|
Literary Review
At the extreme edges
Alison Louise Kennedy.
Her black humour opens a "Rear Window" to Hamlet's graveyard ("I love Hitchcock"). She compares a writer's job to puissance, the equestrian competition for judging a horse's ability to jump heights. Only "I compete with myself." Her Indelible Acts (2002) has been as acclaimed as her earlier collections of short stories (Now that You're Back, Original Bliss) and novels (So Am I Glad, Everything You Need). Winner of many awards, and judge of The Booker and The Guardian prizes herself, ALISON LOUISE KENNEDY is also reviewer and editor of fiction anthologies.
Kennedy has been described as reader unfriendly in writing, and curt in personal encounters. But she proved to be a marvellous reader of her own work-in-progress at the British Council's Provocations Bookcase (Edinburgh Book Festival 2002) organised by the British Council, Edinburgh, Scotland. The eerie microtones were echoic.
Later, the interview with GOWRI RAMNARAYAN was unflinching, but not without odd strokes. Kennedy sang a bhajan (language indecipherable), and chuckled over the Indian's retaliation: Muthuswamy Dikshitar's "Santatam pahimam", a Sanskrit hymn to the Mother Goddess, set to the tune of "God save the Queen". Excerpts:
A hotel dining room, guests at the table. Yet, the opening scene in your novel-in-progress sends a chill down the spine. Nothing horrible has happened, but you push the real-familiar to an edge from where it seems weird-unreal. Is this the way you see things everyday?
EVERYTHING comes from character. I am interested in people who are adrift in extreme situations, when perceptions become intense. The woman (in the novel) is cut off from everything, including her own recollections. I travelled on her behalf in Budapest, taking notes, seeing the world as she'd see it, feeling the way she did. Frightening, especially the sense of being cut off. I've done this kind of thing before, but it is more extreme in this book... Terrible things are going to happen to this woman...
In all your work, a wacky, acid humour cuts that emotional intensity. We relax, but you tauten the strings again. A deliberate ploy?
The scariest ghost stories are also funny. I let you off the hook now and then by making you laugh, but the next time it gets dark it will be that much darker. Soon I realised these effects were beyond what I consciously expected. The leavening had other reactions too. You laugh, become happy, vulnerable — that's when I do horrible things to you.
You've won so many prizes yourself, and been a Booker judge. Do literary prizes encourage quality in writing?
The British press always attacks these prizes. The PR companies say that controversies sell the book better, so they encourage the press to devalue the prize, the writers, and books. Shortlists are always criticised. So the prizes have a way of reminding everybody x number of times a year, just how terrible everybody's writing is, how awful writers are, and how none of them deserves to get any money at all. The Booker means much less than it did 10 years ago. Most of the prizes have very complicated agendas, so they're not about encouraging quality, or diversity, which is a part of quality. Frustrating.
With the new meta-language that it has crafted, does post-modern criticism help the reader or the writer anymore?
Today literary criticism is a monster without reference to the book. If your writing is incomprehensible it means either you don't know what you mean, and are resorting to obfuscation to prevent others from finding it out, or that you are putting something simple into weird, pseudo-French, post-Derrida language to make it sound impressive. After all, what new things can you say about James Joyce?
They can say something new about you.
Yes, they can if they write in English. Or if people came out more subjective, responded as readers... Some of it sounds like the Holy Writ, and factual, whereas they are merely opinion, an anthropological piece of work. Critics are so serious. They see a plan in everything you do, x is always a part of y. A tiny thing you mention somewhere becomes central to a whole thesis. They can't see a writer flailing about, trying to make things up, and x happening by mistake.
Stop! Flailing about?
Oh yes. Until you start writing you don't know what's going to come out. It's not like a pursuit... It's a huge process of controlling panic. Plan ever so much, when you write you're actually encouraging chaos because you want the book to be alive. If you're dealing with something that has its own life, you can't entirely control it, you are encouraging it to be uncontrolled. You make a tiger — and then, try to deal with it so it won't eat you. Writing is connected with dreaming, with playing. If the person who wrote a story can't tell you how it happened, I don't see how anybody else can. You can guess, but no one can give a definitive answer, (mischievously) certainly not the critic.
You said that language is getting fuzzier today. How?
I mean the active use of language to say things other than what it means, often to hide crime. Sometimes it is politically correct usage. You get people lying and obscuring the fact they're lying by making it impossible to understand what they are saying at all. There's another kind of squeamish, racist or discriminatory language — tiptoeing around people with disabilities, or people who live differently from the way they do. It is as if you are terrified of people who are different. Offensive! Or take marketing jargon. Companies are doing just what they were doing 10 years ago but now they've taken on board all the Green language so that it doesn't belong to the Green people anymore. It is through language that we make sense out of our lives. Many forces are now making it hide what it means, taking the power away from you. Or you get a mass of people making a pet of some word and training it to do their thing!
What do you think of Indian writers?
There's a great interest in Indian books now, but what we get here is clichéd, or poorly translated. The only kind of people we meet are the family collecting cow dung in the streets. The misery level gets to a point where it's quite absurd. You never meet anybody for long enough. A House for Mr Biswas was interesting, but Naipaul won't let Mr. Biswas become a full human being. I'm not being allowed to have any contact with his emotions. Everyone has followed that Naipaul line. Not that I want people to be merely polemical. But I've not read a politically complex novel about India. What we get is a product saleable in the West, this horrible kind of squalor but its also quite picturesque, tourist brochure and bleak realism. It diminishes somebody having that struggle and makes it silly.
So you can't empathise?
In an Indian novel you can read the glossary at the end and say, now I know something about Parsi culture (or whatever) that I didn't know before. But I don't learn that organically, like I would if I had a Parsi friend. You look for a book where you see a human being from a different culture, living in a different place, who is as fully human as you are. I think there are books like that in India but they aren't getting to Britain because that's not what Britain really wants, certainly not for the purpose of winning prizes.
I know you went to India, but why did you go to a Hindu temple in Dundee?
Why? The brahmin invited me. I went for nearly three years. Relaxing. Good meditation. We sang songs which sounded vaguely Celtic. And nobody said we're going to make you a Hindu. After the puja you got fantastic curry!
Baleful sex is at the core of your work. Any tenderness is fleeting. Why such desolation?
My life is quite desolate in that area... I don't believe in happy endings. I believe in stressful relationships. I try to make the moments of tenderness seem more transcendent by putting them in a context where you look at the other side. When people like each other, they are vulnerable. You are giving all your defences to somebody. I like to look at what happens when you do that... To emphasise the risks. People do take enormous risks. Ninety per cent of the time it isn't dangerous... but occasionally... I like that kind of ritual... it is at the core of mankind. Go to the extreme edge, that's when you know what intensity means.
Printer friendly
page
Send this article to Friends by
E-Mail
Literary Review
|
