Chapter 147: Beautiful Disquiet
Argentinian poet Alejandra Pizarnik once wrote, “All night I hope my language might succeed in configuring me.”
There’s alchemy to words, the chance that the right dosage and syntax can capture something about ourselves that turns what was vague solid, and spells out what we couldn’t bring ourselves to think.
Some books can tell that tale, others can make you feel it, and only a few achieve both, where form and subject seem to occur in unison.
It’s a rare talent to be found in the work of Chilean author Lina Meruane, a Distinguished Writer in Residence at NYU. She has an award-winning body of work that includes five novels, and various books of essays, short stories and theatrical dialogues, two of the former are available in English, Seeing Red and Nervous System, both objects of beautiful disquiet.
DC: As a writer you were first shaped by journalism, in which you started working when you were 21 years old, covering themes that would later reappear in your work. Could you tell us what you learned and took from that time into literature?
LM: I decided to study journalism early on, partly because I was fascinated by the figure of (Italian journalist) Oriana Fallaci. That is no longer the case because she later became someone else, but back then her interest in the world and her interest in the people in her interviews and her whole character fascinated me. There also was the prospect of having a job that would allow me to write.
Cultural journalism was a great education, because I undertook interviews obsessively. Before meeting each writer I read all their books, and studied their character, and it taught me the way to read to understand a work. I also did travel journalism, in the magazine of a bus line that crosses Chile. There were short trips, and then there were 36-hour trips from Santiago, the capital, to the north.
At that time we didn't have the internet, so I had to do whatever research I could then get to the places, go to the public libraries, to see what was going on there, what was interesting about it, and talk to the people. This taught me to think about the journey and made me lose my shyness.
I also worked in a newspaper in Valparaíso, where I more or less knocked on the door and asked if they could hire me. They took me on and quickly realized that I was interested in writing and that I wasn't very good at running after politicians because I didn't know who they were. So they started sending me to do the most extravagant things, like interviewing the widows of shipwrecked fishermen. Or to spend four days on a Navy training ship, doing naval exercises, the only woman among 300 men. I learned a lot, and I wrote a lot, during those years.
DC: Ten years passed between the “radical experience” that inspired your novel Seeing Red and your writing. In the meantime, what you conceived as a memoir became a novel. The protagonist of Nervous System is ten years younger than you were when you wrote it. Is that the necessary distance to understand an experience, or to put words to it? What does time represent in your writing process?
LM: I find that my novels have a lot of reflection time behind them. I take very long to find the tone and the way in. Seeing Red is a novel that I must have started five times, in different ways, until the appropriate language for that book appeared.
But it is also true that I needed to let some time pass because the experience from which that novel arises is a very radical one, which is that of having lost my sight. Fortunately, the blindness was an experience that lasted only three months and I was able to recover, thanks to three surgeries.
I think the closeness to the event was not allowing me to write a novel. I thought I would write a memoir. To write a novel, I needed distance. When I had it, it turned out that the mere reproduction of what had happened no longer held my interest, because I had already processed the event of blindness, and what appeared in the writing of the novel were other questions that had to do with implications on love, family and social relationships of a sudden disability.
So, one's own experience, or the account of one's own experience, that had mattered to me at one time, ceased to be so important. And the questions that came up when I finally wrote the novel had changed, and for me they became much more interesting and more important questions, ones that I had not yet resolved in my life but that instead I resolved or investigated in the actual writing of the novel.
DC: You have said, “Fiction for me is always anchored, to a small or very large point, in a real element in life.” How do you identify those anchors, and know they will have the desired weight? What does it offer to play with that intimate material, and what do you gain by going deeper into fiction?
LM: In truth, I think of everything as material. I think of my own experience as material, of history as material, of reading and the ideas that arise from it as material. In other words, everything for me ends up in literature, in writing.
I have lost the fear of saying that there are, in fact, many things that come from personal life, from the stories of others, and that it all converges in the text. In fiction, unlike non-fiction, there exists great liberation. While in nonfiction one somehow promises the reader that one is going to tell him something true, something that happened or something that at least is anchored in very concrete references, in fiction one can allow oneself to go in other directions, explore other facets, and even go behind the characters and see what they are doing.
There is something very joyful in the work of fiction that although it may start from an element of the real, one's own or someone else's, invention allows us to explore other avenues, other directions.
When I am very tired of reality I think today I am going to write a story, I am going to write a novel, I am going to allow myself to take other paths and follow my characters and free myself from my self, from the personal self. Let's say that all these real experiences in fiction are points of support, from which to take off, as it were, the base from which one leaps. And what happens in fiction is that aerial somersault that takes you to another place as yet unknown.
DC: And the shape of that somersault matters. In your novels, language is inseparable from the story it not only tells but also conveys. How do you find the right form?
LM: Sometimes, in my first attempts, I got to page five, page ten, page fifteen, and felt that the text would not stand up, that it was as stillborn, and I abandoned it. Yet I also know that though you can abandon a project, the project never abandons you, it always comes back. It's like a kind of ghost. There is a haunting.
When you truly need to write something, you may not find the way, but the text always returns to demand to be written, because it is beating inside you. If I feel that the text is not latent with energy, an emotion, a commotion, I know I should not go on. I should not persist with that form, and that the right way will come. And when it comes...when I started to write the version of Seeing Red that was published, I felt there was a pulse in that writing and that I needed to keep going. It was like the writing itself was pushing me.
When that happens, I know that this book is the one I need to write, that this is the form, and this is the voice. The words themselves begin to acquire a certain autonomy. It is as if each word as it appears pushes the writing forward. That invention, that wordplay, carries me to where the plot stops mattering and words are leading the writing. And while I'm enjoying that, I feel that the text has a force that I hope is going to carry the reader forward as well.
For me, each book is an apprenticeship in the writing of that book. Not only a challenge in terms of work but also of enjoyment, pleasure, of play, which is what allows me to write each book, to follow where it leads me. I think that's why the form of the writing changes each time. How to attempt a different writing? How to think about the characters in a different way? What is the question behind this text and how could it be formulated otherwise in the prose itself?
There is a mandate of mine, which is to look for different manners of writing, but at the same time, it’s also happening intuitively. I am investigating how to write that book and I am discovering it as I write it. They are the result of searches and findings.
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Nothing good ever came from writers punishing themselves. We know writing is hard. We’re here to show that it doesn’t have to be torture. Writerland, The Delacorte Review Newsletter comes out every week.
Félix Valloton, Le Bibliophile