Tuesday Morning Hodgpodge & Alternatve Ways with the Novel

 I think a sinus infection may have hit me yesterday. I took a nap, thinking to get rid of this headache right behind my right eye, and I fell into such a deep sleep in two hours, I woke up thinking it was the next morning. The headache had left me, and so had much in the way of energy to write.

I got out "Problem Solving" to a few places last night. That was as close to any writing I did last night. Except for a long email I sent DM on Orthodoxy. He was raised Roman Catholic and long ago left that church. I am curious to see what he makes of Orthodoxy.

I still have not gotten through all my email. However, I did read the newsletter from n + 1, and the following comes from An interview with Amit Chaudhuri:

n+1: In your n+1 essay “Why I Write Novels,” you characterize your career as a novelist as an unresolved struggle with the novel form—does this persist with Sojourn? Or has this experimentation progressed since you wrote the piece? 

AC: Right: I don’t think I’m equipped to undertake the canonical form of the novel, which we identify with narrative, where narrative is an instrument of one variation of realism or the other—even magic realism or fantasy. Yet I’m drawn deeply to the form of the novel, a form in which something happens, though my idea of a “happening” may be a bit different from others’. A “happening” is rare; the writer probably has a duty and peculiar capacity to be alert to it. You can’t make a happening up. But it has never happened before; you’re not recording it or reporting it.

It’s not as if these problems or contradictions have been resolved. It’s just that I’m more at peace with them. What I once saw as a disability—my short attention span when it came to categories like plot, character, description, background—I now see as enabling other ways of being attentive.

n+1: Your characters are evocative of your writing adage, “give nothing centrality.” The professor comes across two characters who define his time in Berlin, almost in tandem—the exiled Bangladeshi poet Faqrul, followed by a ghost-like woman named Birgit. Many others fall in and out of the pages, without intersecting. How did you come up with these figures, and how do they interrelate?

AC: One of the things I meant by “give nothing centrality” was that we shouldn’t think a story or novel belongs only to the protagonist—their visible appearance and their inner life—where everything else is mentioned only inasmuch as it’s important to the protagonist’s life, which comprises the main story. We should be open to distraction; the world is held in balance, where what’s “happening” (according to the narrator) might be only one element among a number of constantly shifting elements.

Birgit is part of this constant transformation, which is maybe why the narrator can’t, and doesn’t want to, entirely hold on to her. Faqrul is part of my ongoing interest in friendship, its dynamic of irritability and dependency; its homelikeness, in that you know a person is a friend even if you have never seen him before.

n+1: In Sojourn, the hard lines of language and nationality are confused or abandoned—the professor allies himself with his district and confuses German for Bengali (“He said ‘neu’ like the Bengali nine”). How does the immediacy of the professor’s surroundings to identity reflect your own views on language and culture? 

AC: I believe in the importance of history, language, and, to a certain extent, nationality, but I don’t think these categories are really addressed by the ways in which we usually interpret them: this is European; that is Asian or “Eastern”; this is ancient; that is new. For instance, the histories of the Cold War, of socialism and capitalism, create a different set of borders, lines, and affiliations from nationality, lines which characterized the world for much of the twentieth century until globalization and the fall of the Berlin Wall. Those borders and the worlds they enclosed created a particular kind of humanity and set of memories that can’t be accounted for by nationality and ethnicity. The erasure of those borders has led to a sense of loss and directionlessness. To write a novel only about an Indian in Berlin in 2005 would not evoke the specific historical drift he experiences. I guess we have to put notions like “home” and “abroad” to one side as we try to make sense of our complexity as historical beings.

And with that I started my Tuesday morning.

Now to get ready for work.

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