work by first attempting a new approach toward a work that I’ve already written—I try to fight the same opponent one more time. Then I take the resulting draft and continue to elaborate upon it, and as I do so the traces of the old work disappear. I consider my literary work to be a totality of differences within repetition.

I used to say that this elaboration was the most important thing for a novelist to learn. Edward Said wrote a very good book called Musical Elaborations, in which he considered the meaning of elaboration in the music of great composers like Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms. Through elaboration these composers created new perspectives.

INTERVIEWER

How do you know when you have elaborated too much?

OE

That is a problem. I elaborate and elaborate and year by year my readers diminish. My style has become very difficult, very twisted, complicated. That was necessary for me to improve my work, to create a new perspective, but fifteen years ago I experienced profound doubt as to whether elaboration was the right method for a novelist.

Fundamentally a good author has his or her own sense of style. There is a natural, deep voice, and that voice is present from the first draft of a manuscript. When he or she elaborates on the initial manuscript, it continues to strengthen and simplify that natural, deep voice. While I was in the United States teaching at Princeton in 1996 and 1997, I got to see a copy of the original manuscript of Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn. I read a hundred pages or so and gradually I realized that from the beginning Twain had an exact style. Even when he writes broken English, it has a kind of music. It makes it clearer. That method of elaboration comes naturally to a good author. A good writer wouldn’t normally try to destroy his voice, but I was always trying to destroy mine.