THE LITBLOG CO-OP

Paule Constant Q&A

White Spirit translator Betsy Wing was kind enough to direct a few questions from Anne Fernham to author Paule Constant.  Not only did Wing send off the questions, but she was graciously offered a down-and-dirty English translation for Constant's responses.

How conscious an influence was Heart of Darkness?

To my great regret I have never been able to get into any of Conrad’s books. I’ve frequently been told that I reminded readers of him but I don’t know to what extent. However, I believe that landscapes dictate their own laws to literature. That’s how all novels, American, Japanese or African are written.

This one is harder to word but one that I'd like to hear more about. I'm wondering about the *cultural* translation of the book's theme of skin lightening. It's my sense that, in the current cultural climate, talking about differences in skin tone is pretty taboo, underground--not absent, but cautious. Certainly, I would suspect that white American writers would face some pretty loud objections from all corners if they wrote a novel about blacks wanting to lighten their skin. It's easy to find literature in the states by African Americans from the twenties (Nella Larsen, Langston Hughes, Jean Toomer) about the significance of various skin tones, but since "black is beautiful" in the seventies, the conversation about skin tones seems to have gone underground. How is the topic of skin color and race treated in France and postcolonial French Africa?

I spent almost all my life in Africa which is like a motherland to me. My entire formation is African. It’s natural that like any writer I return to the sources of myself. If I have no tabous in respect to Africa it’s because in my first novel, Ouregano, published in 1980, I forcefully denounced colonialism. Though, taking into account sociologists and philosophers, I was not the first to do so, I was certainly one of the first novelists who did. Consequently, when White Spirit came out nobody thought to criticize me. All literature transgresses (otherwise it is called journalism), but the transgression in White Spirit isn’t the fact that a Black woman (actually mulatto) wants to lighten her skin, always a widespread practice (see, for example, the dermatologists’ repeated cautions about the dangers of the products used). The White Spirit in this book is a symbolic product; it represents a false Holy Spirit given to humanity to make up for its hardships. As in most of my novels the real transgression takes place on a religious plane. What I find most troubling in the novel is the erasure of the borders between human and animal. The White Spirit, which destroys the young woman’s skin and kills an entire village, symbolizes western evil imposed on a natural world. If taken in that way my novel is very “politically correct.”

But your question concerns censoring and self-censoring. As you know we, particularly in France, have had to fight religious censorship. In libraries there was always a “hell” composed of forbidden books, in which you’d find great writers such as Francois Mauriac and Julien Green. Writers have also had to fight erotic censorship (Proust, Julien Green). One begins to realize that in every period the writer has been accused of immorality by society, which means that he or she has not gone along with the morality of that period. Is political correctness, perhaps, the new morality of the contemporary world which believes its freedom is demonstrated in relation to religious or sexual issues? Here too, of course, one feels the pressure to be politically correct, but I believe it necessary to refuse to do this and not write communal literature. The novelist’s freedom has to be the ability to talk about everything, even about things he doesn’t know. I even believe that one becomes a writer when one dares talk about things one doesn’t know on the basis of what one is not. White Spirit marks an important stage for me; it represents the moment in which I am no longer recounting the Africa I experienced (as I did in Ouregano and Balta), but begin to invent it. And this, of course, is where (this is the novelist’s secret)—

Thank you, Paule and Betsy, for taking the time out to respond and translate, respectively!

Stay tuned this weekend, when we offer our podcast interview with Betsy Wing.  Even Betsy's dog makes a brief barking cameo.

Incidentally, you can find Betsy's translation work in the following books:

The Book of Promethea/Le Livre De Promethea by Helene Cixous (University of Nebraska Press, 1991)
Outwitting the Gestapo by Lucie Aubrac (University of Nebraska Press, 1994)
Poetics of Relation by Edouard Glissant (University of Michigan Press, 1997)
So Vast the Prison by Assia Djebar (Seven Stories Press, 1999)

As to more Constant-Wing adaptations, the University of Nebraska Press has the following novels available:

The Governor's Daughter (1998)
Trading Secrets (2001)

LBC Podcast #2: Kellie Wells

Nominator:  Dan Wickett

Nominee:  Kellie Wells

Subjects Discussed:  Interdependent stories, the perception of a “novel in stories,” “Compression Scars” as the launching pad for the novel, building community consciousness within fiction, setting down distinct vernacular, preserving Midwestern cultural details, Sherwood Anderson, the publishing industry’s prejudice against the Midwest, cap guns, finding the right brand name referential balance, Spirographs, novelists as chroniclers, the adaptive nature of human behavior as expressed through fiction, The Pickwick Papers, writing about abuse, the origins of What Cheer, punk culture in Kansas, and the propinquity of magical realism to personal experience.

Backup Link: (MP3)

(A co-production of the LBC and The Bat Segundo Show.)

University of Nebraska Press

The following comes from Kate Salem, Publicity Coordinator of the University of Nebraska Press:

We’ve had two UNP titles included on the list of four nominations, and are overjoyed at this recognition of our authors and books. To have such an esteemed group of thoughtful readers take an interest in, and nominate two of our titles, is quite an honor. Skin by Kellie Wells is the latest offering in our critically-acclaimed Flyover Fiction series. White Spirit by Paule Constant, translated by Betsy Wing, is another stellar offering within our program of translating important international fiction.

Back in March, you (Dan Wickett) notified me that you would be nominating Skin, and asked if we would be able to provide 21 review copies to the LBC members—which we were very willing to do. Next, I heard from Michael Orthofer, wanting to “toss Paule Constant’s White Spirit into the ring.” We were able to ship both books together to the LBC members needing review copies, and that worked out well. Following the shipment of books, we had only to wait and hope for news that we’d have a title selected—you can imagine our surprise at the announcement of two nominations!

This week, we’re following with interest the Lit-blog Coop discussion of Skin that has begun—and look forward to next week’s discussion of White Spirit. Ed Champion has also contacted us recently, to arrange the podcast interviews with authors/translators. The recent Jordan Stump podcast was thoroughly enjoyed. Jordan Stump’s translation of Minor Angels, by Antoine Volodine (UNP, 2002) is mentioned in Kellie Wells’ post of yesterday (thanks Kellie!). We are pleased to have numerous translations by Jordan Stump on our list—interested readers can find more by going to our website at: www.nebraskapress.unl.edu.

Having just joined the blogosphere with a blog of our own at http://nebraskapress.typepad.com/, we realize the importance of this medium. A note of Ed Champion’s to our author, concerning the podcast interview, points out that the Lit-Blog Coop “has garnered the attention of the Associated Press, the Los Angeles Times, the Daily Telegraph, the Village Voice.” In today’s world of shrinking review space in these and other publications, we can credit the litbloggers for illuminating lesser-known writers, and recognizing work from small and university presses. We sincerely thank you, and continue to admire your successes! 

Interview with Kellie Wells - An Update

Kellie was kind enough to answer some follow-up questions as the earlier posted interview is nearly 4 years old now. 

Dan:
 
When you published Compression Scars as a story within your collection, did you know at that time it was part of a larger work?
 
Kellie:
 
I didn’t write the story thinking I was going to expand it into something longer, but I’d started to work on the novel by the time the collection came out. I had this vague and shapeless desire to try to represent a community consciousness, and those characters seemed useful for that purpose. And Nancy Zafris also suggested to me that there was more to that story than the story.

Dan:
 
Your essay you shared yesterday about Stanley Elkin was very interesting in terms of getting a feel for the type of writing you enjoy both reading and writing.  What other authors really grab your attention?
 
Kellie:
 
Well, of course, there is an endless list, and I mentioned a few books I love at the end of the original interview. Lately I’ve been returning to Bruno Schulz, Robert Walser, Djuna Barnes, Angela Carter, Joy Williams, Jaimy Gordon, Kathryn Davis—they’re staples of my reading diet—and recently I’ve read and admired fiction by Kevin Brockmeier, Antoine Volodine, Kate Bernheimer, Natasza Goerke, Judy Doenges, Brian Evenson, Michael Martone, Etgar Keret, Rikki Ducornet, Neela Vaswani, Kelly Link, Eric Chevillard...
 
Dan:
 
A great portion of your life has been spent located in the Midwest - growing up there, graduate degree at Western Michigan, teaching in St. Louis.  Some of the conversation that's occurred at the LBC so far this week has referred to you as a Midwestern writer (and Skin was published in the U-Nebraska Press' Flyover Fiction Series).  However, you've also lived in the south and outside of the country at times.  Do you see any effects from living in these non-Midwestern locales in your writing at all?
 
Kellie:

I want to say something about the word “Midwestern,” which is that it’s freighted. It sometimes gets used pejoratively, dismissively, depending on who’s wielding it and why. And it’s reductive of course, as such terms generally are. It collapses together parts of this country that are more varied than the term would suggest. Having said that, it’s not a label I feel compelled to disavow, because clearly that freight is something that interests me.
 
As for the effects of living outside the Midwest, I find it easier to write about a place when I’m somewhere else; it just throws things into relief.

I’m really interested in mystical and occult movements of the nineteenth century, particularly as they intersect with the medicine of the day, so Rudolf Steiner, founder of the Waldorf Schools and anthroposophy, is someone I’ve long wanted to write about, and through him I hope one day to make use in my fiction of my time in Berlin. 

Dan:
 
Where in the world did you get the idea of including Prairie Dogs in Skin?
 
Kellie:
 
Ha. If you travel across the Great Plains states by car, you’ll likely pass a prairie dog town or two. They make an impression.

Dan:
 
I know from past discussions with you, and from reading your website, that you are at some stage of work on your second novel, FAT GIRL, TERRESTRIAL.  How is that coming along?  And, can fans of your short fiction expect to see any more short stories anytime soon, or have you decided to concentrate on the novel only these days?
 
Kellie:

The novel’s coming along, thanks for asking. I’m more a writer of sentences and paragraphs than chapters—that’s sort of my unit of composition—so I progress snailishly. I love the breadth the novel affords; it allows me to indulge (overindulge Joachim, my husband, would say) my natural tendency toward diffusion. But I also still quite like the form of short fiction, and when I get stalled with the novel, I stop and write a story. The stories I’m inclined to write now, however, in the middle of writing a novel, are fairly short. I’m thinking I’d like to teach a craft class on the 5-7 page story. It’s too long to be considered a bona fide short-short, is not so distilled, but at that length there’s still some compression going on.

Dan:
 
Thanks for the update Kellie!
 
Kellie:
 
Thank you, Dan!

Interview - Kellie Wells

The following is an interview with Kellie Wells conducted November 26, 2002, not long after her collection, Compression Scars, was published.  Later today, some follow-up questions will be answered by Kellie and posted in a separate post.

Dan:

Hello Kellie, thanks for taking some time out of your schedule to answer some questions.

Kellie:

Hi, Dan. My pleasure. Thanks for your interest.

Dan:

Where do you believe your interest in reading and writing stems from?  Are your parents and sister big
readers as well?

Kellie:

My parents were readers of news magazines and newspapers, but they weren't big readers of fiction
particularly. They did always encourage me to read.  Yes, my sister Jane is a voracious reader, always at the library.

My father owned and oversaw every aspect of a small-town newspaper, THE SILVER CITY RECORD, and he wrote a weekly column called "Small Talk." I imagine seeing him at his desk each week writing the column made an impression on me. As did his old linotype machine--he also printed the newspaper himself. As a child, I was fascinated by the letters knocking into one another, sliding down chutes, forming words, sentences. Words have always seemed almost like physical objects to me.

Dan:

Can you describe what you did while working for Arts & Letters?

Kellie:

I was the fiction editor, so I read, solicited, selected, and edited Fiction manuscripts. I also
helped with the layout of the journal. Ruth Knafo Setton is now the fiction editor.

Dan:

Can you remember a story by somebody completely unknown to you just demanding to be published?  Also, who was the most responsive to a solicitation from yourself and Arts & Letters?

"Skirls and screaks" About Style and my Abiding Affection for Stanley Elkin

Dear Blogerati and lovers of literature,

I thank you sincerely for what you do here, for bringing attention to books on small and independent presses, books in translation, and books that are challenging in a way that necessarily makes them undersung. I’d like to thank especially Dan Wickett, who is a tireless force for good, a real mensch, and whose unwavering enthusiasm for my work has meant a lot to me. Thanks also to Ed Champion, and to Meg Sefton and Mary O’Connell for their comments on Skin. (And I urge you all to check out Mary’s terrific collection of stories Living With Saints. And while I’m recommending, let me mention to you another U of Nebraska book: Minor Angels, by Antoine Volodine, translated by none other than Read This! Jordan Stump.)

At the risk of adding hot air to a heat wave, I thought I’d just post here an excerpt here from an essay that is partly a statement of poetics, an essay I was asked to write for a Dalkey Archive electronic casebook on Stanley Elkin’s The Magic Kingdom, edited by Elkin’s biographer, David Dougherty.

----

At the time I entered graduate school, Raymond Carver, though dead a few years, still held aesthetic sway in the graduate workshop, and though I read and admired the so-called minimalists (well, okay, some of them), I knew I’d never be one myself no matter how much literary Slim Fast I might force down my starving gullet, but it wasn’t clear to me (having had my own predilections summarily savaged in workshop) what the alternatives were. The strong-arming thuggery of hegemonies (all right already, uncle!) is always so, erm, persuasive. So happening upon the maximalism of Stanley Elkin was something of a revelation to me, license to indulge the (as I saw it, productively) convoluted syntax, the profligate diction, and the darkly comic situations that came more naturally to me and were much abhorred by many of my classmates, the more staunchly partisan and word-rationed realists among them.

Here are some aspects of Stanley Elkin’s aesthetic that attract me: first and foremost his attention to language, to the sensual pleasure of how words can so pleasingly fill up the mouth and dizzily stumble off the tongue, a rapturous kind of gluttony, one descriptor never enough; the hazardous over-the-topness and word-besotted overindulgence of his work (an intemperance that can give a reader the spins and necessitate imbibing again the lapidary hair of the dog)—in every book there's a certain Disneyland excess that is money-grubbing, celebrity-seeking, larger-than-death, paradox-embracing America, and it is his confidence-man, beat-the-clock rhetoric that persuades you to spend 300+ pages on holiday there. I'm also smitten in Elkin's work with the absurdity that results from taking the familiar, the commonplace, and canting it just a few degrees north so that the ludicrous shape of everyday life, which can go unremarked beneath the manufactured veneer of the quotidian, is heightened, made all the more discernable. And I identify with his fascination with the compulsive or beautiful or charming freak (in his cosmos center stage rather than in the wings, redefining freakhood), as well as his interest in the failing body, not to mention his sense of the comic, which is so black every laugh, and there are yuks aplenty, exacts an emotional toll from the reader. All this would be the tradition to whatever individual talent I could lay claim to, the literary nation of which I wished to be a citizen, even if it meant being deported from this hostile republic I found myself in those days inhabiting.

Taking Chances

In Skin, Kellie Wells follows up with an aspect of writing that she had shown earlier with her short story collection, Compression Scars - she is a writer willing to take chances.  The stories of the people living in What Cheer, Kansas are not what you might typically find in novels.  As Meg Sefton so elequently put in an earlier comments section:  (Skin) " ... is about spiritual exploration, a dream world, the possibilities inherent in imagination and what is not on the surface of our lives, but what we share in our humanity and our commonality with the planet."

It is perhaps the combination of this spiritual exploration and the fact that the world has a dreamlike feeling about it, or almost a magical aspect to it, that was most surprising to me.  Wells doesn't come out and blast away with religious dogma at all.  She instead allows her various characters to explore their own individual faith and spirituality based upon their own situations.  There are teenagers, Duncan and Ivy, exploring their burgeoning relationship, while dealing with the fact that Duncan is a living time bomb based on the compression scars his body has as a result of an earlier accident.  There is also Charlotte McCorkle, slowly losing it and believing that she is responsible for the death of her husband, even though he's not dead, but instead in a nursing home across town.  Wells also has a Deacon hitting the wall in terms of accepting his life and faith, a highly imaginative little girl and her mother and grandmother and their interactions, and others - and each brings something to the table in terms of exploring faith and spirituality.

Wells brings all of these together and does so with language and a vocabulary that challenges the reader.  She infuses her writing with many biological terms and phrases that sent me wandering to dictionary.com more than a few times.  She also has a great hand at metaphors and similes, which I tend to enjoy.  An example:  "The sparse and occasional vegatation that poked through the otherwise bald ground looked like two days of beard growrth sprouting on a lumpy, featureless face."

The combination of the writing, the unique topics Wells points her readers towards, and the risks she takes in her fiction are what kept my attention once I began reading Skin, and kept it there through the end of the book and further.

Skin by Kellie Wells

I first became aware of Kellie Wells' writing just before she was awarded the Flannery O'Connor Short Fiction Award from the University of Georgia Press for her story collection, Compression Scars.  I made sure to order a copy of it at the time, and consider it one of the best story collections that I've read in the past decade.

Wells has an ability to merge religious confusion and moral ambiguities, and then toss in a biological element seamlessly that strikes me as very interesting.  The title story of that collection is actually included within Skin as a single chapter, very early on.  And the compression scars of this title are an indication of what to look for in Wells' writing - an affinity for what is going on beneath the skin as she often writes about blue skin, veins, organs deep inside the body, and the flowing of blood. 

Skin is set in What Cheer, Kansas, and is part of the University of Nebraska Press' Flyover Fiction Series, celebrating writing of the Midwest.  The novel is set up so that each chapter is told from one, or occasionally two, of seven characters' perspectives.  While setting her novel in what one might assume would be a pretty plain location, Wells has given her readers some interesting characters - Duncan, a boy with compression scars across his body, just waiting for the moment they decide to expand and end his life;  evangelist Ansel Dorsett, a deacon suffering what appears to be a mid-life crisis; Charlotte McCorkle, who believes she's killed her husband, though he's across town in a nursing home; and then there's Ruby Tuesday Loomis, the child who dreams of fruit growing from her body.

Between this group, Wells conjurs up a story that is a bit magical, a bit fantastical, and at times possibly more surreal than some readers will enjoy - but she does so with a lyricism and vocabulary that is a joy to bounce through.  While allowing things to perhaps extend a little too far mysteriously, she reigns the story back in with her title's motif of Skin being  both what that which keeps us whole, as well as that which makes us vulnerable. 

She is a writer willing to take some chances - both in her story, and in her language - a trait I believe deserves a little attention.

After the jump is a small excerpt from Skin - please come back the week of July 31 - August 4 when we'll be discussing Kellie's novel.