Context N°22
This interview was conducted by email correspondence over the period between June 17 and July 15, 2008.
Shushan Avagyan: I’d like to begin with your last novel—The Mirror in the Well. One of the epigraphs to the first chapter is from Octavio Paz: “Defending love has always been a dangerous, antisocial activity.” Is Mirror a dangerous book?
Micheline Aharonian Marcom: I suppose, like Octavio Paz, I have come to realize that desire, and erotic love, unregulated—by societal norms, decorum, the laws and rules of cultural exchange—is, in effect, dangerous to society. If it were not, it would not be so strictly regulated via prevailing moralities, the codes of conduct between sexual partners, the laws of marriage, etc. Is Mirror a dangerous book? Were Henry Miller’s books dangerous? Or D. H. Lawrence’s? (Both had books which were banned in the U.S. for quite some time.) I don’t think the author ought to decide if a book is dangerous to society, the author decides if the book is a fine book, if it is, in his estimation, the best book it can be, if it is, also, truthful. If art is dangerous—and it is—it is dangerous because its gaze is relentless, wide, unrestrained and amoral—not immoral, mind you, but concerned with things as they are: not as they ought to be, or partially could be, but are. As Whitman put it in Song of Myself, “What living and buried speech is always vibrating here, what howls restrain’d by decorum.” I suppose I have been interested for a long time in what isn’t said, what is denied, erased, or elided, what, perhaps because of shame, decorum, societal norms, power relations, one is not supposed to say. I don’t think there has been yet a book quite like Mirror, one which takes as its subject and inquiry, female sexuality and female desire, so openly and physically described via the sexual act and the female sex itself. A woman’s pleasure, displeasure, grief, and joy is the subject—all of it via the cunt itself, as symbol and a not-symbol, a physical reality—for of course every woman has her sex. I suppose in a society where female sexuality is feared and repressed and shamed: where the cunt itself is shameful and to be hidden, cleaned up, covered, then to put the naked form of a woman at center with her point of view, her sex, and pleasure as the point of inquiry, well, then, yes that could be radical, it could offend, it might be considered ugly, immodest, in bad taste and immoral, and of course it is the most natural thing on earth. As D. H. Lawrence said about Lady Chatterley’s Lover in an essay on the topic of obscenity: “I want men and women to be able to think sex, fully, completely, honestly, and cleanly.” And modern society, again according to Lawrence and with whom I am in agreement, has a morbid fear of sex for the manner in which it interferes with the “money-making schemes of social man.” But sex and beauty are allied, as, perhaps, are sex and truth.
SA: Who is “the girl” in Mirror, and what’s the most sobering, terrifying thing that she discovers about herself and about “the slow sad fat fat-filled TV watching beaten down middle class life”?
MAM: I suppose she is a particular kind of woman—modern, urban, American, middle-class—in a sense, and in another sense she is an “everywoman.” The book plays with the world of feminine archetypes, with the old stories of love and of heroines, so Helen of Troy makes an appearance, as do Scheherazade and Isolde. Perhaps the most terrifying thing the girl realizes is that in the city and within her prescribed modern life and its culture, she is not fully alive, she has not fully lived.
SA: Can you talk a little bit about the novel’s title?
MAM: It was a hard book to give a title to—the working title was “The Edge of Love,” from a Clarice Lispector story called “That’s Where I’m Going.” It is also an epigraph in Three Apples Fell From Heaven: “At the edge of love, there we stand.” The full quote is: “What am I saying? I am saying love. And at the edge of love, there we stand.” Now I don’t entirely understand why for more than ten years this quote has haunted me, but on some level, I think, all four of my novels have been an inquiry into love. What is love? The word itself seems like such a falling away from whatever it may be. Maybe it’s what makes a salmon move back up his natal stream bed, or what holds a moon in its orbit, or sustains the electrons’ attraction to the nucleus of an atom. I can’t say, but I am curious, I enquire, make stories. A friend of mine read the manuscript a while back and he suggested The Mirror in the Well, and it felt right immediately—there is the mirror at the front of the book into which the girl gazes to see herself and sees herself newly; there is Narcissus gazing at himself in the old story, cursed by Nemesis to seek what is nowhere, what is only shadow and illusion; there is the well of grief and loneliness of the book, and a mirror, perhaps, a reflection from inside the darkest places, at the labyrinth’s center, where the monster waits.
SA: Some of your reviewers have objected that your prose is difficult, at times frustrating. Although novels like Daydreaming Boy or Draining the Sea provide factual details as a frame for the stylistic elements, it’s often hard to separate them. Mirror is somewhat easier but still requires a great deal of attention to each detail.
MAM: I don’t set out to write difficult prose, or easy prose for that matter, although I was interested [in Mirror]—especially after Draining the Sea—in writing sentences which were simpler; the phrasing in Draining the Sea is often so, well, labyrinthine at times. The novels are inquiries, and depending on the subject matter, my own evolution as a writer too I suppose, and my interests artistically, have been written accordingly. I read a lot and think a lot during the time of writing a book—but not while sitting to write it, if that makes sense: when I write I don’t think, I write into whatever it is that draws me. I’m not sure how else to describe it. And I often feel as if I am pushing against the language, against English, to get it to say what it is, in the silences also, I am trying to say and to evoke. It’s the way in which, perhaps, my own reflections on my work are never as interesting as the books themselves, because the books contain everything that I think—I think in literary prose—it’s the way I understand the world. But, this “thinking” of mine does not involve only analysis, my analysis of my work is often a bit banal actually, a less complex story about stories. And of course stories, and symbols, cannot be reduced, ought not to be reduced, even via analysis, to one or two meanings. But, I will say that after writing about war and genocide for eight years, and particularly upon completion of Draining the Sea, I was a bit tired, and wanted to turn my gaze to an unhistorical story, and to a story which took as its subject Eros and desire over Thanatos. So, in some ways, I see this book as the coda to the trilogy. It was also the first book in years where the protagonist was a woman, which was fun to return to again.
SA: “Labyrinthine”—that’s a perfect description of the sentence structures in Draining the Sea. They are also kind of broken down, ruptured, not in “standard English,” if you will. They have a specific stylistic function—
MAM: I think that the great books are a match of style and content, so “matched” in fact, that they feel as if they could only have been written in that way. Draining is trying to think about so many things at the same time—the reality/realities of history, of time, and of place. And the sentences reach to do that also—hence the rupture, the breaking of linear time and even of syntax and the usual “logical” structure of sentences: time space history, all of it is now, as it is in “real” life, and inside of a sentence, if possible!
SA: Why is Draining the Sea, and this is perhaps true of your other novels, one of “the books we unwrite unread: unthought books, a prewritten kind of text: the interstitial books: the sort of narrative that makes loops in the mind”? Do these kinds of books cultivate the reader in a certain way?
MAM: I’m not sure that these books cultivate readers, perhaps they do, I might even hope so. I don’t think of the reader as I write, I think of the book, of the characters, of what it is I am trying to investigate into, trying to say. But, the books that I love, which I think of as masterpieces, have, in a manner, taught me as I read them to read them—books like The Sound and the Fury, or The Street of Crocodiles, or The Rings of Saturn—so perhaps in that way books cultivate readers, and books also, by the way, “make” writers into the writers that they are. My books in some ways have made me as much as I have them.
SA: I see a particular movement in your work from your first novel, Three Apples, where you have characters with distinct identities, to the second in the trilogy, Daydreaming Boy, in which the main character, Vahé Tcheubjian, is a man with a borrowed identity, whose narrative is unreliable and even unpredictable, to your third book, Draining the Sea, where the narrator is an unidentified man. How does “the girl” in Mirror fit in this pattern of moving away from “fact” or “certainty”?
MAM: Somehow when I took up writing Draining the Sea I began to read in a different subject area than I had prior. As with all the novels in the trilogy, I did a tremendous amount of reading and research, perhaps more for Draining the Sea than any other book before that: about Latin America, the Maya, about the U.S. and the history of the West and of Los Angeles, and then, somehow, I also began reading Mircea Eliade and his books about the history of religious ideas, and from there to Jung, and then an amazing book by Roberto Calasso called Literature and the Gods. So I became interested, over time, in, I’m not sure what to call it exactly, but a telling of story about the inner landscape, as much as the outer, and how stories, via the symbol, in myth, encode knowledge; how, as Nietzsche asserted in The Birth of Tragedy, “Art represents the highest task and the truly metaphysical activity of this life.” So, I am not sure that the girl moves away from certainty or truth, or closer to it, but she is, perhaps, a distillation of an American woman, or at least, in the case of this telling, some of what might be part of her “personal identity” is not included—and do we know her less, or do we know her more?
SA: You said earlier that you were tired of writing about war and wanted to write a story unconcerned with history. But it seems that Mirror is a thread picked up from one of your earlier novels, which is now being retold from someone else’s—“the girl’s” perspective? I’m thinking about Rita from Daydreaming Boy, or maybe even Beatrice?
MAM: I know the books are connected, hence my sense of Mirror as a “coda” to the trilogy, I know it intuitively as I have implied, but not entirely consciously. So, I am unable to answer your question satisfactorily. However, I do remember thinking, when beginning this book, that I not only wanted to write something erotic and from the female point of view, but something quiet. I had reread Duras’s The Lover, and was thinking about quiet short books, and characters without specific first names, but roles, I suppose, and the effects of the use of terms like “the lover,” and “the beloved” inside of a book.
SA: But Mirror is certainly not a “quiet” book. In fact, it’s a bold book that vocalizes erotic desire. It’s also a very dark book—there is a palpable presence of death.
MAM: For me, Mirror is still a “quiet” book—a book which takes as its subject one woman and what we might call her “journey”—both sexual and otherwise—into the labyrinth, and down, I suppose, into what was once referred to as the underworld: the place of the dead, of the old spirits, of what we moderns might call “suppressed desires.” What lies at the center of this “erotic” book? It is not the lover, it is, curiously, the mother, and her death in future. I didn’t plan that, I don’t even know exactly what it means, but I do know it is right: the death of the mother is at the center of the girl’s fear of loss in love. The specter of the dead mother is the girl’s monster/minotaur. But, you know, I think The Death of Ivan Ilych is a quiet book also, so by quiet I don’t mean the novel is not bold, I suppose when I use the word “quiet” I mean that the book takes this one girl and her lover as the point of inquiry without the vast backdrops of history or social upheavals as my other books have done.
SA: Sure, there is a strong feeling of something almost unbearable that lingers on after reading Ivan Ilych. In Mirror, though, there is no horror of death, only some kind of silent mourning. One is overcome with a feeling of bottomless melancholy.
MAM: Somehow it is terrain which I know well. I’ve known it for much of my life, and I can’t say, exactly, wherefore. If groups can sometimes be said to be characterized by a set of traits, or one trait in particular, I would say that Armenians, diaspora Armenians at any rate, suffer the attribute of melancholy—at least in some measure. Of course I make this assertion based on my own family and on other Armenians I knew growing up, and know still—but the aftermath of genocide and exile has been a heavy one, one that can still be felt, has rippled across the generations to reach even someone like me: a half-Armenian girl who was raised mostly in Los Angeles. There seems, concomitant with this melancholy, always some inestimable loss at play, which lies behind most things: something and some things not spoken of, some place unknown or vaguely known, some people long-lost, some before when life was different, some terrible wound which obscurely and continuously presents itself as an evening shadow might on the dark ground. And this melancholy which surges and falls, I remember it vividly from the songs we sang as children—those sad Armenian songs from the old place.
SA: You often mention the “dead language” in your books—referring to Armenian, the language from the old country.
MAM: I think that is a metaphoric way to understand how the culture and language are no longer in their place: Anatolia. Although, neither is English, and I seem to be speaking and writing in it all the same.
SA: In her 1993 Nobel lecture, Toni Morrison remarked: “We die. That may be the meaning of life. But we do language. That may be the measure of our lives.” What’s peculiar about the language that you’re working with?
MAM: I suppose that all literature is working in the realm of the symbol, and it is the symbol, as Carl Jung asserted, which leads to ideas that lie beyond the grasp of reason. Jung says, “Because there are innumerable things beyond the range of human understanding, we constantly use symbolic terms to represent concepts that we cannot define or fully comprehend.” With that in mind, and in terms of this little book and what it seems to grapple with, I might ask: what is love? and, what, desire? The language of Mirror is, in its way, trying to make some kind of sense of Eros, or as Morrison might say, and in reference to your quote above: to take measure of love.
SA: I always wondered what you meant by “millenary dream” in Daydreaming Boy?
MAM: That was what I wanted to call the book originally, no one liked the title, too close to the word “millinery” and then everyone thinks only of hats of course. In some sense there is a repetition of images in that book, the iconic nature of it, I suppose, which the word “millenary” captures for me. And something else I am interested in: how the mind makes iconic images, archetypes.
SA: Can you talk about your fascination with dreams? It’s almost like an obsession.
MAM: They do figure prominently in Mirror. Dreams are the symbols that we individually produce, of course, “unconsciously and spontaneously,” as Jung said, and as such do interest me quite a lot. I suppose I know that full comprehension of anything is not possible via thought alone, via language even, but in language the sublime, if you will, the invisible world, well, that can be hinted at, can be hollowed out, a space made where it can be felt: poetic, or what we might call “literary,” language is, I think, the language of reality.
SA: What are some of your writing habits? How do you set out to write a novel like Mirror, for example? How do you know a novel is finished?
MAM: I set out to work on most days, reading and writing. I have a seven year old, so I am a bit more limited time-wise than I once was, hence I rarely work at night or weekends. In Mirror, as in my other books, I find that I follow the voice as it reveals itself to me—scene to scene the book comes out, and I don’t have a particular plan in mind, only after the book is drafted do I go back and tie up the threads of the narrative, see that all fits together correctly, think about the overall arc of the book. I guess I trust that the mind makes patterns. And I am always reading as I write, reading into the material that interests me during a particular project. While writing Mirror I reread Duras, Lispector, some Martin Buber (his introductory essay to Ecstatic Confessions is amazing), D. H. Lawrence’s essays, some Holderlin, Tristan and Isolde, etc. I can tell when a novel is finished usually because by that point I am sick to death of every sentence in it which I’ve seen and read innumerable times.
SA: What do you think of contemporary literature? Who has been most influential to your work?
MAM: I don’t read contemporary American literature much. By and large the plot-driven “realist” novel bores me, which seems to be most of what one finds in the contemporary novel form—I have loved Cormac McCarthy’s early novels though, the language is incredible, especially his Blood Meridian and Child of God . . . Foreign literature? There’s lots of amazing stuff, not necessarily contemporary, that I have learned from and enjoyed immensely in the past few years: Bruno Schulz, Danilo Kiš, Duras, Clarice Lispector, some Calvino, Kawabata, Hesse, D. H. Lawrence’s essays . . . I just read Jose Saramago’s The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis and thought it was wonderful. Who has been most influential? Well, it has varied over the years, but the above mentioned, plus William Faulkner, Whitman perhaps, I love Rilke too, and Wallace Stevens, Sebald has been good company, Borowski, and then Moby-Dick of late for a book I am currently finishing.
SA: I understand that Three Apples is going to be made into film. What are some of the things in the novel that you think would be untranslatable (I don’t want to use the term “lost”) in the film version?
MAM: Well, film is a very different medium from literature, obviously—something which is very image driven, visual. In books you get that amazing meeting of consciousness, the reader’s up against the writer’s, the book’s. I love that about books—and I don’t think that is translatable.
SA: What are you currently working on?
MAM: I am currently finishing a novel called “The Brick House,” about a house in the Pacific Northwest where people go to have dreams—the people, by the way, in this book are also “unnamed”—the book is a series of dreams, one juxtaposed against the other.
