A Conversation with Claribel Alegría by Abbie Fields
Claribel Alegría and her husband, Darwin “Bud” Flakoll.
Over the past months, I’ve watched the news regarding U.S. relations with Cuba with bated breath. In March, Minnesota Democratic Rep. Collin Peterson introduced into the U.S. House of Representatives HR4645, the Travel Restriction Reform and Export Enhancement Act. Chairman of the Agricultural Committee, Peterson advocated agricultural trade with Cuba that would benefit Minnesota farmers and lessen hardships experienced in Cuba. He also advocated fewer restrictions on U.S. citizens wanting to visit the island.
Over the course of house debates and deals, the export and agricultural dimensions of the bill seem to have been put aside. Still, the travel restrictions look ripe for reform. This doesn’t mean no travel restrictions, but the idea is to roll back to a Clinton-era understanding of the rules. George W. Bush turned the heat up on Cuba; Obama may be finally turning it down. Not way down, but a start.
I’ve already got travel guides, history books, and other literature on Cuba lined up on my desk. I’ve begun planning. Why? Because visiting Cuba means taking the blinders off. Seeing Cuba means seeing the world in a radically different way.
I’ll let poet and essayist Claribel Alegría explain:
AF: You lived in Mexico, Chile, Uruguay, Argentina, and Paris during the 1950s and early 1960s, which was where many of the writers who would become the most critically acclaimed of the Latin “boom” were living at the time. Writers such as Cortázar, Fuentes, Vargas Llosa, García Márquez, Benedetti, and, of course, Neruda. Why do you think this was such a key moment for young Latin American writers?
CA: I think the Cuban Revolution had a lot to do with it, because when the Cuban Revolution won, lots of people from the United States, from Europe, from all over suddenly focused their eyes on Latin America. They were wonderful writers, but nobody had paid much attention to many of them. And there was a publishing house called Seix Barral in Barcelona, Spain, that had started publishing these writers, and that caused a sort of “boom.” So these writers are very well known in Spain and the rest of the countries of Latin America….
AF: Do you think the interest in these writers had something to do with political repression in their countries, or with living as political refugees or exiles? For instance, the writers who were in Paris in the early sixties.
CA: Yes, many of them were in exile because they couldn’t go back to their countries. Julio Cortázar, for instance, wasn’t in forced exile but he chose exile because he didn’t like the Peronistas [in Argentina], and so he went to Paris. When I met Vargas Llosa he was working at Agence France-Presse. It was dangerous for him in Peru at that time, I think. And for Mario Benedetti, it was far too dangerous to go back to Uruguay. So they were living in exile. I am talking about 1962 to 1966, before we went to Majorca….
AF: I know you do not consider your writing “political” as such – you have said that your political poems are not really political, but are rather poems of love to your country. Do you think that political events have motivated your writing?
CA: Let me tell you something. Before the Cuban Revolution – there’s that Cuban Revolution again! – I didn’t care about politics. I thought that writers couldn’t do anything about these dictators in Central America. I thought, What can we do with these military dictators and the U.S. government always helping them? Then the Cuban Revolution happened and I marveled at that. I thought if the Cubans can do it, why not Central Americans? At that time I was living in Paris, and I started thinking about 1932 in El Savador. I was only a child in ’32; I was seven years old, but I remember – a child’s memory is really something. And then I started talking about this, and it was Carlos Fuentes who told me I needed to write about it. But I had been a disciple of Juan Ramón Jiménez, who had taught me to work very hard in poetry – that was my genre – and I had no experience with prose. I’d always worked with poetry, all my life. And then Bud, who was a newspaperman, suggested we write it together. And that’s how Cenizas de Izalco (Ashes of Izalco) came about. And, yes, in Cenizas I was very focused on the fact that the people who would read the book would find out what had happened in Central America. The love story is incidental. We mostly wanted to transmit the historical event.
But when I said that my poems are poems of love, that is true too, because I never sit down to write a poem in order to denounce something. For that, I have prose, or the testimonials, or historical novels. However, I was hit really hard by the things that were happening in Central America, and those things filtered into my poetry, and so some people think they are political poems. I don’t care; it’s okay, whatever they think. I never wanted to commit my poetry in that way.
Claribel Alegría's interview was first published in Tin House no. 32.
Share on FacebookA Conversation with Charles D’Ambrosio by Heather Larimer
Charles D'Ambrosio
Agents, editors, writers, readers – they’ll tell you: Get rid of back story. But should back story be so reviled? Really.
“Back story” in these instances, of course, usually means explanation. This is what happened before to the characters. Boredom! Chop it up and take it to the dumpster.
But what if back story could be made sexy again? If that tussle on the mattress (or table or couch or the turf of the local football field) that spawned you, in all its I-don’t-want-to-go-there-but-f*ck-that’s-a-story glory, could be revived? Because surely your characters did something nasty to get where they are. And surely that’s more interesting than letting them play out conservative, bourgeois values in front of you and the world.
Maybe Charlie can help you understand:
CD:My brother-in-law was childhood buddies with the Mitchell brothers, who made, most famously, Behind the Green Door. I want to go down into the gone world of San Francisco porn. I don’t like the story; I like the back story. When I approach a thing I want somebody to say, “I’m sorry, I can’t tell you the story,” because my response is like, “Fuck you, I don’t want your story, I want the story about how you won’t tell me the story.” Back story is where the fecundity is before everything cools and hardens and dies into cliché. It’s where life is. It’s where contradiction is. If somebody offers me the story, I immediately look for the back door and the room where all the props are stored.
HL: So what’s you take on porn?
CD: The porn thing is particular and amazing. I suspect it began with hippie chicks who’d fuck on camera for fifty bucks and then like so much of the sixties – the glories of sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll – everything turned to shit. Porn is where free love had to start paying for Vietnam, maybe. Anyway, I’m always interested in this kind of black de Sade underside, what happens when the civil barriers between people are removed. In Piero Pasolini’s brilliant movie of 120 Days of Sodom, one of the characters says something like, “The only problem with sex is the need for another person.” Woody Allen has an answer for this, but forget it. The point is, once you pose that extreme question the next step is the elimination of the other, the annihilation of that other who frustrates, who pollutes your need. We live in muck and I’m not big on purity as an answer; more muck, I say. But the consciousness fascinates me. And I want to sink down into it. It’s gone but I’ve got a tour guide, a great one. Then there’s this lingering fifties thing, this strange Sandra Dee world. A lot of guys making porn in this particular heyday were maybe jocks in hot cars whose main sexual ambition was to get a hand up a girl’s skirt; then they did, and more, and what happened after – after, the aftermath of an innocence, the horror and despair of what was initially a victory – that’s the shit.
Charles D’Ambrosio is the author of two collections of short stories, The Point (1995) and The Dead Fish Museum (2006), and a collection of essays, Orphans (2005). Interview was first published in Tin House no. 14.
Share on FacebookArt Friday: More on Christian Boltanski
Christian Boltanski, Cover Image from The Possible Life of Christian Boltanski
Nearly every single day, including Sundays and holidays, people come to Inkslinger to read my post about "salon life" in Minneapolis and a talk I led on Christian Boltanski way back in March. I feel bad for those folks stumbling upon my post. It doesn't say much about Christian Boltanski (so I'm NOT going to link to it!). And these poor souls had to have waded through pages of Google hits to find that wee-thing. I put up the post just to have something there -- because March (and February and April and May and June) were such bears. Too much work, too little art, and far too much winter up here in Minnesota.
A group of art-loving individuals came together that evening half-a-year ago to discuss the recently published 200-pg. interview/memoir by Christian Boltanski, The Possible Life of Christian Boltanski. If you don't know Christian Boltanksi -- and some people don't, and I think that's sad, sad, sad -- but, then, I don't know a hell of a lot of hip, fantastic things, and I'm always hoping no one will judge me for that -- let me give you a run-down of cocktail-party talking points to use some day in the future. He's French. He's married to Annette Messager. He creates large installations, often using votive candles, blown-up yearbook-ish pictures, wire, lights, and clothes. He's married to Annette Messager. One of his earliest canonical pieces (housed now in the Pompidou) is The Impossible Life of Christian Boltanski. Oh -- and he's married to Annette Messager. Yes, yes -- I'm just making sure you're reading carefully. Reason: I came to learn about Christian because of my true-blue love for Annette and her work, but back then (1996) Annette wasn't much known in North America while Christian was a superstar. Now that Annette's a superstar in France, I'm hoping the same happens over here. But back to the point....
Which is: this book The Possible Life of Christian Boltanski (and the people clicking on my blog in the hope-0f-all-hopes I've actually written something about it or him, or both). Because we're all busy, busy art people, we read a few chapters, maybe six or so? (Hey, that's more than most Ph.D. students read of a book for their oral exams!) We also read this review of the book -- which maybe you've read, too, if you've been clicking on all the links regarding Christian Boltanski. Go click on it -- you should -- it gives an idea how Christian's storytelling can be received.
I have a different take on The Possible Life. For one, I'm not looking for pictures of art (a criticism leveled at the book). Maybe I'm not looking for any discussion of art. Why? Because the book IS the artwork. Memoir as art. Story as art. No, life as art. No, the artist life as the exemplar life as the oeuvre, and this book gives us the documents (detritus?) of life/art to sort through, all in the guise of giving the story of Christian from childhood to the present. That's Part One of my thesis regarding this lengthy conversation between Christian Boltanski and Catherine Grenier. Part Two of my thesis about this marvelous volume (I love the book! Go buy it!) is that it's also the story of Grenier's relationship with Boltanski, now going on for two decades.
Two stories for the price of one. How fabulous is that?
As early as 1990, you see, Grenier has been curating shows that include Christian (and Annette! never forget Annette!). She also wrote one of the most interesting essays on their work that I found in the French archives back in 2000-2001. It's titled “Légendes Dorées” (Golden Legends) and it was written for an exhibit put on in Normandy: Vie d’artistes (Life of Artists). The artists included Boltanski, Annette, Hannah Darboven, James Lee Byars, Arnulf Rainer, Ger Van Elk, Zush, and On Kawara. I have never seen this exhibition mentioned in U.S. writings on French art. That's too bad -- the essay may give incredible insight into Grenier's view of contemporary French art and how its trajectory is presented and framed under her influence at the Musée National d'Art Moderne, Paris.
I encourage reading The Possible Life of Christian Boltanski side-by-side with "Légendes Dorées." (I have a copy if you can't make it to the Bibliothéque nationale Richelieu). In it, Grenier questioned the role of art criticism and biographies when dealing with artists like Boltanski. These artists are their own best biographers, and that biography they give has a very special role in the art as a whole. Put simply, according to Grenier, the oeuvre is the life of the artist as presented or told by the artist.
Grenier presents a whole theory to explain this that I won't parse out here (it contains a lot of that French theory my overlords in grad school thought ridiculous and should be stripped from any discussion of French art). Essentially, Grenier sees artists like Boltanski moving away from their psychological, biological being. They stake everything, instead, on being an “artist.” They live out a role, and they do so all the time, in everything they do, including when they tell stories about themselves. According to Grenier and her co-curator Françoise Cohen, there is nothing outside the life-oeuvre or artist-as-oeuvre.
Indeed, the raison-d’être of the artist is now located in the creation of an “exemplar life.” Like a saint, is how Grenier and Cohen put it.
The Possible Life of Christian Boltanksi fulfills, twenty years later, Grenier’s thesis in that 1990 exhibition. Christian is his biographer. It is through this biography that his oeuvre is presented. Indeed, this biography/memoir is more important than what we conventionally understand as the oeuvre—thus the scarcity of pictures. And that’s because the oeuvre is not simply a catalogue of works, it’s the time he’s lived. Meanwhile, the art critic/historian is there to listen and to ask questions, no more.
So that’s the first thing I found very interesting in the book.
The second is more a detail from this biography. I’m always moved by French artists talking about ’68 and the aftermath. It was a tough time for artists because art didn’t completely change. The stand against the powers that be didn't reform the world, including the art world. Not surprisingly, a number of curators and critics in the ‘70s still railed against the fact that art was still art. But here, Boltanski talks of that time with such energy. I find it refreshing to hear of artists doing art with such little regard for the marketplace. It doesn’t seem possible or probable these days, now that contemporary art has become so inflated financially.
Maybe that's just nostalgia -- maybe it's just a lovely moment of rewriting history -- and that's certainly possible from a guy known to have a huge ego, even way back then. Still, it's nice to read a reflection of that era that isn't bitter. Thanks, Christian.
Share on FacebookComing Up: Tin House Interviews
Tin House, The World Within
Now that I've finished going through The Paris Review Interviews -- all four volumes of them -- I'm turning my attention to Tin House's single volume of interviews: The World Within: Writers Talk. Tin House kindly sent me a copy last December, and I'm oh-so-grateful they haven't asked me to return it! The contents are fabulous. Right after receiving the volume, I posted this snippet from Rikki Ducornet's interview with Rachel Resnick. Starting next Monday (September 27, 2010), I'll explore the other marvelous interviews.
I'll be frank -- I enjoy the Tin House interviews more than those in The Paris Review. Some of The Paris Review interviews are astounding, of course. My favorites have been with Salman Rushdie, Norman Mailer, Maya Angelou, Huraki Murakami, V.S. Naipaul, Jack Kerouac, Truman Capote (true love!), Peter Carey, James Baldwin, and Toni Morrison. Each of these writers spoke passionately about place, voice, politics, crisis, the purpose of art, and/or the value of history. They said racy things -- and I play these words again and again in my mind. The Tin House interviews consistently go after these racy thoughts. They let the writer be who they are -- at least as far as interviews can.
Join me starting Monday. I think I'll begin with Charles D'Ambrosio and porn.
Share on FacebookMarilynne Robinson: The Art of Fiction (The Paris Review Interviews, Vol. 4)
Marilynne Robinson
This Monday, we post snippets of the last Paris Review Interview from Volume 4 -- indeed, from the whole book series. I hope you enjoyed the anecdotes, words of advice, and reflections about the life of the writer captured in this series.
Here, then, is Marilynne Robinson on beauty:
Interviewer:
[Your character] Ames [from Gilead] says that in our everyday world there is "more beauty than our eyes can bear." He's living in America in the late 1950s. Would he say that today?
Robinson:
You have to have a certain detachment in order to see beauty for yourself rather than something that has been put in quotation marks to be understood as "beauty." Think about Dutch painting, where sunlight is falling on a basin of water and a woman is standing there in the clothes that she would wear when she wakes up in the morning -- that beauty is a casual glimpse of something very ordinary. Or a painting like Rembrandt's Carcass of Beef, where a simple piece of meat caught his eye because there was something mysterious about it. You also get that in Edward Hopper: Look at the sunlight! or Look at the human being! These are instances of genius. Cultures cherish artists because they are people who can say, Look at that. And it's not Versailles. It's a brick wall with a ray of sunlight falling on it.
At the same time, there has always been a basic human tendency toward a dubious notion of beauty. Think about cultures that rarify themselves into courts in which people paint themselves with lead paint and get dumber by the day, or women have ribs removed to have their waists cinched tighter. There's no question that we have our versions of that now. The most destructive thing we can do is act as thought this is some sign of cultural, spiritual decay rather than humans just acting human, which is what we're doing most of the time.
Marilynne Robinson is the author of Housekeeping (1980), Gilead (2004), The Death of Adam: Essays on Modern Thought (1998), and Home (2008). Her interview with The Paris Review was published in 2008.
Share on FacebookDavid Grossman: The Art of Fiction (The Paris Review Interviews, Vol. 4)
David Grossman
Where Stories Come From:
Interviewer:
Do your story ideas usually come about in this kind of way -- seemingly out of nowhere?
Grossman:
I often feel that my subjects find me. When I start writing about a character, a young lady, for instance, I don't understand why she is so important to me. She is totally alien and comes from another milieu. Yet gradually I see how choosing her was inevitable, and how she evokes in me things that without her, I never would have been able to explore. Then sometimes I'll have a character and not know what to do with him. Take the novella "Frenzy," which I was writing, on and off, for eleven years, between books. I began with the character of this obsessive, jealous husband, but I couldn't find him a partner for his voyage through the night. I tried putting him with his brother, with his friend, there were three or four other attempts, and each time I felt I could not write it, because I didn't have someone capable of balancing all his craziness. And then one day a character named Esti just jumped to the page. I wasn't sure if I liked her. She was foreign to me, but she forced her way in, and suddenly the book was completed. I was so relieved. Having Esti allowed me to explore this rut of feelings, this monster, jealousy....
Interviewer:
Do you have any strategies you employ when you get stuck?
Grossman:
Sometimes I write a letter to my protagonist, as if he were a real human being. I ask, What's the difficulty? Why can't you make it? What is preventing me from understanding you? It's always helpful.
Grossman's books include See Under: Love (1986), Be My Knife (1998), and Someone to Run With (2000). The Paris Review Interview with Grossman was published in 2007.
Share on FacebookOrhan Pamuk: The Art of Fiction (The Paris Review Interviews, Vol. 4)
Orhan Pamuk
Interviewer:
When you're experimenting with ideas, how do you chose the form of your novels? Do you start with an image, with a first sentence?
Pamuk:
There is no constant formula. But I make it my business not to write two novels in the same mode. I try to change everything. This is why so many of my readers tell me, I liked this novel of yours, it's a shame you didn't write other novels like that, or, I never enjoyed one of your novels until you wrote that one -- I've heard that especially about The Black Book. In fact I hate to hear this. It's fun, and a challenge, to experiment with form and style, and language and mood and persona, and to think about each book differently.
The subject matter of a book may come to me from various sources. With My Name Is Red, I wanted to write about my ambition to become a painter. I had a false start; I began to write a monographic book focused on one painter. Then I turned the painter into various painters working together in an atelier. The point of view changed because now there were other painters talking. At first I was thinking of writing about a contemporary painter, but then I thought this Turkish painter might be too derivative, too influenced by the West, so I went back in time to write about miniaturists. That was how I found my subject.
Some subjects also necessitate certain formal innovations or storytelling strategies. Sometimes, for example, you've just seen something, or read something, or been to a movie, or read a newspaper article, and then you think, I'll make a potato speak, or a dog, or a tree. Once you get the idea you start thinking about symmetry and continuity in the novel. And you feel, Wonderful, no one's done this before.
Finally, I think of things for years. I may have ideas and then I tell them to my close friends. I keep lots of notebooks for possible novels I may write. Sometimes I don't write them, but if I open a notebook and begin taking notes for it, it is likely that I will write that novel. So when I'm finishing one novel my heart may be set on one of these projects; and two months after finishing one I start writing the other.
Panuk's books include The White Castle (1990), My Name is Red (2001), The Museum of Innocence (2009). His interview with The Paris Review was published in 2005
Share on FacebookHaruki Murakami: The Art of Fiction (The Paris Review Interviews, Vol. 4)
Haruki Maurakami
Are you one of the thousands of writers struggling to get an agent and a publishing house behind you? Well, perhaps it's time to take a page from Haruki Murakami's book.
While a self-styled surrealist writer, Murakami deliberately wrote Norweigen Wood in the realist style so to break into mainstream publishing. Otherwise, he would have remained a "cult writer," as he calls it.
Still, surrealist and magical realism techniques are what capture his imagination. Here are some of his thoughts on magical realism -- and how he subverts it for his own purpose:
Interviewer:
One of the cardinal rules of magical realism is not to call attention to the fantastic elements of the story. You, however, disregard this rule: your characters often comment on the strangness of the story line, even call the reader's attention to it. What purpose does this serve? Why?
Murakami:
That's a very interesting question. I'd like to think about it . . . Well, I think it's my honest observation of how strange the world is. My protagonists are experiencing what I experience as I write, which is also what the readers experience as they read. Kafka or García Marquez, what they are writing is more literature, in the classical sense. My stories are more actual, more contemporary, more the postmodern experience. Think of it like a movie set, where everything -- all the props, the books on the wall, the shelves -- is fake. The walls are made of paper. In the classical kind of magic realism, the walls and the books are real. If something is fake in my fiction, I like to say it's fake. I don't want to act as if it's real.
Interviewer:
To continue the metaphor of the movie set, might the pulling back of the camera intend to show the workings of the studio?
Murakami:
I don't want to persuade the reader that it's a real thing; I want to show it as it is. In a sense, I'm telling those readers that it's just a story -- it's fake. But when you experience the fake as real, it can be real. It's not easy to explain.
In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, writers offered the real thing; that was their task. In War and Peace Tolstoy describes the battleground so closely that the readers believe it's the real thing. But I don't. I'm not pretending it's the real thing. We are living in a fake world; we are watching fake evening news. We are fighting a fake war. Our government is fake. But we find reality in this fake world. So our stories are the same; we are walking through the fake scenes, but ourselves, as we walk through these scenes, are real. The situation is real, in the sense that it's a commitment, it's a true relationship. That's what I want to write about.
Murahami's work includes Norwegian Wood (2000), Sputnik Sweetheart (2001), and the upcoming 1Q84 (2011). His interview with The Paris Review was published in 2004.
Share on FacebookV. S. Naipaul: The Art of Fiction (The Paris Review Interviews, Vol. 4)
V.S. Naipaul (copyright Getty)
As Naipul and his work shows us, the author's perspective or voice is not just about style. It's also about place and history. And while Naipul is right that an English -- or American -- writer is born into a great knowledge of origins and culture, I'd venture to suggest that many new and emerging American writers would benefit from revisiting that history/culture. If you're a writer having trouble with "voice," I suggest bringing that historical and cultural knowledge to bear on it:
Interviewer:
Do you think it is crucial to your function and material as a writer to know where you came from and what made you what you are?
Naipaul:
When you're like me -- born in a place where you don't know the history, and no one tells you the history, and the history, in fact, doesn't exist, or in fact exists only in documents -- when you are born like that, you have to learn about where you came from. It takes a lot of time. You can't simply write about the world as thought it is all there, all granted to you. If you are French or an English writer, you are born to a great knowledge of your origins and your culture. When you are born like me, in an agricultural colony far away, you have to learn everything. The writing has been a process of inquiry and learning for me.
Naipul's work includes A House of Mr. Biswas (1961), India: A Million Mutinies Now (1990), and Beyond Belief: Islamic Excursions among the Converted Peoples (1998). His interview with The Paris Review was published in 1998.
Share on FacebookPaul Auster: The Art of Fiction (The Paris Review Interviews, Vol. 4)
Paul Auster (photo by Dmitri Kasterine)
"The anecdote as a form of knowledge."
-- Paul Auster, from The Invention of Solitude
Paul Auster on the purest, most essential form of storytelling:
So many strange things have happened to me in my life, so many unexpected and improbable events, I'm no longer certain that I know what reality is anymore. All I can do is talk about the mechanics of reality, to gather evidence about what goes on in the world and try to record it as faithfully as I can. I've used that approach in my novels. It's not a method so much as an act of faith: to present things as they really happen, not as they're supposed to happen or as we'd like them to happen. Novels are fictions, of course, and therefore they tell lies (in the strictest sense of the term), but through those lies every novelist attempts to tell the truth about the world. Taken together, the little stories in The Red Notebook present a kind of position paper on how I see the world. The bare-bones true about the unpredictability of experience. There's not a shred of the imaginary in them. There can't be. You make a pact with yourself to tell the truth and you'd rather cut off your right arm than break that promise. Interestingly enough, the literary model I had in mind when I wrote those pieces was the joke. The joke is the purest, most essential form of storytelling. Every word has to count.
Given Auster's interest in both the anecdote and the joke, it is not surprising that he developed what became the National Story Project with NPR. For him, the aim was a true representation of American life, something difficult to achieve due to celebrity/star fixation.
Interviewer:
Did you feel you were performing a public service?
Auster:
To some degree, I suppose I did. It was an opportunity to engage in guerilla warfare against the monster.
Interviewer:
The monster?
Auster:
The "entertainment-industrial complex," as the art critic Robert Hughes once put it. The media presents us with little else but celebrities, gossip, and scandal, and the way we depict ourselves on television and in the movies has become so distorted, so debased, that real life has been forgotten. What we're given are violent shocks and dimwitted escapist fantasies, and the driving force behind it all is money. People are treated like morons. They're not human beings anymore, they're consumers, suckers to be manipulated into wanting things they don't need. Call it capitalism triumphant. Call it the free-market economy. Whatever it is, there's very little room in it for representations of actual American life.
Interviewer:
And you thought the National Story Project could change all that?
Auster:
No, of course not. But at least I tried to make a little dent in the system. By giving so-called ordinary people a chance to share their stories with an audience, I wanted to prove that there's no such thing as an ordinary person. We all have intense inner lives, we all burn with ferocious passions, we've all lived thorugh memorable experiences of one kind or another.
Auster's work includes The New York Trilogy (1987), The Book of Illusions (2002), The Brooklyn Follies (2005), and my favorite, Leviathan (1992). His Paris Review interview was published in 2003.
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