Has living abroad, particularly in the United States and Canada, enabled you to better perceive, and perhaps exploit, the potential of provinciality in your own work? Did you find epiphany, clarity, maybe, in your separation? What role did nostalgia play in the creative process?
I’ve come to realise that I’m an ethnographer of memory, not of reality. It’s hard for me to write interestingly about a room when I’m physically there – it comes much better to me when I’ve left the room, and I’m groping my way through memory, which acts as a force of natural selection. Memory identifies my relation with places and objects rather than merely recording them; it makes me part of the narrative, part of that place in a way I cannot be when I’m actually there.
And memory’s my research. The novel was powered by memory and my sensual relation with the remains of these places, as they exist today, and as they surround me when I visit Calcutta.
Living in America heightens this distance, deepens a kind of desire and sharpens the editorial power of memory. There is a kind of safety in that distance. Through that distance, a place emerges as a subject.
You mentioned to me in a previous discussion that, to some extent, you envisioned The Firebird as a Bengali novel written in English, correct?
As the novel got under way, and certainly when I finished the first draft, I realised what I had in my hand was a story that was rooted in the blistered earth of the lanes of Calcutta. And not just in language and food and dress habits, but in its fundamental value-system. It was a moral universe that felt somewhat out of joint with the craft of the novel that encased it, and even the English language that gave it body. This out-of-jointed-ness has given me pause, made me hesitant about what kind of animal this novel has become. And yet at the end of the day I realise that whatever strength this novel has is inseparable from this out-of-jointed-ness.
I have to say that The Firebird evoked some of the best elements of Joyce for me. You effectively bring the reader to Calcutta, for example, with the clouds of cigarette smoke and auto rickshaws, in much the same manner that Joyce takes us to the cobblestoned streets of Dublin. There’s also something about the novel that reminds me of Chekhov, and the story centred around the theatre seems to reinforce that idea. How heavily do such writers influence your work?
The deadness and bleakness of the locale, its exclusion from major forms of historical modernity, its backwardness and provincialism, all of this inspired Joyce. Some of the same things have inspired me as well, and I’m very happy that you notice that. Still, I feel my affiliation with Joyce in this novel is more atmospheric than thematic. The story, though it also has, like the early stories of Dubliners, a young boy at its heart, is rather different, and probably owes more to theatre and performance than modern prose.
Chekov’s The Cherry Orchard haunts me all the time, even though I’ve read it many, many years ago – the intensity and grandeur of historical change absorbed into the inevitable placidity of quotidian life, which seems to me quintessentially modern. There is some of this interlocked tension in The Firebird, I hope – the attempt to capture the pre-modern, perhaps primitive art form of performance, seeped in ritual and religion, in the calm modernity of prose. If the novel succeeds as a work of art, I would say much of its success derives from this strange crossbreeding of the pre-modern and the modern, the visceral and the linguistic.
The Firebird is a huge critical and commercial success in India. What does it offer for a western audience?
Your reading of the book, and your questions say it all, don’t they? You – in singular and in plural – are the western audience this book seeks. The fact that the author of a brutal saga of snowy, rural Michigan is drawn to this Calcutta novel makes me hopeful that the rich provincialism of American readers and writers will find something in it as well. A young boy’s disturbing attachment to a mother in performance, a community’s suspicion of women who perform, and an intense relationship to an art form that eventually turns toxic: perhaps it is a local telling of an idiosyncratic story, but arching over it is a reality that is, at the end of the day, human. Not universal, perhaps, but human.
The full interview was originally published in the Los Angeles Review of Books.
Joseph Daniel Haske is a writer, critic, and scholar, whose debut novel, North Dixie Highway, was released in October 2013.