Aleksandar Hemon and Myla Goldberg

Here is a terrific exchange; two of Chicago's finest writers exchange emails concerning their works, the world and suburban/urban writing in particular. At worst it tends toward a smug sort of urbanity, when Hemon describes the suburbs as the hallmark of American bourgeoise. The conversations are extremely illucidating on the topics of both writer's aspirations for writing, as they really get into it over whether fictions matter or not, and how useful they can be versus how useful they seem to be to the author. One interesting note Hemon makes, in reference to Danilo Kis, is that any society overly focused upon a single text, or personality I would say, runs the risk of slipping into totalitarisnism or fundamentalism. Even if it were On the Road or Gravity's Rainbow, any "one book is dangerous," while a more representative literature would encompass myriad voices. Hemon's reference to the city as a model for litature echoes this splintered textual ideal:

"Speaking of books about cities, in his review of Joyce's Ulysses Jorge Luis Borges addresses the fact that he had not read all seven hundred pages of the book, only bits and pieces in English (the Spanish translation would not appear for another twenty years), and yet he admires it immensely, knowing, he says, "what it is with that bold and legitimate certainty with which we assert our knowledge of a city, without ever having been rewarded with the intimacy of all the many streets it includes." What a wonderful concept — a book as a city: populated with a myriad human beings, not reducible to representing "us" (whoever we may be); complicated and conflictual; chaotic yet organized; approachable from any number of angles; and so much more. Reading this, I realized that what I want from books is to be cities, which is why I have such a problem with a lot of contemporary American fiction — a lot of "important" American books about "us" are book-suburbs, books about suburban people in their American fantasies of self-isolation, to whom dissociation from the world appears as freedom (the hollowness of which they have to face but are helpless to change), whose minor epiphanies are represented as major events and metaphysical revelations. But let me not rant against the contemporary American bourgeois fiction — I dream of books as cities."-AH

Calvino wrote Invisible Cities with just this in mind, and as Goldberg points out, Dos Passos was also thinking along similar lines. This criticism of American academic writing is a bit simplistic, but has its valuable points nonetheless. I wonder if the alienation he describes could relate to the vocational over-specialization that our culuture demands of people as much as the local zoning plans do? The thrust of the idea seems to be that suburbanization is trend which exemplifies American culture in its isolated sense of itself:

"Your description of "suburban" fiction in your last letter is how I tend to perceive American academic fiction, with its tidy maxims, producing a monoculture of "minor epiphanies." I think one of the most dangerous of those maxims is "write what you know," which when applied incorrectly can produce the sort of navel-gazing that we both find so tiresome."-MG

"The suburban/academic navel-gazing narratives are, of course, fantastically boring, but that just points at the inability to imagine oneself as being in the world, as being a part of a gigantic network of history and human experience — all they can imagine is suburban America, a fantasy in its own right. And this suburban isolationism, by the way, exactly replicates the political isolationism of America today."-AH


http://www.randomhouse.com/boldtype/1002/hemon/roundtable.html