Known and Strange Things Page 7

  Above all, there is in Double Negative, as in all Vladislavić’s writing, an impressive facility with metaphor. Metaphors are the observational scaffolding on which the story is set. They also occasion much of Vladislavić’s finest writing in this finely written book: someone has “three wooden clothes pegs with their teeth in the fabric of her dress and they moved with her like a shoal of fish”; “a window display of spectacles looked on like a faceless crowd”; barbershop clients “reclined with their necks in slotted basins like aristocrats on the scaffold”; somebody “faded into the background like a song on the radio”; and, impishly signaling his own technique, lenses on a pair of black-rimmed glasses are “as thick as metaphors.”

  In the 1980s, the scholars George Lakoff and Mark Johnson argued that metaphor is pervasive in the English language and that our penchant for metaphorical speech creates the structures of social interaction. But in Vladislavić’s hands, the metaphor goes well beyond this quotidian utility and, refreshed, reconstructed, and revived, does a great deal more: it becomes a ferry for the uncanny, a deployment of images so exact that the ordinary becomes strange and the strange becomes familiar. Metaphors are at home in South Africa’s strange and sad history, where many things are like many other things, but nothing is quite the same as anything else.

  A metaphor is semantic. A double negative, on the other hand, is syntactical: two negations in their right places in a sentence usually lead to an affirmation (in the wrong places, they could be merely an intensified negation). A double negative, in the sense of two wrongs making a right, is a form of strategic long-windedness. To use two terms of negation, to say, for instance, that something is “not unlike” something else, is not the same as to say it is like that thing. Double negatives register instances of self-canceling misdirection. They are about doubt, the productive and counterproductive aspects of doubt, the pitching ground, the listing figure, and the little gap between intention and effect.

  Beyond the grammatical sense of “double negative,” Vladislavić wants us to think also of the photographic negative, upside down, its colors flipped, its habitation of the dark. Its double, the printed photograph, is the right side up, with a system of colors and shadows that resembles our world, and a form that invites viewing in the light. “A photograph is an odd little memorial that owes a lot to chance and intuition,” Auerbach says. But a photograph is also a little machine of ironies that contains within it a number of oppositions: light and dark, memory and forgetting, ethics and injustice, permanence and evanescence.

  Late in the novel, a grown-up Nev Lister talks to his wife, Leora, about someone who recently interviewed him:

  “She was being ironic, obviously,” she said.

  “Yes.”

  “And so are you.”

  “I guess.”

  “The whole thing is ironic.”

  “Including the ironies.”

  “Maybe they cancel one another out then,” Leora said. “Like a double negative.”

  In Place of Thought

  IN 1913 A compilation of Gustave Flaubert’s satirical definitions was posthumously published as Le Dictionnaire des Idées Reçues (The Dictionary of Received Ideas). Flaubert hated cliché, a hatred that expressed itself not only in the pristine prose of Madame Bovary but also in his letters and in his notes on the thoughtless platitudes of the day. The Dictionary of Received Ideas is a complaint against automatic thinking. What galls Flaubert most is the inevitability, given an action, of a certain standard reaction. We could learn from his impatience: there are many standard formulations in our language, which stand in place of thought, but we proclaim them each time—due to laziness, prejudice, or hypocrisy—as though they were fresh insight.

  I let Flaubert’s Dictionary inspire me, and I also opened myself up to the influence of Ambrose Bierce and his cynical Devil’s Dictionary, Samuel Johnson’s mostly serious but occasionally coruscating Dictionary of the English Language, and Gelett Burgess’s now-forgotten send-up of platitudes, Are You a Bromide? What the entries in these books have in common, in addition to compression and wit, is an intolerance of stupidity. As I wrote my modern cognates, I was struck at how close some of them came to the uninterrogated platitudes in my own head. Stupidity stalks us all.

  AFRICA. A country. Poor but happy. Rising. ALMOND. All eyes are almond-shaped. AMERICAN. With the prefix “all,” a blond. ARTICULATE. Say “You’re very articulate” to young blacks, and then ask where they are from. ARTISAN. A carpenter, in Brooklyn. ATHEISM. Deranged cult of violent fanatics. AUSTRALIANS. Extremely fit. Immune to pain. If you meet one, say “Foster’s.” The whole country is nothing but beaches. BLUE. The color of purity. Countless mysterious ads are devoted to pads and liners that absorb blue liquid. BRAVE. Doomed. BREAST. No joking matter. One glimpse on television sufficient to destroy a childhood. (See CHILDREN.) BUDDHISM. The way of peace. CAESAR. “Veni, vidi, vici.” Get into a conversation about the pronunciation. CARAMEL. Term used to describe black women’s skin. No other meaning known. CHILDREN. The only justification for policy. Always say “our children.” The childless have no interest in improving society. CHINESE. Wonder what they’re thinking. CHOCOLATE. Term used to describe black women’s skin. No other meaning known. CHRISTIANITY. Peace on earth. CLARIFICATION. Reversal. COAL. Clean. COFFEE. Declare that it is intolerable at Starbucks. Buy it at Starbucks. COMMUNITY. Preceded by “black.” White people, lacking community, must make do with property. CRIME. Illegal activities involving smaller amounts of money. CRISIS. Mention that it is composed of the Chinese characters for opportunity and danger. DIVERSITY. Obviously desirable, within limits. Mention your service in the Peace Corps. EGGS. Always say “You can’t make omelets without breaking eggs” whenever the subject of war comes up. EMIGRÉ. Jewish immigrant. EVOLUTION. Only a theory. FASCISM. Always preceded by “creeping.” FEMINISTS. Wonderful, in theory. FISH. A vegetable. GERMANS. When watching football, “never rule out the Germans.” HARVARD. Source of studies quoted on BBC. Never say “I went to Harvard.” Say “I schooled in the Boston area.” HAUTE COUTURE. Always declare that it is made by gay men for boyish girls. Wait hours to see fashion exhibits at the Met. HEAT. Antonym of “humidity.” HILARIOUS. Never simply say “funny.” HIP-HOP. Old-school hip-hop, i.e., whatever was popular when you were nineteen, is great. Everything since then is intolerable. HIPSTER. One who has an irrational hatred of hipsters. ILIAD. Declare a preference for the Odyssey. INDIA. Work your tolerance of or aversion to spicy food into the conversation as quickly as possible. “A land of contrasts.” INTERNET. A waste of time. Have a long online argument with anyone who disagrees. ISLAM. Religion of peace. JAPAN. Mysterious. Always “the Japanese.” Mention Murakami. JAZZ. America’s classical music. The last album was released in 1965. LITERALLY. Swear you’d rather die than use “literally” as an intensifier. MAGISTERIAL. Large book, written by a man. MEN. Always say “All the good ones are gay or taken” within earshot of the straight single ones. MIGRANT. Mexican immigrant. MOCHA. Term used to describe black women’s skin. No other meaning known. NEWSPAPERS. Bemoan their gradual disappearance. Don’t actually buy any. NIETZSCHE. Say “Nietzsche says God is dead,” but if someone says that first, say “God says Nietzsche is dead.” ODYSSEY. Declare a preference for the Iliad. PARIS. Romantic, in spite of the rude waiters and Japanese tourists. Don’t simply like it; “adore” it. POET. Always preceded by “published.” Function unknown. PRETTY. On Facebook, to indicate an unattractive woman. PROUST. No one actually reads him. One rereads him, preferably on summer vacation. PUNS. Always say “No pun intended” to draw attention to the intended pun. RACISM. Obsolete term. Meaning unknown. REGGAE. Sadly, just one album exists in the genre. RUSHDIE. Have a strong opinion on The Satanic Verses. Under no circumstances actually read The Satanic Verses. SCANDAL. If governmental, express surprise that people are surprised. If sexual, declare it a distraction, but seek out the details. SEMINAL. Be sure to use in a review of a woman’s work. Proclaim your innocence after. SMART. Any e
ssay that confirms your prejudices. STRIKE. Always “surgical.” (See EGGS.) SUNSET. Beautiful. Like a painting. Post on Instagram and hashtag #nofilter. TELEVISION. Much improved. Better than novels. If someone says The Wire, say The Sopranos, or vice versa. TOUR DE FORCE. A film longer than two and a half hours and not in English. VALUES. “We must do whatever it takes to preserve our values.” Said as a prelude to destroying them. VIRGINITY. An obsession in Iran and in the olive oil industry. It can be lost, like a wallet. YEATS. Author of two quotations. ŽIŽEK. Observe he’s made some good points, but.

  A Conversation with Aleksandar Hemon

  ONE DAY IN early October 2011, I was waiting outside the hotel across from the New York Public Library when Teju Cole walked down the street. He advanced in long strides, like someone comfortable getting around the city. This was the first time we met, and it was to share a car ride to Scranton, Pennsylvania, to take part in Pages and Places, a literary festival dedicated to books and cities.

  The conversation in the backseat of the car started, I believe, with soccer—never a bad beginning—and then it went on for hours, touching on religion, Miles Davis, Sarajevo and Lagos, New York and Chicago, Sebald, soccer, writing, Hitchens and Dawkins, more soccer, faith, and many other things, including soccer. By the time we took part in the panel we were meant to share, there seemed nothing left to talk about. And then we talked some more, in a church with bad acoustics, and it seemed nobody could hear anything. By the end of the day, I felt I’d never talked so much in my life. But more importantly, I felt that I’d never listened so much ever before. We’ve been friends since.

  Salinger’s Holden Caulfield made a distinction between writers you would like to call on the phone and those you wouldn’t care to talk to at all. Teju Cole belongs to the former group. I grab any occasion to talk to Teju Cole: in person, via Twitter, or, as in this case, by email.

  —ALEKSANDAR HEMON

  ALEKSANDAR HEMON: I’ve always found the insistent distinction between fiction and nonfiction in Anglo American writing very annoying, indeed troubling. For one thing, it implies that nonfiction is all the stuff outside of fiction, or the other way around, the yin and yang of writing. Another problem: it marks a text in terms of its relation to “truth,” a category that is presumably self-evident and therefore stable. But narration cannot contain stable truth, because it unfolds, and it does so before the narrator in one way, and before the listener/reader in another way. Narration is creation of truth, which is to say that truth does not precede it.

  In Bosnian, there are no words that are equivalent to “fiction” and “nonfiction,” or that convey the distinction between them. This is not to say that there is no truth or falsehood. Rather, the stress is on storytelling. The closest translation of “nonfiction” would really be “true stories.”

  You declare Every Day Is for the Thief a work of fiction. Why?

  TEJU COLE: I made a sideways move from art history into writing, and I think this, in part, is why I also find the stern distinction between fiction and nonfiction odd. It’s not at all a natural way of splitting up narrated experience, just as we don’t go around the museum looking for fictional or nonfictional paintings. Painters know that everything is a combination of what’s observed, what’s imagined, what’s overheard, and what’s been done before. Is Monet a nonfiction painter and Ingres a fiction painter? It’s the least illuminating thing we could ask about their works. Some lean more heavily on what’s seen, some more on what’s imagined, but all draw on various sources.

  Writers know this, too, but I think they knew it a lot better before the market took such a hold. Would Miguel de Cervantes have considered himself a writer of fiction? Would François Rabelais? Would Robert Burton consider his activity (let’s telescope the eras here) essentially dissimilar to Rabelais’s? They all pretty much understood themselves to be spinning narratives out of whatever was at hand. And let’s not even get into Daniel Defoe, who played devious games with the emerging genres.

  But these days, a work has to be clearly marked “fiction” or “nonfiction,” and Every Day Is for the Thief is called a work of fiction because it has quite a number of things in it that are made-up. But when I’m reading Michael Ondaatje’s Running in the Family, or W. G. Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn, or those short stories by Lydia Davis, the last thing on my mind is whether they are literal records of reality. Who cares? All I want is to be dragged down into a space of narrative that I haven’t been in before, into a place where, as you say, a truth is created. And let’s be frank: even the most scrupulous New Yorker article is an act of authorial will and framing, and is not as strictly “nonfictional” as it suits us to think it is.

  In any case, you are right, this is an Anglo American obsession. The Rings of Saturn was originally published in German as Eine englische Wallfahrt (An English Pilgrimage). Make of that what you will.

  AH: Sebald is pertinent here, for a number of reasons. As far as I know, none of the books published while he was alive were labeled as fiction or nonfiction, novel or essays. And he made sure that storytelling was at the heart of it. In Austerlitz, for example, he does what I term (for personal use) “concentric narration” (he said that she said that he said…), whereby whatever comes from the past passes through people. The only way to have an organic connection with the past is by way of narration, while the knowledge of (as opposed to information about) history has to be shared in language. I always thought that Sebald used photographs in his books in order to expose their failure as documents. He places photos to interrupt the narration so as to show that they mean nothing unless they are inside storytelling. Photographs might be self-authenticating (as Roland Barthes thought), but their authentic truth is available only in language, as practiced in narration.

  What prompted you to include photos in Every Day Is for the Thief? What kind of work do you want the pictures to do?

  TC: For sure, Sebald was up to something sly with his photographs. His writing tested, much more than that of most other writers, the boundaries of what we consider fiction. I think the photos, many of which were found photos, and many of which were intentionally worn away through repeated photocopying, were there to create a mood. But they were also there to propose a dare. “Look, this is all testimonial,” he seems to be saying. And we almost believe it—until we notice the slight fracture between the claim in the text and the photograph, or until we look so closely at the text that we realize there are elements in it that came into being because he had a certain photograph on hand for which he made up a story, and not the other way around. As you say, the pictures “mean nothing unless they are inside storytelling.” So, I think of his photos as helping create the uncanny, destabilizing mood of his books: it must all be true, we think, but we know it can’t all be true.

  My interest in Sebald came late, only after I had written Every Day Is for the Thief, and some friends who read it said, “Hey, you should check out Sebald.” My idea of putting photos in a book came from elsewhere: the fact that I happened to be interested in both photography and writing, the fact that I was a blogger. But, also, I had read Ondaatje (The Collected Works of Billy the Kid), Orhan Pamuk (Istanbul: Memories and the City), and Barthes (Camera Lucida)—the latter two of which are not fiction but use photos in a non-textbook way. And then, later on, in the time between the writing of Every Day Is for the Thief and its American publication, I became aware of other interesting uses of black-and-white photos. Many writers were using images in a way that had imprecise connections to the text: Julio Cortázar’s From the Observatory, Catherine Taylor’s Apart, Carole Maso’s The Art Lover, and a certain Aleksandar Hemon’s The Lazarus Project.

  Add to all this the fact that I was being trained as an art historian, and that writing a paper and leaving out the images was unnatural to me: in a way, I was destined to put photos in Every Day Is for the Thief. And though I love Sebald to the point of tears, it’s important to me to push back a little against the idea that there’s this vacuu
m in which he alone ever put pictures in works of fiction. Also, I’m not completely sure of this, but I might be the most obsessive photographer of all the people I mentioned; I think almost everyone else is using other people’s photos, found photos, or (in Sebald’s case) sometimes snapshots. In my case, I have for sure spent more time in the past decade taking pictures than writing.

  I know that your friend, the immensely talented Velibor Božovic, did the photos for The Lazarus Project. Other than the sheer beauty of his pictures, why was it important for you to have images in that book?

  AH: It started with two images of the dead Lazarus Averbuch sitting in a chair, being triumphantly offered by a blazingly white policeman to the American public. In 1908 these photos were supposed to show that his alleged anarchist proclivities were visible in his body and that the foreign life in said body was successfully terminated by law and order. I’d come upon the photos before I read Sebald and, more importantly, before the Abu Ghraib photos were released. When I saw the images from Abu Ghraib, they were instantly recognizable, because I’d seen and studied the Lazarus photos, which were structurally and ideologically identical to them.

  In The Lazarus Project, I wanted to engage the reader into confronting the history as signified by the photos in the story. And I wanted to stretch the book between the (arbitrary) poles of subjectivity and objectivity (which some would equate with fiction and nonfiction), so I wanted the photos to cover the same range, too—but only to complicate readers’ ideas and perceptions.

  What always interests me—indeed obsesses me—is the way we engage in history. Except there is no “we.” Americans do it differently and, often, irresponsibly and without particular interest. Abu Ghraib is long forgotten now; no lesson seems to have been learned. Specialist Lynndie England and ten others went to prison and are now out of it—with no officers among them, let alone anyone from Bush’s court of sociopaths.