2021 Craft Talk with Zadie Smith

good afternoon everyone and my official good afternoon uh to everyone here and uh to our virtual audience uh we're here at the anheuser-busch auditorium uh at cook hall on the campus of st louis university on behalf of our st louis literary awards selection committee composed of members of the slu faculty and the st louis community the st louis university campus read committee our alumni development department the office of the provost and the st louis university libraries i would like to welcome all of you to the 2021 st louis literary award author craft talk featuring this year's award recipient zadie smith [Applause] before we welcome uh zadie out here i wanted to take a couple of moments to tell you about the st louis literary awards series of programs which have been expanding each year and all of them are free and open to the public and some of those include the aforementioned campus read which focuses on a specific book written by the current award recipient this year it's grand union which is a collection of zadie smith's short stories that came out in 2019 and this also features book talks and lectures spread throughout the year now this year we've got two not one so spread throughout the semester so we've got um three more book talks to go uh one in november and two more in december connected to uh to zadie smith and her work our campus read committee by the way features faculty and staff from 19 different departments from both here in the st louis campus and on the madrid campus and by the way if you have not yet read grand union we still have copies available at the pious library and those are free the undergraduate writing award we rotate between fiction creative nonfiction and poetry and poets you're in luck this is your year you can still submit a poem for this year's competition check it out online we also sponsor the walter j on graduate research award in the english department the craft talks at st louis university video audio podcast is a series where we interview writers artists and educators about their creative process and world perspectives the inspired by art showcase is open to both high school and college students around the region all you have to do to possibly win a fabulous cash prize is to connect some form of literary visual or performance art to uh some a theme in one of the grand union stories you still have time to enter by the way that goes until december 10th and we've got i think flyers out front if you want to check those out evenings from home is a terrific lecture series that we've hosted since the early 1980s connecting a writer who has roots of some level here in missouri and the literature and medicine program is a series now in its 10th year it explores the vocation of medicine and health care through the lens of literature both fiction and non-fiction and that's led by our english faculty i wanted to also thank our team and i know i'm forgetting people but dave patrick fran donna annalise claire tony tara nate tidy projects and of course the university libraries faculty and staff for being the backbone of all of our programs and now a little bit of information about our guests today zadie smith is the author of the novel's white teeth autographed man on beauty and w and swing time as well as three collections of essays changing my mind feel free and most recently intimations professor smith was elected a fellow of the royal society of literature in 2002 and was listed as one of grant's 20 best young british novelists in 2003 and again in 2013 white teeth won multiple literary awards including the james tate black memorial prize the whitbread first novel award and the guardian first book award on beauty was shortlisted for the man booker prize and won the orange prize for fiction and nw was shortlisted for the bailey's women's prize for fiction sadie smith is currently a tenured professor of fiction at new york university and a member of the american academy of arts and letters rachel greenwald smith is today's moderator and she is the author of on compromise art politics and the fate of an american ideal which just came out on gray wolf press and affect and american literature in the age of neoliberalism and that comes or came out on cambridge university press she's an associate professor of english here at slu where she teaches courses at the graduate and undergraduate level on contemporary literature and critical theory everybody please give a warm round of applause to rachel greenwald smith and zadie smith [Applause] hi hello hey can you hear me okay i think we're okay this way that way better check check okay hi [Laughter] um i wanted to start out since this is a craft talk and so i don't ideally we're going to be talking about creativity um by asking you um to talk a little bit about the ideas about creativity that we see in your most recent book of essays intonations so in that book's opening essay which is entitled peonies you talk about the relationship between experience and art and you say that while most people consider writing to be a form of creativity and here i'm quoting you you say writing is control the part of the university in which i teach should rather than the creative writing department properly be called the controlling experience department um so i'm wondering if you can say more about that distinction between creative and control creativity and control and how it plays out in your writing um i think it's just the way i think about language maybe maybe it's the way i was educated like at the moment there seems to be a really different attitude towards language like to me i think of it as an innocence in front of language like most people treat language like it's been handed down from moses from the mount and then they apply it to their lives and their experiences i was always taught from a kind of phenomenological perspective that experience is this like absolutely unformed uncategorizable thing and language is exactly what you use to control it it's not the truth it's just a structural thing that helps you categorize your life but there's no truth to it it's it's temporary and partial and so for me writers are are the worst offenders of that you know they're the opposite of um you know i don't know a kind of pure indigenous spirit of experience they're all about structuring giving language giving shape to what really has no shape giving narrative art to what has no narrative arc so to me that's all an act of control and tends to be done by people who like to be in control [Laughter] i love that um so and you of course teach and we talked this morning with some members of the english department about your pedagogy and how you sort of prefer to teach literature rather than it's a very grand word for what i do well i'm going to ask you about it as because it occurred to me that you know your invocation of the controlling experience controlling experience department sounds like a sort of curriculum initiative what would the what would the curriculum of the controlling experience department look like if you were to run one um i mean the way i teach i teach you know 14 novels every year i've done that for almost 20 years unbelievably and what i'm kind of trying to demonstrate to my students is is the workings of rhetoric like each of these novels is a kind of manipulation for the period that you're in this novel you're seeing the world through through this version through this particular language and when you notice that about novels you start noticing it about everything presumably you stop being so innocent in front of rhetoric whether it's political general internet language whatever it is psychiatric language so for me it's about demonstrating to them that there's no such thing as a neutral language it's always a manipulation of of one kind or another the question is uh who do you want to be manipulated by and uh i'm offering to them you know instead of zuckerberg or bezos or whoever dorsey i'm offering them tony morris and tolstoy and the bokoff uh but it but it's a manipulation all the same yeah um of course this essay begins in a is the beginning of a book that's largely about the kova 19 pandemic um and i think i found it very affecting the way you begin this book about the pandemic with the discussion of creativity and control partly because it really spoke to me as a writer who also struggled to think about the role of writing during the pandemic at the end of that essay you say that covet 19 and again i'm quoting you makes a nonsense of every line so i'm wondering how the pandemic affected your thinking about control and creativity and also another word that comes up in that essay is submission um you talk about the pandemic as sort of insisting on a kind of submission and so right i mean i i'm always interested in a i think sometimes slightly un-american way in limits in human limits of time of existence the limits of language the limits of art so i've never had any grand ideas about writing i've always thought of it as a limited art and myself as a limited person doing a limited art so it didn't really change that um perspective but it did um [Music] you know in in a world focused on utility it did bring home even more intensely the the non-utility of what i do but also in a slightly maybe more american way i do i suppose believe in souls and the idea of the need of souls and that's my business along with a lot of other artists that we're in the kind of business of caring for that part that practical life doesn't allow for you know that whatever you want to call that that existential part of our lives is what i'm concerned with so i it made me think even more intensely that that's a vocation and one i'm one i'm glad to be involved with yeah i mean in that sense the book itself was a work of service in the sense that you donated the profits to nonprofit organizations working with covet 19 and racial injustice but also did you see it as sort of an act of service in terms of a sort of giving giving something to people who are struggling in that moment i i that makes it sound much more noble than it was it's always primarily selfish in that my mind was in tatters it was like on the floor all i did was check covid numbers and read the internet and normally i'm like all of you i mean i read the internet a lot but i've never read it that much because i don't have the phone and normally i'm not on my laptop every day doing that i block the internet i do all those things but for the first time i was fully in it like i think most people are in it day and night and that was an interesting experiment what it revealed to me is that it's intolerable and then i felt great admiration for all of you for doing that day and night like it's unbelievable what you're doing and the labor that you're doing the unpaid labor the emotional destruction the psychological brutality of it i was like this is what people are doing all day long this is their life so as a writer that's like a that's a really important thing to know that you can theorize and imagine what it's like but for once i really knew what it was like and i and a lot of things became very clear like the kind of writing i read every day the kind of novels that come through my door the kind of conversations i have with people under 30 i was like oh okay so then it was a kind of way of uh like physician heal thyself like i really thought needed to remember that language can do other things than what it was doing and what it does online um so it was just for me first of all primarily like can i remember what it was like to feel that my consciousness was my own and then i thought if i could do that and pass it on and that's that's actually been the happiest part of that book for me that every now and then people will write to me and say i couldn't read i couldn't write i couldn't concentrate and i read those little essays and i felt i could read again and that's exactly what it did for me so i'm glad if it did that for someone else that's great that knowledge of what digital experience is like of a certain kind do you think that's going to come into your fiction in the future um because you do handle technology in a kind of interesting way in swing time where the iphone kind of frames the novel um i'm always writing about it but if you mean am i going to become patricia lockwood no because i don't think the purpose of i mean i admire what she's doing but i i don't feel any need to reinvent or repurpose in this ridiculously old-fashioned way what's happening online i don't see personally i don't really see the purpose of that even though i think it's incredibly useful news like a writer like that is reporting to you this is what consciousness feels like under this drug so it's it's news um but that's not what i'm interested in doing because what i really want to remind people of what i think is a more radical and necessary move is to remind them that things were not always like this the most toxic part of the situation is that it naturalizes itself it pretends that there is no other way to be there never has been any other way to be this is the only existence possible and that to me is not nature that's ideology and particularly capitalist ideology that's what it intends to do is to ensure that you feel there is no possible exit and that crazy old lady on the stage talking about the disaster of iphones is like what's her problem that is the whole purpose of this thing no way out no exit never but it's 2008 and i remember life before 2008 and a few people in the room will also remember it and if i do nothing else for the next 30 years i will continue to remind myself and remind others that life could be otherwise you can have no radical action without the possibility of otherwise that's great um we have a couple of questions that were sent by some high school partners that we're simulcasting this out to and this one to me relates a little bit about what you were saying earlier about structure and control um their their question is in your essay that crafty feeling you describe two types of writers micromanagers and macro planners can you explain the terms and discuss why you see yourself as a micromanager rather than a macro planner how are these two categories potentially helpful and instructive for young writers i don't know if they are helpful i mean it was just what i was thinking about at the time but i i all i meant is that i write line by line i don't have a plot plan i don't plan anything out i don't i just write line by line in a very kind of my new way and edit each page as i go along and and it's clear to me that other writers work very differently they have a kind of macro plan and they fill it in afterwards um [Music] to me there isn't anything apart from the sentence and but that's a very british thing and it can lead you into um it can it can stop you from understanding what's good about a lot of other types of writing that writers i loved when i was a kid like martin amis or his kind of high stylist in england um i they are great writers but they genuinely could not would not be able to comprehend why you know i don't know nause guard is good or tau lin it would mean nothing to them because if all your attention is to the sentence or sally rooney you can't comprehend what is good about these writers because it seems to you that these sentences are dull and boring or you can't understand what's good about dostoevsky or you know or it's a it's a kind of aesthetic battle but i don't think that i know what kind of writer i am but i understand that writing can appear in different forms you know an obsession with the sentence um can be really limiting because aesthetic pleasure at the sentence level is not the only thing writing is for or about that leads me to a question i have about style um also sort of driven by a piece in intimations titled a hovering young man in which you talk about style by riffing on a line from susan sontag style is a means of insisting upon something and you say in the essay that you repeat that to your students a lot um and so i was thinking about this in relation to your work um and sort of what i think about is some of the stylistic properties of your novels and one of the things that came to mind was sort of your use of narrative commentary especially in your earlier work where you have a sort of third person novel or third-person narrator who sort of comments on the characters and even in a novel like swing time that's written in the first person you still have this kind of self estrangement and ability to comment on characters so i'm wondering you can talk about that or some other element of your own style but i'd be really curious to hear you talk about what you think you're insisting upon with those sort of stylistic tendencies or if that i mean it may not be something conscious but if you can think back upon your white teeth self in a minute it is called i mean conscious in the sense that what i'm insisting upon is that the self is not everything that there are other demands in the world like i understand that you feel like i personally don't really feel like anybody and i think that's quite a common trait of writers like me and comedians and actors and and i understand we are a minority concern i don't expect average citizens to walk around feeling like no one that's clearly not ideal but the fact is there are people who feel that way and we also have our rights and our our right to feel like no one in particular to belong to nothing in particular so there are there is this weird psychological quirk of of a certain kind of writer and i wouldn't um wish it on anyone but perhaps what it it has little moments of revelation like when i see a group of people in a dark room going to see a comedy act laughing that's what they're getting they're getting someone who is dissociated from themselves in a certain way and is able to laugh at themselves deconstruct themselves and and the audience gets something from that even if they can't do it themselves they see it and you get something from it's like a moment of freedom from this tyrannous self that you have to drag from place to place so my prose i think is interested in that dissociation and what it might allow you know it might allow you sometimes to get over yourself which is sometimes a significant and important thing to do in us in a social environment and to realize that alongside rights which are incredibly important there are also duties and alongside self-identification there's also the chance that your self-identification is not meaningful to everybody at all times basically that you are not the center of the world and this is a kind of consciousness that um for me for like radical communal action is important it's not that people aren't closely attached to themselves but what i'm asking them is does that close attachment have to exist at all times in all modes or are there times when you can release it a little bit and make space for the claims of other people and not take that as some kind of personal disaster for yourself that relates a little bit to the sort of theme of solidarity that seems to come through the end of intimations and um at the end of the book you cite um muhammad ali as sort of a figure for that sort of claim of solidarity or is that one of the inspiring forces for the claim of solidarity can you talk a little bit more about how that functions in your work do you think are you writing solidarity narratives when you're writing i grew up in in a very i think of an american situation or maybe an older american situation which has been dispersed with a group of poor people in a tower of many different backgrounds so it's it's not that the indian family or the african family the caribbean family find themselves to have massive overlap but they had this overlap of poverty so it constructs in your mind an idea that it is possible to both state difference and states claims that sometimes adjacent but they don't have to be complete in order for things to happen so all kinds of strange alliances i mean sometimes they're you know you can see in my body sometimes they're physical the jamaican marries the englishman or the irishman marries the pakistani or the polish jew marries the african so that is my neighborhood there's obviously that kind of uh intimate i wouldn't even call it solidarity because often these marriages end in divorce but uh you know this kind of intimate uh connection that happens but there was also um in my child the possible possibility of collaborative action you marched for each other sometimes everybody came for the south african march or the south asians marched for the blacks or the jews marked for the black we worked together with no particular language for it no one was walking around talking piously of allyship he just thought this is my neighbor and here we go yeah so that's the background that i came from in which there was a lot of mixing and some of that mixing is you know painful and comic and ridiculous and uh now has a language too the microaggression but i again when i'm writing i'm not trying to reproduce sociological terms in fiction i'm trying to talk about people's actual human lives and i'm not trying to uh you know i watch both the left and the right having elaborate rhetorical arguments about their particular political identities but when you live amongst working people this is really not what concerns them what concerns them is is there a school can i get health care is it free these are the actual concerns of working people i remember because i was one once and lived amongst them and grew up amongst them and it's not that your more rarefied political arguments don't matter but to me first principles come first and those are to do with health care and education and housing those three things matter to me far more than what particular splinter of the left you choose to identify yourself with and i think when i'm writing my fiction that's what i'm thinking of primarily how how are streets arranged how are people living what does it mean [Music] what does it mean to have a tall tower book rather than a low one was it mean to have a garden in the middle or a bare playground because those things when i was a kid were absolutely vital they changed lives the organization of a project changes lives civic planning changes lives those things are much more interesting to me than you know whatever the argument of the day is online so um maybe asking that question a little bit more broadly um one of the things you say in intimations is that both that you think artists often overstate the political efficacy of art but that you still believe in it so i'm wondering if you could sort of broaden that out and talk a little bit about what you think novels can do politically or how you think novels touch on politics i mean my political consciousness is made from my life and the novels i've read but it's not a direct recipe you never know what book is going to change your mind or make you feel differently or reveal something and the kind of like i remember when i read recently eduard louis is now a good friend of mine he's grew up white french extremely poor like if i ever thought i was poor talking to edward is like a wake up call completely different and much more extreme poverty gay in this nationalist extreme country setting in france where paris was as far as the moon as far as he's concerned whereas i no matter what my background i was in london surrounded by culture and fancy people and interesting things to see and edward comes from the boondocks completely different scenario and sometimes the if you assume the political efficacy of a certain book you you assume too much you don't know who's going to make what connection well i can remember 20 years ago sitting next to tony morrison a great hero of mine just but backstage and i tried to talk to her and she didn't want to talk to me she maybe she's in a bad mood or whatever just not interested in me nothing eduard wrote her a letter and said you know i love your books and she said come on over and he spent like two days in her house so you never know what what connections people are going to make you can't assume you can't look at them and think oh well tony and lady are going to get on like a house on fire turns out no not according to her but eduard and tony yes this skinny gay white boy from the middle of nowhere and tony morrison had some kind of connection with each other you can't pre-assume these things so that's how i feel about like the political efficacy of books that it absolutely exists but it cannot be it's not diagrammatic and all kinds of things can surprise you i i've learned as much from you know i just translated the chore search also is a 600 year old what people casually say these days dead white guy like that means something it's ridiculous to me literature is a huge lake and nothing is um nothing in it is unaccessible to me nothing doesn't have the possibility of being powerful on beauty in a certain sense is about this right um i mean i read that novel and think it's one of the better works of aesthetic theory of the recent past in the sense that you seem to really definitely deal with these sort of more codified arguments about cultural appropriation and art um and sort of right you know culture wars on campus as well it seems like a very relevant novel now the thing is that those codified arguments change every 10 years young people don't realize that but they just flip so you can find jim james baldwin saying how dare you say that tolstoy isn't mine that the the chartres cathedral isn't mine these are all mine that was the argument then don't you take this culture from me i'm a human being it's mine mozart is mine and then 20 years later it flips and then it'll flip again it it's if you don't read through the history of literature you have no idea how these arguments go blimp in black arguments in white arguments they're not permanent and you will find yourself as you know the person who thinks they have the right set of arguments 30 years later a dinosaur completely incomprehensible to the 20 year old in front of you that is the way the history of ideas goes so none of that surprises me but it you know it is almost comic sometimes to see arguments literally reversed within the span of 20 years it's what happens i don't really have a kind of judgment on it i just i'm fascinated to watch it watch it go yeah so speaking of old arguments um your 2008 essay two paths for the novel has continued to have a lot of influence on contemporary literary studies um and in that essay and i'm not going to paraphrase it back to you but a little bit for these folks here who may not have read it you make a distinction between um sort of the lyrical realism that you saw as sort of um kind of paramount throughout maybe the past hundred years of literary history 150 years of literary history and you use um joseph o'neill's netherland as a sort of the almost a self-parodying version of that tendency on the one hand and then you talk about tom mccarthy's remainder which is a very weird book um as sort of an alternative which is a more sort of guard or experimental path and seem to claim that path is the path that you see as more productive in literary fiction going forward um what do you think of that argument now do you still see these two paths for the novel one sort of more lyrical sort of based on the history of realism one more experimental no you see something else aesthetic arguments are temporal they're about a certain moment and even looking at those two writers joseph has gone on to write just the best short fiction in america like it's unbelievable his stories at the moment they've got this wildness and they're so funny and so dark whereas tom mccarthy is you know increasingly anemic and like stuck in a kind of series of intellectual spirals that don't allow in for the human so there's always a gap and a blind spot like i loved in that mccarthy novel the spirit of what you would call punk right like there's something wonderful about the spirit of punk that it just wants to burn it down destroy strip it off but then for me there's always a but yeah like as inconvenient and tedious as humans are i always want to say tom well but here i am in my flesh bucket walking around the world capable of pain capable of loss so you know it would be great if i was like a machine the post-human is an interesting concept but people suffer children suffer women suffer communities suffer and suffering cannot be allied in my mind so i whenever you're making a kind of provocation literary provocation is always partial what one argument could explain literature it doesn't exist but absolutely at the time i was just so tired of pretty novels and their pretty ideas and and also i guess it was a very it was a great strain of literature which was often about you know this kind of liberal situation of why don't you read the novel your empathy will increase and then you'll be a better person and and you kind of hope for that and then these lovely people who all read these lovely novels and had really nice feelings about them grew up and sent their kids to the same private schools and moved into the same suburbs and i was just like well what is the purpose of this activity if nothing ever changes like your empathy is is enlarged but you don't actually ever do anything so you i got a little impatient with that kind of literature i suppose yeah um it was it's interesting to think about what happened to your fiction since because nw which you were presumably working on at the time yeah did seem to be an experiment in some of those questions around interiority and then swing time your next novel turned to the first person for the first time and seem to at least buy that turn to the first person promise a different relationship to the to interiority did you see it that way or what was and i i guess another version of that question might be why the turn to the first person in swing time what did that do for you i was interested in a self that had no distinction like it was a very it was the beginning of the social platforms and the thing about selves was that they had they were very distinctive they had opinions and they had feelings and they had a lot of them and i thought i don't that's not how i feel when i'm walking through the world i just don't feel that way i don't feel very defined i don't feel like i have i feel like something to whom experience happens it just keeps on coming and it's overwhelming and i try and deal with it but i i couldn't tell if you said to me what type of person are you i really don't know i couldn't tell you that and i i thought either i'm a freak or or this feeling is deeply disguised in people but sometimes when i read other writers like i just i keep on talking about i just finished that book oh william by elizabeth stroup it's about a woman married to a man for decades and decades and decades divorced and now spending a little time with him again and even on the last page she's like who is this man like who is he and that is my experience of life like i people represent an enormous mystery to me and i include myself in that mystery like i know i walk around and perform things and act a certain way but when i'm by myself in silence it's very unclear who i am and i think what's interesting about the phones is that they're really designed to never allow you any silence so you never when you have that moment it's so easy just to grab the phone and be reassured because people are going to tell you who you are by their responses to you constantly so you never get that moment you just sit there emptied out silent just think what is this so for me swing time was about remembering a time where that silence existed and was possible and the slow encroaching of various kinds of technology primarily television which is the one i grew up in that took that silence and shaped it and curated it and told you this is your life yeah so we have some questions coming in from our remote audience hello remote audience hey remote um speaking of phones and such um one question is uh notes i mean i i'm going to add to this question and say that in both your writing and in person you're very funny and that this question is what is the value of humor in fiction or more specifically how do you value fiction in your sorry humor and your affection why because it's a rhetorical way in like i've really noticed in america in the past since 2016 the elevation of comedians to basically philosophers because they're the only people left who are able to make arguments make debate provoke conversation through that little hole in you humor in which for a moment you are disarmed and able to listen even listen to the possibility of a thought that isn't like yours so it's really interesting to watch that happen and then also just as they've been appointed philosophers they're also equally destroyed as philosophers right because it's what they're saying is so far from our usual discourse which is basically just a series of performances to each other pro-face performances or furious arguments so comedy interests me that way my brother's a comedian i love comedy um and i i think like philosophy it asks it's pauses from the average discourse and asks the very basic and most stupid questions that's what's funny about it that's why you're laughing because nobody puts it so blankly and so simply usually there's much more sophistication over the top so when i'm using comedy i'm not aware of using it i just partly it's the way i see the world and partly it's a way of communicating with other people like before their defenses come up um if you can make them laugh you've got them in a space where something might be able to happen you know they can think a bit more freely they're not defending themselves um i i find that a useful sport this is related to relating to people another question from the audience um this person says i've heard you say before when talking about your books that you're most interested in knowing what the ordinary reader thinks if that's still true have you found ways of interacting with readers organically especially outside academia i meet them at signing tables sometimes they stop me in the street or in airports or and it's funny what you know um i i like to hear it but there's only this is i guess a difference between me and a lot of younger writers like i'm i'm always interested in life on a human scale and it is on a human scale for someone in the street to stop you and talk about a book or for maybe you join a book club and five friends tell you what they thought of your story what is not human is for 700 strangers to comment every second on on your on something that you've written that that's not a reasonable thing and what's so interesting to me is part of the the trick of the social platforms is they convince really good and well-meaning people that it would not be responsible to know anything less than what everybody's thinking all the time and i think sometimes my students look back on you know poor people without internet like socrates or kant or early alice walker and think what are you doing you don't how could you write without understanding moment by moment what everybody thought of everything you wrote every second so that the space of privacy of the self the space where you have a moment to actually reflect on what you want because the model that they're dealing with is not actually liberatory or responsible it's it's focus groups it's capitalist it's did you like this yogurt is it good should i change it should i do this should i do that would you like it strawberry flavored that's that's not liberating that's that's about customers and i don't think of my readers as customers that's not the relationship that we're in they are absolutely free to hate the books to dislike them to abuse them to find everything disgusting offensive whatever that is your right you're a human being with your own opinions and feelings it is also my right to write and not modify myself moment by moment because you don't like it that is my right to so this is another question from an audience member that relates to what you were just saying and and touches on a question i have about generations and and writers of different generations um this question is you acknowledge largely the influence that the late david foster wallace had on your writing and in your eulogy of him in five dials write about the post-industrial bind of the need always to be liked for which dave was in some sense freed by being awarded the macarthur i don't right have you personally experienced and found ways to overcome this bind in your own work no it's so funny that he's he's so demonized now by this younger generation because he is their prophet he described the bind that they now live in day and night wanting to be seen to be good wanting to be seen to be right wondering whether that is i mean the gap i think there is a difference that him and franzen and everyone in that generation were worried in this almost christian moralistic way if i do something good am i only doing it because i want to be seen to be good that concern is gone yes nobody's worried about that anymore being seen to be good is the whole goddamn point so uh that that part has gone but um no i i'm born of it i think it's from television i think it's because we all grew up watching so much television that we had this completely phony idea of ourselves as basically on a tv show with an audience and i think a lot of kids who grew up in the 70s and 80s had that very mistaken conception it's it's existential it was built into the tech so the question for the younger generation is what's built into your tech that is disturbing and how long will it last because i know the television delusion has lasted my whole life and the metaphors of television like uh you see in my generation's tv products like x factor all that stuff or america's got talent the idea of this is your moment that's a tv concept or that you could rewind and do it again back to the future or that there is a moment where your life changes these are all tv metaphors that we took as as reality so that kind of stuff is super dangerous and it infects your brain and your relationships and everything about it so i it's funny to me because with my kids even though i know all of that about television when i was given the option with kids do i give them the internet or tv i absolutely gave them tv so my kids have watched all tv that exist in the human world that has ever been made for children since since they started making stuff for children and i absolutely made that decision consciously so generationally you choose your poison for sure i knew because i think with tv i know what tv does delusional ideas of relationships love i did i know all of it i've lived it i still prefer it i still would take it over this this other thing and so maybe every generation makes their own choice along you know what's your poison but uh tv was mine for sure it's very helpful i'm going to spend the next week thinking about how i've been poisoned by television so relatedly we're now beginning to see the influence of millennial authors on literary fiction um so here i'm thinking about writers such as sally rooney brandon taylor attes tessa mashfeg and ocean vong but they're all older you know i mean they are older i mean so right i mean it's funny because i was born in 1979 and so the question is to who's a millennial and who's a generation xr is a real question seems 27 but she's 40. right no wait she's 1980 i think she was born in 1981 so yeah she's technically a millennial she's just right you know there's this so the distinctions of course are really baggy um but a writer you've um said is that you're a fan of brett easton ellis recently said that millennials quote don't care about literature none of them read books no he's completely wrong and that's just not the case at all and i it's a bit it's a bit depressing brits kind of grumpy old man that has appeared no i i love he's such a great writer but it happens to all of us and i'm sure i'm sure i'm along the path right i'm going to be a grumpy old woman soon so i can't judge but um the writing which actually really interests me is younger it's the zeds can you say that and there was a publisher in new york called tyrant books and unfortunately the editor just died of an overdose but some of the stuff that they published and that i found really interesting because to me it the millennials are still a bit stuck to our end and and kind of a uh like they're making moral arguments or interested in what happened to us and what was this what was the hipster or whatever all that stuff but the z kids are just report it's just reported it's just like it's internet brain unfiltered and some of those texts i thought are absolutely extraordinary there's one called internet girl i can't remember the name of the author but i read about a year ago and it's just a first-person account kind of unpunctuated and completely it feels insane to read but what she's describing is what it was like to be because i consider it i am a moralist and i do think a generation of parents through no fault of their own but because they were subsumed by this technology it came over them like a wave did not notice what happened to their kids and those kids this girl is describing what it was like to be you know four when the towers come down and then you're you know you start online with the little games at about eight nine and then you're just fully in from then on in and it is so shocking to read and so without like um she's not trying to make any argument on what she's just saying this is how it was if you're interested what it's like to watch you know endless amounts of hardcore porn aged 11. this is what it's like and this is what it does to your brain and this is so this is just it's just all there and i think that i mean i am lucky because my kids are slightly younger and we're all much more aware so it's not a question of the only people i blame are the people who made it and knew and i don't blame any individual because it's an overwhelming thing but it did it was amazing to read and amazing to think that someone could could live through all that and still find a language for it really engaging interesting language for it and so that i i think is the heroic in fiction you know when you can really uh [Music] take something pre-packaged and meant to flatten you out completely and refuse to be flattened like still say hi i'm still here even if i'm like uh a cyborg here's my cyborg account and i really dig that do you see that it's different than what someone like lockwood is doing i just think she's older it's just completely different it's much more she had more time and from the background she came from she had more time with her brain in a very separate space i'm talking about kids who there is no other space yeah they even know what you're talking about when you talk about some other space so that that's different so an audience question asks um what the future of the novel is and litera and literary creativity given all the other media available to young people today do you have an answer for that i have no idea like i'm not really attached to the i i these kind of elegies for the novel or whatever right i never they've been written forever and they don't interest me i think i guess i think more generationally i think i know i grew up in a generation who read and if only they follow me down to if we all go to our graves together that's okay with me like i i'm very happy if people outside my generation read me but i'm really talking to to my people like my time cohorts and i like being with them and i like moving through the world with them and and if it all crashes and burns it all crashes and burns like there are other ways to tell stories that's fine there's always been many ways to tell stories i was listening to that it's a great bbc series called history of the world in a hundred objects and it's very um humbling like you can go hundreds and hundreds of well in one case an object two million years old like a stone that's been you know cracked so they can kill an animal that tells a story or a rain it's i think it's a reindeer horn that's been carved into the shape of two beasts that's somebody telling a story like an indigenous person hundreds and hundreds of thousands of years ago telling a story the medium changes and that's okay and if the novel turns out to be a 20th century thing that dies in the 21st century you know other things will happen so our high school partners have also asked that you speak about writing in different genres so your most recent two books are both exercises in short forms the essay and the short story and it's interesting to me actually intimations is a book of essays ostensibly but you have those lovely little documentary sketches that almost feel like they're contiguous with short stories in some way um so why the turn to shorter forms lately and what do you think you've learned from working in shorter forms that you think you'll take with you into your novel writing um a lot of it is really just practical as to do with being a woman with small children i could never write those whatever they are like 25 page chapters in on beauty i couldn't i don't have that kind of time or focus or it's just all my writing is done in the gaps so it necessitates this kind of epigraphic form and certainly with intimations that was you know a genuine negotiation between me and the other writer in the house there's only a certain amount of hours in the day and there's two small children so it was never going to be anything but small um but all restrictions are aesthetically useful and it's it's just wonderful to jettison what was too much anyway in my prose and so uh i absolutely took that lesson into the novel yeah i just see with clarity like i never did when i was young what i don't need to do that's the best way i can put it i just there's just so much stuff i don't do anymore just it's just fallen away and uh even though it's a victorian novel and it should feel like a big baggy monster it's it's um i probably maybe it will end up long but the bits of it are small like i'm really interested in these small sections and how little you have to do in fact to get to the heart of things aside from the length of the chapters what else has fallen away oh it's just i mean i think it's from reading tolstoy again like you don't if you're doing things right no dialogue needs and no you don't need to say to any reader she said this you know tartly or strongly or like if you write good dialogue the reader will know everything all bad writing is basically hand-holding it's like anxiety and terror on the part of the writer that something isn't getting across so you just you don't really need metaphors you don't need similes you don't really need that many objects what you need is clarity and it all kind of falls away after a while it's not like i'm hating on metaphor but i it's very rare that i find the need to say something is like something else i'm just much more interested in the thing in itself and trying to convey it in language as directly as possible did you have that interesting clarity as a younger writer is that something you think has developed over time it developed over time just maybe it's urgency of as you get older you really really want to get the thing across and also the numenosity of the world begins to overwhelm you like there's no need to compare anything to anything else it's just so beautiful and and complicated in itself and you learn lessons like rooney is a sally rooney is a good friend of mine and i love reading those books and one of the gifts she has she's always had is exactly that clarity of vision you know particularly in the last book there's so many beautiful pages that are just saying what's there knowing that that's enough is is a very unusual thing in a young writer to understand or to know and she does get criticized for her sentences anyone who does that doesn't know what writing is it's so stupid i can't even it's not something i can even contend with yeah um can you talk about the distinction between fiction and non-fiction um and i guess this question for me does come from that little bit in intimations those um this little bit softer burger um so it's a distinction that seems like it's a little bit blurry in your recent work it's certainly a distinction that has been sort of elevated into this discussion of auto fiction lately which i know i heard a little bit of an interview you did with jennifer egan in which you said that you thought that that was a dumb ideology and i tend to agree with it um but you know it's a it's a conversation people are having right now um and so i'm wondering about the distinction between non-fiction and non-fiction for you sort of theoretically and then also how it happens in your work sort of how you decide what goes into fiction and how you decide what goes into non-fiction i mean i don't i don't really it doesn't really mean anything to me to be honest maybe that makes me a terrible person but i believe in journalism i would call that non-fiction yeah by journalism i mean going out reporting on the facts of a situation as far as you can discern them and interviewing people and gathering information i absolutely believe in that that's what i would call non-fiction but in literary world non-fiction is not a thing that i conceive of it's just writing are you imagining when people write their non-fiction essays or their memoirs about their life that they're telling some ultimate truth to me this is like genuinely delusional it's just rhetoric it's just a different form it's the rhetoric of i instead of the rhetoric of she he it's got nothing to do with truth so i can't i can't take it seriously no to be honest i know that people feel they must feel that they're telling the truth of their lives when they write autobiographies but i would say ask their sibling or ask their aunt if this was the truth there's no such category when it comes to talking about people's lives there's only what you remember what you choose to remember what matters to you what emotionally is meaningful to you but there's no truth in that racket are there novels of yours that have been more or less autobiographical they're all autobiographical in the sense that i i am the raw material but autobiographical in the narrow sense i think i have just a different sense of what people mean by yourself like when i like right now it's 1830 how could it be autobiographical half the people at the moment are white before i get into me like none of these people have anything to do with me supposedly if you think that selves are easily identified by looking at them immediately and saying well that person doesn't have anything to do with you but if i'm writing you know the 70 year old man walking down the street in london in 1830 some part of me is in there when i'm tired i feel 70 sometimes when i wear a certain outfit i feel man-ish sometimes these are all inside me they're not physical permanent identities but they exist sometimes i feel female sometimes i feel male sometimes they feel black sometimes they feel white sometimes i feel tall so it depends i think a lot of people have these feelings inside them they're unexpressable in our social lives because it's outrageous to say sometimes you feel me what do you mean by that but fiction is the one place where i have to i could admit the truth of it you know if i'm walking down the street with big earphones on and big jeans i can feel like a 15 year old boy sometimes i'm a 46 year old woman what how can that be true it's not true in the sense that identities need to be true in order to perform political actions or but it is existentially true and i think people know it to be true they feel it inside themselves but they don't know how to say it because it sounds outrageous how can you possibly claim the identity of the other but that's not what it means i'm not claiming anything i just all these threads are inside me so when i'm writing i just pick one out and there you go and then you flesh it out with all your experience of seeing people knowing people hearing people the fact is that you are constantly um you know in all your emotional relationships appropriating in some way you always are doing that in order to imagine what your child feels you've appropriated their feelings in order to imagine what your wife or husband or boyfriend you've made this leap into the other you've made some guess usually you're wrong that's what causes huge domestic arguments day and night but you're always making these guesses that's what social life consists of and the person who couldn't make the guess who could never in a million years imagine what their girlfriend or son or aunt or that person would be someone you could not have a relationship with relationality depends on making these guesses and they don't have to be lethal they can be playful fun comic interesting sometimes they are painful sometimes they are oppressive sometimes in the case of stereotype they are deadening and sometimes in our political lives they are literally lethal but i am talking about a novel in which that playfulness which is in all within all of us might perhaps be allowed the possibility of existence we have time for one more question and i want to ask you before we go about place um you lived in new york for a decade over a decade maybe um and you're now back in are you back in london yeah um so and elsewhere you've talked about i think last night actually you mentioned that you thought writing you think of writing in the first person as sort of an american trait in fiction or that you encountered it i've certainly picked it up well this is sort of my question i'm wondering you know even if you are planning on leaving the states do you think of yourself in any way as an american author now having spent so much time here having written so much about new york and about the us yes i love america i don't know why i love it so much i can't it doesn't make any sense i disapprove of so much of it and yet i think it's what everybody says who comes to america there's this like uh well freedom is the word right but the freedom is both exhilarating and lethal it is as i've always said in my mind like freedom to do anything but also freedom to die in the streets it's a it's a lethal kind of freedom and it's terrifying a lot of the time but to pretend it isn't real is is a pretense too far i don't even mean freedom has such a positive sense in america and i don't really mean it that way i mean that there is a lack of limit here which is sometimes thrilling and sometimes genuinely terrifying like it scares me it always scared me living here that i didn't know where the boundary would ever end in both people's sense of themselves of what they think is possible in human life um of what what liberties they think they are allowed all of those things are frightening to me and yet if you come from old europe there is always some excitement to it and i guess to be released from some version of class that i had lived been born and bred in in america and opened out into into black america into this idea of a huge community in which i could play some role or some part that was a big part of the attraction i i had never i went from a place where race was not spoken or people tried hard not to smoke speak it because it was impolite to a place where no one ever stopped speaking about it and it was a kind of liberation in a way but even then i was always there was always a resistance like because i come from a different part of the diaspora i come from the caribbean and from england so i never even i was always fascinated by race the american conception of race i could never concede to it entirely because that would be to concede to the idea that american life is universal life and i just can't do that i can't concede to american imperialism because when you go when you travel and you end up in the tiny village in gambia or the little place in norway or when you meet black people of all sorts you can't concede to america's version because it's parochial and it's yours i respect it i listen to it i'll try and learn from it but i i will not accept it as my own no well thank you very much thank you [Music] [Music] you

Channel: SLULibraries

Views: 23,086

Keywords:

Id: fhgKCsGW_1k

Length: 62min 3sec (3723 seconds)

Published: Thu Nov 11 2021