PEN WORLD VOICES: Journey to the Ants and the Advantages of Fiction

A little before noon I get settled into my seat in the Celeste Bartos Forum of the New York Public Library for Adventures in the Skin Trade.

The session begins with Colum McCann reading from Dancer, his novel about Rudolf Nureyev. He is followed by Michael Ondaatje, who reads from Divisadero, his most recent novel. Both of them are mesmerizing readers.

McCann: One of my great heroes is Buddy Bolden, the legendary jazz musician in Coming Through Slaughter. How did you get to Buddy after Sri Lanka and Toronto?

Ondaatje: I’ve always imagined other lives and jazz music has always been central to me.

McCann: One of the gifts of writing fiction is the privilege of coming alive in someone else’s life.

McCann: I went into the world of dance interested in the sound of dance.

Ondaatje tells him he knows a choreographer who creates dances according to the sound of the floor boards on the stage. “He is very tactile.”

McCann asks Ondaatje if he has fun in his life and if he has fun when he writes.

“Yeah, serious fun,” Ondaatje says.

Ondaatje asks McCann if he was hesitant about writing about a famous person.

“Nureyev could take care of himself,” McCann says. “Like other writers I admire—you and John Berger—I like to write about dark anonymous corners if human experience; how they intersect with ‘big’ lives.”

“Having a conscience in a book dragged me down. In Zoli I felt a responsibility to the Romani people.”

“I felt the same thing in Anil’s Ghost,” Ondaatje says.

McCann: I’m disturbed by questions about how to write about violence.

Ondaatje: There is a kind of pornography of violence.

McCann comments that Divisadero is about symmetry and echoes.

Ondaatje: I’m interested in the architecture of a book.

McCann: Do you still get scared?

Ondaatje: Yes, until 3 or 4 months after the book is published.

McCann quotes a young British writer he knows who told him that the only thing he was interested in writing was the unexecutable.

Ondaatje: I’d like to write a Noel Coward comedy.

Someone asks what happens when a character refuses to come alive.

“I leave that character around for my next book,” Ondaatje says.

McCann: “Two and a half years into writing Zoli, she left me. And then she came back. I felt she wanted me to know about exile. She’s an enigma—still.”

“Does form get dictated by content?” McCann asks.

“Very much so.”

An audience member asks them to comment on the relationship between fact and fiction, the tension between the documentary and fiction.

McCann quotes the writer William Maxwell: “Our responsibility is not to fact but to the texture of the fact.”

Someone else asks Ondaatje about his use of visual images when he writes.

“I want to get the most complicated scene on the page with the most clarity. Things are layered.”

McCann says, “I start from image and work toward sound.”

* * *

Following the Skin Trade, I walk to the South Court Auditorium in the Library for A Conversation with Jeffrey Eugenides & Daniel Kehlmann.

The moderator quotes Norman Mailer—“writers speak across national boundaries better than the politicians”—and then steps away. The German novelist Daniel Kehlman and Jeffrey Eugenides sit facing each other on the small stage.

Kehlmann is the author of a historical novel, Measuring The World. He worries that the historical novel is a fraudulent thing. He believes that the magical realism of Garcia Marquez is “one of the most important things that has happened in the novel. It’s freeing literature.”

Eugenides asks Kehlmann if he thinks there is such a thing as an authentic voice in literature.

“You have to work to stretch your abilities so you don’t repeat yourself,” Kehlmann says. “As a writer you have to fight against this. However, novels are autobiographical in that the themes are there again and again./ Even the kind of language you use is the same. There is an essence that is distinct from a literary voice. Even when you read Mason & Dixon you know you are reading Thomas Pynchon.”

A prospective writer in the audience asks for advice.

Eugenides: Write as much as you can. Read as much as you can.

Kehlmann: Nabokov’s advice to his students was to read poetry.

Eugenides and Kehlmann discuss the influence of film and television on the way stories are told.

“You learn the codes of movie making and then you can understand films. Films influence the way human beings react to reality. We experience reality as something that happens in cuts. Plot and consequence are where we live.”

Someone asks Eugenides about the switch from a female to a male perspective in Middlesex. What is a hermaphroditic voice like in a novel?

“There are lots of ideas about this—mostly French,” he says. “Does testosterone determine syntactic patterns? Male and female are categories that seem reductive to me.”

* * *

At 4:00 I’m back in the Celeste Bartos Forum for the Books That Changed My Life panel. There are eight people on the dais--Paul Holdengraber, our moderator, Yousef Al-Mohaimeed, his translator, Antonio Munoz Molina, Annie Proulx, Oliver Rolin, Catherine Millet, and a French translator.

Holdengraber, who is Director of Public Programming at the New York Public Library, wonders about the notion that books change lives. “Do we want to be changed?” he asks.

With this question hanging in the air, he invites the Spanish writer Antonio Munoz Molina to go first. Molina’s pick is a shocker—Journey to the Ants, by E.O. Wilson. “The book was a revelation to me,” he says. “Writers tend to be self absorbed, but if you can render reality in itself as clearly and as precisely as possible, you are probably writing great literature. Wilson had bad eyesight. He was nearsighted, so he focused on a tiny part of the world. We need to pay attention to the world at large, not just the world of books. Journey to the Ants is an example of the power of words to convey the world exactly as it is. The world itself is so interesting. This book was a revelation to me.”

“Before Ants, what book influenced you the most?”

Molina says Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom, which he read when he was 20 years old, the year Franco died.

“I think I was so moved by this book because it was about the suppressed past. The American Civil War is analogous to the Spanish Civil War. The stories about them are told in a very fragmented way. The past is not an archive. It is a network of voices. And it is not even past. This is the lesson from Faulkner.”

Catherine Millet says the book that changed her life was “the book I wrote myself—The Sexual Life of Catherine M. It is not unrelated to that book about ants. It looks to experience that is outside of literature.”

“Alors!” says Holdengraber. “What about the book that was important in your youth?”

Millet talks about listening to Balzac’s The Lily of the Valley on the radio with her parents when she was 13 or 14 years old. “I felt I had a complicity with literature that others didn’t have,” she says.

Molina says Balzac is also important to him. “Sometimes stories are larger than the books that contain them,” he tells us.

Holdengraber asks Millet why The Lily of the Valley had such power over her.

“The subject matter was extremely important, but the mood of the book was more important,” she says.

Yousef Al-Mohaimeed didn’t have access to television when he was growing up. He tells us his sister read The Arabian Nights to him as a child. He backs up Millet’s assertion about the importance of hearing a text. Japanese haiku was also important because “it taught me about the invisible life of small things.”

“Most importantly, at 18 or 19 I read Zorba The Greek,” he says. “It awakened me from my slumber. It expanded my horizons.”

Oliver Rolin’s choice is Under The Volcano, by Malcolm Lowry “because it dealt with great metaphysical themes—the loss of Eden, guilt, self-betrayal—and it wasn’t solemn like Dostoyevsky, but it was full of humor.”

Rolin qualifies his assertion: “It didn’t change my life, but it accompanied my life. We all have certain books that form a kind of orchestra that surrounds us.”

Annie Proulx says Jack London’s Before Adam, which she read when she was seven years old, was life changing. It was the beginning of a lifetime of reading adventure and cracked open the world of ideas for her. “Even bad books can initiate you,” she says. “Books can lift you out of your life.” She mentions recently reading D. W. Winnecott on the contribution of the mother to society and thinking that a book can also be like a mother.

Antonio Molina talks about the great importance of books that really aren’t very good. “They can have an opening effect on your life,” he says. He tells us about being profoundly moved by Jules Verne’s 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea when he was a child. He recalls being captivated by Captain Nemo’s library. “I wanted to live on the submarine, but I worried about not being able to attend Mass if I did. And later, when I read Mysterious Island and Captain Nemo reappears, I was astonished….”

Paul Holdengraber presses forward with his question. “Do we really want to be changed? Is this a trite idea that books change lives?”

“To become a writer was a way to change my life,” Millet says.

“There is an element of class here,” says Proulx. “Reading is a way out of the working class.”

Molina agrees. “Reading doesn’t happen in a void. A book says, ‘You can do this. There is another life for you’.”

Holdengraber reads Proust on Ruskin on reading and he turns to Rolin. “Oliver, I’ll make you into the one who is absolutely skeptical. What would a changed life be?”
memory
Rolin sidesteps the question by telling us he read The Most Extraordinary Man I’ve Ever Met column in the Reader’s Digest when he was young.

Everyone laughs.

Al-Mohaimeed says, “No book completely changes your life to the other side. It’s more the memory of the book.”

Proulx mentions essays, which she says are edifying but not transformative.

Molina would like to discuss the books that change our lives for the worse. Literature can make us miserable, he says. “We need books that distress us deeply.”

After some discussion, there seems to be a consensus among the panelists that Kafka’s remark that “a book must be the ax for the frozen sea inside us” is a romantic idea.

“In difficult times reading a book sometimes helps more than a friend,” Proulx says.

Holdengraber talks about reading Dostoyevsky’s The Idiot when he was recovering from meningitis as a young person. “It is a platonic disease because you emerge into the light from darkness,” he says. His illness is connected to his experience of reading The Idiot.

* * *

I hustle down the street to Grand Central Station and catch the 6 Train south to Cooper Union for the final public event at 6:30. Umberto Eco delivers the Third Annual Arthur Miller Freedom to Write Lecture, The Advantages of Literature for Life and Death. Mr. Eco informs us the title of his talk is a misnomer. It should be The Advantages of Fiction for Life and Death. “That narrows the subject down to something I can handle,” he says.

As far as I’m concerned, the Great Hall is another misnomer. The acoustics aren’t great and the sight lines are awful due to an extraordinary number of pillars in the auditorium.

“The Advantages of Fiction for Life and Death: This sounds like an untrue proposition. How can such a discourse as fiction have an impact on life and death?”

“After he wrote The Count of Monte Cristo, Dumas visited Italy and discovered a real prison that people said was the place where Edmond Dantes had been incarcerated.”

“Devotees of Joyce go to Dublin to tour the sites in Ulysses. They pretend that something is true.”

“I know Stephen Dedalus better than I know my own father.

“These characters can influence our own behavior. They have the power to shape our destiny. In the past, literature and fiction had a central place in our lives.”

“Fiction educates our sense of what is the case.”

“The truth of King Lear helps us understand the truth of Napoleon.”

“In the universe of literature it is possible to determine if something is true or false. We can claim to make true statements about, say, Little Red Riding Hood.”

“Derrida’s belief in the instability of the text is wrong. We can say an interpretation of a text is bad because the text is frozen, fixed, complete.”

“We have always used the text as a hypertext. Hyperlinks are merely a mechanical perfection of something we were doing before hyperlinks. We are on a continuum. We are all medieval monks living in a scriptorium.”

Gopnik asks Eco if he thinks the internet is producing a new kind of literacy.

“Too much information is no information. It’s the New York Times and Pravda. The web gives no instruction about how to discriminate. If you already know the subject matter, it’s ok. If not, you can’t discriminate. Schools should teach the art of discrimination. Otherwise, everybody makes up their own encyclopedias. There is either infinite credulity or enormous suspicion.”

“The internet can be a kind of powerful prison. We experience the plurality of the world through machinery.”

“Languages are biological entities. They do what they want. Russians now believe that Mafia is a Russian word.”

Gopnik invites Eco to comment on “the endless insularity and narcissism of America,” but Eco declines. “A man who lives in a country ruled by Berlesconi can’t claim any moral superiority,” he says.

By the end of this I’m not sure that Eco has made a case for the advantages of fiction for life and death, but it was certainly an interesting ride. And anyway, I already believed that fiction is essential to a well-lived life.