SIRI HUSTVEDT

Photo by Marion Ettlinger

Siri Hustvedt is the internationally acclaimed author of a book of poems, six novels, four collections of essays, and a work of nonfiction. In 2012 she was awarded the International Gabarron Prize for Thought and Humanities. Her books include What I Loved; Memories of the Future; Living, Thinking, Looking; and The Blazing World, which was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize and won the Los Angeles Book Prize for Fiction. She has also published numerous papers in scholarly and scientific journals. She has a PhD in English literature from Columbia University and is a Lecturer in Psychiatry at Weill Cornell Medical College. Her work has been translated into over thirty languages. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.

SIRI HUSTVEDT

The reason I think you should read in these other disciplines is because it will help you in your own work. Now I really mean that. I think what has happened with the fragmentation of disciplines is that when problems arise. ...the people working in the discipline are unable to see avenues out of the problem that they would easily see if they had worked through problems in other disciplines.

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Libraries can be the lifeblood of communities. In my little hometown, Northfield, Minnesota, I started going to the local library...and I loved it. I remember going there. I remember the smell of the books, the card catalog. I remember the excitement of checking out books. I remember the reading group I belonged to as a very small child. And the whole atmosphere, the excitement. My father was a professor. And he would take my sister and me along with him while he worked in the archives...And we often drew or read on the floor, but the feeling of the library, which then was of course associated with my father, and my affection for my father ran deep.

Of course, for writers, the music of a sentence is hugely important. And, you're right, I have felt more and more a kind of strange insensitivity to prose–even among people who review books and seem to do this for a living–that there's a kind of dead ear. That may be the result of, as you say, the increasing importance of visual images as opposed to text, although people are texting and tweeting and all these things, so we haven't lost symbols. I mean, language is going to stay with us, but maybe the motion of a prose sentence, you can certainly see it in 19th-century letters written by people who had very ordinary educations, ring with a higher sophistication than a lot of writing today. And that's rather interesting. That may be due to the fact that the whole culture turned on reading and writing in ways that it doesn't now.

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It's interesting because I have to say, and this is a little wrinkle on creative work, which is that after you've done it for a very long time, you have a feeling that you're not going to have to abandon a project. And yet, I knew this thing was dead, and also I think I understood once I started writing Memories of the Future that I was in part training myself for writing this.

THE CREATIVE PROCESS
(referring to some female characters in her books who have come up against bias)

It's like the elephant in the room, but sometimes as a woman, you have to be twice as hard or be twice as intelligent and still want to seem maybe as an object.

HUSTVEDT

I think these are complicated issues and particularly complicated, of course, for young women. One of the strange qualities of our culture, and it is, of course, that a beautiful young woman is assumed to be stupid. I mean, people do it without thinking. There is an implicit assumption that beauty and intelligence are at odds, even though, of course, rationally, I think most human beings know that this is not the case. If you pushed people to the wall and asked them and they would say, "No, of course, women can be beautiful and intelligent at the same time." But I've used this example before, I used it in an essay to point out how we all carry around implicit prejudices. And I said, so here's a little story. There's a beautiful young woman in a low-cut cocktail dress standing across the room talking to two other people. And then on the other side of the room, two people are watching her. And one of them says to another, "You know, that's so-and-so. She's working on her second postdoc and molecular biology at Rockefeller." And the general position is surprise. How can that beautiful girl in the low-cut dress with a glass of champagne in her hand be working on her second postdoc? I think this is a pretty widespread assumption in the culture. Why is that? Well, because people in molecular biology for a very long time were not women at all of any kind. So we carry around these stereotypes with us, and they affect our perception very deeply. I mean, perception is hugely about expectation.

THE CREATIVE PROCESS

And speaking of process, you’ve written extensive on creativity, not only in your novels, which are often about artists, but in numerous essays you’ve given much thought to how creativity and imagination is developed.

HUSTVEDT

Oh, it must begin in childhood. And I'm very interested in child development, in the kind of openness that's necessary I think for people to work creatively. And that some childhoods turn out to be better for that than others. And if you think about creativity not just as painting or writing or making music but as an enterprise that is finally human, just it's a thing people do–we have creative urges from the time we're very young–then I think it's easier to frame it. So I think creativity or art begins in play and in child's play and, as Winnicott says, there are adults, adult patients, who need to learn how to play.

There's also Vygotsky, another hero of mine, the Russian psychologist who writes very beautifully about play and the use of certain things like a spoon as a person. And how this is crucial to the emotional and cognitive development of children. So I think creativity or art begins in play and in child's play, and as Winnicott says, there are adults, adult patients, who need to learn how to play.

THE CREATIVE PROCESS

Yes, it's curious because it seems it's how we tell stories, we make pictures, we dance. We do these things as a way of understanding the world. And then we are told we must forget how to play. You went to a Steiner school as well? Only for one year. It was the year I was in Norway in the seventh grade. I have to tell you, I loved it. It was as if someone had transplanted me from a cold, almost military school environment into paradise. I had a wonderful teacher, too. I had wonderful teachers all around, but my main teacher was someone I loved.

THE CREATIVE PROCESS

You're very playful, but were there things where they encouraged you to be more free. Do you remember their advice?

HUSTVEDT

I think I was just ripe for that school. They were very kind to me as well, but I fell in almost immediately. We were able to draw. We wrote, for example, the stories of history that we were told into books and then we illustrated them. Every girl and boy learned to knit. We painted every day and every 15 minutes on the hour, we were allowed to go out and just run and shout and do whatever we pleased. So it was a heavenly school for me.

THE CREATIVE PROCESS

That's beautiful. So I imagine you because I know, of course, you do an immense amount of research, but also I think, playful writing. The books also come out of you having accumulated all of this. And now I imagine you having a little breaks you could practice yoga. Do some kind of dance to get out of the writing rigors?

HUSTVEDT

Well, I love to dance. I don't go dancing enough, I have to say, but every time I'm at a wedding or I get some chance. I think in our world, maybe especially since the scientific revolution and the 17th century, the division between the mind and body is a really serious and unhealthy one because we are not two things. I'm not a substance dualist. I think Descartes was wrong as invigorating a writer as he may be. So we are bodies that think. That's what human beings are. We are not minds hovering over flesh. I recognize, for example, how a day of ferocious intellectual labor makes me physically really tired and that it calls for moving one's body, stretching, walking, doing something else, exercising vigorously, whatever. You get physically tired.

The other interesting thing, which I brought up with my hero that she discovers while she's walking in the city, is that there's a very strong motor component to writing itself, which mimics the human gait. And I find that when I am stuck on a paragraph if I stand up and walk usually the sentence gets jogged loose. So that's a very interesting thing. There are obviously differences in people's aptitude that we may be born with, but the ability to dance intellectually is learned just the way it's learned by dancers and by musicians. There's certainly some native aptitude that is quite mysterious and that may be there but without training it's lost.

THE CREATIVE PROCESS

And that's why I think also novels are great teachers because it's this kind of–besides the academic reading–which is wonderful that you can go into these words. I think a lot of people feel limited. But in terms of novels it's a whole world experience. You're learning about so many aspects of the world without even realizing that you're learning.

HUSTVEDT

Listen, I have come, I don't even know if it's full circle. I mean a Ph.D. in English literature, but now at age 64.

THE CREATIVE PROCESS

Oh, I don't believe it.

HUSTVEDT

Oh, yes. I'm an old lady. I have come to believe that one of the greatest forms that we have is the form of the novel. And it is because in the novel in its highest realization–we can think of many of the great novels–that you have access to the particularity of human experience in ways that you have nowhere else. I really believe that.

Excerpt of a 10,000 word interview which will be published across our network of participating journals in the coming weeks. This interview was conducted by Mia Funk with the participation of collaborating universities and students. Associate Interviews Producer on this podcast was Amiya Marshall. Digital Media Coordinator is Yu Young Lee. “Winter Time” was composed by Nikolas Anadolis and performed by the Athenian Trio.

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