Perumal Murugan: ‘How I, descended from a legacy of illiteracy, become a writer’

 Murugan’s new book of short stories in translation, ‘Four Strokes of Luck’, will be published shortly.

I was born into a family that was immune to the fragrance of letters. When my grandfather once chanced upon my books, he glanced through them and said, “What is this, it looks like pellets of goat dung stacked together!” My ancestors reared cattle, and their world was restricted to the needs of their cows and goats. I had arrived into a tradition in which letters looked like goat pellets. And yet, I represent the first generation that could distinguish the two from each other. How did I, descended from this legacy of illiteracy, become a writer?

As a child, I could usually be found clinging to my mother’s pallu. I did not like being in crowds – of four or five people. I was terrified of human voices. Even after I was enrolled in school, I preferred solitude. I was hesitant to make conversation. I would rarely utter more than a word or two, and those were murmured. I loved my textbooks. The pictures and lessons created a little universe, just for me.

Perumal Murugan

In Class 1, we had a single textbook. In Class 2, there were two. These weren’t enough. I would wait with great anticipation for my mother’s return from the weekly market – her basket was a treasure trove.

Tamarind, jeera, black pepper and other condiments were less interesting to me than the newspaper in which they were wrapped. I would collect these newspapers. I would read these broken bits of news items, opinions and short stories, not leaving out a single fragment of a line irrespective of how much I understood.

The treats my mother brought home were divided equally between my brother and me. Once he was done eating his share, he would give me the newspaper in which it had been packed. I had to give him part of my share of treats in return. Sensing an opportunity, he came up with another proposition – just as the treats were divided between us, so should all the newspaper packaging.

He had figured that he could charge me a larger sum in treats to hand over his share of newspaper. My mother refused to oblige. She was furious that my brother had tried to pull a fast one on me with bits of newspaper whose only use was as fuel for the stove.

“Why are you such a simpleton?” she sighed.

She would search out bits of paper and bring them to me as grand presents. She would use them for the stove only once I had finished with them. My cousins got to know of our deal. There was a paucity of paper in that agricultural land on which all of us lived in little houses scattered about our holdings.

News of my obsession with paper travelled through the school too. The pocket money I occasionally got for sweets was spent on orange mithai. Each mithai would come in its own newspaper packaging, and so I was able to overcome the shortage. I didn’t mind sacrificing my entire quota of treats for the joy these bits of newspaper gave me.

In Class 3, we had five textbooks. I was thrilled.

In those days, the sunset was our signal to finish our dinner and draw our cots to settle down for the night. We were already half asleep when we heard the bells chime eight o’ clock in the neighbouring town. It was also the heavy labour on the farm, which began in the wee hours of the morning, that necessitated this early retirement to bed.

Kerosene was expensive. And hard to procure. Because of the prevailing belief that a lamp should be lit at dusk, we would put a tiny wick into the mini-lantern and let it burn for exactly an hour. We had to be frugal with the oil. I used to take my textbooks close enough to the lamp for its tiny glow to fall on the page, and read aloud.

Dialogue and narration had the same inflections. Maths could be read out like science. It was all language, wasn’t it? I loved the music latent in language. Words moved me. Amma helped me out by substituting the kerosene with castor oil so I could read longer. Castor bean grew on our lands, and so we didn’t have to be stingy with castor oil.

I had a little game – I would switch the words that appeared in my textbooks for others. There was a song that went, “Maambazhamaam maambazham, malgova maambazham.” (Mango, mango, Malgoa mango.) I would change it to “Goyya pazhaamaam goyya pazham” or “Pappaali pazhamaam pappaali pazham”, throwing guavas and papayas into the mix. The semantics were all right, but the aural effects were lost.

There is a variety of banana called poovanpazham, which we used to call “poompazham”. “Poompazhamaam poompazham, pudhupudhu poompazham” worked as a refrain. And so I would skip about the fields, stringing together words, making sense and nonsense as my whims dictated.

These strings of words eventually made it to the empty pages of books. At the end of the academic year, I would tear off the blank pages from my various notebooks and stitch them together to make a receptacle for my scribbles. I sensed that writing was my one acceptable companion, even as a child who craved solitude. Those scribbles were essentially imitations of things I had already read. All literature is imitation, isn’t it? An imitation of life.

Translated from the Tamil by Nandini Krishnan.

(Source: Scroll)

‘No one person gets to limit what it means to be Indian’: Namit Arora, author of ‘Indians’

To write his book, Arora travelled to the seats of the different civilisations of India.

An alumnus of IIT, Kharagpur, Namit Arora spent almost two decades in Silicon Valley as an Internet technology professional. In 2013, he quit his job and returned to India and, almost for two years, he volunteered with the Delhi government to find innovative solutions to civic problems; he led the drafting of Delhi’s solar energy policy and a task force on air pollution. In between, he published two books, The Lottery of Birth: On Inherited Social Inequalities, a non-fiction, and Love and Loathing in Silicon Valley, a novel set in Silicon Valley.

Arora’s third book is about Indian civilization, titled Indians: A Brief History of a Civilization. He spoke to Scroll.in about his journey from tech professional to author, his latest book, and how he looks at the idea of Indianness. Excerpts from the interview:

Tell us something about your journey from a career in internet technology to becoming a published author of two non-fiction books and a novel. What inspired Indians: A Brief History of a Civilization?
I was herded into the “safe” engineering profession by the great forces of the Indian middle-class. Not that I desired something else in my teens. It was actually good for me in many ways. It took me from IIT Kharagpur to California. Earnings from my career funded my wanderlust and evening education in the humanities. But I did see it mostly as a day job that paid the bills.

In the early years, as with most aspiring writers, I too faced my share of rejections in the publishing world, but I lived and learned, and built a nest egg. In due course, I quit the job, returned to India, and persevered until, fortunately, things worked out. Ironically, it was my unloved tech career that financed my new life of full-time reading, writing, travelling and the sporadic volunteer project like drafting the solar energy policy for Delhi – not to mention my labour of love, Indians.

My interest in history really began after leaving India, when life in the US raised for me various questions of culture and identity. In my mid-twenties, backpacking through Mexico in the early 1990s, I was blown away by the ruins of the Mayan and Aztec civilisations. That got me hooked on “lost cities”, or historical sites that were entirely lost to living memory and were dug out by archaeologists. I’ve since visited scores of lost cities around the world.

In the mid-2000s, my partner and I took a break from work to travel in India for two years. That was an amazing experience. We visited over a hundred sites in 20 states, including all of the lost cities I write about in Indians. Each of them raised new questions for me whose answers I could not easily find.

Namit Arora at the site of Nalanda University.

For instance, I wondered what life was like in the city of Dholavira, and what of the Harappan ethos is still with us. What urban milieu produced a great thinker like Nagarjuna? What was a day in the life of a student at Nalanda? What religious worldview promoted erotica on Khajuraho’s temple walls, and why did it disappear? How did the city of Vijayanagar become so rich? Can scoundrels also gain moksha after death in Varanasi? Questions like these.

So I started digging for answers, from which emerged the idea for a book like Indians. I read early travellers and literary-philosophical works, academic histories and monographs, Bahujan and feminist scholars, and Hindu nationalists. I visited site museums and read archaeologists’ reports. I wrote book reviews, essays and travelogues. As I connected the dots, the scope of the project evolved.

What was the transition to the history of Indian civilisation after writing a novel, Love and Loathing in Silicon Valley?
It wasn’t difficult. Though the novel and the history book were published within eighteen months of each other, both books had gestated for over a decade. They proceeded in parallel and became two different modes through which I explored questions of culture and identity, with the hope of gaining a better understanding of my world and my place in it.

The dust jacket of your new book says ‘Indian civilisation is an idea, a reality, an enigma.’ Can you elaborate on this statement?
I think the statement tries to capture the varied, mutating quality of Indian civilisation. Its reality is, of course, borne out by any academic definition of “civilisation”, even as its form and content have never been stagnant or singular. 

Indeed, Indian civilisation has been a journey of profound and continuous change – from the Harappans who built the first cities with indoor toilets and the most egalitarian civilisation of the ancient world, through the dramatic reshaping of the subcontinent’s culture by the Aryan migrants with new languages, religious ideas and the varna system, the rise and fall of Buddhism and Tantrism, the advent of feudalism and Bhakti, and the Turko-Persians bringing Islam and giving rise to a new syncretic culture, to India’s momentous encounter with European colonialism and western modernity.

Not surprisingly, then, Indian civilisation has been different things to different people. For instance, there is no historical evidence that Brahmins and outcastes, or urbanites and Adivasis, or priests and Carvakas, or sultans and peasants, or Tamils and Mizos, took pride in a common idea of Indian civilisation – and is there a good reason to privilege one over the other? Can it not contain many such ideas? With so many coexisting social realities, Indian civilisation is also an enigma that has produced various, often conflicting, appraisals of its central features and qualities. People joke that India frequently confounds academic social science. To adapt Whitman, Indian civilisation is large, it contains multitudes. So it’s all of these at once: idea, reality, enigma.

Different sets of people describe and define ‘Indianness’ in different ways. How do you look at the idea of Indian identity? What according to you are the basic qualifications for being an Indian?
As I see it, anyone who considers herself an Indian is Indian. Period. There should be no further litmus tests, no additional qualifications. “Indianness”, or “Indian identity”, which transcends the citizenship of the modern state, ought to be expansive enough to accommodate all those who consider themselves Indian in whatever ways they see fit, wherever they live. No one person or group gets to limit what it means to be Indian, at least not without a fight. As the poet Rahat Indori memorably said, “Kisi Ke Baap Ka Hindustan Thodi Hai”.

Many books have been written about the history of Indian civilisation by Indians as well as foreigners. How is your book different from them?
I think each reader will see my book as different (or not) in her own way. That said, let me offer a few provisional thoughts of my own. I’d say that Indians is rare in combining narrative history with archaeological travel writing. It’s a non-traditional history. It aims for an engaging, human portrait of our lost cities, in which the traveller (me) is part of the narrative.

It also draws new insights from early travellers’ accounts that speak to our 21st century concerns and sensibilities. In short, it tries to bring alive our forgotten pasts in rich and evocative detail, combining quirky stories with the big picture of Indian civilisation and its evolution. It strives to include non-elite perspectives – the view from below – rare in histories written by non-Indians and upper-caste Indians. Nor do I shrink from controversial topics or avoid calling a spade a spade. It also incorporates significant new research from archaeology and genetics.

According to American historian Hayden White, ‘history is no less a form of fiction than the novel is a form of historical representation’. How do you interpret this statement?
What I hear White saying is that, as narrative forms, history and fiction have more in common than meets the eye. This is a compelling view, though it can be easily misunderstood. I mean, one might object and point out that the historical narrative is built on facts and verifiable events, while the fictional narrative requires nothing more than subjective human experience and imagination, and so these are two very different kinds of endeavours.

But facts are one thing, their interpretation another. Facts alone do not necessarily make the narrative of history more truthful than the narrative of fiction. Indeed, fiction can often reveal our past and present more truthfully and vividly than what facts alone can convey. This is because both types of narratives must also employ significant interpretation – ie, subjective moral and aesthetic choices and judgments – which is what makes them similar forms.

A corollary is that a great historian has much in common with a literary master. Both must attempt to enter the society they reference, to see the world as its members saw it, and understand, to the extent possible, what it was like to live in it. Both require ample sensitivity, imagination, depth of perception, the right distance, and the ability to synthesise vast bits of social knowledge. Both must examine the psychology, morals, aspirations, and assumptions of ordinary people. Neither can claim to be an impartial or omniscient narrator, and so both history and fiction are subjective, value-laden enterprises sharing a family resemblance.

You present insights in your book from the accounts of the Persian traveller, Alberuni, and the French traveller, François Bernier. Both spent more than a decade in India and wrote extensively about their experiences. How do you compare their views about India?
Alberuni visited India between 1017 and 1030, when Mahmud of Ghazni was raiding wealthy temples. Bernier stayed from 1658-69, during Aurangzeb’s first decade as emperor in Delhi. They are two of the most fascinating and perceptive observers of medieval north Indian society. Both espoused a scientific temper and a humanistic ethos. 

Both admired many things Indian but also criticised other things. They each wrote near the eve of a major incursion from outside the subcontinent – Turko-Persian and European, respectively. Like any observer, they too had their biases and blind spots (which I discuss), but they’re still very informative about two different moments in Indian society.

Alberuni, a veritable polymath, had emerged from a great flowering of science and cosmopolitan culture centred in Persia. He despised Mahmud and condemned his raids. He learned Sanskrit in India, studied the major Indian religious, philosophical and scientific texts, translated some into Arabic, and sought out learned Brahmins to clarify his doubts. He praised earlier Indian achievements in mathematics and science, but noted the dismal state of science in contemporary India (for instance, unlike Aryabhata half a millennium earlier, leading Indian astronomers now held that the earth did not rotate on its axis but was at rest).

Caste made a powerful impression on Alberuni. He saw that such birth-based inequalities and segregated living, sustained by both religious scriptures and temporal laws, prevented social solidarity and a sense of common cause. He called it the chief difference between Indians and his own people. He hated the caste mindset of the elites. It bothered him that learned Indians did not mingle with foreigners like him – refusing to sit, eat, and drink with him – for fear of being “polluted”. He saw this as a kind of “fanaticism”, and called them more “narrow-minded” than their ancestors.

Alberuni’s extensive account confirms that on the eve of the Turko-Persian invasions, Indian society wasn’t exactly the picture of intellectual and moral vigour that many now fondly imagine it to have been. India’s intellectual culture had declined in the preceding centuries; it had fallen behind in science. Buddhism and Tantrism were in terminal decline, Bhakti and Brahminical orthodoxy were ascendant. Indians had grown more insular, conservative, superstitious, caste-bound, puritanical and patriarchal (I explore this change and its causes in the book).

Such “is the state of things in India”, Alberuni lamented, that Brahmins attempt to combine ideas of purity and pollution with the pursuit of science. He also described and analysed Indian texts, marital and funerary customs, taxation and inheritance, laws and punishments, etc – which frequently differed based on one’s varna status. His portrait of north India is so thoughtful and persuasive that he deserves to be called the “first Indologist”.

As for Bernier, he was a physician-philosopher who identified with the emerging Enlightenment thought in Europe. He greatly admired the fine architecture of Delhi and Agra. Employed by one of Aurangzeb’s noblemen, he observed the pomp and glitter of the Mughal court, “the base and disgusting adulation which is invariably witnessed there” and “the vice of flattery [that] pervades all ranks”.

He derided harmful superstitions, the practice of Sati fuelled by “merciless Brahmens” but discouraged by Mughal governors, and noted the primitive state of Indian medicine. Indians “understand nothing of anatomy,” he wrote. “They never open the body either of man or beast,” so do not know of the circulation of blood (working with bodily fluids was “polluting”). According to Bernier, Hindu scholastic education in its customary guru-shishya format, which he observed in Varanasi, was limited to mostly Brahmin men of “an indolent disposition”. He proclaimed that ‘”profound and universal ignorance is the natural consequence of such a state of society”.

Bernier’s account reveals a powerful, extractive bureaucracy concentrating riches at the top, funding a huge army and the luxuries of Indian aristocrats and the seraglio. This malady went beyond the Mughal realm. He reports extreme disparities and that “most towns in Hindoustan are made up of earth, mud, and other wretched materials”, and are poorer “than those of many other parts of the globe” (then too, India’s per capita GDP was below the global average).

Bernier analysed the causes of the dismal economic state of common folk in pre-colonial India – worse than in Europe, and a far cry from popular history’s boosterish metaphor, sone ki chidiya. As in Alberuni’s time, Bernier’s account shows Indians, especially Hindus, as creatively weak, ritualistic, mired in regressive cultural habits – and, in hindsight, entirely ill-equipped to resist the next big incursion too: a European imperialism powered by modernity, joint-stock mercantilism, the nation-state, science and scholarship (which would also lead them to discover, through the coloniser’s eyes, their own forgotten antiquity).

In his recent book, Early Indians, Tony Joseph, whose work you also quote in your book, argues, ‘We are all migrants. We are all mixed.’ What is your take on this statement?
Tony’s claim is spot on, not only in terms of physical migration and the mixing of genes; it’s also true with the migration and mixing of culture. Whatever the means, cultural diffusion across regions, ethnicities, languages, religions, traders, etc has been a prominent feature of Indian life. Think of what the Aryans from Central Asia added to Indian languages, the Greeks to art, the Persians to architecture, the Sufis to music, the British to politics, and so on.

The Hindu pantheon grew out of extreme cultural appropriation and assimilation of non-Vedic folk deities. Look at how mixed our art, architecture, literature, philosophy, music, dance, cuisine, sports, dress, painting, and crafts are today. And Indians gave much to others too. The depth and complexity of such mixing becomes even more vivid in the long view of history that I take in my book.

Can you talk to us about your visits to Dholavira? How has it contributed to the understanding of Harappan civilisation?
Dholavira (2600-1900 BCE) is the best excavated Harappan city in India. It is a lovely site to wander through, with gateways, streets and homes laid out on a grid-like plan. Astonishingly, one can still find on the ground shards of their painted pottery, bits of stone bangles, and semi-precious stones used to make jewellery. One can see greenish copper slag from the smelting process for purifying the ore, as well as the tiny bones of some of the animals Dholavirans ate: cows, buffaloes, goats, sheep, wild pigs, wild asses, deer, fish, rabbit and chicken.

The onsite museum has evocative game boards carved on stone, children’s toys, figurines, seals, pottery, and more. The village of Dholavira, after which the Harappan city is named, is a short walk away, and the landscape around the island is starkly picturesque.

All Harappan sites have much in common but they spanned a large geography and are also diverse. Unlike the four larger Harappan cities we know of, riverine and rain-blessed, Dholavira was on an arid island in the Arabian Sea (it’s now amidst a salt marsh, the Great Rann of Kutch). Because of this, its inhabitants focused a lot more on capturing water.

They built amazing water harvesting systems, city-wide storm-water drains, and sixteen giant reservoirs, one of which is nine times larger than an Olympic sized swimming pool and a hundred times larger than the Great Bath of Mohenjo-Daro. They surrounded the city centre with reservoirs, which must have made a visually appealing sight.

Most of Dholavira’s structures were built not in mud-brick, the Harappan norm, but in stone, including beautiful multihued stones from a nearby quarry that I visited. Dholavira has turned up what may be the world’s first stadium, with a stand of three rows. Its trade and material culture were more maritime than riverine, and it was likely a leader in Harappan seafaring innovations. Its funerary structures also differ from other Harappan cities in largely being cenotaphs, devoid of human remains, suggesting different cultural beliefs.

Dholavirans had other distinctive cultural attributes, but their major legacy seems to me their incredible creativity, resolve and engineering acumen ,through which they managed their scarce water resources for many centuries. They waged an epic struggle against the elements. Will we, their descendants, be inspired by them and rouse ourselves to tackle climate change?

Are you planning a follow-up to Indians?
No concrete plans yet. I’m just making my way through a pile of books that had built up while I was working on Indians. I also lost my father to Covid this year during the second wave, which has been very unsettling. Perhaps a new book project, for which I have at least a couple of candidates, will emerge in due course.

Abdullah Khan is a Mumbai-based novelist, screenwriter, literary critic and banker. His debut novel Patna Blues has been translated into eight languages. 

(Source: Scroll)

‘He was what was called in those days a sports type’: Ram Guha through the eyes of Rukun Advani

 ‘His aim was to disprove the Hindu idea of reincarnation by circumventing his own afterlife through becoming either Bishan Singh Bedi or Erapalli Prasanna.’

It may be best for me not to begin my recollections of Ram along the standard template which recommends the phrase “The first time I met...” The reason is that our first meeting was inconsequential. Apparently, we met on a college badminton court forty-five years ago, in about July 1974.

Since Ram did not go on from this badminton court to become the father of Deepika Padukone, this first encounter’s location, at least, was not an augury of the direction of Ram’s future fame. I have no idea what Ram was doing near a badminton court in the mid-1970s because his interests lay in a corner of a different field, the cricket pitch. His agenda even then was anti-Hindutva, though it took a peculiar shape because it had become mixed up with his interest in cricket.

Ramchandra Guha. | SAM PANTHAKY/AFP

His aim in those days was to disprove the Hindu idea of reincarnation by circumventing his own afterlife through becoming either Bishan Singh Bedi or Erapalli Prasanna in this life. Failing either of those two options, he seemed to have resigned himself to a third, which was to become Gundappa Vishwanath. Since I was far from passionate about cricket, for the remainder of our college years Ram and I lived proximate lives without ever coming close.

I knew roughly who he was, and I also knew precisely what “type” he was – he was what was called in those days a “sports type”. This knowledge was a subconscious certainty somewhere inside me that if there was a fellow in our college who was never going to amount to anything intellectually, his name was Ram Guha.

He would develop his muscles, grow into a hunk, even perhaps wear a turban, and the climax of his aspiration would – to put it with the studied inaccuracy of those mystified by cricket enthusiasts – be to draw Viv Richards out of the crease and bowl him round his legs.

To my mind in those days Ram Guha was someone who could be safely written off and forgotten about. I was not alone in thinking this way. The college we went to was full of bright people who were all mostly determined to join the IAS, and they too seemed to think Ram didn’t stand much chance of becoming a bureaucrat.

In an ironic way, and for the wrong reasons, they were right. We all thought Ram would never make it into the bureaucracy because he seemed keener on the square drive than the intellectual drive, less interested in his present IAS prospects than the future prospects of EAS Prasanna.

But the real reason, which perhaps no one saw, was that Ram was too restless, too passionate, too wayward, and too interested in too many things – such as playing bridge, participating in quizzes, and casually pursuing as many women as possible – to fit into the Procrustean mould that shapes most bureaucrats. So I forgot Ram quite comprehensively for many years until in the mid-1980s we ran into each other quite by chance at the wedding of a friend we had in common.

I was by this time an editor at the Oxford University Press (OUP) and Ram seemed keen to woo me with his passion for the PhD in sociology he’d been working on at the Calcutta IIM. I expressed interest in hearing what he’d been up to and invited him to drop in at the OUP. Some days later, Ram arrived in my office to discuss the book he had in mind.

What he did not know was that I had only invited him out of sheer curiosity – curiosity over why this man who I recalled as the failed reincarnation of Bishan Bedi had been so animated about some Garhwali village where, apparently, the women had taken to embracing tree trunks. Had his failure to make it to the Indian Test team as a spin bowler bowled him clean out of his own mind?

You can imagine my surprise at our meeting, during which a man I’d by now mentally certified as a lunatic at a loose end started telling me about how the Subaltern Studies series had helped him understand narratives of dissent that were forged at a distance from nationalism. He spoke also of EP Thompson and someone called Sartono Kartodirdjo, a name so alien and impossible to pronounce that it could only have been of some exalted foreign academic.

The realisation slowly dawned on me that the man in my office had turned himself into a scholar. It seemed a bad case of spin taking another turn: the Ram I’d seen worship at the altar of Bishan Singh Bedi and Gundappa Vishwanath was now worshipping at the altar of Chandi Prasad Bhatt and Sunderlal Bahuguna. It was a transformation nearly inconceivable, most unanticipated, and quite absolute.

I did not foresee then that this was only the first of several radical changes of direction in Ram’s intellectual life. Nor was The Unquiet Woods, Ram’s first book, which was published by the OUP in 1989, something that either I or anyone else at the time could have seen for what it was – the starting point of the unusually variegated career of a writer and intellectual.

My recollection of it thirty years on is still sharp – because of the exceptional clarity and accessibility of the prose in which it was written. Having edited the early volumes of Subaltern Studies and Ranajit Guha’s Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency, I was just about getting used to the somewhat arcane terms in this kind of Indian history-writing about protest and dissent, the only greatly readable exception to the general trend being the prose of David Hardiman who, like Ram, seemed interested in an audience not confined within cloisters.

The prose of these two seemed to me modelled on a template traceable back to EP Thompson, in those days perhaps the important historian in the intellectual genealogy of every liberal and left historian. For my humdrum editorial purposes when facing the script of Ram’s first book, this was a wonderful lineage because it emphasised a vital interpenetration of complexity of thought and clarity of expression, which basically meant that I as editor had to do very little work as far as straightening out prose went.

In fact, in Ram’s writing ever since I have found very little that needs straightening out because he instinctively stays clear of obscurity. In his first monograph, though matters were frequently complex and complicated, the prose was never gratuitously “complicating” issues – an activity academics had begun taking a fancy to around then. His arguments and analyses were never the sort that could only be unravelled and properly understood by an intellectual elite already thoroughly immersed in the literature.

Ram was writing from the start for seriously interested and ordinarily intelligent readers, unswayed by the value fashionable academics put on fatuous obscurity. This partly accounts for the considerable success even of his first book, despite it being on a specialised subject.

Excerpted with permission from ‘The Unquiet Ram’, by Rukun Advani, from A Functioning Anarchy: Essays for Ramachandra Guha, edited by Nandini Sundar and Srinath Raghavan, Penguin Books India.

(Source: Scroll)

What writers and editors do

 The work of the literary editor is conducted in a kind of shadow, cast by the name of the author. A few editors have stepped out of that shadow, becoming perhaps more infamous than famous, for the labels “editor” and “famous” seem like a contradiction in terms, essentially incompatible. An example is Gordon Lish, who became known in the literary world as “Captain Fiction” and whose authors included Raymond Carver. Another is Maxwell Perkins, editor of Hemingway and Fitzgerald, whose epithet was the “Editor of Genius.” One of the most celebrated editing jobs ever done was carried out by Ezra Pound, not in any formal capacity, but as a friend, his ruthless hand paring down an early version of T. S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land” into the form in which we know it today. Gordon Lish’s editing was quite as unconstrained and uncompromising, the style we think of as Carver’s being in fact Lish’s work. Carver himself was rather ambivalent about it, though it unquestionably established his name as a writer. This became apparent when Carver’s own manuscript was published after his death, his stories there being quite differently ample and expansive, barely recognizable. There is little doubt that the editor’s Carver was better than Carver’s Carver, and how must that have made the author feel as he stood in the spotlight to receive his accolades, hailed as the great new name of American literature? The example is interesting, for the job of the editor is to exert influence, not for his own good, nor necessarily for the author’s, but for that of the book, and if we can suggest that Lish went too far, we must also ask in relation to what? After all, the book was certainly the better for it. Were the wounded feelings of its author more important? Without Lish, Carver’s books would have been poorer and he would have been a reasonably good writer rather than a brilliant one. This raises the question of what a writer is, and where the boundaries run between the author, the book, and the surrounding world.

America has a tradition of strong editors, though the issue is not specifically American. I know of Norwegian editors who to all intents and purposes move their author’s feet, so to speak, in the dance of their literary endeavors, who basically instruct them: left foot here, right foot there, left foot here, right foot there. And I know, too, of Norwegian writers at the exact opposite pole, who deliver print-ready manuscripts to their editors and would change publishers promptly at the suggestion of reworking anything.

Lish’s job on Carver is perhaps too extreme to serve as an example of the role of the editor, but what any kind of boundary breaking always does is to draw attention to the boundary itself—in this case between editor and writer, who together with the text form a kind of Bermuda Triangle within whose force field everything said and done disappears without trace. Had Lish not gone as far as he did, everything in Carver’s texts would have been attributed unequivocally to Carver, the way all novels, short stories, and poetry collections are attributed unequivocally to the writer. To understand what goes on in this shadowland, we could ask ourselves: What would the books have been like without their editors? In my own case, the answer is simple: there would have been no books. I would not have been a writer. This is not to say that my editor writes my books for me, but that his thoughts, input, and insights are imperative to their being written. These thoughts, this input, and these insights are particular to me and my writing process; when he is editing the work of other authors, what he gives them is something particular to their work. The job of editor is therefore ideally undefined and open, dependent on each individual writer’s needs, expectations, talent, and integrity, and it is first and foremost based on trust, hinging much more on personal qualities and human understanding than on formal literary competence.

I remember a time in my late twenties when I was working for a literary magazine, we had commissioned a contribution from an established poet, and I was given the job of taking care of it. I read the poem and responded with a few comments, some suggestions as to minor changes, and a tentative inquiry as to whether the poem might be developed a bit further in the same direction. The reply that came back can be summed up in a single question: “Who are you?” In fact, there may well have been an undertone in that reply warranting an even more forceful wording: “Who the hell are you?” I was vexed by this, my comments had been cautious and, as far as I could see, justified. It was how I was used to commenting on the works-in-progress of my writer friends. Surely a poet of such experience and standing could relate more professionally to their own writing?

But the reaction wasn’t about the poem. It was about a faceless editor wanting to change the poem, which I guessed was being construed as an attack. As if there was something wrong with the poem and this faceless young male academic thought he knew what was needed to fix it. Objectively, I think my comments were on the right track, but when it comes to writing there is no such thing as objective, it’s all about the person writing and the person reading. If I had met this poet a few times, if we had been able to gain an impression of each other, perhaps get an idea as to each other’s literary preferences, I think my comments might have been taken differently, perhaps even prompted changes to the work, though not necessarily in the way I had envisaged.

PHOTO: © BILLIONPHOTOS.COM / ADOBE STOCK.

The situations in which creative writing takes place are often complicated, to put it mildly—anyone even slightly familiar with the writing profession, as we so grandly refer to it, knows that it is one great big entanglement of neuroses, hang-ups, blockages, frailties, idiosyncrasies, alcoholism, narcissism, depression, psychosis, hyperactivity, mania, inflated egos, low self-esteem, compulsion, obligation, impulsive ideas, clutter, and procrastination—and working with writing in that kind of context means that a concept such as quality is a poor standard indeed, at least if we think of quality as an objective norm. In literary editing, quality is a dynamic entity, more a process than a grade, and one that will vary according to the individual writer and editor.

That the books that come out of this are treated in almost exactly the opposite way in literary criticism, which is very much about weights and measures and comparisons to other books, can often throw an author into shock and is something one never quite gets used to. It feels almost as if there are different books, one belonging to the editor, another to the critic, and for the author this can be difficult; should he or she listen to his or her editor, who will invariably say that critics don’t know what they’re talking about, that they are insensitive and stupid, driven by their own agendas, and so on, or to the judgement of the critics?

Erlend Loe exploits the comedy that lies in the difference between the work of editors and critics in his most recent novel, Vareopptelling (Stocktaking), which opens with an editor phoning an aging poet and telling her how great the reviews of her latest collection have been, everything he says being more or less veiled with the intention of shielding her from the reality of the matter, after which she embarks on a personal crusade to erase the discrepancy between her own perception of the book and that of the critics. It’s funny because it’s recognizable, the editor’s attempts to deal with poor reviews, as well as the thoughts of vengeance they can give rise to in the mind of the author, it strikes a chord. Even a writer like Stieg Larsson, who made a name for himself with his very first book and was canonized in his own lifetime, lets the poorer reviews get to him, he can’t let go of them, including in his collection of poems Natta de mina (Goodnight My Dear Ones), a grotesque fantasy in which a named critic is mutilated. And Paul Auster, a world-renowned author one would think to have been so acclaimed in his time that poor reviews would be like water off a duck’s back, expends a great deal of emotional energy in his recently published correspondence with J. M. Coetzee reacting to James Wood’s critiques of his books in The New Yorker, not with arguments, but with descriptions of what it feels like—which is like being mugged in broad daylight.

This is so because writing and publishing a book is to lay some part of oneself bare, in such a way as to be utterly defenseless, and allow oneself to be judged by someone with nothing at risk. An editor who also works as a critic, which is to say interpreting and passing judgments on quality—and yes, they exist—serves literature poorly, since interpretation and judgment wrap up a work as if for good, whereas what they should be doing is keeping it open as long as possible. For literature is always something that is becoming, in the making, whereas the forms in which it appears are something that is, they exist already. And since the art is to force oneself beyond what is and into what is becoming—which is alive and essentially unknown to us until we get there—then only those who don’t know how to write can write, only those who can’t write a novel can write a novel. From this it follows that the role of the editor can’t be about knowing either, for in these processes knowledge is sabotage.

Now we are far from the classic editor, the fifty-six-year-old man in tweed, bent over the manuscript, pencil in hand, and are approaching my own editor, whose pencil never appears before a date has been set for publication and the services of a proofreader engaged to go through the final manuscript. What his work until then involves I can’t say with any certainty, other than that we talk quite a lot. These discussions take place during all stages of the writing, from before a single word has been put to paper and only a vague idea exists as to what area of reality the novel is to explore, until the book has been published and the various ways in which it has been received call for endless and occasionally crisis-bound conferences with a person who knows how much has been invested in it and has invested so much in it himself.

Although this has been going on for seventeen years, during which time we have published a total of eight novels and sat for countless hours talking on the phone or in conference rooms and offices, and have gone through thousands of manuscript pages, I am still unable to say “this is what he does,” “this is how he works,” “this is how he thinks.” Of course, this has to do with me never being able to really see others, the fact that I’m so involved in myself that I never quite manage to get beyond that, but that’s not the only reason. It has to do with his way of working, too, which is not about remoteness, the famous view from without, but about nearness, the view from within, which is more difficult to see and define. What we stand above is easy to see, what we stand below is easy to see, and what we stand beside is easy to see, but what we stand in the middle of is not.

When I was writing my autobiographical novel My Struggle there were three people in particular to whom I found it difficult to give shape, difficult to give voice. It didn’t matter how hard I tried, I could neither hear nor see them. I knew who they were to me, but it was almost impossible to give that awareness form. One of these people was my mother, one was my wife, one was my editor. What could these three very different people have in common that meant they were stuck in the shadows of my writer’s mind? In a way, the people they were went without saying, they didn’t need me to speak for them, they spoke for themselves. For an author, this is interesting: writing is about giving form to something, constructing something, familiar or unfamiliar, by means of language. Usually, this is easier the more unfamiliar the object: a cow wandering through a poor street in India is easy to depict, whereas a man watching TV in his apartment is not. Nearly all literature is about conflicts, which have their root in differences, the unlike breaking out of the like and only then allowing itself to be captured. Sameness residing in sameness, which is to say harmony, is almost impossible to make into anything. And this is where my mother, my wife, and my editor come in, for what roles do they play in my life? They give, demanding nothing, or very little, in return. To see such a person, who gives without making demands, is hard indeed. Demands have outline, but the absence of demands? Such absence is nothing, it is without shape, yet at the same time significant, and quite fundamental in everything that is human.

We see and talk about everything that works loose and tears itself away, never about what comes to us. This is true in the greater perspective and true in the smaller perspective. My father took something from me, I competed with my brother, this is easy for me to see and write about, but my mother gave me something, and this is difficult for me to see and write about. What did she give me? I’m not sure exactly. My editor, what does he give me? Suggestions as to books I should read? Yes, but many other people do that as well. An understanding of what I’m doing? Yes, but I have that myself, and if it isn’t complete, there are many other people I know who could fill in the gaps. Inspiration? Certainly, but I get that opening almost any book about art.

All this is important, but it isn’t what is significant. What is significant is a feeling, something vague and elusive, perhaps best captured in the word trust. I have absolute trust in him. With absolutely everything I write, even the smallest newspaper article, he has to read it before I can publish it anywhere. This is something on which I’m totally reliant and at the same time take for granted. It’s not a function, it’s not something anyone else can do, because it’s not about the role of editor, it’s about him, the person he is. And that’s what the role of editor is for me.

*

There are many conceptions about writing. One of the most common is that it’s a lonely business, something writers do on their own. I can’t see myself in that. On the contrary, in all the years I’ve been making my living as a writer I’ve been dependent on the help of others in order to write. When I was writing My Struggle, I read every word of it out loud to a friend, Geir Angell Øygarden, I called him on the phone every single day and read him what I had written, some five thousand pages in total. Why? Because someone had to tell me it was good enough, that was one thing, but also what it actually was that I was doing, and, importantly, what it might become, in what directions I could proceed. I needed his thoughts, they came together with mine but from a completely different place, and this was essential; because I was writing about myself I desperately needed that view from outside, which in this case was not simply a view but a whole outlook, which I made my own in the novel. Those conversations formed a space, and I think all books exist within such a space, either very obviously (as in my case) or less so, for instance when what surrounds them is the literature an author reads during the writing process, or has read before it starts. Even though I knew nothing about this when I began to write at the age of eighteen, I still set up those kinds of spaces; it was as if the need itself made it happen. The actual act of writing still took place in solitude, but everything that surrounded it, which after all was what was important, had to do with other people. When I was nineteen, for instance, studying literature at the university in Bergen, I met Espen Stueland. He was writing, I was writing, we became friends, and he shared with me everything he could think and read, everything he had thought and read. He introduced me to books by Ole Robert Sunde, Tor Ulven, Claude Simon, Gunnar Ekelöf, Osip Mandelstam, Samuel Beckett, to pick out just a few of the many names that swirled in the air at that time. We read each other’s texts, and his critiques, as sincere as they were severe, encouraged me to rewrite or toss. But even when I tossed what I had written, I was stirred, because through Espen I had suddenly come to a place where literature mattered, and was perhaps what mattered most of all, a place where it was impossible to bluff, impossible to cheat, impossible to be half-hearted in anything we read or wrote: it was all or nothing. Espen soon debuted with the poetry collection Sakte dans ut av brennende hus (Serene Dance Out of a Burning House) and uprooted to Oslo, got involved with Vagant, and shared that with me, too, introducing me to the writers and critics he met in that connection. I stayed behind in Bergen, and there I met another student who wrote, his name was Tore Renberg, we, too, became friends, and he shared with me everything he could think and read, everything he had thought and read. Tore’s literary preferences were different from Espen’s, but included many of the same authors: Tor Ulven was impossible to ignore for any student of literature in the early nineties, Ole Robert Sunde likewise, and Samuel Beckett was everywhere. But the writers Tore was most immersed in at that time were Eldrid Lunden (whose work I had never read), Tarjei Vesaas, and Sigbjørn Obstfelder. We, too, read each other’s texts, and in a very short space of time he wrote a collection of short prose pieces that got accepted for publication, the title was Sovende flokke (Sleeping Tangle), and, like Espen, he, too, uprooted to Oslo, debuted, and soon after became involved with Vagant.

When all of this was going on, when I was sitting around in cafés with Tore or Espen, talking about literature or music or football, the three of us having in common the fact that we wrote and wanted to be writers, it was nothing. None of us knew how things were going to pan out, we barely knew what we were doing. Were we doing anything at all? Weren’t we just idling away our time, doing nothing other than following our own inclinations? It was all without shape, as yet undefined, and if reading Tor Ulven, for instance, pointed forward in time to a future Tor Ulven influence in our generation’s literature, which is now incontestable, we were oblivious to it then, for we were no generation, we represented nothing, and what we were doing stayed between us and had no audience, the very thought was absurd. It was as local as you can get, the coffee was lukewarm, the rain came down outside, and if I needed a piss I could wait out of politeness. But writing this now I sense it transforming from nothing into something, an era is committed to writing, a milieu emerges, a history unfolds. And yes, seen from where we are now, Espen forty-two years old and a father of two, Tore forty-one and a father of two, I myself forty-four and a father of three, middle-aged men the three of us, authors of a sizable number of books, essays, and articles, a straight line seems to go from all our get-togethers and discussions back then to where we are now, authors of our generation.

As such, history always lies, it turns what was inconsistent, all over the place, perhaps even meaningless, into something consistent, systematic, and meaningful. The situations and events that occurred, the people who were there, and the discussions between them were of course real, it is not the case that writing about something is the same as lying or distorting, but the moment that reality is written down it is given a form that is basically abiding and unalterable, which pins it down in a certain way, whereas what was significant about it was that it was all over the place and could not be pinned down at all. To write about a situation is to take out part of its potential, at the same time as its remaining potential disappears into the shadows of the unsaid, the unthought, and the unwritten, in the valley of opportunities lost.

But anyway, there I was in Bergen, twenty-six years old. My two best (and only) friends had achieved the only thing I really wanted to do in life, they had made their literary debuts and moved to Oslo, to the very center of Norwegian literary life. It felt like they had abandoned me, and if they were unaware of exactly how jealous I was, they must surely have had an inkling, or at least should have had, the three of us had shared the same lives, young aspiring writers, shared the same ambition, to become authors, we had shared all our reading experiences, everything we learned, and they had succeeded—Tore spectacularly so, receiving that year’s Best New Writer Award—whereas I had failed and was left behind in Bergen, with what amounted to nothing, because unlike Espen and Tore I couldn’t write, in the sense that nothing came out when I sat down at the computer, not a sentence, not a word, I was completely empty. I told myself the ambition of writing, or the belief that I actually could do it, was self-delusion, a deception. Tore had it in him, Espen had it in him, I didn’t. What I did then was go back to studying. Within a year, I did a subsidiary course in art history and began majoring in literature. I was going to write about literature instead. But then something totally unexpected happened. An editor called me up asking if I could come in for a chat, he had read a short story of mine and wanted to discuss it with me.

Nowadays, this is a fairly normal way of going about things. Back then, in the early nineties, it wasn’t. For anyone harboring ambitions of becoming an author in the late eighties and early nineties the way to do it was this: you wrote a book and submitted it to a publishing house, after which you waited a month or two before receiving a reply in the post, very likely a rejection, which could fall into one of several categories; it could be a standard rejection, which was a bad sign, it meant the manuscript came across so weak it hadn’t been worth the effort to give it an individual assessment. If, on the other hand, it was accompanied by a reader’s assessment, then it was a notch up, even if that assessment happened to be negative, since it meant someone at least had seen enough merit in the work to commission an external reader to read it and make an appraisal. That appraisal might conclude with something to the effect that the author showed promise, but that the present manuscript could not be recommended for publication, or—oh, joy!—that they would like to read it again in revised form. But because that revision had to be done by the author alone, with at best a couple of vague suggestions to go by, it, too, normally ended up in a rejection. Only very, very seldom did it happen that a manuscript was accepted as it stood—I remember hearing at the time that it was one in a hundred.

Because of the distance between author and publisher, so great it amounted to an abyss, a lot depended on capturing the attention of this mysterious and unapproachable reader from the outset. A strong title, in an eye-catching font (if memory serves me right, you could buy sheets of lettering back then, before we got word processors, in Gothic style, for instance, and stick them on), without typos or scribblings-out, a meticulously worded accompanying letter. I remember a piece of advice to us from Øystein Lønn when I was at the Writing Academy: Put your best parts first, no matter how little it says about the text overall, put the best parts first. It was all about getting read, about making sure whoever was charged with sifting through new manuscripts at the publishing house didn’t just toss yours aside, but was intrigued enough to read on.

The first novel I submitted as a manuscript, it must have been in 1989, drew a standard rejection of no more than a few lines, the publishers had read the manuscript with interest, which was good, but they wouldn’t be publishing it. Still, this was nothing compared to Tore, who not without pride had told me he’d been turned down eighteen times. He was nineteen years old. But when he debuted, it happened in a different way altogether. He had not submitted a manuscript to a publishing house, the way generations of budding Norwegian authors all the way back to Hamsun had done before him, no, in his case the publishing house had called him. He had written some reviews in Morgenbladet and Vinduet, and one morning the phone rang and it was a man presenting himself as an editor at the Tiden publishing house, wondering if Tore would like to be a reader for him. Tore accepted gladly, though not without mentioning that he was a writer himself. The editor, who had suspected as much, duly offered to have a look at his work.

That was how Tore was taken on by Tiden and became an author. The year after, he was asked by them to edit an anthology of so-called new voices in Norwegian literature and asked me if I happened to have anything he could use. I did. Tucked away in an attempt at a novel about a slave ship that was basically lifted in its entirety from an existing nonfiction book I’d found was a story I sent to Tore and which, perhaps because my envy, which he must surely have sensed, made him feel sorry for me, he published. It wasn’t a very good story, but it did mean that I, too, received a phone call from the same editor, and a few weeks later was seated in his office in Oslo’s Operapassasjen, casting stolen glances at the piles of manuscripts there in case they might reveal something significant to me while he was out getting us coffee. When he came back, we talked a bit, or he did mostly, and then I was back in the street again. It was hardly anything to speak of, but it was enough, for when I left there it was with the feeling of having been seen.

Oh, how fragile these things are. It’s hard to describe that this vague feeling of having been seen, of someone showing faith, was enough for me to start work on a new novel, one in which I went much further than I had before. Was it because of him, that editor? Let me put it like this: had he not asked me to come and see him, I would never have started writing again, at least not in the same way. When I sent him the first beginnings of this new novel, I was ashamed and felt like a dog. Now surely I had let him down, abused his trust, ruined everything. One part in particular felt shaming: at one point, my main character goes into a phone booth on the Torgallmenningen in Bergen, from where he makes a phone call to his ten-year-old self. It was so stupid!

A few weeks passed and then the editor called me. He liked what he had read, especially the part where the main character phones back to his own childhood, that was really good! And he said something else, too: Henrik keeps repeating a thought, something about in the world, out of the world, in the world, out of the world. That sounds like a title, don’t you think? Out of the world?

These two comments were decisive, and they steered the rest of the writing until the novel was finished. Movement from one time to another, or from one place to another, by means of a metaphor or simile, often something concrete like that phone booth, runs through the entire novel and is its way of thinking, all times and all places held within a single consciousness. And the title he gave me, Out of the World, steered its complex of themes in much the same way.

The next time I met the editor from Tiden, he asked me if I wanted to sign the contract there and then or wait until we were closer to publication. I nearly passed out. Up until that point I had looked on this as a test, something that might lead on to something else. He wanted to publish it! Not until years later did it dawn on me that he hadn’t considered the manuscript to be even remotely good enough at that point, but that his suggestion had been all about instilling in me a sense of confidence and belief, and the feeling that a novel was something that was within my grasp. In other words, he manipulated me. It was like what a magazine editor did with Hunter S. Thompson one time. Thompson had been commissioned to make a trip and write about what he saw, but after he got home he found himself unable to muster a word, he was completely blocked. The editor called him up and asked him to jot down some notes just to give the magazine some sort of idea as to what the piece would be about. Thompson obliged, only for the editor to call him again a few weeks later, letting him know that his notes had gone to press. They were the piece. And that, I think, is often the way we get to what it’s all about. If we strive to go there, we block, for there are so many expectations, so many demands and misconceptions that it’s almost impossible to find a way. But if we don’t know, if we think we’re doing something else instead, as if in preparation for the real thing, then the real thing, which requires a form of unfetteredness, comes into being.

*

Another conception about writing, at least as common as that of the writer being on his own, is that writing is craft. I can’t see myself in that either, again I find it to be quite the opposite. Writing is about breaking down what you can do and what you’ve learned, something that would be inconceivable to a craftsman, a cabinetmaker for instance, who can’t possibly start from scratch every time. That doesn’t mean a cabinetmaker isn’t creative, can’t work out new solutions to old problems, and I assume, too, that a cabinetmaker is best when he or she isn’t thinking about what they do, but simply doing it, much as a driver is best when the skills he or she has acquired, the craft of driving, are not reflected on, but simply performed. This is how it is with musicians, too; the technique or craft is something so well mastered that the musician’s awareness of it is not a conscious awareness, and the music becomes art only in the flow. A soccer player who has to think about how to control the ball, who asks himself whether it’s best to swerve right or left to get past his opponent, who wonders what to do then if he does get past him, pass the ball left or right, or try a shot, will be a poor one. What the musician, the cabinetmaker, and the soccer player have in common is that they have practiced their techniques for hours and hours on end, until they belong to the body and have become like a reflex, selfless and natural. This same kind of state applies to writing, too, and it is just as coveted—I once read an interview with the British author Ian McEwan in which he spoke about the selfless state into which the act of writing could transport him, and how that selflessness, which occurred only very seldom, felt like the very apex of the writing process. But unlike the other activities just mentioned, there is actually nothing to practice in writing, no techniques to be endlessly repeated until learned—what would they be? A dramatic turning point approached again and again? A certain way of describing a face or personality? No, writing cannot be practiced in that sense, it can never be reduced to exercises, it can only ever be the real thing, what it is in itself, because writing is about getting to the core, something that can be done only once, in that one way, which can never be repeated, because if you repeat it then you are no longer at the core but at something false that merely resembles. So what writing is about, more than anything else, is not practicing, but failing. Failing, not succeeding, not being able to make it work, failing, failing, failing—but not in order to get to the core at some future time, that would be half-hearted, and the half-hearted is the antithesis of writing, no, failing must come from risking everything, in all earnestness, with the utmost of effort. Failing to get the ball properly under control on the football pitch can be annoying, but it doesn’t hurt. Failing in literature hurts, if it doesn’t then it’s an exercise and can lead nowhere. In other words, in order to write you must trick yourself, you must believe that this time I’m onto something, no matter how worthless it might turn out to be. In that process, everything is uncertain, everything is fluid, and even if that shining state of selflessness should occur, it doesn’t have to mean that what you write has any value, possesses any kind of quality—after all, those who most often vanish into the selfless state are children.

Failing on your own is fine for a while, but only up to a point, since failing in literature is no fun, failing there is failing for real, and when you are surrounded by friends and family with jobs to go to or studies to pursue it becomes increasingly hard to defend writing, to keep it up as something meaningful when the results fail to materialize, which in this case means having your work accepted by a publisher. Failing in one’s writing under those conditions is also to fail socially. Everyone knows the type, the guy who cagily says, “I write.” After ten years of that, is there anyone left who still believes in him? After twenty years? Certainly not the writer himself. By then, writing has become a shameful business, a stigma almost. If he’s to go on, he must trick himself, which will become increasingly difficult, until eventually he realizes that it’s true, he has failed.

A published writer has a different social aspect entirely. But the writing is the same. For a while it will be quite as unsuccessful. This is where the editor comes in. The job is to support the author, which in many instances means tricking the author, telling him or her that this is really good, keep going. Recently, I spoke to a Swedish editor who said this was perhaps the hardest part of the job, because the author often suspects that what he or she is doing probably isn’t that good, at the same time as he or she needs to hear how good it is. The author needs that lie and must overcome the suspicion of it being just that, a lie, must deceive himself or herself into believing it. That same Swedish editor always instructs his writers to note down what he says as they go through the manuscript. If they don’t, all they remember are the negative points. He can heap praise on a text and go into detail about how good it is in this or another passage, and even then the only thing that sticks in the mind of the author are his suggestions as to changes. And why do things have to be changed? Because they aren’t good enough, the text is a failure, a mistake.

This is where it hangs in the balance, where everything is at stake. For what is “good” exactly? In the literary world, much is about originality, finding an individual voice, uncovering what until now has been unseen—these are the ideals. Against this stands the concept of quality, the basis of all appraisal, and of any canonization. For when originality, individual voice, and the unseen come together there is nothing with which it can be compared. There is no unequivocal way of saying that something is “good.” When the book is there, with the publisher’s logo on the cover, that in itself is a stamp of quality: a large number of people with fine literary credentials, working in a well-reputed institution, have declared that this is literature, that this book is of value. To give a book that stamp of quality is a risky business. That is, if it’s similar to another book already recognized as good, then the risk is small, but if it’s not, if it’s something apart, then publishing the work and thereby declaring it to be a work of quality takes guts. There’s often a lack of intrepidness in the publishing world, there being so much esteem to be lost, an editor who puts out, let’s say, five books one after another, each of which is slaughtered by the critics, each of which moreover fails to sell, will be pushed toward the safe choice, toward what is acknowledged to be the norm, and will reject that which involves risk. I’m not saying this because I think Norway is teeming with yet undiscovered literary geniuses unable to find outlets for their work, but because whether an editor is good or bad has so much to do with being intrepid. I know of books later canonized that were rejected by one publisher after another as manuscripts, for the simple reason that they resemble very little else, works fully in keeping with the prevailing literary ideal, but which in their fullest consequence required courage to publish. I have worked on manuscripts from first-time writers myself as an adviser and know how difficult it can be to judge quality on one’s own, without the bound book in one’s hand to testify that the criteria have been met. Is it good enough? What is good enough? And if it isn’t good enough, is there anything in it that can become good enough? And if it happens to be very good, then there is nothing to which one can turn for comparison, one is left to one’s own judgment—and is that good enough?

—Translated from the Norwegian by Martin Aitken

 

Karl Ove Knausgaard was born in Norway in 1968. His debut novel, Out of the World, won the Norwegian Critics Prize in 2004, and his second novel, A Time for Everything, was a finalist for the Nordic Council Prize. For My Struggle: Book One, Knausgaard received the Brage Award in 2009, the 2010 Book of the Year Prize in Morgenbladet, and the P2 Listeners’ Prize. Book One was a New Yorker Book of the Year, and Book Two was listed among the Wall Street Journal’s 2013 Books of the Year.

Martin Aitken is the acclaimed translator of numerous novels from Danish and Norwegian, including works by Karl Ove Knausgaard, Ida Jessen, Peter Høeg, Jussi Adler-Olsen, and Pia Juul. In 2012, he was awarded the American-Scandinavian Foundation’s Nadia Christensen Translation Prize. In 2019. Aitken received the PEN Translation Prize for his translation of Love, by Hanne Ørstavik.

From Karl Ove Knausgaard’s In the Land of the Cyclops, translated from the Norwegian by Martin Aitken, published by Archipelago Books.

(Source: The Paris Review)