Key Words

BEGINNING MAY 30, the 2nd edition of the International Forum on the Novel will be held in Lyons, France, sponsored by the Villa Gillet and the Parisian review Le Monde des Livres. At twelve roundtables, some forty-seven writers from around the world will discuss various aspects of the novel, from the role of autobiography to film adaptation. To mark the occasion, the Villa Gillet elicited from participants a set of key words—words they found particularly suited to their ways of thinking about the novel. A selection of these short essays is presented below.

Geneviève Brisac

(HOLY) RUSSIA: my wellspring! The modern novel owes her everything. My music owes her everything. Anton Chekhov and Isaac Babel, Fyodor Dostoyevsky and Marina Tsvetaeva. Not forgetting Jossip (Joseph) Brodsky, the subtly mocking poet of “Flight from Byzantium,” now at rest in the Jewish section of the Venice cemetery. I might equally have written “soul” instead of “Russia,” the Slav soul, kaniechno (of course). The revolutionary Russia of our youth! “Tchto dielats?” (What’s to be done?), asked Vladimir Ilich Oulianov (aka Lenin), and the question being still apt, I love to repeat it. I say: Russia, I hear the joyous clamor of Komsomols on the breathtaking shores of Lake Baikal, I can just make out the throaty singing of the sunflowers, those boundless hopes, the Black Sea, tchornaia morie, the scathing humor of a woman poet, walking barefoot along the winding, sunken lanes of russkaia polia (the plain of Russia). I breathe in the odor of lime trees and blackberry bushes. Russia. The chanting of the Slavonic monks of Novodievitchi haunts my soul and cradles my pain. I say: Russia, I hear the Song of the Marshes, the songs of the Partisans, I see the snow and the dead horses, a pair of fragile spectacles smashed on the ground. Abandoned railway carriages, a plume of smoke rising from each isba (log hut). The witches’ isbas on their hens’ feet moving away across fields of frozen barley. Dievuchki platchout. The young women weep. I know by heart lullabies to console them. Russia, who knows what consolation means.

Literature decidedly belongs to the losing side: Russia and her Jewish emigrants, dispersing to the four corners of the earth with their films, their poems, their books, and this thorn in their hearts––they embody it.

—Translated by J. A. Underwood

James Cañón

Language, an ever-evolving process, varies from culture to culture and place to place. In Spanish, the word MARIQUITA can mean many different things depending on the country or region. In most of South America, a mariquita is a ladybug; in the Caribbean, it’s a saltwater fish; and in Argentina, it’s a folk dance. Puerto Ricans use the term to identify a rare blackbird with yellow wings, and Costa Ricans give the name to an indigenous tree. But without exception, in the entire Spanish-speaking world, mariquita is an offensive, derogatory term for “homosexual.”

When I first set out to write “The Other Widow,” a short love story set in rural Colombia, I needed a name for the village where it would take place. “The Other Widow” deals with the uncharted, mysterious ways of the human heart—but the two lovers in it just happen to be boys. So I decided that, as a paradox, the prejudiced village where the story would take place would be called Mariquita, literally, “little faggot.” The story turned out to be the seed of my first novel, Tales from the Town of Widows, and Mariquita soon became synonymous with isolation and chaos, a town of widows where all but three men had been press-ganged into fighting in the civil war by guerrilla groups. For sixteen years, this group of ordinary women are caught up in a struggle to survive; to overcome their grief, fear, ignorance, and passivity and build a new society of their own on the patriarchal rubble of the old. Ultimately, they create a new way of life based on a female perspective on what is right and good: peace, equality, and respect for each individual within the larger, all-important community.

Mariquita, the village, proves to be a vivid setting in which human nature is revealed and culture reinvented. Mariquita, the word, becomes synonymous with freedom, harmony, compromise, and progress. Language has continued its ever-evolving process. This time, however, all the meanings are positive and, most important, universal.

Rafael Chirbes

Caesar defeated the Gauls didn’t he at least have a cook with him? . . . / Thebes, of the seven gates, who built it? In the books the names of the kings appear. / Did they haul the big blocks of stone?

—Bertolt Brecht

Carpenters, locksmiths, plasterers, bricklayers: At times, I overhear them discussing their WORK in the bar. They comment on the difficulties they run up against, tell one another how they resolve them. In the meantime, they build walls, hang doors, install taps, put up railings. If now you pass by what a few months ago was just a piece of empty ground, you discover a house is being built in which someone leans out the window and from whose inside there comes the sound of voices or music. They go on talking in the bar about whether they’ve done a good job or whether they’ve been obliged to turn in something slipshod. I envy them the possibility of working together, of being able to put their skills to the test. The thing that lasts, doesn’t get covered in cracks, supports the action of water, fits just so; the door that doesn’t yield.

Meanwhile, I see myself flapping about among shadows, capable of nothing, empty for days on end. I miss those craftsmen’s certitudes: to have the avatars of time for a witness. The months go by, of course, and what was nebulous starts to become suspicious. The chaos is put in order, and after a while a messenger from the publisher brings me a book of several hundred pages that, don’t ask me how, has surged up from the depths of the nebulousness that pervades me. Like the walls, the doors, and the taps, my book, too, is but a result of work. I know that a book doesn’t have the solidity of a house, but in Moscow, few houses remain of the ones that were around when Tolstoy was alive; and of Berlin’s old Alexanderplatz, what would remain if it weren’t for Döblin’s book? I tell myself I can argue about the resistance of materials with the workers in the bar, because a house and a book are expressions of the surprising inner toughness retained by that fragile human animal felled in some accident or other.

—Translated by Paul Hammond

Péter Esterházy

"WORDS, WORDS, WORDS . . . ” And the rest is silence. I might have chosen this silence for my “heraldic animal,” in which case 1,500 empty character spaces would follow. But that would not be entirely fair because—as I see it—all novels exist inside this silence, on the borderline of silence and speech, so it wouldn’t be uniquely characteristic. I don’t know whether, as the request put to me suggests, there lies a thought or idea in the background of a novelist’s work, for my own is tied to a singular experience, namely, that I have nothing to work with, except for words. I have no father, no mother, no loves, no children; I have nothing but words. And then I start building from the words backward—a father, a mother, feelings, and so forth.

Which is an exaggeration, of course.

But Flaubert encourages us (or, to be more precise, literature) to exaggerate.

Mask. That, too, could do as my key word. There’s a connection between it and word-centricity, for if we ignore so-called reality (what is reality? I’d rather not go into that now, and not merely for lack of space) and construct the world from words while, philosophically speaking (shades of Kant), we do not give the whole thing due consideration—we’re hoping against hope that we are also saying something about the world, in which case we can adopt as many masks as we wish with no limit set on our endeavors except—and that’s no mean limit!—the words on the page.

I should have also said something about quotation marks, because they’re very much part of the key word.

I was given a free hand to write these lines in the genre of my choice, and as you see, I chose the genre of unencumbered speech.

—Translated by Judith Sollosy

Nicolas Fargues

NOVICE: You have none of Pierre Michon’s magisterial language, Echenoz’s elegant reserve, or Houellebecq’s powers of analysis. But if you take great care not to lose sight of who you are, you just might succeed in finding a way.

Don’t “make literature.” Don’t write because that’s what people expect of you now that you’re a “writer.” Don’t write for the beauty of the gesture or the love of art. Beware of fine phrases and well-turned maxims: That’s not your thing. Watch out for words that strike a pose. But do let your memory and your instincts flow—let the most apt words, the words that resemble you most closely, come of their own accord. Call a spade a spade (you do it beautifully, sometimes without even being aware of it). Write while it’s still warm, before distance intervenes, before you allow yourself to be corrupted by your desire to please. And don’t let yourself be misled by what editors, journalists, or readers might expect of novelists in general: style, energy, provocation, audacity. Forget all that, even your own recipes. Empty your mind and let come what comes.

Let necessity come and find the courage to drop it if nothing does (and try to persuade yourself that maybe it isn’t so bad, even if you don’t believe a word of it).

Be alone in order to remain free. Alone in order to keep a clear head. What a privilege, what an incomparable stroke of fortune it is, to know how to listen to yourself.

(Hold on, I’ve just cribbed a bit of Pennac.)

—Translated by Arthur Goldhammer

Alberto Garlini

There are three theological virtues, faith, hope, and charity. “But of these, the greatest is charity.” In literature, charity is called PATHOS. Pathos is a technical term from Greek rhetoric: the ability to stir intense emotion and total participation on the aesthetic and affective levels. Pathos is the concept on which I build my idea of the novel. I seek the reader’s empathy for the characters that I trot out. I myself live in total empathy with them. They are more alive than living people.

Pathos, for me, is a concept that is opposed to the postmodern aesthetic. Where irony, quotation, and free play with structure are preached within the context of an intelligent disengagement that creates a pact of entertainment between reader and author, I seek a knowledge that is not rational but mimetic. I believe that knowledge—as recent studies on mirror neurons teach—is developed through physical and emotional identification with other subjects, real or invented. I believe that empathy is a characteristic that is particular to man and that it is the basis for every moral (even the more despicable ones). I believe literature has always served to bind the community to its moral possibilities. When I write a novel, I give voice to the victims, to those who see reality from a point of view that is different from the dominant one. The victim’s point of view seems more authentic to me: It unveils the hidden violence.

—Translated by Michael F. Moore

Yannick Haenel

Twice, in western history, we have heard the resounding of “NO WHY.” Thus Angelus Silesius, in the midst of the Middle Ages, described the palpitation of the poetic: “Die Rose ist ohne warum” (The rose has no why), he wrote. No causality determines the blooming of the rose; it exists for nothing—and this disinterestedness coincides with what we call poetry.

The second time, it was Primo Levi who referred to “no why.” It was in a concentration camp, in Auschwitz. Primo Levi was thirsty. A snowdrift had formed against a window. He went out of the barracks, wanting to break off a piece of ice to quench his thirst. A German Kapo stops him: “Why?” asks Primo Levi. “Hier ist kein warum” (Here, there is no why), answers the Nazi.

The “no why” in this case is the very opposite of Angelus Silesius’s experience—the precise opposite of poetic disinterestedness: the watchword of a devastated world, the very sign of barbarity, the fundamental absurdity of that world.

What existence there is today is felt through the twofold experience of “no why.”

For this twofold experience—the constant possibility that poetry may appear and the virtual summons of each body to destruction—comes up against the empty core of representation, that is to say, the unrepresentable.

To write in the twenty-first century is to become the witness to the unrepresentable. It is to make audible, through words, both contemporary abjection (the forbidden snowbank) and the possibility of delight (the rose). It is to tap into what currently exists of the vein of evil and poetic openness.

—Translated by Deborah Furet

Etgar Keret

BALAGAN, a word that migrated to the Hebrew language from Yiddish, means “total chaos.” But this word is unique, because contrary to the implied negative value the concept has in other languages, the subtext of balagan is positive. True, that positiveness is not overt—a bit like a proud father trying to hide a smile from his mischief-making son—but it is completely there. Chaos for a society that is itself full of balagan is nothing less than proof of vitality and passion. In a place where people push and shove in line, where children insist on drawing on walls and not on paper, where a briefcase holds stained income-tax reports lying between a pastrami sandwich and a piece of graph paper with the beginnings of a poem on it, that’s where you’ll find human liberty, the liberty that both Yiddish and Hebrew have always held sacred.

Jonathan Lethem

However appalling to consider, however tedious to enact, every novel requires FURNITURE, whether it is to be named or unnamed, for the characters will be unable to remain in standing positions for the duration of the story. For that matter, when night falls, whether it is depicted or occurs between chapters, characters must be permitted to sleep in beds, to rinse their faces in sinks, to glance into mirrors, and so on. (It is widely believed that after Borges, mirrors are forbidden as symbols in novels; however, it is cruel to deny the characters in a novel sight of their own faces, hence mirrors must be provided.) These rules attend no matter how tangential the novel’s commitment to so-called realism, no matter how avant-garde or capricious, no matter how revolutionary or bourgeois. Furniture may be explicit or implicit, visible or invisible, may bear the duty of conveying social and economic detail or be merely, cursorily functional, may be stolen or purchased, borrowed, destroyed, replaced, sprinkled with crumbs of food or splashed with drink, may remain immaculate, may be transformed into artworks by aspiring bohemians, may be inherited by characters from uncles who die before the action of the novel begins, may reward careful inspection of the cushions and seams for loose change that has fallen from pockets, may be collapsible, portable, may even be dragged into the house from the beach where it properly belongs, but in any event it must absolutely exist. Anything less is cruelty.

Daniel Mendelsohn

All writing ultimately is a question of knowing, of what the author can impart to the reader: the novelists with his plots, his inventions; the journalist with his facts, his discoveries, his “story.” But there is, too, the matter—I had almost written “problem”of what the reader cannot know. In fiction, this is a matter, for the author, of information that is either suppressed temporarily (Proust loves to withhold information, as, for instance, when he tells us quite late in the novel that there was, in fact, a baron de Crécy once married to Odette, and hence that her surname was not a nom de cocotte) or willfully withheld (does Lily Bart, the heroine of Edith Wharton’s House of Mirth, commit suicide, or does she die of an accidental overdose? The author never tells, and we will never be able to know). In the case of nonfiction, the matter is more vexed, because the universe that the text inhabits and derives its reality from is not limited to the mind of the creator, as is the case with fiction, but is concentric with the universe itself—with everything there is to know, potentially. To be sure, we often don’t know certain things in nonfiction texts for the same reason we often don’t know them in fiction: because the author hasn’t thought of putting them there, or because it suits his purpose to withhold them. But in nonfiction texts there is, too, the matter (I won’t say “problem”) of what the author himself cannot know—what he has been unable to learn, to discover, to find out, even if it is, after all, something he’d like to be able to tell the reader. In an era characterized by an unprecedented access to vast quantities of information, the persistence of (and the willingness to acknowledge) THE UNKNOWABLE, the sheer and irreducible fact that there are some things that cannot be apprehended for our information, edification, or entertainment, is probably a good thing. Absence, after all, helps to define presence; one way we know what we have is to be conscious of what we don’t have, what has been lost or cannot be found. So, too, with texts. One of the things that shapes every narrative is its boundaries, the white space of the unnarrated, the untold, the unknowable on the other side of the story. Without those borders, without the tension between what gets said and what gets left out (for whatever reason), there could be no literature.

Annie Proulx

TERROIR is a word most often associated with viticulture, a word evoking complexities of place and time, geography, weather and climate. To me, it also has meaning in the construction of fiction that connects a story to a particular place, a construction that ties the lives of characters to the natural world around them, the characters in the same relation to a region as the grapes to their vineyard.

I usually write about rural North American people, and I particularly like to set stories in periods of economic change against a backdrop of natural resources and the uses people make of them, whether Atlantic outport, prairie grazing lands, spruce forest, or Louisiana bayou. The worlds of the characters display shifting values, the collapse of traditional ways, and the difficulties of adjusting to new situations. Just as grape vines are subject to the vagaries of weather and climate, so are the lives of the characters affected by forces they cannot control—weather and climate as well as economic and political decisions made by strangers in distant cities. This half-recognized powerlessness often afflicts the characters with submissive resignation (mythologized as “toughing it out”) and hopeful faith in a deity. And those humans and animals who came before and whom we know only through archaeological evidence still cause deep reverberations of the past that continue to sound in the fiction, if only faintly.

North America is a particularly rich setting for fiction, as its continental shape like a vast chanterelle and its north-south-trending mountain ranges create sharp delineations in seasons and sensitive responses to and amplification of global climate nuances. I am as an iron filing to the magnets of such ice and fire, autumnal sorrow, broken migrations.

Elif Shafak

There is a metaphor that is close to my heart. The holy book of Islam mentions an unusual tree called Tuba. Sometimes this heavenly tree is said to be upside down, its roots up in the air. Sometimes I think writing fiction resembles spreading out your branches like the Tuba tree. Fiction writing has deep roots, but these are not necessarily grounded in one particular territory or one fixed identity. As a writer, my roots are up in the air. My fiction is both local and universal. It is both deeply Turkish and cosmopolitan.

A NOMAD is not an immigrant. These two are different ways of being. The twentieth century has seen an influx of immigrants moving once and for all from one corner of the world to Western cities miles and cultures away. But an immigrant is not someone who would like to make that move an incessant project. Rather, he would like to settle down in new territory. As such, the immigrant is usually future-oriented and has a clear distinction between the past and the present, the country he has left behind and the one he now belongs to. The nomad lives in a “perpetual present moment.” To live the life of a nomad means to be able to make new friendships, meet new challenges, but most of all to let go—of your possessions, of your old self. A sorrowful enrichment attends the soul along this quest.

My writing thrives on journeys between cultures. I believe it is possible to have multiple roots—both to be a modern, secular novelist following the great Western traditions of literature and, at the same time, to be inspired by religious philosophy, cultural history, Eastern traditions, local customs, folk Islam, and, particularly, Sufism.

Dimitri Verhulst

AWARENESS OF BANALITY: The chance of readers coming to tell me that they identified with parts of my work is greatest when I have simply talked about myself in an honest way. Don’t get me wrong, identification is not necessarily the quality a book should aspire to in order to produce good literature. Please, let literature be as many things as possible. But identification remains a facet that large numbers of readers appreciate. And it is possibly a function, one of the many, of literature: assurance through identification, demonstrating that we share many of our peculiarities. That we are unique, but in moderation. That is why I need to write from on the ground and never from the pulpit. Being human first, and only then a writer.

—Translated by David Colmer

The International Forum on the Novel will take place from the May 26 to June 1, 2008, and will bring together 80 writers and critics from around the world for a week of debates and roundtables around the theme “The Novel, what an invention!”

On this occasion, each author was asked to chose a key word and to define it in one page. The result was compiled in the format of a lexicon, Lexique Nomade, which will be published by Christian Bourgois Éditeur in May.