Amitava Kumar and Claire Messud on Literary Friendship

First Draft: A Dialogue of Writing is a weekly show featuring in-depth interviews with fiction, nonfiction, essay writers, and poets, highlighting the voices of writers as they discuss their work, their craft, and the literary arts. Hosted by Mitzi Rapkin, First Draft celebrates creative writing and the individuals who are dedicated to bringing their carefully chosen words to print as well as the impact writers have on the world we live in.

In this episode, Mitzi is joined by Claire Messud and Amitava Kumar for a very special conversation about literary friendship.

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From the episode:

Mitzi Rapkin: I’m curious if you think that in some ways, fiction might be evolving, or maybe it’s a subset of fiction. I think that, you know, Amitava, we’ve talked about this before, that sometimes bringing in journalism or photos, or bringing in interviews into the work; and the same with your novel, Claire, which is highly influenced by your grandfather’s true telling of the story and mixing fact and fiction. I’m talking about maybe some invisible chords and where genre is going and that we don’t have to be in a place where it’s just fiction. Can you both talk about that?

Amitava Kumar: When I was a graduate student, I had read Edward Said, who had said that if you had been a border crosser, if you had crossed borders, also if you had experienced dispossession and exile, you did not have access to a whole history, your history would necessarily, your writing would necessarily be fragmentary. I hadn’t experienced dispossession. I had crossed some borders, but I latched on to that as an excuse to produce incoherent writing. You know, mixed form writing.  Since then, I have developed, and my aesthetics has been more refined. And I do think that the most interesting work gets done at the meeting of genres, rather than sticking to a pure genre, because there’s just much more impurity in our lives. Frankly, the reason why, let’s say someone could stand in front of a picture and worship it, you know, a sacred picture, was because we were living in a time where, as John Berger has taught us, the way of seeing was fixed. With the development industrialization, with the arrival of the movie camera, with all kinds of violence, including the World Wars, our lives are indeed very much fractured. Our way of seeing has multiplied, hence Cubism. So, what it means is that your work therefore cannot be only in a single medium. You are made up of so many parts. We are made up of so many worlds. If we, you know, take off our clothes, we’ll find Bangladesh, Guatemala, India, even on our bodies. You know what I’m saying. So, our work should reflect this global experience, and this global experience is increasingly an experience of movement and scattering and joining in bold new ways. And that’s how I always think that reportage, memoir, fiction, sometimes even poetry, if you’re daring or stupid, all should go together

Claire Messud: And images

AK: Images, oh yes, images.  Images are not necessarily simply illustrations, but actually they complicate the text, and the text begins to breathe because there is an image there. Tomorrow we are teaching that we are dealing with that in with Claudia Rankine Citizen.

CM: In the book I was reading, Stephen Kern, The Culture of Time and Space, 1880 to 1918. It’s about a combination of scientific, technological and artistic upheavals, and the First World War.  And this is the thing I think a lot of about; it’s interesting to see it in his in his book, in that period where it makes a ton of sense, which is about this question of time.  He’s writing about how that was really the first time that simultaneity came into people’s lives. So, with Alexander Graham Bell in the telephone.  It used to be if I wanted to speak to Mitzi, I have to travel however many miles, and it takes a certain amount of time, and my understanding of Mitzi is she’s at that distance. And, you know, we’re separated by both time and space in a way that coheres and makes sense. But once I can pick up the telephone and call Mitzi and speak to her in the same time as we’re in different places, then my understanding of the world is fractured. And of course, this is also the time in which time zones, the standardization of time only comes into effect in that period before that the time might be different an hour from here, right? Everybody an hour from here has set their watch half an hour different from here or 20 minutes or 23 minutes, right? Everybody’s just making up their own version of time. What happens is the artworks that then emerge from this and as these experiences of reality evolve, so too, the art forms have to evolve, to take those changes into account. And of course, the internet and the smartphone being the latest massive upheaval, but, but of something that began 140 years ago.

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Claire Messud is the author of six works of fiction. She is a recipient of a Guggenheim and Radcliffe Fellowships and the Strauss Living Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.  Her essay collection is called Kant’s Little Prussian Head and Other Reasons Why I Write. Her recent novel is called This Strange Eventful History.  She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, with her family.

Amitava Kumar is a writer and journalist. He was born in Ara, and grew up in the nearby town of Patna, famous for its corruption, crushing poverty and delicious mangoes. Kumar is the author of several books of non-fiction and four novels.  His new novel is My Beloved Life. Kumar lives in Poughkeepsie, in upstate New York, where he is the Helen D. Lockwood Professor of English at Vassar College. He serves on the board of the Corporation of Yaddo.