Why one story and not the other? This was the question at the heart of writer Siri Hustvedt’s thought-provoking Southbank Centre Lecture at the London Literature Festival, author of such acclaimed novels as What I loved and The Summer Without Men. She went on to explore the question: what does it mean to have an idea? What is an idea? She engagingly grappled with the ”problem of dualism”, deftly covering philosophies ranging from the “Cartesian divide between spirit and matter” to the present-day, and her lecture was interwoven with a wide range of writers, scientists, and philosophers, with particularly resonant quotations from Margaret Cavendish and also this one from Rumi:
“Don’t turn away, keep your gaze on the bandaged place. That’s where the light enters you” – Rumi
Powerfully describing how her own wounds inspired her to look for answers, she explored some of the issues in her compelling non-fiction book, “The Shaking Woman: A History of My Nerves”.
She also movingly described the voluntary work she has done as a writing instructor for psychiatric patients, both adolescents and adults, and how the written text’s ability to fix something on the page can be a gift for those “at risk of disintegration” and writing’s ability to provide consolidation and integration.
Her new collection of essays, “Living, Thinking, Looking” is published this Summer and Hustvedt elegantly fitted a lifetime of learning into an hour, distilling with wisdom and wit the mysterious process of storytelling peculiar to humans, describing human beings as imaginative creatures who can leap from one thing into another, becoming something else, old or young, woman or man.
Filed under: London Literature Festival 2012, Misc Tagged: | Anita Sethi, London Literature Festival, Siri Hustvedt, southbank
What struck me so forcefully in Siri Hustevad’s lecture was her analysis of truth in fiction. She started by telling the audience that as writer of fiction, she could choose to write about anything. She suggested that she could tell a story about a woman with two heads, or someone who can fly. But she says that she does not write such fantasies, because she would feel them to be untrue.
Novelists like Hemmingway also searched for the ‘truth’ in fiction. I think he is quoted as explaining that he wrote, then edited so that only the truth remained of a story.
Siri has taken these ideas of truth in fiction further, trying to examine why she has such a strong sense of what is the truth within any particular story. (Even when the narrative is pure fiction.)
She started by looking at memory and realised that even when we recount a factual event, our memory will be clouded by many reiterations of remembering. Every time we take out a memory , we modify it.
Siri thinks that this process of re-polishing actual episodes in our past, may lead to our imaginative thinking also undergoing a similar buffing inside our minds.
So when the novelist depicts a fictitious event, they are able to use the same facility of memory and remembering to invent and re-invent a credible story.
The integrity that the novelist seeks in the work, is then enhanced and enriched by the reader, who will overlay upon the story their own palimpsest of interpretation, according to their individual experiences and schemas.
Her explanations of what makes writing seem ‘right’ to the novelist and to the reader was a revelation to me and has given me new courage in my own writing and my reading.
It was an excellent and stimulating talk.