I first encountered Aimee Bender’s fiction when, in quest of a new agent, I interviewed hers, and he told me that my story “Man in the Moon” was very like Aimee’s “Ironhead.” I immediately sought out the story and found that not only did it share several plot elements with my own, but that our literary sensibilities were remarkably similar, in that we both render real emotions and moral conundrums via impossible situations and images. Needless to say, I became an instant fan. Decades later, when I was arranging the tour for my new novel, We Want So Much to Be Ourselves, about an Aryan psychoanalyst and his Jewish family in Nazi Germany, a friend suggested that Aimee might be willing to serve as my interlocutor at an event in Los Angeles.
Thrilled at the idea, I instantly contacted her by email and learned that her father, like my own, was a psychoanalyst—which possibly explains some of the similarity between our sensibilities. One of the most interesting topics we addressed during our conversation at DIESEL, A Bookstore, in Santa Monica was the uncertain relationship between our literary impulses and our need to respond to the grim political circumstances of this era, so we decided to continue and deepen our exploration of this topic via a written conversation. —Stephen O’Connor
Stephen O’Connor:Maybe the clearest conflict between my artistic and political convictions occurred in May 1972, when Columbia University was occupied by student anti-war protesters. A similar protest in 1968, placing Columbia at the center of the 1960s political and cultural revolutions, had played a major role in my desire to attend the college. But by 1972, I was less sure campus shutdowns were politically effective, so I didn’t join the protestors until just before the final class of a creative writing course taught by Kenneth Koch that I already knew was changing my life, both for how he enriched my understanding of language and because, in his class, I felt for the first time that I might actually become a writer. The idea of missing Koch’s final insights and encouragements was almost unbearable, but attending the class seemed a betrayal of my moral and political convictions. In the end, I did attend, but remember nothing apart from looking out the window at a picket line and thinking I should be there.
Aimee Bender: That’s a great example. I relate to it. T here’s a split within me about the desire to do, which of course is hugely important, and the desire to process what’s happening with a government that refuses to take in anything, but instead spits it out for us to muck through.
What’s a Teflon person? A performance of porouslessness. And this relates to the unconscious, an area I know we both are fascinated by, and that you talk about beautifully in your recent novel.
A roundabout example that happened last week: my friend Miranda and I traded phone messages—she was having some parenting struggles, and I felt an intense pull to help and left an advice-y voicemail. She’d actually asked for no advice, but I couldn’t help myself. She called back and said the advice, predictably, wasn’t helpful, but asked if I could talk about what I’d been feeling that led to it, because that might help her access what was swirling around and illuminate her questions. So I thought about my helpless feeling, and the way that hardened into advice, and my own growing up, and how that informed my answers, and this she found way more useful and real.
If I apply this experience larger, then I wrestle with the wish, for example, to try to “solve” something, find an answer, post the perfectly worded post, vs. soaking in the nature of the muck—rage, incredulity, passivity, fog, etc.—to see what emerges. Action and processing need to coexist, but they do take a different focus, a different energy. What’s the purpose of this kind of processing? At the very least, it’s vehemently anti-Teflon.
What was one of the ways Kenneth Koch enriched your sense of language?
SO:You bring up so many interesting points, and it occurs to me that my answer to your question about Kenneth Koch might ultimately address them all. Prior to his course, my literature classes had all been taught by nonwriters—people who, however much they loved literature, stood outside of it and were a little intimidated by it. Their approach to literature was analytical, even cold. They tended to talk about a poem as if it were a code readers had to crack—a notion that would lead any sensible person to ask: Why do poets say X when they really mean Y?
Koch’s answer was that the Y is only one thread in the complex fabric of the poem, and that the full poem can only be experienced by opening yourself to its language—not just to the dictionary definitions of the words, but to their rhythms, textures, connotations and associations, and to all the related images and thoughts they put into your head. Because life is so packed with urgent obligations, we often miss the nuance, not just of language, but of life itself. Thus, nuance is rich in revelation: all those truths people refer to when they say a book has given them something they always knew but had never been aware of before. Also, this notion of knowing and not knowing something simultaneously suggests that at least part of what attention to nuance gives us is access to the unconscious—that part of the mind devoted almost exclusively to our struggles with our desires, fears, mistakes and misunderstandings, and so a primary source of inspiration and the natural territory of literature.
I wonder if there is a parallel between the analytical approach to literature and your advice-y voicemail to Miranda. Perhaps when you gave your advice, you were standing too much outside your friend’s situation and so were oversimplifying it, whereas when you were “soaking in the nature of the muck” you allowed yourself to see the world more as your friend experienced it, and so didn’t force her to accept the oversimplified “Teflon” version of the world rendered through your advice.
Which brings me back to our fundamental conundrum: the conflict between our normal sources of inspiration (the nature of the muck / unconscious) and our need to respond to the political urgencies of our time. When you gave your advice, you were in a hurry to fulfill a duty to Miranda, and so neglected the nuance and/or muck. Likewise, the urgency of today’s political situation can make our exploration of complexities, ambiguities, and imponderable conflicts seem beside the point. Activists aim to move masses of people, and so speak in oversimplifications: This is good. This is evil. There’s no in-between. Whereas soaking in the muck of “the rage, incredulity, passivity, clarity, fog,” tends to confuse, frustrate, and paralyze most people. So is there a role for our type of writing in this political moment? Or should we just pack up our pens and computers and get out on the streets with our whistles, cell phones, and signs?
AB:Good question. My easy response is that both actions are needed, internal, external. (But thinking now of Heather McHugh’s amazing poem “What He Thought,” and the narrator’s smug pleasure thinking she knew the answer to a question about the nature of poetry: “‘The truth / is both, it’s both,’ I blurted out. But that / was easy. That was easiest to say.”As the poem continues she realizes the answer is far more elusive.)
We need records. I’m eager to read about the pandemic now—or “about” the pandemic—however that plays out on page, screen, canvas. I had a student who was writing a scene set in 2021, and he worried we might be tired of pandemic fiction, which shocked me. I’m craving writing to help me take in something I experienced in a kind of frantic blur, and I feel this too about now.
So what statements do I lean on, that don’t feel easy, that apply to differing needs of the moment? My husband, a Buddhist, sometimes quotes the three tenets of the peacemaker lineage of Soto Zen—not-knowing, witnessing, then taking action based on not-knowing and witnessing. Seeing is hard! As a writer and person. But what a worthy goal. Thinking too of activist/writer Mariame Kaba who talks about reaching out in one’s community, all the ways of helping, how to pick something specific to oneself, and this would include writers writing.
SO: Once again you have touched on many interesting topics, especially concerning the complex relationship between knowing and action. I’m not at all religious, but I think there is great wisdom in the first line of the Tao Te Ching: “The way that can be known is not the eternal way”—a line closely connected, I believe, to the first of the three tenets of Soto Zen. I love that line because, while it marks the commencement of an effort to understand our being within the world, it asserts that the effort is semi-futile, that we will never be able to arrive at a complete understanding, but also that the recognition of such futility is a crucial first step along the road to whatever understanding is actually possible.
I believe that the value of writing, and of art, is precisely as you suggest: to help us do the hard, though semi-futile work of seeing the world as it actually is, with all its beauty and horror, its importance, triviality, meaning, and meaninglessness. Much of life is baffling, disturbing, and profoundly difficult to accept, and so we prefer comforting oversimplifications and lies. But we cannot understand good or evil unless we can see the actual, so the hard work of seeing is a necessary first step toward taking action—work that, as you suggest, we cannot do alone, that is necessarily a collaboration with countless thinkers, writers, and artists throughout human history, each offering their incomplete understanding to their own generation and to all that follow, in the hope of advancing our species at least a smidgen closer to the true and the good.
Many people see my new novel, set in Nazi Germany, as a warning about the perils we face today. I am not remotely unhappy that readers see the book this way, but, in fact, its political relevance is mostly accidental. I started writing it before Trump was elected to his first term and finished it before he was elected to his second, and was primarily inspired by a series of moral and psychological paradoxes, none of which had their current political relevance when they came to me. Nor were they intended to inspire any action other than a recognition that many of the standards by which we distinguish right from wrong, true from false, are insufficient to the task—a notion arguably antithetical to political action.
But I entirely agree with your belief that processing and action can and must coexist. Much as I despise oversimplification and false certainty in literature, I know that we can’t stop our descent into fascism without inspiring masses of people to take action. So, between now and the next election, I will be inscribing oversimplifications on placards and shouting them at rallies, as well as canvasing, phone-banking, contributing to campaigns, and, of course, voting—work that will severely diminish my time with my muse, but I don’t see any alternative.
AB: Your novel worked so well for me on many levels, but a key one was how it seemed to inhabit two times at once. Your main character initially blew off worries about growing fascism and I was chilled, reading that. And seeing how many Germans just went about their days while the horrors were happening, how easy it is to go about one’s day.
My expectations of fiction are modest—I don’t think it’s (likely) going to be the thing that makes real change. Doing more, whatever that means, is crucial. But fiction helps us think, on conscious and unconscious planes, and our minds are cluttered by so much non-thinking, anti-thinking; I don’t think I can overstate how precious it is to me to think and feel alongside someone else in this way.
