Salman Rushdie and Orhan Pamuk on homeland - The New Yorker Festival

orhan pamuk and the directorate's am i right who won the Nobel Prize last year has lived in Istanbul for most of his life he is widely considered turkey's leading novelist and literary spokesman his bestselling novels among them my name is red the black book and snow which are almost exclusively set at Turkey steel among other things with questions of culture identity and religion in Turkey both historical and present in a memoir Istanbul memories in the city and in his most recent collection of essays other colours he has produced loving and wistful portraits of his homeland at the same time he has a sometimes strained relationship with Turkey thanks to his honesty and outspokenness he has come under attack sometimes by the press sometimes by nationalist groups in 2005 charges were filed against him for having referred publicly to the Armenian Genocide in the Ottoman Empire those charges were eventually dropped but the up were left him in need of sometimes in need of police protection in his own hometown salman rushdie on the far side was born in Bombay and educated in England and lived in Pakistan briefly before settling in London and then New York his fourth novel The Satanic Verses which was inspired in part by the life of Muhammad told the story of two Indian expatriates in Britain and was published in 1988 what followed is well-known the book was deemed blasphemous by Muslim communities around the world riots ensued it was banned in India and Iran's Ayatollah Khomeini issued a fatwa calling for his murder Rushdie spent years in hiding but continued to write and over the next 20 years produced the acclaimed novels the Moors left side the ground beneath our feet fury and Shalimar the clown as well as a number of nonfiction works among other honours too numerous to mention he was made earlier this year a knight of the British Empire sir Salma so first the first I am just curious to know generally what associations you each make with the idea of homeland our Turkey and India still homelands for you or have they become something else over the years start from us yeah I think I think there's a there's a sense in which the place in which you grow up is is a place that you think about is home in a way that you don't think about anywhere else you know and and and for me I mean Bombay which by the way I do not call Mumbai Mumbai is a an alien City occupying the same space as Bombay the Bombay is home and not just Bombay in general but Bombay at a certain time you know because I think it's I mean the city today is rather different than the city that I grew up in and and I still love it but the feeling of home is also connected with its time as well as space but yeah I mean I I always have the feeling when going to India of coming home always and part of that is linguistic too because I still speak in Hindi able do and one of the things that happens when I go back is that you know the language is all there but at the moment of it today it's kind of half of it is packed away in the Attic but when you get there it comes out you know and so actually regaining the ability to inhabit your mother tongue it's also part of that part of the feeling at home yes of course I hope even similar answer of course my homeland is Turkey especially Istanbul I've been on there and I wouldn't say that I'm out of home home here but probably so and I also resists whenever outside of Turkey everyone is oh you're an exile huh okay now spell it ups and then I resist saying there are many similar things I like and returned it back to Turkey and whenever I want yes there's some protection there too much intimidation but then let me talk about why it's home is wise for home or the wholeness of the home two sources like I think it's the beginning it's like you're a judge I just knew the bone animal and your tentacles out there registering everything and you take those impressions to your hard disk and then they stay and you evaluate and measure the rest of the life with that with those first impressions I'm now better HAP's being very Freudian or whatever and but then there's also the language the culture the things that everyone everything has more resonance and an aura of belonging a sort of a model model home is where moderates actually and my mother is still there calling me okay you have an interview with these guys be very Barling and that sort of thing home is where there is this motherly voice protection where they kept the beginnings of Cartesian consciousness it's the beginning of the world and then I agree with Solomon that it's a certain period of Turkey and for example I wrote a book Istanbul my memories and it's some new generation of young Turkish writers friend said well you know our problem is not like black and white as you such as it's a happier place they said but then I love the saddest humble I allow my memory so for means your mother the beginnings your memories were very used and also the language the language and one thing that I can portable about home is the language I have the language with me I can go to Mars I can go to Siberia I can't go to Latin America wherever is the at the other end of the world but I have the Turkish language with me and I carry it in my pocket in my spirit and I write with it that it's my home and I can I have a portable home with me all the time and that's Turkish language I think I strongly belong to that but then I don't evaluate everything about home which is being home I don't also say that this is and the rest of the world is phony and second-rate I don't say that in fact I'm aware of the allness of the home when I'm outside of Turkey one of my books black book I wrote in the United States and it there I had the most radical anxiety of being Turk I had the most anxiety of my identity Who am I I have faced these problems and I began to think about my home when I was out of Turkey in 85 when I came here first to New York with my wife who was taking her PhD at Columbia and I realized what home was for the first time radically when I was away from home yeah it's interesting that both of you do continue I mean your novels are set around the world and in different places but India and and Turkey are places that you return to over and over again and writing whether you're there or not there and is that just are you just drawn in and compelled to write about these places I think it's just it's just you know it's in the it's in the given of what I have as a writer you know I can tell I mean I have sometimes turned away from it but it always seems to drag me back towards it you know and it's been a kind of sometimes it feels like a tug of war sometimes you think you know we actually want to write about something else and so there's a kind of moving away but it's a drawing back and I think that's that's just what it is it's just going to be like that but I also wanted to save up what Orhan said that I also don't feel like an exile there was a there was only one moment in my life when I did feel like of exile I mean there was a period of you know for reasons that you mentioned period almost 10 years when I was not able to go to India and during that time it was the only time I've actually felt the sense of exile and one of the reasons why I'm unusually proud of the Moors last sigh is that it's the only novel I wrote about India without being able to go to India and when the people in India read it they paid me the greatest compliment of all which is they said okay so you sneaked back in didn't you but mixes because otherwise how do you know all this stuff was it easier in a sense to write about it without going there or not no it wasn't it felt much harder in the case of Midnight's Children it felt easier in the I mean I think the thing about Midnight's Children is I think had I not been living in London it would have been very difficult to have if you like the absurd kind of hotspot of thinking that you could contain a country that size inside a book you go to India you can't contain a street inside a book yeah the idea that you could put you know at that stage half a billion people or war it is insane and I think you had to be a little bit distant from it or I felt I had to be a little bit distant from it too just to have the guts to try it you know but in the case of most of us I know it took much harder to write because a big way I read about home because that's all I know I write about Istanbul because that's where I spends fifty years and when you asked me about humanity I'll talk about humanity without forgetting forgetting that this is I'm only talking about Istanbul but then that's the question in fact that that when we are talking and referring back and underlining our home if we do it exaggerated and dramatize that we are away from home that that there is a home and another world and then there is a difference then we begin to will fall in the traps of representation that of may that I write about Istanbul because that's that did I have come across Humanity in Istanbul and then my aim is not in fact to say that I'm going to describe Turks here there that's how they are or these are the people in in in Istanbul how they look and how they behave well I never felt that way when I was in Istanbul heavily embedded I thought I was writing about humanity when one side was outside of Turkey and begin to get translated everyone began to say that oh he is writing about Turks and Istanbul I thought I was writing about humanity and this is a major concern of I have about underlining or a home that is I be all of our homes it's inevitable it's almost an animal instinct to like err to like the home and return to it and measure everything the rest of the life towards it but there is these are animal instinct sources made a mistaken but there is also like all animal instinct there is also civilized side to us they're a bit more calculated more intelligent side that controls things and that side of me is telling me this as well that that now that I am outside of home and they're asking me questions about owners of the home or whatever home is what it means to me I don't want to underline and make this distinction between home and other places once you begin to do that then you are out there to represent home and then I go to do not to try remember when I got into lots of trouble that seems an unusual thing today but I forgot from little but noted before that traffic but when Midnight's Children was extremely kindly reviewed in the New York Times Book Review The Critic used this phrase or the sentence which was extracted by every publisher which said Midnight's Children sounds like a continent finding its voice the wrath of the continent but Aang was really pissed off they said you know what are we chopped liver you know what am I the only one who's speaking what about 200 years of literature in 0:17 different languages you found the boys uh-huh yeah it's not only this problem of representing then Salman abuse refuses and I also diffuse but then inevitably once there is so much pressure that oh your home is there and you write about Lao then you're writing about home long back there these people you represent then there's so much pressure that either you try to ignore it or you do so you spend so much energy and will to eat trying to ignore it that then you're also distorted somehow I think home is home and then home should be addressed in a natural way I think in the end home is the world that's where I feel I belong to at home is where humanity is and then at my back in my motherly home I managed to see all humanity there is no home if you disregard humanity that you have to address and see in your in your home all humanity and that's the wonderful thing about literature that you talk about your small street all III know where little life our little in life you know my neighborhood my family friends all of my friends who know me in Turkey said well everything you write is autobiographical Orhan yeah don't tell anyone I say that but I shape it around and that in fact the great gift of literature is such that you just switch it around this way trial and error turn it around then it's not your autobiography it's humanity's story yeah my mother who knew everybody's dirty secrets I mean my mother was this kind of I know Garcia Marquez of gossip you know face she had this fat ass it's labyrinthine structure in her mind but exactly who had done what to whom for several generations you know and it was a great resource you know they're appointed which she said I'm gonna stop telling you this stuff because you just put it in your books I get in trouble it comes back to the idea of the mother as home but the one sense in which it has become kind of problematic certainly to I think to writers from the third world more than two Western writers is this question because it gets connected to this idea of authenticity you know that American writers European writers have always felt free to go live anywhere in the world they wanted to live and if scott Fitzgerald lives on the Riviera you know if Joyce lives in Trieste if Hemingway lives in Paris they don't somehow stop being you know American or Irish if an Indian writer lives in London or New York it's a problem and not only that there's also an expectation that if your Indian writer you should only write about Indian material again the you know Western writers have always given themselves the freedom to write about anywhere they like I mean sometimes with um questionable results one need only think of John Updike's novel about Africa you know for that question to be posed the cou one of the worst novels ever written but you know if Picasso wants to use African art as a model fine you know if an Indian writer wishes to use and a Western source as inspiration suspect and so there is this double standard that that one has to deal with you know and actually of course in the case of India anyway this is a huge diaspora culture now you know there are Indians everywhere and the Indian experience is becoming a diaspora experience as well as a national experience you know and there's no reason at all it seems to me why a writer living in Silicon Valley should not write an interesting novel about a village in India you know but it's the response to it in India is very complex now one thing that you both have it you're at your disposal is not just the the Bombay of the 50s 60s or Istanbul in your lifetime but but the historical eras of both countries but you've both written about you set novels well before your time yeah and also made use of the folklore of these countries which seems to be a great resource well it's kind of yeah I mean it's wonderful coming from an old culture it really it isn't it's what do you think about that I mean sorry America I mean I there's always something delightful to be when somebody points to a mid 19th century building it tells me how old it is so yeah well I bet of course Valley will think about what what is dear about home is not its history of course once you belong there you care about the history but it history is such an artificial thing that the politics change and history changes you pay attention to you find you try to find your own history home is also about authenticity that when you're there and when you have you here these first voices first sights first sounds worse smells the rest feels a bit fake phony then again another part of your mind should fight against it because if you insist on too much about wholeness of the originality and authenticity of the earlier smells or earlier recognitions earlier motherly tenderly feel feelings then judging the rest of your home experience as my secondary phony not authentic enough then again you are although you're paying attention to belonging paying your respects to your mummy or your family or whatever is the beginning and being loyal and that is what is accepted and it's a boon not to do so but on the other hand you'll disregard the humanity of the rest of humanity home is both a challenge to accept an embrace this is what feeds us but then we have to be aware of the fact that once we exaggerate it once we base everything on owners of the home then there is a there is a risk of the being a little bit disrespectful for the rest of human experience oh look at this no way we all leave home you know we all do we all grow up in our parents home and at some point we make a home our own you know so the idea of home is not singular it's it's it's its narrative you know you you you have a home that has given to you and then you have home a home or homes that you make and people who never leave home a kind of sad I disagree I know okay finally we disagree let all let me make my case I noticed my book Istanbul when I I never considered rarely I have left I mean Istanbul I wrote about it I there were times that I left Turkey stayed here when for example three years in New York when I was here with my wife but there are people who are judging home I would say by the criteria which is not embedded in homes culture what counts is not staying at the same place you may stay at the same place but that you would be uncomfortable at home I think it was further Adorno who made this remark about morality is not feeling at home wherever your home and when in order to not feel at home you have to have another criteria another idea that is not only then you can stay I mean residentially your address may be the same I hope I wish my address well will have the same old apartment still is that but on the other hand you have a different not homely mind that what counts what then if you have a different point of view read different books you have different criteria you don't agree with the community then I think you are deeply in at home that it is very superficial to be at home and agree with everything I think it's you have a deeper sense of home if you have a set of values which as I do as an auto deduct from books I have read all in my solitary reading hours I derived and values literary images in fact Ito T envisions that I should I should entertain my mind with then I judge my home in fact wrote about home with ideas that are not only and then I manage I naively think pin down home better damn guys who had stayed there and taught the things that were required to think so see I think just to this is saying something similar but or related anyway I mean I think there's a it's the thing I've written about in the past so if anybody's actually read something I've written forgive me if you've read it before but it seems to me that in human beings in all human beings there are opposite impulses there is the impulse to home and the impulse to away you know there's the desire the dream of roots and the dream of leaving and I think we all have that we all have that that feeling of comfort and solidity and an explicable existence you know meaning that comes out of being in a place to which you feel you belong you know and and but there's also a kind of exhilaration in the self and the discovery of the self the discovery of the other which we also all seek and respond to in the act of leaving and I think what's happened however is that the dream of home of roots has been culturally privileged you know and and we think of that as good you know that to belong and stay and and inhabit the thing that is the thing you accidentally were born into and that the dream of leaving the you know the the exit the deliberate chosen exit is more problematic you know and and and sometimes suspect and but the thing is interestingly to me is that if you look at our artistic production you know whether it's weather this is books or movies or whatever it's those figures who we are excited by you know that the ones who go on the road you know the the by Chaplin you know the outlaw the bandit the criminal the person who goes on the wrong side of the tracks you're the lever you know is actually what we dream about so it's as if we spend our non imagining cells trying to construct ideas of home and place and belonging and our imagining cells want to be these outlaws you know and it's that tension I think both those things are in US and all of us going back to something Orhan was saying in terms of your formation as writers what was more important where you came from or the international community of writing that you were - I think it's both that I think in fact interesting thing about being a writer is that you get this universal general ideas from the books you read them here you believe in them they are very valuable you want that back in home they are attractive because home lacks them then then what makes international ideas whatever the idiom of international interesting things so to speak is that we don't have them at home ideas are interesting because you don't have them and home is interesting because they don't have these ideas in fact that where the creativity where I think of books and the electricity that you feel that you feel obliged to represent write about create improve explore is that there is it always a problem with home and always a problem with these general ideas general ideas when you impose them at home then they do not work well and they say well you're getting all these European ideas from books but this is Turkey and then if it's there it's there and sometimes the other way around you have all this your purpose stuff with me with you I was always I said this so many times upset about then well I write a book and then it's reviewed in someplace and they say and I write a little say a lobster and they say Oh comic is writing about Turkish law it's then you'll refer back to back to your home and so it is a constant struggle between the parochial home or the smallness of the whole model motherly tender feelings at home the beginnings and the general thing of course humanity wants Bo I mean and that we want to general we control and command the universals and also belong to particular one thing about being in West or being active living at the center of the world is that that's a privilege say once upon a time Balzac or French literature enjoyed maybe perhaps now English literature or english-speaking literature is enjoying that you are both at home and you also have you're mastering the universe's which is if you look from my corner of the world I get upset and angry about that I want to fight against that that that that is some to some privileged authors home is where they can speak out for in in the name of humanity in almost platonic universals and also have this smell smell of colors of dirt off the little street is this only happens in countries that rule the world so to speak control the cultural world so to speak by the power of soil so that makes it problematical I think when I when I was starting out as a writer I resisted the idea that because I came from India I had to write about India and and my first novel was my first published novel there's this unfortunate heap of but that was never see more that was never published but yes when I wrote this novel which actually take certain themes from from Sufi philosophy but tried to set them in a kind of deliberately to set them in a kind of Western science fiction or fantasy context and that was a deliberate attempt if you like to denature them you know and to to say that these these kind of ideas are not simply culturally specific that you can discuss them in the context of any setting and the result was an incredibly bad No which now embarrasses me probably I think my publishers keep telling me not to say but the experience of doing that made me very very for fun your breathing or huh that it made me very profoundly rethink what I should how I should approach the business of being a writer and and it actually did take me back to beginnings you know and I thought I'm going to go to somewhere much closer to myself somewhere much closer to a world that I know and and what I thought a long before I knew what Midnight's Children was going to be about as a book I thought I would write something that came out of childhood but I would write a novel about what of childhood and it didn't occur to me in my first conception that it would become this much larger fiction with public dimensions you know I really hadn't thought that I just thought I have to go closer to home in order to find out who I am as a writer you know if anyone and so for me that was the key that unlocked the door I mean since then once you go through the door you can you know you can go all sorts of places but for me if I hadn't found that that place close to home I wouldn't have found a beginning you resent sometimes being told that you're writing about Turkish love not love in general or Indian situations not such a can you ever take a writer away from his country would you have a bore hits without Argentina would you have a proofs without France or a Faulkner without America of course not but then you're hinting at the answer you know but that's a serpent that's a certain kind of writer that that's a certain kind of writer I mean as I say you can have a Hemingway without America you know then it goes bad man at that but that it implies that Americans have this imperial vision that they feel it form every place they don't need a visa and then they have the money and they go and everything every Norman assistant why are you here at the except it's natural for the Americans to be all around while if I go so why are you here is this your first time in New York I've been asked this question for the last 25 years so many times there I get up I get you know if I if I if I venture some observation on the likelihood of Rudy Giuliani being the Republican candidate broadly speaking negative observation people say oh so you think you understand American politics I think yes but it is it is it is this strange difference which has to do with the history of the world it has to do with imperialism and colonialism and so on that the the assumption is that Western writers can be writers of the world whereas Eastern writers must be trapped in there not one it's not unfortunately an assumption it's set back oh yeah but then we have to fight against its writing you can know that it's an assumption you replace the fact by in fact you know but I was very well aware of the fact when I wrote fury I was very well aware of the fact that I was going to get into harsh life with this even more trouble you know because of because of a kind of turf war you know oh what he's going to come and tell us about us now look they're asking about a poem they're asking this listen to us because then they feel that we are out of home maybe let's ask them I've gotta fill out their home you know I mean I've got to buy got a home it's it in actually Manhattan and I have lived there for some considerable time I don't think you're an American writer mmm do you think you're an American writer no not I'm not an American writer in the way that that Roth is or DeLillo is or comic McCarthy is but but one of the great things about let's say New York City is that anybody who brings their story here automatically makes it in New York story you know and so it's one of the pleasures of living here that there are that the stories of the world become the stories of this city you know and and for me I wanted to write that kind of book I would I would not presume to write a novel about a kid growing up in Newark you know in the in the 40s or 50s but I can write about the kind of New Yorker who is somebody who has arrived you know and who is making his story one of the layers of the stories of the city you know and I think that's a that's a subject which is mine now that you have come to New York and now that we are here and another part of being a strong subject about home is that you have to be in your home you have to be nice to people at home right and so now that we are here we have to be nice to people in New York actually you see I disagree I think the home is the place where you don't have to be nice to people okay they have to put up with you Eddie okay okay then my definition of home did which I discover just lately is this that that I had an event at the public library and then someone said you know it just came and I think that's the most instinctively reply that I ever had about home and outside of being home and they said so what's the difference of between here and Istanbul and my immediate answer was that Oh in Turkey in Istanbul I feel responsible about everything why I here I don't feel the response maybe if I stay here too often stay here then this das they see and feel that the dictum that isn't that that we have to feel responsible to everyone about everything maybe slowly and slowly down upon me here I feel I'm not home at home because I don't feel that I left that responsibility behind and I am I'm only here with my freedom of playfulness being away from homes responsibilities the weight of belonging and responsibility and you fill in obliged to answer all questions and also at home a writer is in my part of the world not necessarily Turkey that that if you're a writer you're a professor of everything you're responsible you have to have an information about everything and answer and address all the questions the nation the country have had while here there is a bit of a more freedom that you're a writer you write your books you do your interviews you promote your books and then the beauty of the book that counts is that cities and I and perhaps because of that or perhaps I haven't lived he enough to get to pick up enemies anger resentment our first there's some part of me that I'm sure that I will begin talking here more radically in the coming years but then what makes it for me the distinction between and it's different for every person I imagine is that that it back in Turkey I feel responsible for everything not that I should show it all the time but here I feel freer and then things are happening I'm a Boyar and it is a nice feeling and I'm a visual writer don't forget that now I'm very I'm very moved by our handsets of responsibility I've always so I think responsible for you to solve annoying I don't feel responsible for you I've always felt completely irresponsible you know I think I'd yours you're kind of saying that by getting here and being able to shed that sense of responsibility it's a kind of liberation yes no and I mean I've always been in favor of a responsibility really but this question about also bad writers being expected to know everything you know it's it is very bizarre it's very exact I mean I find myself you know I we go around the place and I'm endlessly asked to solve the Middle East problem yeah but that is if they never ask you to solve the American problem right well but to tell us what I said I always say I'm glad you asked me that question because as it happens I'm the person with the answer if it's a person and it's kind of mystifying that the governments of the world have never realized there's an approach me because otherwise it would be solved if it's if it um and this sense that writers kind of in some way have the answer is you know it's a myth that I think we should encourage on the whole that we are doing that yes it's dangerous dangerous 2-ton to deconstruct it too much in front of this darkened space out there drinking people on a different tack you both come from you're both relatively secular people who come from countries in which religion is is central so in which religion is central does that make you feel less at home in your own countries no because there's always a bunch of people who agree with you there's yeah there's also strong secular history of this particular tradition in both country I think and then it's not religion is not so strong or it doesn't crush everything that that is you feel it put you on one side of a wall that's but in the middle of you knows but no I think you feel that you're involved in a kind of argument but actually what that's that's if you like that's a non-fictional answer no I mean the fictional answer is that it doesn't matter whether you believe in something or not if you're writing about people who do believe in something you have to faithfully create that reality you know let's see it's you would be a very bad writer if you could not create the world view other than your own you know in mind in the mind of somebody you wanted to write about so actually when I'm writing fiction its complete my own if you like religious beliefs or lack of them I'll kind of be relevant you know I'm just trying to make the people live and if those are religious people then they must meet religious people and if not not really certain see you've also studied Islam and in you you're very knowledgeable you're responsible for it and it's it's played a central part in several of your books and Orhan your last novel snow was about a secular person going into a very religious community and almost from a journalistic point of view so what is the question obviously these things are important even though they're not actually you know the were if you have a life yeah writing novels is about our capacity to identify with people who are not like us and all my friends are telling me that I'm right always writing autobiographical fictions but then this some characters are autobiographical then I do my best to identify the people with whom I don't politically culturally agree with that for example in snow that you refer to is there's a character called blue which is a sort of an radical Islamic fundamentalist then I did my best to identify and show it as false they say is a good man and that is that I think beauty I wouldn't say a duty they joy and challenge of writing a novel that you don't you don't have it although theoretically in a in a corner of your mind you have a set of values which judge this person when you're writing fiction you have to do your best to forget about these values they may be home values there may be values that you have important or you want to forget about but the essential thing is that that it's best to be able to identify with people who disagree with you religious secularly this or that way and I think when we're referring to home what matters most is that it's it's a subject matter it's where you started but then we can do everything I can I can write a novel that takes place in New York in Marx in Latin America in places that I've never been to the problem is to find the right poem the right voice and if it's artificial that if you haven't lived these experiences the tone of the novels we also artificial so that it works that I think I believe in the art of the novel that that you can do anything with it we are not buried with our homes the home stays with us it's the beginning but it's not necessarily what we write all the time that we carry it it also there is also expectations commercial expectations now that now that you are asking us about home now that it's obvious that we are not originally from here everything wants everyone expects that you do something and if you do otherwise that thing it's not authentic enough it's not really enough you may not be noting about the stuff so they also want to pigeonhole to you to a whole we all love our homes but then we are being able the capacity to go beyond it come back play around it home is a center but then we are also creative people and cook and turn around home and make or more interesting go back and forth that's the interesting about the interesting thing I think about home that you can carry it all the way and return and reach it with new experience so forth and so on this is an easy thing to say to a New York audience because actually almost nobody's prepared I think that's it not so many people come to a great city like this from elsewhere that the subject of of you know where you come from you know is a big subject for any what you know for millions of people in this city but I think the very interesting point that Orhan made a question of tone and form that I mean it's very well illustrated for example by Kafka's novel about America yeah he's an American Kafka never came to America you know and his novel which was posthumously given the title America by mocks broad in which he himself I think wanted to call the stoker America with a K is a wonderful mobile which kind of isn't about America at all except that it takes place in a lot of it in a place called America and that ability to create a fictional space you know with a real name if you like you know it's that's a it only works if you get technical aspects right it's to do with tone form rhythm language it's not to do with quotes reality unquote and the novel is not really a realistic form and and this is something which much contemporary literary criticism loses sight of the novel is an imaginative form it's it's it's a it's a it's a formalized dream you know I mean these things did not happen these people did not live these these events were not so you know and to insist on the fictive nature of fiction you know is also to liberate you from the question of authenticity and location and roots you know you can we can make this stuff up also there's maybe we have to talk about carpet and there is the writer who sees form everyplace then I think that's many refer to a person who never leaves home and as a sad person I think the sad person is the person who goes out out in world but see is happy to see home every play that there are authors like that in fact that is or our minds are constituted so that we feel secure comfortable when we realize that although we are out of home we see oh he is like my mummy he's like my brother he's like my boss he's like my teacher oh there were just such a comfortable place the Copeland's mother is living over here you know I have this I wrote a piece some years ago about the Wizard of Oz and one of the things I said there was that the only of the movie I don't believe is when Dorothy says that there's no place like home you know what the Kansas I mean it's in black and white you know Oz is in Technicolor Oh in Kansas there's nothing to eat in all those you know nothing to eat actually nobody eats in The Wizard of Oz but the idea that she would prefer impoverished barren you know miss Gulch containing cancers to the world of squashed witches you know it's absurd I mean it's there obviously are many places that are much better than home and and in fact it's a thing which frank baum perfectly understood because if you read the sequel to The Wizard of Oz not only does Dorothy return to us but she makes her home in Oz and not only that but she brings Aunt Em and Uncle Henry with her they all settle in Oz and have the intelligence to leave Kansas behind so so sometimes the place you go to is better than home you know and it just felt like a lie yeah you know when when when at the end of the film when the kind of lesson she's supposed to learn is that she didn't like that she never needed to leave home in the first place you know rubbish of course she did it to leave home there were no cowardly Lions in Kansas you know or not the Chi match anyway going back to your point about you know it's all fiction and it's invented regardless of where it's set a problem you've both had as people taking you literally is reading your fiction as and and that they have to delete like that it sees what I write is all facts run out so what about yeah enough against this problem of people thinking a you're writing as yourself not as a narrator and B what you're writing about is actually happening and there's you have a certain audience that doesn't suspend their beliefs yes that's the point about being a writer you write fiction and they people judge you about your right as if you're writing journalism and you have to answer all the questions in that manner that is the interesting thing about addiction but they rated both knows it's fiction and also judges it's on reality given that the question you're most often asked as a writer is that something is how autobiographical is it you know that's the most I developed a technique on book tour which is to give opposite answers two consecutive journalists the Duke that you would say you know it's not old it's not at all you know I mean I just it's just all kind of out of my head and why would you idiot imagine that it's autobiographical the next journalist you say it's totally autobiographical everything that happened in this book happened to either to myself or to two close friends or family members and these interviews appear on the same day in the same city and nobody ever notices that you've contradicted yourself which just shows that nobody reads interviews and writers do you have to have ever have to think of yourself because of this as reporters in a sense do you feel you feel you have to be faithful to the reality yeah sometimes yeah so if you underline the wholeness the authenticity of your experience that that this is something that no one had lived and this is this descent of my fiction and my imagination comes from the authenticity of the experience which if we over underline the fact that there is a home and then gets the authentic thing then yet the question of authenticity or journalistic value the realism a realistic content of what you have written is how it begins to go out up up up I think that that we have to accept there is a home it's near to us it's like my my mother but then it's the beginning but then it's not it's not the whole is the only criteria to judge the rest of the experience I we we all feel obliged to pay attention to it return to it turn around to it but then again that experience there is no sense I don't believe in that understanding that the only real experience authentic self is there the rest is not true I always James Joyce wrote Ulysses in Trieste not in Dublin and that we carry our homes with us but that's the beginning then we invent things over it and continue that we have to underline the fact that there is a home with that's where we started maybe in order to understand what we write what we do we need that but that is our work is not should not be based on their realistic content whether it's faithful to the home it is a boat combinational imagination human freedom and something that has left from home of course which is for me is more language and memories and I think I you know on the subject of reportage I think I mean I think I have two things to say one is that there's an aspect of the truth you know what really happened which is very energizing to a text you know and it's true that Joyce wrote Ulysses entry estimate he took with him the Irish Times of June the 16th you know the Irish Times of Bloomsday he carried with him everywhere he wrote that book and almost everything in that newspaper finds its way into the novel including the name of the horse throw away that he's got a bet on including the advertisements you know what is life without pub plum trees potted meat incomplete you know with it at abode of bliss so he in that sense he took the trivia of the everyday life of the day he met his wife and made it the basis of this great novel so that is sense in which yes it would that you know I mean I remember for instance and used it in on marine drive in Bombay there's a pedestrian bridge that goes over the road that goes by the sea and there's always billboards on both sides I always remember there was a time when on one side there was a an advertisement for Esso which said put a tiger in your tank you know and when you get to the other side it was a safety warning which said drive like hell and you will get there and I thought the fact that you had these two different approaches to motoring opposite sides of the same bridge you know was very attractive you know so of course give it a steel you steal the good stuff you know so in the same way as Joyce would use the trivia of that day you know that I would I would also try and pinch the trivia of everyday life you know I put them in but the other issue is a if you like a more kind of historical political issue which is that there is there was a role for the nineteenth-century novel of bringing the news you know like when when Dickens wrote about four schools in the north of England it did a great deal to hasten the reform of those schools that owned after Nicholas Nickleby we don't so much see the novel as having that role now because there are much bigger information information media faster available but I think the problem is that we live in an age where the truth is so trivialized falsified and simply hidden from us you know that that the novel still has the role of bringing the truth but they also have a civilized and falsify are novels what about that well that's just nasty of them but I think you're there are there are moments where which anyone knows when your memory of a historical event is very much at odds with the way in which that event is officially described you know and and it becomes the case that your personal memory is by that by that fact sighs you know I mean I remember for example to give only one example the 1971 Bangladesh war no the war for the liberation of Bangladesh in which the Pakistan Army committed a number of well-documented atrocities you know executions of college professors burnings of trade union buildings etc it's with people inside central I mean there are eyewitness reports as photographic evidence cetera et cetera however no Pakistan government from that day to this has ever accepted that those things happened and and when people refer to them they are called lies so so what happens is that if you simply are performing an act of remembering this becomes at odds with official history and therefore you know becomes becomes an active of reportage and so there is occasionally still in the novel a place for that you know it's a very problematic place because the problem of writing about contemporary events in a novel is that the subject changes you know and we live in a world in which the subject change is very very fast and what can then happen is that the thing you've written ceases to be interesting because nobody is thinking about that anymore you know so that that's a that's a very particular minefield for anybody who wants to incorporate contemporary material in a work of fiction you know I mean I'm not talking about now essays or political pieces but so the question is how do you incorporate that material in such a way that it's properly integrated into the fictional architecture of it imaginative work and that's a very difficult question but that's the only way you can do it unless you want your book work to be only topical I know you know whatever we publish a piece of fiction in The New Yorker we get at least one letter from a reader saying you know what a nice story but unfortunately you have your facts wrong and grier cheese doesn't smell or that bridges in Delhi not Calcutta but one of the great experiences of being published in The New Yorker is to have fiction fact-checked so much are you doing that Deborah if I'm not very happy right there are people for that I remember the ones many years ago writing a short story which was published in The New Yorker and in it there was a reference to a man living in Bradford in Yorkshire in England with the last name of dar dar and he was not even a character the story he was offstage referred to The New Yorker fact checkers got the Bradford phone book and looked through it and his first his initial was M first day was Mustapha so they looked through the Bradford phone book to see how many people there were with that name that came up five people they phoned them you know in order to establish that they were not the people in the story there was one person they failed to reach and so on the press day of the magazine I was asked if I could replace this name with another name that was not a problem but because it was about to go to press could the name be the same length I rebelled but it is there's something very beautiful about having fiction checked for factual inaccuracies thank you both very much thank you and thank you all for coming you

Channel: The New Yorker

Views: 29,106

Rating: 4.8311348 out of 5

Keywords: festival 2007, Deborah Treisman, Salman Rushdie, Orhan Pamuk, Homeland, festival, nyer festival

Id: 3VimE5_GKmQ

Length: 57min 35sec (3455 seconds)

Published: Tue Jul 22 2014