Aleksandar Hemon is the author of The Lazarus Project, finalist for the National Book Award and National Book Critics Circle Award, and New York Magazine's No. 1 Book of the Year, as well as three short story collections: The Question of Bruno; Nowhere Man, also a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award; and Love and Obstacles. Stories, articles, and reviews have appeared in the New Yorker, Esquire, Paris Review, Granta, TriQuarterly, New York Times, and elsewhere. He is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and the MacArthur Foundation "genius grant."

Published Date: September 19, 2012

Transcription

Speaker 1:

Welcome to the AWP Podcast series. This interview originally occurred at the 2012 AWP Conference in Chicago. The recording features Jessica Anthony and Aleksandar Hemon.

Jessica Anthony:

I'm with Aleksandar Hemon at the Association for Writers and Writing Programs Conference in Chicago, Illinois. Aleksandar Hemon is the author of The Lazarus Project, which was a finalist for the 2008 National Book Award and National Book Critic Circle Award, and three collections of short stories, The Question of Bruno Nowhere Man, which was also a finalist for the National Book Critic Circle Award, and Love and Obstacles. Born in Sarajevo, Hemon wrote his first story in English in 1995. He was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2003 and a Genius Grant from the MacArthur Foundation in 2004. His fiction and essays appear regularly in the New Yorker, Guernica, and elsewhere. Sasha, thank you for being here.

Aleksandar Hemon:

Thank you.

Jessica Anthony:

Would you mind starting us off with a brief excerpt from The Lazarus project?

Aleksandar Hemon:

Sure. I'm a reasonably loyal citizen of a couple of countries. In America, that somber land, I waste my vote, pay taxes grudgingly, share my life with a native wife, and try hard not to wish painful death to the idiot president. But I also have a Bosnian passport I seldom use. I go to Bosnia for heartbreaking vacations and funerals. And on or around March 1st with other Chicago Bosnians, I proudly and dutifully celebrate our Independence Day with an appropriately ceremonious dinner.

Strictly speaking, the Independence Day is February 29th, a typically Bosnian convolution. I suppose it would be too weird and un-southernly to celebrate it every leap year, so it is an annual chaotic affair taking place at some suburban hotel. Bosnians come in droves, and early. Parking their cars, they might run into a fight over a parking space for the disabled. A couple of men swing their crutches at each other trying to determine who might be more impaired, the one whose leg was blown off by a landmine, or the one whose spine was damaged by a beating in the Serbian camp.

While waiting in the vestibule, for no discernible reason, to enter the preposterously named dining hall, Westchester or Windsor or Lake Tahoe, my fellow double citizens smoke as numerous signs inform them that smoking is strictly prohibited. Once the door is open, they rush toward the white, loaded tables with an excess of glasses and utensils, driven by poor people's affliction, the timeless feeling that plenty never means enough for all. They spread the napkins in their laps, they hang them on their chests, they have a hard time explaining to the waitstaff that they would like to eat their salad with the main dish, not before. They make disparaging remarks about the food, which then turn into contentious contemplation of American obesity. And pretty soon, whatever meager American-ness that has been accrued in the past decade or so entirely evaporates for the night. Everybody, myself included, is solidly Bosnian. Everybody has an instructive story about cultural differences between us and them. Of these things I sometimes wrote.

Jessica Anthony:

There's a line that I am especially struck with in the book. It was the Bosnian manner. Nobody asked you anything. You had to make your story be heard. Is that a particularly autobiographical statement? And maybe can you talk about the impulse for the novel?

Aleksandar Hemon:

Well, it's a general statement that applies partially because the narrator, Brik, he's all about us and them. There is Americans and Bosnians, and he's invested into establishing or dealing with differences and far less invested in that for a number of reasons. But I'm interested in the ways in which those disciplines are established. There's however a proclivity among Bosnians to interrupt and have a less democratic conversation, yes, at least in my family.

So as for the book, it was a while ago, but I had come across a book called An Accidental Anarchist, which was a recounting of the Lazarus Averbuch affair as it really happened, including the fact that some questions could not be answered. But the book featured a couple of photos of Lazarus sitting dead in the chair, which also in my book, in addition to the amazing story of Lazarus Averbuch and the sadness thereof, there were also those photos which I found and find striking. And I decided to find a way to include those photos in my book, and I decided to write it in those photos. And then it took me a little while to figure out how exactly to do that and then to write a book.

Jessica Anthony:

So the photographs came before the language, the words?

Aleksandar Hemon:

Right.

Jessica Anthony:

In what ways do you feel that these images are doing the work of narrative in the book? And why did you feel this desire?

Aleksandar Hemon:

I don't know if they're doing the work of narrative. In fact, I think they're in the book precisely because they cannot do that work. It was, I thought, a way to contrast the work that a photograph would do as opposed to a story. The photograph, when you see it, it's amazing in many ways, but it's even more amazing if you know the story behind it and the fact that Lazarus is dead in those photos and how he got there. And you realize... When I first looked at the photo, there's a spot on the chin, which looks like a birthmark or a mole, but it's a bullet hole. And so with the story around it, the photo looks different.

And I also thought that the narrative would look different, would be different with the photo. Photos, Rowan Bork used the term self-authenticating, at least until the digital photography era. What was in the photo was a physical trace of something that existed in some physical space. So there was always a reality behind that photo, and you could see the traces, physical trace of the reality in the photo, but what you didn't have inscribed in the photo is the story of it. And a literary text or story is not self authenticated. It is a story. That is, language is not a physical trace of anything. It's a trace of thought, and literature is a trace of thoughts and emotions and questions and human experiences. And so I wanted those two things, two modes of human expression to interact and complicate.

Jessica Anthony:

Like so much of your writing, the novel is packed with lines which I think of as sort of temporary landings, sentence level destinations. Like, "Home is where somebody notices your absence." And, "I'm just like everybody else because there's nobody like me in the whole world." Can you speak a little bit about your relationship to sentences in terms of the poetics of prose?

Aleksandar Hemon:

I suppose I hear the music of sentences, or at least try to hear that. And also Miles Davis said, "I listen to what I can leave out." So when I think about it and write, I also listen to what I can leave out. But the music, I would not sacrifice meaning to music, the music of sentences of the language. But I hear it for whatever reason. And to me, those rhythms have to be respected, while at the same time the meaning is respected. It's a tricky thing to do, but it is a lot of fun. I like doing that. There are writers, and this is not meant to disparage their writing, I can tell they do not hear their sentences from the language in the book. I can simply tell. And then that has been confirmed a couple of times when I heard them read. You can tell they do not hear their own sentences.

They might be brilliant in any number of other ways, but they do not hear that. For some reason then my inner ear is attuned to that, and I pursue that. In some of the early stories, and in fact, in some later stories, I've actually counted beats in sentences and then looked for words that would fit the written pattern that I was for some reason looking for. I don't do that in every sentence, otherwise it would be poetry when I write, but moments or passages when I thought it was important, and then I would do that.

Jessica Anthony:

Who are a few writers who you would perhaps align yourself with in terms of musicality of style?

Aleksandar Hemon:

I dare not align myself with Nabokov, but Nabokov is the patron saint of musical writing and also of brilliant images and also of brilliant thought. So that often goes, and Nabokov's with me, it goes together. One cannot be separated from the other.

Jessica Anthony:

Do you return to him to-

Aleksandar Hemon:

Constantly. Well, I'm teaching this semester, Nabokov.

Jessica Anthony:

You're a prolific writer of nonfiction as well as fiction. And I'm curious about the way that you either choose your subjects or you find your subjects choosing you.

Aleksandar Hemon:

I don't know if there's a method. Sometimes the younger people ask me if I would like to write about this or that, or if I have something that I would like to write about. Sometimes I pitch it to them or someone else. There are stories that I would like to tell, and for one reason or another, I've lost patience and cannot wait any longer to find a way to fictionalize those stories that applies to some textbook, whatever. So then finally, I write them. I had a piece in Grant about dogs, two dogs, and it came about because I was having breakfast with the editor of Grant and some other people, and I was telling the story, and they told me, "Why don't you write that?" Thereby commissioning the piece. So all right, all right. So I wrote it.

Jessica Anthony:

Your essay, The Aquarium, published in June of the New Yorker, for the people who haven't perhaps read this piece yet on our podcast, this is an essay which chronicles the loss of your daughter, Isabelle, but it is equally about imagination and language. I found myself taken, especially with your own personal struggle to contain the dominance of your own imagination and how your older daughter's invention of an imaginary brother, Mingus, revealed something to you about the importance of fiction. Fiction, you say, had given your daughters, it gave you more lives. Do you feel that fiction is a basic evolutionary tool for survival [inaudible 00:10:45]?

Aleksandar Hemon:

I do. I wouldn't call it fiction, but storytelling.

Jessica Anthony:

Storytelling.

Aleksandar Hemon:

Because fiction is sort of an arbitrary tag for one aspect of storytelling. But I have grown to believe, and to a large extent watching my daughter come up with stories, that we process the world by creating stories about the world. And I don't mean this metaphorically, but literally. That at her level to process experience and process language that is necessary to relate to the experience, she invented stories. And they're not stories, not... But they're stories, and you can see, I can see the struggles to make parts fit. And she doesn't have what we have, which might be sometimes unfortunate, a need to complete it and print it. Well, for example, print it. She doesn't have a need to complete those stories. They don't have to have a conclusion, ending. They don't have to be rewarding in a way that a reading experience has to be rewarding.

It is essential to the way you process experiencing stories. Because she's a child, she just doesn't have enough experience for the language that she already possesses, so she has to come up with stories that would allow her to employ that language. Language, in other words, exceeds her experience. And in fact, I would think that for a vast majority of people, language exceeds their experience and exceeds their immediate personal experience. And to engage with other people, to imagine alternative possibilities in your own life, to imagine different outcomes of your actions, morally or any other way, you need stories.

I'm not talking about literary fiction. I'm talking about basic stories. And I think that's inscribed in the human brain. John Cage, the great avant-garde composer, was once telling the story about going to a deaf room where all the sounds are muffled from the outside and inside because the walls are padded and all this. And he said the only two sounds he could hear was the beating of his heart and the high pitch sound of the nervous system. And he said his conclusion was that the future of music was ensured. As long as there are living human beings, there will be music. And similarly, I think as long as there are living human beings, there will be language, and therefore there will be stories. Publishing might be out, but there'll be stories.

Jessica Anthony:

Well, you said that language was actually what was shaping this metaphor of The Aquarium. It was shaping the experience for you, the people who could only speak to you in platitudes and the people who didn't have any interest in knowing the truth of the language that you had to be using every day.

Aleksandar Hemon:

Well, I think supposed language for everyone, and for writers in particular, can operate as for the purposes of comforts or tranquilization. That's where you go to protect yourself from the difficulties of the world, which is why cliches are rampant. I get hives when I go to a restaurant and the waiter addresses me as "you guys." I hate "you guys." It drives me crazy. Not for any particular reason, not that I require "sir," just everyone's using "you guys." It just drives me nuts. And I'm plotting conspiracies against "you guys." How, what can I do just to sabotage this?

And there are other things too. The recent increase in the frequency of making the verbs function as present tense, continuous, "I'm liking this." It's, "I like, I know, I see." That's all. You don't say, "I'm seeing." You know what I mean? You do sometimes, but it suddenly became... Anyway, just an old man talking.

My point is that there's a comfort in cliches and platitudes and already processed language where all the metaphors are already tucked in and absent, as baffling are no longer baffling. But then what literature does, what could do for writers also for readers, is push you in the direction where language is dangerously de-familiarized and made strange again. And so the instabilities in our existence, the ontological quirks and bumps are exposed, or just the fact that we often do not talk what we talking about at all. There's a comfort if you think I know what I'm talking about, and that guy knows what he's talking about. And so isn't this just great? We know what we're talking about. Life, death, all that.

But there are ways to, and this is interesting to me as a reader and to me as a writer, how to impact the language and then it becomes not dangerous in and of itself, but stops being a buffer against the world, but rather an access or gateway to the world as it is. And that's difficult because it's... Well, it's emotionally exhausting, but also not all readers want that. They want to curl up by the fireplace under a blankie and pass out with a glass of chardonnay. They don't want to be kept up all night, thinking, "Is my life meaningful? Are we going to live through the century?"

Jessica Anthony:

Well, it was Orwell, I think, who said, "Just like language can corrupt thought, thought corrupts language." And so oftentimes, I feel like when I hear platitudes and cliches used-

Aleksandar Hemon:

Yeah, but it's necessary for common communication. And we all use, all, including many writers, including those who open up dangerous space for comfort and for communication with other people for socializing in the best sense. But that's not the only purpose of language. It's certainly not the purpose of literature, to provide comfort to people. That's entertainment. That's what entertainment does. Entertainment provides comfort in various ways, whether it's horror as a genre or it's just someone else humiliating themselves in front of 10 million viewers right now. And I'm curling up under the blanket by the fireplace, drinking my chardonnay.

In other words, there's literature that is entertainment and particularly soothing entertainment. There's literature that is... It's art. I like art. And if you want entertainment... Sean Penn once said, "If you want entertainment, you get two hookers and an eight-ball. That's entertainment." A book is... It's not good as entertainment. That's entertainment.

Jessica Anthony:

Sasha, thank you so much for speaking with us today. This has been a great pleasure.

Aleksandar Hemon:

Thank you. Thank you for talking to me.

Speaker 1:

Thank you for tuning into the AWP podcast series. For other podcasts, please visit our website at www.awpwriter.org.