Writers I like don’t take language for granted. It’s not just this machine you use to get places.
That’s Aleksandar Hemon in an interview, Toxic Assets and English Syntax: Aleksandar Hemon talks with Bookforum (June/July/Aug 2009).
BF: The narrator’s father, who appears in “The Bees, Part 1,” has a “hatred of the unreal” and isn’t keen on his son’s literary aspirations. Is your own father like this?
AH: Yes. The most disdainful thing he could say about any kind of narrative art is that it’s unrealistic. He doesn’t really read books — he reads newspapers. No fiction, other than my books. It’s not the absence of imagination — it’s a different kind of imagination. My father is an amazing storyteller. He can turn a visit to a supermarket into a story.
BF: The father has his own literary aspirations, motivated by his need to document what he deems to be the truth.
AH: Stories, whether they’re told or written, document human experience, and that is different from documenting fact. If I try to tell you what happened to me in ’91, I’ll have to guess about certain things, I’ll have to make up certain things, because I can’t remember everything. And certain memories are not datable. You and I might remember our lunch, but some years from now we won’t remember it was on a Friday. I will not connect it with what happened this morning because they are discontinuous events. To tell a story, you have to — not falsify — but you have to assemble and disassemble. Memories are creative. To treat memory as a fact is nonsense. It’s inescapably fiction.
BF: There’s always embroidery. It’s human nature.
AH: There’s something called the narrative paradigm, which suggests that people think about themselves as a character in the story of their life. We have to organize information to be received through our senses, through our intellect, through other books, into some sort of a story. I think editing is one of the most important parts of storytelling. There’s great pleasure in actually taking out, including the stuff that I might have started the story with, not to mention the sentences with curlicues and the boring stuff.
BF: Your fiction borrows from your life, but you’ve said you hate memoirs.
AH: I hate confessional memoirs. There are valuable memoirs, no doubt. But you have to have a life worth talking about. Not every experience is valuable. Literature, to my mind, starts from some sort of personal space — and then it has to go beyond that. Whatever experience you may have had, whatever stories you might have to tell about yourself, they have to be transformed into something that’s meaningful beyond yourself. And because it’s transformed at some point, it stops being about you. The person in my fiction is not my life, so we can talk about it. If it were my life, what would you have to say about it? Memoir is not subject to interpretation. That is antithetical to literature. Confessional space is solipsistic: I’m the only one there, you don’t get to enter. You can watch from the outside and as a voyeur, and that appalls me.
[ ... ]
BF: In “Stairway to Heaven,” the teenage narrator is trying to figure out how to construct a story out of his time in Africa, to report to his girlfriend back home. How do you make readers take that leap and appreciate an experience so foreign to them?
AH: The challenge is, how do you talk about other people’s experiences? If you have fear of talking about other people or with other people, of telling their stories and not just yours, then you’re going to end up in a kind of solipsism where everyone speaks individually but nobody hears. Reading fiction is trying to imagine what someone else’s life is like. This transference from private to public, from personal to shared, that’s the exhilarating thing about literature. I can read Madame Bovary — I know it’s not me. I’m not French, I’m not a woman. But I can communicate with her.
In spite of my Unreal Nature moniker, like the father described above, I tend to dislike what is blatantly unreal. I like unreal that could be real. I use unreal to make it clear that my pictures are fiction not memoir. I disassemble and assemble.
Read the full interview. [ link ]
-Julie
