“We may lose our rights”

Comparing her last book, Mothers, Fathers, and Others, Virginia Woolf published A Room of One’s Own in 1929. How have writers’ rooms changed over time?

Virginia Woolf’s book describes what it means to be a woman and a writer, and we still have to deal with the circumstances surrounding these two conditions. We have the impression that there is steady and sustained progress as time goes on, but there is still much to be done, especially with regard to women’s rights. History is not progress. It’s a 19th century fantasy, but it’s so ingrained in our culture. We are in 2022 and things have not changed. Look back into the 20th century, how the Nazis came to power in Germany. Now we see in authoritarian movements in the USA, what happens with abortion… History is not linear, we may lose our rights. Most women with families have to deal with family responsibilities, including children and husband, housework, work, writing… My husband [el también escritor Paul Auster] he once said to me: you can do two things, but you cannot do three things; It is a very correct point of view. Someone once asked me how I felt about being a woman, a mother, and a writer, and I replied if I should ask a writer the same thing.

Never.

That’s right, never.

I share your love for the song Dirt in the Ground by Tom Waits, whose chorus features “We will all be soil”.

Tom Waits is a great musician but also a great songwriter. This letter represents the idea that the best thing we can do is get up and dance. It reminds me of the urgency of being alive, the importance of each day. Emphasize the truth: we will all die and become part of the world. And somehow, there’s something exciting about it, because while it’s a cliché, our days are numbered. Rather than being something terrible, it is a kind of inspiration until death comes to us. Why are we here, why are things happening? It is the principle of vitality.

In this sense, in one of his essays, he assures that “we cannot treat the corpses of our dead like the garbage we throw on the street”. What do you think about the way western society deals with death? Has it changed with the pandemic?

Well, it will have to be seen. A million people died in the US and now have some form of amnesia. In fact, this is something that already happened during the 1918 pandemic, in which an estimated 50 million people died. In New York, only those who died in the hospital were counted in this epidemic, but what about those who died at home? A scientist friend says the best way to determine the death toll is to compare the death toll with any given year. When my mother was a kid in Norway and I was a kid, if a family member died, for it to be known, kids would go to school with a black bracelet. Now there is an idea that you need to get over it. But it can’t be overcome, that’s how it is. My mother was 96 when she died and I miss her every day.

Of course, and it will remain so until the last day of his life.

Of course. The point is not: “I have already passed my year of mourning…”.

No, it’s something you have to learn to live with.

This is how it is. Also, the dead are no longer watched at home. This connection with death now often takes place in a hospital, implying that the reality of death is not felt, it is hidden, hidden.

The article he wrote about his mother’s death is moving. He says he has never experienced such pure grief and talks about visiting her in a dream.

Yes, I waited for him, but he didn’t come right away. It was a wonderful dream. Suddenly my mother appeared and I knew in the dream that she was dead. I hugged him, felt his bones, and it was the truest feeling of what it was like to hold him while he was alive. And I thought: Isn’t this the most wonderful and beautiful ghost I’ve ever seen? My mother was very active, loved to travel, was constantly going from place to place. In the dream she was supposed to take a train to go somewhere in Norway, but I couldn’t go with her, so I packed her suitcase and took her to the train. It is the parable of death. Sometimes we dream very well, dreams reveal all kinds of anxiety.

What do you think about the relationship between dreams and writing?

The best example is Kafka. Somehow he managed to create stories as we imagined; A country doctor is the clearest example. I think writing, especially fiction, is like daydreaming. Writers work at the optimum level where dream work is implicit. Where does all this material come from? It must be produced by something like the mechanism of dreams. I believe dreams and writing are closely related. This is how the best fiction is produced. Consider the material of a novel or short story; It was not chosen consciously.

Of course not.

Why is something right or wrong in a work of fiction? It’s not because you’re doing any conscious or structural analysis, you just feel like it’s okay that way. And that feeling is what moves you forward in writing. It is an emotional, emotional and also physical judgment about rhythms and all those embodied realities that move a work and lead you to write it.

She writes about willful neglect, confidentiality, and how it can define families’ lives, relationships. What about neglect in literature? Because it is something that defines us.

I think so, yes. This is something that might be obvious, but at the same time it is not. Consider, of course, the neglect of women. There were more women writers than men in 18th-century England, but they disappeared over time. There is a big shortage there. But at the same time, I was fascinated by how, in philosophical terms, birth does not look, is incomplete. In philosophy there is a constant suppression of the beginning and an obsession with the end. There are a lot of important texts that suppress the fact of pregnancy, skip it. And if we take into account that we all came from another human body, that is, the origin of the whole world, we were all fetuses.

Yes, it is the origin of life.

Yes, we all know, but no one talks about it. Kierkegaard, for example, constantly uses metaphors of pregnancy, but he never wrote about his mother. This is a fascinating thing. One of my leading philosophers, Merleau-Ponty, has the idea of ​​intercorporeality, but never associates it with birth. It’s an omission, it’s fascinating how some of the obvious things are skipped over.

In this respect, words are everything to me. I value them very much and take care of them, I take care of their meaning. And so it is because I believe that what is not named does not exist. Do you join?

I partially agree. I believe that what we cannot name, from a conceptual point of view, does not exist in our reality, in our framework. But that doesn’t mean that… Let’s see how I’ll explain… There have been discoveries in the history of humanity that no one knows about. For example, we now know that the sun does not revolve around the Earth, but it doesn’t seem to make any difference. In science this happens all the time. But you are right that naming is extremely important to conceptual reality.

I love the article titled The Future of Literature. In it he claims that “the future is the land of our expectations, hopes, fantasies and projections, in other words, the future is a fiction”. What about now? A reflection of the past?

Philosopher William James has a great concept. He calls it a dubious gift and goes on to say that the present does not exist. Therefore, you take the past to live and guess it. I believe that the present moment we live in is a phase of expectation, and so perception is always partial.

biased and conservative.

That’s a good appreciation. Certainly, the perception is very conservative. We all have perceptual experiences that are fascinating. Most of our perceptions are determined by the emotions we are currently feeling. It is reasonable to doubt our perceptions, it is something we should do. Adopting a certain skepticism is healthy because it gives you more pluralism in your interpretation of how we live in the world.

In the book it says: Reading is an act of love, just like writing. Both the reader and the writer give themselves to another. But I am afraid that reading and writing cannot solve the problems of our society.

I am a pluralist, an epistemological pluralist. I firmly believe that you need to take multiple approaches to asking the same question. But what ruins the world is that people feel they have the truth, whatever it is.

The problem is that fiction can also distort reality.

In fact, we live with fictions, conspiracy theories that many people find strange, and many of them are in very ancient forms. Some are unconscious, but others are very conscious.

And how can we protect the truth? Can we save him?

Truth, as we know, is a very complex philosophical concept. But I want to say that when people lie, they know. Normal people, not hallucinators, know when they’re lying. So preserving truth is preserving truth that doesn’t lie, but it’s complicated because truth as we know it is produced by some kind of cultural compromise. It was a common consensus that when witches were convicted, when people believed in witches, such evil events could happen. Part of the problem is that the fragmentation of culture is such that when all these multiple realities are so divided, what unites them?

However, as he argues, the artist does not seek literal truths.

Nerd.

What matters is freedom.

Freedom and emotional truth. A good book is good because it tells you something about your own human experience that you wouldn’t recognize without it. I think that’s what great art can do and what sets it apart from many other experiences.