SHORT TALKS
With Critics Who’ve Swum the Hellespont
A Nobel prize-winning author, anti-apartheid activist, and HIV-AIDS campaigner, Nadine Gordimer has published 14 novels and 18 short story collections to date. Ms. Gordimer is no stranger to censorship so it comes as little surprise that she has served as PEN International’s VP. This South African native was appointed to the 2007 Man Booker International (MBI) judging panel.
Novelist, journalist, and literary critic, Colm Tóibín is one of Ireland’s cultural icons. His writings have won numerous awards and praise. The Blackwater Lightship and The Master were short-listed for the 1999 and 2004 Man Booker prizes respectively. Presently serving as the Isaac and Madeline Stein Visiting Writer at Stanford, he was appointed as a judge on the MBI’s 2007 panel.
HHR: The Man Booker and the Man Booker International are prizes that transcend borders, literal and metaphorical. In what ways does literature transcend borders?
Nadine Gordimer: Well, because it’s a product of the imagination….[There is the fact which] belongs to journalism, and there is the narrative, which is a kind of structure of a work of fiction. But it’s the imagination that goes below and above the facts. It goes as far as a writer can, depending upon his or her abilities, into the mystery of being, of what makes us what we are: our emotions, our frustrations, and our opinions. These are formed from pressures from the outside: You are told by your family, by your school, by your group who you are, or what you are. You can have a religion that has a very strong influence on you….Then you may join a political group and you have gained another identity. But the fact is you don’t have a single identity. You are all these things, which makes you into a whole person. And I think that is where literature comes in, in creating characters, and attempting to do so, in depth and in volume.
Sir Howard Davies: The Man Booker Prize is open to novelists writing in English outside the United States. The UK remains the largest source of entries, but in 2007, 37 of the 110 novels entered were from elsewhere. 11 other countries were represented: Ireland, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, South Africa, Malaysia and the Lebanon. So it is clear that in literal terms the prize does cross borders and one interesting feature this year was the appearance of novels from countries, which have rarely been represented in the past.
It was also interesting this year that a number of novelists wrote about the immigrant experience, especially in London. The last few years have seen a rapid growth in new immigrants in London, especially from Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. They are already a rich source of imaginative inspiration for our novelists. This year Marina Lewycka wrote a second novel about Ukrainian fruit pickers and Rose Tremain wrote a moving story of a Polish immigrant. 4 or 5 others mined the same seam.
It was also notable in 2007 that the historical novel has made a significant comeback. 37 of the 110 novels were set in the past (and four in a dystopian future). Historical and contemporary fiction seem comfortably to co-exist, and sometimes to overlap. Michael Redhill’s Consolation is an interesting example of a novel, half of which is written in the form of a persuasive historical reconstruction, with the other half a very contemporary morality tale. Also, unusually, there were two crime novels among the submissions list this year, though not ones which appealed strongly to the judges.
Overall, the entries were remarkable in their diversity, of time, theme, geographical location and style. Doris Lessing, when accepting her Nobel Prize last year, said that the British are best at small, circumscribed, domestic novels. That may be so, but novelists in English are certainly also working hard in other more expansive genres.
Colm Tóibín: I think when you’re writing the last thing you’re thinking about is your passport, your gender. You’re actually trying to work a rhythm into a sentence. I think when you’re reading you’re involved in the same process but on the other end of it, where you’re getting the emotion in a sentence. And it may be terribly important eventually, in other words, this is not to deny the Russian-ness of Tolstoy, you know, or the French-ness of Flaubert, because you’re not just alone in a room as a writer or a reader, you’re also part of a society. Things matter, politics matters, laws matter. And they affect private life in all sorts of different ways; they have in Ireland and South Africa. You know, two of us have been involved in that, where we’ve lived in countries where the way laws are made affect how people actually make love, or how people eat, or how people relate to each other. So that public-private thing is a very important connection as well as distinction between a nation, a society, a state and its people and it is one of the subjects of a novel and always has been. You can say that a novel is pure language or pure cadence or pure rhythm or pure character. But it never really is, is it? I mean you are always dealing with areas of restriction, areas of how public life affects private life. So the answer is, yes and no, that borders do not affect the reader in the act of reading. But they do, in another way, matter enormously to how we live in the world. And that’s really what we deal with as writers: how we live in the world.
HHR: Do you find there is a certain continuity and consistency of theme, style, or voice in a writer’s body of work?
NG: I think, in essence, a writer only writes one book. It’s all one book; it seems to be different books, but in the writer’s sensibility and the writer’s ability to go deeply into life and into what it means to be alive and what it means to be that complicated creature, the human being [it is all one book]. So the writer moves from having this stage of development and understanding to another and to another….I’ve got about thirty-one, thirty-two books, novels and stories, and I think I can see the connection. They’re completely different: They’re narrated by different people; they’re narrated by men, by women, by young people. When I was fifteen years old I wrote a story and the main character was an old man. I don’t know how writers do that; it’s part of the thing we do. But it is all our little bit of knowledge about what it means to be alive.
CT: Yeah, that is a DNA. It may be a sort of restlessness, where a certain imagination, like someone like Salman Rushdie, where you don’t know where the novel could be set, in New York, London, Bombay, but there will always be a playfulness in the language, a way of taking the eighteenth century novel and working with it, say. Or the Dickensian character and he will work with that throughout his career. Or someone like Ian McEwan, [who] is much more careful and precise, [and has a] slightly ironic tone, [a] much more held tone, mainly English. Or Alice Munro, from the beginning finding certain things that interested her and going right through. Or Michael Ondaatje, where we simply have no idea where his next novel will be set, what length it will be, what style it will be written in, or what it will be about. But you can always find in Ondaatje certain things that really interest him: the paragraph as a painting, the way in which he wants character to be fluid. He wants narrative to be fluid, but he is deeply concerned with the effect of political violence and other forms of violence on a society as well, but in a way that’s not direct. That goes right through The Skin of the Lion and The English Patient and Anil’s Ghost in his work. With someone like Atwood’s work there’s a sort of brittle tone, there’s a smartness, there’s a readiness to take on: I will actually make my novel equal a machine. And that goes right through, although she will set the novels in different times and places. So yeah, there’s a DNA and you start with it and you end with it. And it’s not what it is, but what you do with it that matters.
HHR: Anne Michaels, a Canadian poet, has written, “Reading a poem in translation is like kissing a woman through a veil.” However, without translation we wouldn’t have Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky. How much of the translator and how much of the writer do we see in translated work? Some would argue translators are co-authors.
NG: First of all, I’ll make a big distinction between poetry and prose: you can’t really translate poetry and I know in my case, I don’t speak German, I understand German. From the time I was seventeen years old I adored Rainer Maria Rilke and as time went by…I had the Leishman translation and then I got the others, and I saw the difference! Which is the real poem? So, I think with poetry you can never really understand it if you don’t know the language. I think prose is less delicate, shall we say, and as I [said] before, if you read several of a writer’s works as translated you quickly begin to hear what you know you can hear is the real voice. You think: No, this second book, this writer would never have written that sentence, there is something wrong with it. In the previous book you got the complete shock of understanding or seeing something fresh and now in this other translation that is missing. I think that is how one judges a translation.
CT: I think there’s a real problem about translating poetry...if a poem rhymes in one language, to get the rhyme in the other language…. For example, the English iambic pentameter line does not make its way so easily into Spanish for example. So how would you translate an iambic pentameter poem into Spanish? You would really have trouble doing that. If it had another rhythm, it would be another poem. Prose is different in the sense that you can just simply.…The cadences are not as strict, the systems of rhythm. Therefore you can actually achieve more. Anne Michaels is probably right about poetry.
HHR: Every now and then you hear the phrase “The novel is dead”. Where do you see the novel in fifty years?
NG: I don’t think the novel will ever be dead because storytelling is never dead. Of course, the written word on paper and bound is under threat from the image. It starts very young. I’m sure that when you were a child somebody still read you a bedtime story. Children nowadays don’t get the bedtime story; they are put in front of a television set at bedtime. This has a very serious effect on real literature because to be truly literate you must be a reader, not just reading signs and having perhaps a good vocabulary when you talk. It’s only when you hold that book in your hand and you can turn the page and you can go back to it that you’re not dependant upon an electrical connection or a battery.
HD: I was struck last year by the vitality of the novel in English. We considered 110 entries, almost all of which were worth reading, if a number were structurally flawed. That does not suggest an art form in decay. And I am uncomfortably aware that there may well have been another 30 or 40 which we elected not to consider, but some of which were undoubtedly of high quality. So, on the face of it, there is no reason to believe those Cassandras who forecast disaster. Reports of the novel’s death are, as in the case of Mark Twain, much exaggerated.
But perhaps one might see some signs of concern in the relative lack of experimentation with form. There are no “fold in novels”. The English equivalent of the “nouveau roman” has faded away, and of course was never very flourishing here. One of last year’s entries appeared partly in print and partly only as an online supplement. It is hard to know whether that will prove to be a durable medium of publication. It was not one of the stronger entries and has attracted little attention among the wider public. One of the short-listed novels did, however, come with an associated website. Animal’s People by Indra Sinha was set in an imagined Indian city (one based on Bhopal) and Sinha has created a tourist website to accompany the novel. If you wish to consider visiting Khaupfur, you can do so on www.khaupfur.com, where you will see reports of the novel itself and information about the lives of some of its characters. That kind of “tie-in” has perhaps been more common in children’s fiction in the past. Maybe it is on its way in the adult market too. That could be one way in which the novel will be refreshed in the digital age.
As for the novel in 50 years time, I am content to leave that to the next generation. If I am still reading novels at the age of 106 I will be thrilled, but I imagine I will then be rereading those I have loved. My optimistic prognosis is that we will continue to be interested in stories and in imaginative recreations of life which hold up a mirror to our confused present. On that broad definition, the novel will be with us for the foreseeable future.
CT: I was joking earlier about saying, “The word, what else is there?” But obviously there’s the image and the way in which the 20th century has been taken over by the image. I mean the moving image, I mean the TV screen, I mean the movie. But that business remains of someone sitting alone with a book, or even with a newspaper, with the printed word and that having a hold on people.... In societ[ies] where people desperately want to control things they need to control that as much as the moving image because it represents an extraordinary sort of freedom, the freedom for you to be alone with a book and the relationship those printed words have with your imagination, the freedom of your mind at that time. So, it’s a battle, but I don’t think it’s been a particularly bloody battle between the image and the word. In other words, it’s a natural thing. I mean, a new technology came. Anyone who would have predicted a hundred years ago this [the movie] is going to wipe out the book.... People thought that TV was going to wipe out the cinema, or the DVD was going to wipe out the.… It seems certain things we have really matter to us and will always be there. And what came before the word? I suppose the image came before the word. We saw before we spoke, didn’t we? But in making sense of what we saw we used the word. Without the word, what is seeing? It’s a pure seeing without language. Does language not actually form the beginning of understanding rather than the halfway house of understanding? So yeah, I don’t have any problem when it comes to thinking of the future of the word.
Interviewed by Ramya Jegatheesan with help from Skandha Sunderasen, Macy Siu, Patricia Robinson, and Aya Kiriliuk.
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