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| Tim Corballis (Fiona Amundsen) |
Can you explain where and how these novellas
started? When did you first learn about R (Joan Riviere) and H (Hermann
Henselmann)?
I’m
not sure where I first learned about Riviere—I think it was in any essay by Adam Phillips, but it was a long time
ago and I’ve completely forgotten
the context! I think I kind of invented a significance for her that is probably
different from her ‘objective’ significance. I became
interested in the idea of someone who feels like she is a mask, and perhaps
nothing behind the mask—and
the idea of trying to sympathise with such a person. You know, the problem of
understanding what is going behind the mask when the mask is also
everything. That’s what interested me
about writing about her.
My interest in Henselmann is an easier story: he’s impossible to avoid in East Berlin, or at
least his buildings are. Karl-Marx-Allee as it’s now known, formerly Stalinallee, is just around the corner from
the flat that Creative New Zealand rents for their Berlin Writer in Residence.
At first these things strike you, as a visitor from somewhere like New Zealand
where monumental architecture and planning are really pretty unknown, as just
big. But the Soviet inspired ‘socialist
realist’ architecture
is also pretty strange, so I was curious to find out where it came from. Once I’d read a bit about Henselmann, I became
pretty interested in his situation—a
believer in high modernism kind of forced to adopt the Soviet style, but he
also I think was genuinely persuaded of it too, even though he then changed his
mind again later… So
it’s another kind of mask
without interior I guess.
Did the two stories always feel like they
would be novellas or is this a conclusion you came to as you wrote? Is a
novella just a shorter novel, or did you feel that there was something in the
construction that sets your novellas apart from the novels you’ve written?
The book about Riviere was always going to be a
novella, initially part of a trilogy—but
the other two projected novellas came to nothing. Henselmann was added later.
In fact I did initially submit R to VUP on its own, but realised in discussion
with Fergus that another companion novella would be good.
From the start, though, I liked the structure of
three (later two) novellas that speak to each other thematically. I’ve always, in my longer-form writing, thought
in terms of structure: large movements or sections within a work, say, rather
than chapters, plots, rising actions, climaxes, denouements. And I’m also interested in the juxtaposition of
unrelated material—so juxtaposing
materially unrelated, long-ish forms made sense to me.
These works are different in so many ways from
my earlier novels, that it’s
hard to say whether length is really a factor in that difference or not. I’m currently working on a novel, and it shares
a lot of features with the novellas, so maybe not. But I saw the novellas a
kind of sketches I guess—not
biographies, but small snippets of a life or a situation. That doesn’t justify much length. To lengthen them, to
give them ‘novelistic’ arcs, would be to
impose a fictional structure on them—something
that’s done often enough,
but I’m not really interested
in doing it. I’ve added ‘fictional’—in the sense of ‘made
up’—material in them, but
I haven’t wanted them to
conform to the expectations of the biographical novel that things will develop
in a certain way, that there will be a meaning or a lesson to a life, etc.
In your introduction you call yourself a ‘trespasser’ in history and biography and describe your expertise as an expertise
of not-knowing. Is this what fiction can offer traditional historical
interpretation, a messing-up, in a way, of History with a capital H?
I hope so. Fiction’s a complicated word here though, since I think the danger behind
much history writing is precisely that it hopes to give narrative coherence to
events—to give it a fictional
arc, a meaningful arc. Think of Belich, for example, whose histories of New
Zealand always seem to end in the glorious present, in the moment of maturity
and decolonisation. What a wonderful novel! Historians can be wonderful
synthesisers of huge amounts of facts—but
what’s interesting to me in
these novellas is the possibility of letting facts remains unsynthesised,
unshaped, stubborn, confusing. Maybe that can be called fiction too—though it’s a very different sense of the word. I hope it can open up the
possibility that a life doesn’t
need to be narrated to be valuable, to be enjoyable—that different things can be made out of a life than the stories we’re used to. Something like that, anyway.
I think your approach to history – accidental – also
begins to articulate your approach to fiction – a way of
resisting the clear arc, the easily understood meaning of a story. How hard is this to do? Sometimes it seems to
me that it is almost impossible to avoid ‘the arc’ in fiction or perhaps in any sort of story-telling. What do you
think?
I think you’re probably right. I mean, there are stories told in these novellas
too. I do structure them in ways that interrupt a more expected narrative arc—and of course I’m by no means the first to do that. Even a non-story could be read
as a kind of story, anyway, whose meaning is ‘there is no meaning’… so sure, it’s
hard to avoid. Maybe it’s
partly about how a reader comes to the work too? That’s partly why I liked the idea of an author’s note: something that can kind of prime a reader not to want to
understand everything, to allow the form of the work to be true to the
difficulty of understanding the world. I guess the main thing I would want to
avoid is the need to understand—I
want to give not understanding its own forms of pleasure.
You have a clear aesthetic statement about
your novellas –
you say that they’re an Antipodean form, and that their form is a form for the
internet age. Can you explain these statement a little more here?
The relationship of the Antipodes to somewhere
like Europe—and I guess other
places too, partly just by virtue of distance—is that it’s very easy to take
stuff out of context. We read European books here without knowing well the very
dense worlds of thought and argument and politics that they come from. I’m thinking partly about the histories of
psychoanalysis and communism that I write about in R.H.I.—these were never strong public movements
here, and they certainly aren’t
now, so these bits and pieces of history can seem here like they’ve come from outer space. They’re totally out of any context that can give
them their full meaning. I like that we can then pick them up and make
something new out of them. There’s a
freedom in forgetting all that dense culture, but taking its tokens and ideas,
thanks very much, and constructing something.
The internet is another name for all that. It’s a name for the way information can so
easily float free from its context—and
for how impossible it is ever to have a view of all the information out there.
It inevitably comes in the form of bits and pieces, snipped here and reported
there. So the process of making something—this resembles ideas of sampling and remixing, but has an older
heritage too—that’s interesting to me. Maybe its a way of
coping with that big world without needing an overarching story… Instead you pick up its
flotsam and jetsam, stick them together, and hope that the result is a partial
view, sensitive to what’s
out there, but not summarising of it.
You’ve been writer in residence at the IIML this year – how
has the year gone for you and can you tell us something of the project you’ve been working on?
The year’s been very productive so far. For the first time in years, I’m finding my writing day very long—even, sometimes, too long! That means I’m kind of loading myself up with projects.
The main thing is a novel with a time travel premise, which should be complete
at least in draft form by the end of the year, but I’m also working on various essays and a project that starts with
interviews of a small handful of Victoria academics.
R.H.I. will be launched at 19 Tory St this Wednesday 19 August. 5.30pm–7pm. All welcome.
R.H.I. is in all good bookstores and the VUP online store now.
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