| Thursday, May 8, 2008 12:05AM | | | | Conversation and Change | Posted By: Rachel Wetzsteon
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I see that Molly McQuade has already given us a witty account of some of the highlights of the McEwan/Pinker conversation at the Morgan, so I’ll abandon –- with some relief I confess -- the plodding summary I had in mind and instead list a few of my own favorite moments, in the hopes that they’ll supplement hers (thanks Molly):
PEN World Voices Festival Director Caro Lllewellyn accidentally introduced the two men as “Steven McEwan” and “Ian Pinker,” but this name-mangling turned out to be surprisingly apt, for this was a conversation that really felt like a conversation, a highly spirited rather than a dully scripted back-and-forth in which the two men engaged with, riffed off and piggy-backed on each other’s ideas, anecdotes and opinions.
Their range of references –- the Watergate transcripts, the movie Tootsie, The Odyssey –- was exhilarating. And I liked the way each gracefully and graciously brought up the
other’s work –- especially Pinker on the newlyweds’ dismal communication breakdown in McEwan’s On Chesil Beach -- without any devolution into back-patting.
Pinker was brilliant in his account of how, in romantic relationships, we resist articulating the terms of our relationships (I am with you because…; this partnership
is founded on…), perhaps because to do so would be to accede to the fact that we have decided to be in the relationship –- which would also imply that we can decide not
to be in it. Instead we tend to engage in nonverbal, highly symbolic behavior with ritualistic roots: walking in step (we are one body), eating together (we are one flesh). All this was fascinating and vaguely disturbing.
McEwan’s account of the final scene in Joyce’s “The Dead” was particularly moving. Pinker had just discussed “mutual knowledge” -- the mechanism by which, when Person A asks Person B, “Would you like to come see my etchings?” both
parties are aware of the sexual subtext, so that Person B’s “No thanks” gives Person A his/her answer with minimal embarrassment. (The howlingly awkward inverse of this
of course being –- q.v. McQuade -– McEwan’s frank brave disastrous come-on.) McEwan then applied this concept, or rather its sad lack, to Gabriel and Gretta Conroy coming home from the party, he full of surging lust and love and she, utterly oblivious to both, haunted instead by the ghost of her dead singer/suitor. (McEwan also lamented Joyce’s abandonment of such powerful emotional moments for the “literary and aesthetic cul-de-sac of Finnegans Wake.”)
All in all, a terrific afternoon that made even sports-averse me want to take up tennis –- albeit of the anaerobic dialogic variety.
A very different but equally stimulating conversation took place the next day at the New York Public Library, with five writers (several aided ably by interpreters, and flanked again by that sad empty chair) holding forth on “Books That Changed My Life.”
Moderator Paul Holdengraber –- a self-described “linguistic monster” who kept things moving along nicely on account of his fluency in four languages and his provocative quotations (Kafka’s book as ice-axe; Beckett on Proust’s bad memory) -- revealed that many of the writers he’d contacted had actually wanted to choose ten books, but each one present spoke of two.
Humane and witty Antonio Munoz Molina cited Bert Holldobler and E.O. Wilson’s Journey to the Ants because it teaches self-absorbed writers the lesson that the world is more interesting than they are! (Touché; there is also a very fine TV documentary on ants, narrated by Wilson.) His runner-up was Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom, whose fractured style taught him that “the past is not an archive but a network of voices.”
Pensive Catherine Millet mentioned her own book, The Sexual Life of Catherine M. –- curiously noting that some of its critics had compared her to an ant! –- and Balzac’s novel Lily of the Valley, which she first heard on her parents’ radio as a teenager. Above all she prized Balzac’s sense of place, his use of landscape as a metaphor for his characters’ lives. (Munoz Molina, also claiming Balzac as a big influence, remarked that he learned from him as well as Faulkner how to develop characters over time, throughout not one but many works.)
Bright-eyed Yousef Al-Mohaimeed cited three books: The Arabian Nights (read to him by his sister), a collection of Japanese haiku (which made him want to write short sentences), and Kazantzakis’s Zorba the Greek.
Suave Olivier Rolin –- who, like Holdengraber, challenged the notion of change, remarking that important books didn’t alter his life so much as accompany him through it like a “personal orchestra” –- cheated slightly and spoke of Lowry’s Under the Volcano, Borges, Proust’s Time Regained, Celine’s Voyage to the Night, and Apollinaire’s poems.
Likeable Annie Proulx tantalizingly tossed off a few titles –-Willem Hermans’s Beyond Sleep, J.F. Powers’s Wheat That Springeth Green, Robbe-Grillet’s Jealousy –- before settling on what she frankly described as “a bad book” which nevertheless influenced her hugely: Jack London’s Before Adam. “Not a good book, but very racy," it took her from a world of “Dick and Jane and relatives” to “pure unadulterated social Darwinism.” She recommended it to kids “fed up with the normal stuff.” (She also playfully proposed that the book might not actually exist, but a quick Internet search reveals that it definitely does.)
Many other important and interesting issues came up during the discussion. What constitutes change? Do we want to be changed? Can we change for the worse? Does reading become dangerous when it becomes a substitute for reality (a possibility to which Holdengraber and Munoz Molina subscribed)?
And charming stories, too: Holdengraber told of how Russian translators Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky met when they found themselves sitting next to each other reading the same book, Dostoevsky’s Idiot. She was laughing, he was not. Eventually they got married and translated this very book which had unquestionably changed both their lives.
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