(Source: rosings)
(Source: fleurishes)
Helen DeWitt is the author of The Last Samurai, Your Name Here, and Lightning Rods, which I reviewed for the Los Angeles Review of Books here [link]. She also maintains a blog at paperpools.blogspot.com.
We conducted this interview over email last month (as the inserted images probably make clear).
In bold defiance of the LARB tradition of having an absentee interviewer, I present the questions that inspired these responses, though, in the hopes of pre-disorienting the reader, detached from the provided answers.
1. Was there a time when you decided to dedicate yourself to writing?
2. You’ve said that you decided in the late 1990s to write ten novels each in a single voice — an antidote to the complexities posed by The Last Samurai. Lightning Rods was one of those novels. What were the other nine? What voices did they feature? What state of completion are they in?
3. Did writing a book about male sexual obsession pose special challenges? Were you sympathetic to Joe’s sexual fantasy life? Did you find it hard to understand why he might be attracted to the sorts of acts he found appealing?
4. You’ve expressed an interest in Edward Tufte’s philosophy of information design. Your work — including Lightning Rods — tends to foreground systems and information, education, our relationship to knowledge, etc. The “systems” novel or “novel of information” is often attacked for failing to present rounded characters and human relationships. I’m thinking particularly of James Wood’s disdain for “hysterical realism” and Jonathan Franzen’s conversion from a “status novelist” (concerned with systems) to a “contract novelist” (concerned with characters). Do you have views on the debate between advocates of “novels of information” and “novels of character”?
5. What sort of book does the twenty-first century desperately need?
— Lee Konstantinou
HELEN DEWITTThere is a strange taboo in our society against ending something merely because it is not pleasant — life, love, a conversation, you name it, the etiquette is that you must begin in ignorance & persevere in the face of knowledge, & though I naturally believe that this is profoundly wrong it’s not nice to go around constantly offending people.When you publish a book you do a lot of interviews. It gets harder each time. You try to work out what you want to say. Finally you think you have said the thing that matters, then people cut it out because it’s not right for the publication. So you get new questions by email and it’s hard to go through it again.
— Helen DeWitt, The Last Samurai
reblogged from: lareviewofbooks
Joey: Suicide is often associated with mental illness. But in your work it’s presented as a logical act. A fiercely rational act. Did you always think of suicide this way? You mentioned that there’s a need for suicide philosophers. One of the warning signs for suicides is a sudden cheerfulness after a long depression, which can be a sign that they’ve made their decision. Is there a freedom that comes with this view of suicide as tool available to us, even if the decision has not been made?
Helen DeWitt: Well, it’s possible to be mentally ill and rational - Leonard Woolf always said Virginia was extremely rational when she was mad. But I don’t think I have ever thought suicide per se evidence of mental illness.
Any number of philosophers have written about suicide. The one I mentioned in The Last Samurai is Jonathan Glover, a modern Utilitarian who wrote a book called Causing Death and Saving Lives. I can’t quote from memory - it’s been a long time since I’ve read him - but he says something like, if death really looks better than the life you’re leading, try to change the life first before killing yourself. Quit your job, leave your wife, go to another country.
So yes, taking suicide as a serious option might offer freedom. If you’re ready to walk away from your life, it clears the mind: you can ask yourself whether killing the body is the only way. There might be some other way to walk away from your life. You could get on a plane, go somewhere new, start over again. NEW GAME NEW GAME NEW GAME.
Or, of course, there might really be no prospect of something better. Virginia Woolf once wrote in her diary: Father would have been 92 today. 92! People do live to that age. His life would have been the end of mine: no writing, no life, nothing. [I am paraphrasing horribly, relying on a very bad memory.] Sir Leslie Stephen died when she was 21, if I remember correctly. She wrote the entry in her diary when she was 46. If someone of her talent was to have no chance of using it, death at 21 looks better than death at 46. And her life as a daughter in a middle-class Edwardian household is hardly the worst we can imagine.
"Helen Dewitt on suicide.
The Complete Manual of Suicide (完全自殺マニュアル Kanzen Jisatsu Manyuaru, lit. Complete Suicide Manual) is a Japanese book written by Wataru Tsurumi. It was first published on July 4, 1993 and sold more than one million copies. This 198 page book provides explicit descriptions and analysis on a wide range of suicide methods such as overdose, hanging, jumping, and carbon monoxide poisoning. It is not a suicide manual for the terminally ill. There is no preference shown for painless or dignified ways of ending one’s life. The book provides matter-of-fact assessment of each method in terms of the pain it causes, effort of preparation required, the appearance of the body and lethality.
Several years ago, I found an okay translation of the book’s preface and just dug up a document I’d copied and pasted it to. I, geefitch, did not translate this myself, but I did clean it up as much as possible to make it more understandable. Some bits are still a bit hazy, but you get the gist. I neither condemn nor condone suicide by posting this, rather The Complete Manual of Suicide is one of my many morbid interests and I find the preface quite disturbing. That’s saying a lot. This book has been found on bodies in the famous Aokigahara Forest and the preface itself provides a very dark insight into a certain mindset of youth and young adults at a very particular time in Japan’s history - a time which saw the aftermath of the economy’s bubble collapse (refered to as “The Lost Decade), the ripples of which stretched far and wide across the country - among the other, usual factors (discussed in the text to come.) Culturally, I feel this is some striking and unique stuff.
So yeah, just wanted to throw in a little perspective in there. I really needn’t give a trigger warning here but if you’re feeling depressed at the moment, I’d definitely give it a miss. Anyway, enjoy.
(Source: Wikipedia)
reblogged from: geefitch
