JOYDEEP ROY-BHATTACHARYA on Philosophy & Storytelling Across Cultures

Joydeep Roy-Bhattacharya was educated in politics and philosophy at Presidency College, Calcutta, and the University of Pennsylvania. His novels The Gabriel Club and The Storyteller of Marrakesh have been published in fourteen languages. He lives in the Hudson Valley in upstate New York. 

This interview took place in the Cemetary Montparnasse near the graves of Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir. 

THE CREATIVE PROCESS

I am thinking about your background in philosophy. I'm wondering do you start from a character and find your way to a theme or work from the theme to character? 

JOYDEEP ROY-BHATTACHARYA

Five years ago I decided that because there is so much misunderstanding of the Muslim world and so much misinformation about the Muslim world that I needed as a writer to try to do something that one can do–in terms of  creative writing, in terms of fiction–that one cannot do in terms of journalism or in terms of polemic essays, which is to introduce the lay reader to a world that is significantly different from the Western world but also significantly similar in terms of fundamental human qualities. So I decided to write three novels with a more or less peaceful aspect, focusing on components that make the Muslim culture, culturally unique. And then three novels that dealt specifically with the last fourteen years of experience of war. So in terms of the set of three cultural novels, for the first one I wrote a novel based around a storyteller in Marrakesh. The title for that novel was The Desert of Lovebecause it grew on the Sufi theme of love, which means the abnegation of the self, which means complete surrender.

THE CREATIVE PROCESS

It had another title as well?

ROY-BHATTACHARYA

The Storyteller of Marrakesh. In the U.S. Publishers are very conservative when it comes to titles. I am working on a very large book now, which is book two in the trilogy which is not... you know they're each unique novels. This is set in Iran, and it deals with painting and calligraphy. And the final novel in the cultural set will be set in Abbasi, Baghdad in the 9th century and will deal with basically what you and I do, the world of books. Because so many institutions that are part of publishing in the West today started in Abbasi, Baghdad. Book readings, book cafes, paperbacks, libraries, patronage of writers by publishers. So those are the three novels that deal with cultural aspects and are set in different parts of the Muslim world. In terms of war and the last fourteen years, I began with Antigone because I've always been enormously attracted to both the character and the theme, and I always saw that set of three novels as a connected trilogy.

So I'm just about to finish and deliver the prequel to Une Antigone à Kandahar. The middle book, which is The Watch[Une Antigone à Kandahar] presents both in this case; the Afghan and American points of view, with my stepping out of the picture because all these three novels are novels in voices following the greek choral pattern. In other words, each chapter is in a different voice. The prequel is entirely from the Afghan point of view. It has six Pashtun women belonging to three different generations, and one of the women is the Antigone character in the book that has just come out. So it is she, her mother, her grandmother, her sisters, her sister in law and the impact forty years of war in that country has had on a very rich and yet, in terms of the impact of war and modernity, very fragile tribal culture.

The final book, the sequel to Antigone, book three in that set, is going to  be entirely from the American point of view. It’s based partly on the play Ajax and it addresses the question of what happens when these very young men, who have been sent into a foreign land to kill and be killed, come back home and are expected to seamlessly merge back into a very, very different civilian culture. So that is my project. In terms of a political point of view, I am being very deliberately objective in terms of the war trilogy because I want to let the voices speak for themselves. Therefore, it's important for me to give voice to every kind of expression in the political spectrum. So some of these voices will have opinions and ideas I do not agree with, but I let the reader decide on the basis of the story and on the basis of what they are being told by these voices where he or she stands. I believe we are in a period of perpetual war, that it is completely unnecessary, but that it is required for the economy of the West, especially in the United States, but also I notice in France. The defence industry is incredibly powerful and also probably the only industry that is actually making an old-fashioned capitalist profit.

THE CREATIVE PROCESS

Yes, but it is funded as well. So you wonder if it would still be making such a profit if it weren’t funded.

ROY-BHATTACHARYA

It gets obscene amounts funding, in America at least, but it also makes obscene amounts of money. So, for instance, all of the combatants in Syria and Iraq today are using American weapons. Whether these weapons are captured, whether these weapons were initially supplied to a set of rebels on the expectation that they would be the good guys but turned out to be the bad guys and so forth. It is a tragedy that is comparable to the years that led up to the first World War because leadership seems to be entirely lacking, especially if you look at how the whole refugee crisis is being handled by Europe. In terms of the cultural set of three novels, my intention is much more to be an educator, to basically expose your lay reader in Paris or, I don't know, Marseilles or Lyon or Texas, to aspects of Islamic culture that I can guarantee you they have no idea about. And it is an enormously rich culture which served as the bridge between classical cultures in India, for instance, or Greece and the Western Renaissance. I'm not Muslim, but I felt an obligation, a moral obligation to educate myself and realized how little I knew about the world because, of course, like most urban educated literary elite from the Third World, my education was fundamentally Western, and at a rather late middle age I am now discovering the culture of the world I come from. And it’s been an absolute revelation because I had no idea it was so rich. And to that extent, the last fifteen years have been enormously rewarding for me because it has entailed a lot of research and a lot of reading that I probably wouldn't have done under the circumstances. Because I was, you know, I did my graduate work in German philosophy. And I think it happens to all of us. I think what is going on now is we are being forced to recognize that this paradigmatic Western civilization, what we are part of, that we have been indoctrinated with, has fundamental flaws. And the most fundamental flaw is this automatic assumption that everything coming from the West always came from the West, had no other origins, whereas it’s almost the opposite. If you look at the three religions of the book, they all came from the fourth religion of the book, which no one knows much about, which was the Avesta religion, which became the Zorastrianism. But the concept of good and evil, the idea of a prophet, the idea of angels, even something as little as the Christmas tree...

THE CREATIVE PROCESS

–it was all cannibalized and repackaged. 

ROY-BHATTACHARYA

Absolutely, absolutely. And this is the kind of history that we are not made aware of because we are told a particular story. We are told a particular fiction. You know, there was Greece, there were the Dark Ages, there was the Renaissance, there was Enlightenment, and here we are–well, I guess at this point–postmodernity. While the dark ages in the West were actually not that dark because there was intense interaction with the Islamic world. And for the Islamic world during that period, that was the Golden Age.

With special thanks to Lethokuhle Msimang for editorial assistance.

Mia Funk is an artist, interviewer and founder of The Creative Process.

SHIRLEY starring Elisabeth Moss & Michael Stuhlbarg w/ Novelist SUSAN SCARF MERRELL - Highlights

Susan Scarf Merrell is the author of Shirley: A Novel, which is a film starring Elisabeth Moss and Michael Stuhlbarg. She is also the author of A Member of the Family, and The Accidental Bond: How Sibling Connections Influence Adult Relationships. She co-directs the Southampton Writers Conference, is program director (along with Meg Wolitzer) of the novel incubator program, BookEnds, and teaches in the MFA in Creative Writing & Literature at Stony Brook Southampton. She served as fiction editor of The Southampton Review. Essays, book reviews and short fiction appear most recently in The New York Times, The Los Angeles Review of Books, The Common Online, The Washington Post, and East Magazine.

THE CREATIVE PROCESS

So just tell me what, I knew you went to Bennington, and there are many interesting writers, but what attracted you particularly to Shirley Jackson?

SUSAN SCARF MERRELL

I went up to Bennington, to the writing seminars, with my husband to give a talk. And while I was giving the talk, I sat in on some of the graduate lectures that the writing seminars MFA candidates have to do. And I got in the car to drive home, and I said to my husband, “I want to grad school. I want to go there.” And I had already published two books at that point. I really, there was no logical reason I would be going to grad school, but I had always sort of thought that there was something that I would be more comfortable with if I went through a grad program. So six months after I gave that talk, I was in the next class at the writing seminars. And it’s a low residency program, so you develop a reading program with your mentor and you exchange fiction and annotations on the books that you’re reading, all semester long, for six months. And so in the very first meeting that I had with this writer named Rachel Paston, she said, “What is it that you’re interested in learning?” And I said, “I really want to write about domestic things, but with a twist, with some kind of magic in them.” And she said, “Have you ever read Shirley Jackson?”

I had read Haunting of Hill House, you know, when I was twelve, and I went back home and reread Haunting of Hill House, and then I read We Have Always Lived in the Castle, and by the end of the semester, I had read everything Shirley had written. I came back up to school for my second semester, and I was meeting with my new mentor, and I said I had been reading her. He said, “You know, she lived here, she lived and worked here.” And I said no, I had no idea because I know nothing about her life story. So then I went to the library at the college, and I realized that she lived in a house, one of the two houses that she lived in the whole time she lived in Bennington, was a house that I had walked by every day on my way to get coffee. That market I was buying my cup of coffee every morning was Powers Market where the idea for the Lottery came to her. There’s a famous story about how she came running home from the grocery store, pushing the pram up the hill, and went in and wrote the story in three hours. So, it just kept happening for me that I would meet somebody who would say, “Oh, my husband was best friends with one of the Hyman children, one of Shirley’s children when they were in high school” or “I have this treasure trove of letters” or “I know this person who was Shirley’s husband’s best friend”. Things just kept happening, she just kept sort of pushing into my consciousness in some way. In many ways, I felt as if she found me, I didn’t find her.

THE CREATIVE PROCESS

And what did you discover about her, and yourself, in the writing of the novel?

SCARF MERRELL

That’s such a good question. Haha. I’m not entirely sure what I discovered about her… I certainly, what I imagined about her, was how she got from A to Z, in a certain way. And what it would be like to go through a fallow period in one’s career. I was really writing about a period of time where she was agoraphobic, and she didn’t leave the house and wasn’t writing. That was tremendously interesting to me, and I think, something that resonated for me personally because, at the time that I went to grad school, I had really been wrestling with whether I wanted to continue writing or not, and whether I had anything else that I wanted to say. So, I guess you can say, I learned that writers write no matter what. Shirley has this wonderful moment in her journals, which as I saw in the Library of Congress and so well-worth going to look at, I cannot recommend that journey highly enough, where she is responding to something that her therapist said to her. She writes in her journal, “Writing is the way out. Writing is the way out. Writing is the way out.” And I think that’s true. I learned something about how novelistic truth is different from human truth, in writing this book. As I say for myself, no matter what, I’m just going to keep doing it. No matter what happens, it isn’t really a thing that I have a choice about doing. Not in a kind of weird, overly-dramatic way, it’s just something I love to do, so much.

THE CREATIVE PROCESS

And in your own work, and I’m thinking about other things you’ve dealt with in other books that focus on family, whether fiction or nonfiction. Can you discuss some of those themes? We were talking before, at dinner the other night, about architecture, bringing in your husband, James Merrell…

SCARF MERRELL

Also a Jim, haha. [referring to James Harris, a popular figure in Shirley Jackson’s writing]

THE CREATIVE PROCESS

A Jim! I was thinking about that! Yeah, you have your own-

SCARF MERRELL

I have my own Jim!

THE CREATIVE PROCESS

Yeah... and how you approach books and stories from that point of view [the point of view of architecture]?

SCARF MERRELL

So, that’s something that I have really grown into. I think, with Shirley, that was the first time that I very consciously used the notion of what a house is, and what a house does for a character, as part of the planning of the book. Of course, because Shirley was agoraphobic, I mean it was sort of given to me in a certain way. But I also think it was part of the appeal for me. The idea of a novel as a structured narrative that you wander through, and that the intent of the architect, the writer, the intent is to drive you through the rooms with a particular kind of information-reveal. That’s something that I think Jim brings very consciously to his design-work, in terms of how you live and work in houses that he creates. And I have been trying more and more to bring to my written worlds, in terms of how they are experienced as wholes, as whole institutions that you go through.

THE CREATIVE PROCESS

Sure, to different extents, whether it’s a larger narrative or not, your world-building… and I think particularly with novels, short stories, it depends on the length, but people inhabit novels, and they are sorry to leave them, and they return to them. They reread them, they have that sense.

SCARF MERRELL

Sure, and often there is this sense that you can walk through a house of a novel that you have really loved. You can walk through Northanger Abbey a thousand times. Or Moby Dick. Or Light in August. These are books that welcome you back time and time again. I think that’s true of Shirley’s work. I’ve read all of her books, multiple times, and they never cease to reveal new things to me. And that would be a goal for me, as well. Something I would strive towards, that I would like that kind of world-building to take place. That you can see a different view out every window every time you pass them.

THE CREATIVE PROCESS

How can we better improve our education models? To be teaching “embracing the arts”, creating more creative individuals, engaged individuals, not just in arts education, but throughout?

SCARF MERRELL

Oh gosh, I don’t know. (laughing)

THE CREATIVE PROCESS

Susan, solve it for us! (laughing)

SCARF MERRELL

Obviously, I believe that reading is incredibly important for creating empathy, and for enhancing the imagination. I think, the idea that I read somewhere earlier this week, that because of the Common Core, many students graduate from high school never having read a novel, you know, that’s kind of astounding to me. I think that all the research that says we develop empathy through imagining the lives of others. The novel is a form that has been created for that purpose. I don’t see how we cannot require our students to read stories. That would be my broadside, we must read. You know, people just have to read.

Mia Funk is an artist, interviewer and founder of The Creative Process.

SUSAN SCARF MERRELL - Novelist

Susan Scarf Merrell is the author of Shirley: A Novel, which is a film starring Elisabeth Moss and Michael Stuhlbarg. She is also the author of A Member of the Family, and The Accidental Bond: How Sibling Connections Influence Adult Relationships. She co-directs the Southampton Writers Conference, is program director (along with Meg Wolitzer) of the novel incubator program, BookEnds, and teaches in the MFA in Creative Writing & Literature at Stony Brook Southampton. She served as fiction editor of The Southampton Review. Essays, book reviews and short fiction appear most recently in The New York Times, The Los Angeles Review of Books, The Common Online, The Washington Post, and East Magazine.

THE CREATIVE PROCESS

So just tell me what, I knew you went to Bennington, and there are many interesting writers, but what attracted you particularly to Shirley Jackson?

SUSAN SCARF MERRELL

I went up to Bennington, to the writing seminars, with my husband to give a talk. And while I was giving the talk, I sat in on some of the graduate lectures that the writing seminars MFA candidates have to do. And I got in the car to drive home, and I said to my husband, “I want to grad school. I want to go there.” And I had already published two books at that point. I really, there was no logical reason I would be going to grad school, but I had always sort of thought that there was something that I would be more comfortable with if I went through a grad program. So six months after I gave that talk, I was in the next class at the writing seminars. And it’s a low residency program, so you develop a reading program with your mentor and you exchange fiction and annotations on the books that you’re reading, all semester long, for six months. And so in the very first meeting that I had with this writer named Rachel Paston, she said, “What is it that you’re interested in learning?” And I said, “I really want to write about domestic things, but with a twist, with some kind of magic in them.” And she said, “Have you ever read Shirley Jackson?”

I had read Haunting of Hill House, you know, when I was twelve, and I went back home and reread Haunting of Hill House, and then I read We Have Always Lived in the Castle, and by the end of the semester, I had read everything Shirley had written. I came back up to school for my second semester, and I was meeting with my new mentor, and I said I had been reading her. He said, “You know, she lived here, she lived and worked here.” And I said no, I had no idea because I know nothing about her life story. So then I went to the library at the college, and I realized that she lived in a house, one of the two houses that she lived in the whole time she lived in Bennington, was a house that I had walked by every day on my way to get coffee. That market I was buying my cup of coffee every morning was Powers Market where the idea for the Lottery came to her. There’s a famous story about how she came running home from the grocery store, pushing the pram up the hill, and went in and wrote the story in three hours. So, it just kept happening for me that I would meet somebody who would say, “Oh, my husband was best friends with one of the Hyman children, one of Shirley’s children when they were in high school” or “I have this treasure trove of letters” or “I know this person who was Shirley’s husband’s best friend”. Things just kept happening, she just kept sort of pushing into my consciousness in some way. In many ways, I felt as if she found me, I didn’t find her.

THE CREATIVE PROCESS

And what did you discover about her, and yourself, in the writing of the novel?

SCARF MERRELL

That’s such a good question. Haha. I’m not entirely sure what I discovered about her… I certainly, what I imagined about her, was how she got from A to Z, in a certain way. And what it would be like to go through a fallow period in one’s career. I was really writing about a period of time where she was agoraphobic, and she didn’t leave the house and wasn’t writing. That was tremendously interesting to me, and I think, something that resonated for me personally because, at the time that I went to grad school, I had really been wrestling with whether I wanted to continue writing or not, and whether I had anything else that I wanted to say. So, I guess you can say, I learned that writers write no matter what. Shirley has this wonderful moment in her journals, which as I saw in the Library of Congress and so well-worth going to look at, I cannot recommend that journey highly enough, where she is responding to something that her therapist said to her. She writes in her journal, “Writing is the way out. Writing is the way out. Writing is the way out.” And I think that’s true. I learned something about how novelistic truth is different from human truth, in writing this book. As I say for myself, no matter what, I’m just going to keep doing it. No matter what happens, it isn’t really a thing that I have a choice about doing. Not in a kind of weird, overly-dramatic way, it’s just something I love to do, so much.

THE CREATIVE PROCESS

And in your own work, and I’m thinking about other things you’ve dealt with in other books that focus on family, whether fiction or nonfiction. Can you discuss some of those themes? We were talking before, at dinner the other night, about architecture, bringing in your husband, James Merrell…

SCARF MERRELL

Also a Jim, haha. [referring to James Harris, a popular figure in Shirley Jackson’s writing]

THE CREATIVE PROCESS

A Jim! I was thinking about that! Yeah, you have your own-

SCARF MERRELL

I have my own Jim!

THE CREATIVE PROCESS

Yeah... and how you approach books and stories from that point of view [the point of view of architecture]?

SCARF MERRELL

So, that’s something that I have really grown into. I think, with Shirley, that was the first time that I very consciously used the notion of what a house is, and what a house does for a character, as part of the planning of the book. Of course, because Shirley was agoraphobic, I mean it was sort of given to me in a certain way. But I also think it was part of the appeal for me. The idea of a novel as a structured narrative that you wander through, and that the intent of the architect, the writer, the intent is to drive you through the rooms with a particular kind of information-reveal. That’s something that I think Jim brings very consciously to his design-work, in terms of how you live and work in houses that he creates. And I have been trying more and more to bring to my written worlds, in terms of how they are experienced as wholes, as whole institutions that you go through.

THE CREATIVE PROCESS

Sure, to different extents, whether it’s a larger narrative or not, your world-building… and I think particularly with novels, short stories, it depends on the length, but people inhabit novels, and they are sorry to leave them, and they return to them. They reread them, they have that sense.

SCARF MERRELL

Sure, and often there is this sense that you can walk through a house of a novel that you have really loved. You can walk through Northanger Abbey a thousand times. Or Moby Dick. Or Light in August. These are books that welcome you back time and time again. I think that’s true of Shirley’s work. I’ve read all of her books, multiple times, and they never cease to reveal new things to me. And that would be a goal for me, as well. Something I would strive towards, that I would like that kind of world-building to take place. That you can see a different view out every window every time you pass them.

THE CREATIVE PROCESS

How can we better improve our education models? To be teaching “embracing the arts”, creating more creative individuals, engaged individuals, not just in arts education, but throughout?

SCARF MERRELL

Oh gosh, I don’t know. (laughing)

THE CREATIVE PROCESS

Susan, solve it for us! (laughing)

SCARF MERRELL

Obviously, I believe that reading is incredibly important for creating empathy, and for enhancing the imagination. I think, the idea that I read somewhere earlier this week, that because of the Common Core, many students graduate from high school never having read a novel, you know, that’s kind of astounding to me. I think that all the research that says we develop empathy through imagining the lives of others. The novel is a form that has been created for that purpose. I don’t see how we cannot require our students to read stories. That would be my broadside, we must read. You know, people just have to read.

Mia Funk is an artist, interviewer and founder of The Creative Process.

ROB NIXON - Professor of Environmental Humanities, Princeton

Rob Nixon is a nonfiction writer and the Barron Family Professor in Environmental Humanities at Princeton University. He is the author of four books, most recently Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor. Nixon is currently writing a book on environmental martyrs and the defense of the great tropical forests. He writes frequently for the New York Times. His writing has also appeared in The New Yorker, Atlantic Monthly, The Guardian, The Nation, London Review of Books, The Village Voice, Aeon and elsewhere. Much of his writing engages environmental justice struggles in the global South. He has a particular interest in understanding the roles that artists can play in effecting change at the interface with social movements.

ROB NIXON

There are some recurrent threads in indigenous cultures across the world. One of those is–We don’t own the land. The land owns us. It’s not seen as property first. It’s seen as inalienable in that sense because you don’t own it in the first place. What we’re seeing now is a kind of movement where more and more indigenous people are living kind of amphibious lives. On the one hand, they have their indigenous cosmologies. And the other hand, in order to increase the likelihood that they can keep out big corporations, mining, logging, and so forth, their presence on the land needs to be bureaucratically recognized is to have recognition that “this is your property.” So in one sense many of these communities I find are both inside and outside private property regimes.

This interview was conducted by Mia Funk & Phil Kehoe with the participation of collaborating universities and students. Associate Interviews Producer on this podcast was Phil Kehoe. Digital Media Coordinator is Phoebe Brous.

Mia Funk is an artist, interviewer and founder of The Creative Process & One Planet Podcast (Conversations about Climate Change & Environmental Solutions).

Europe, Asia, and the World: IAN BURUMA - Chronicling Culture, Politics & History - Highlghts

Ian Buruma is the author of many books, including A Tokyo Romance, The Churchill Complex,Their Promised Land, Year Zero, The China Lover, Murder in Amsterdam, Occidentalism and God’s Dust. He teaches at Bard College and is a columnist for Project Syndicate and contributor to The New Yorker, The New York Times, and other publications. He was awarded the 2008 Erasmus Prize for making "an especially important contribution to European culture" and was voted one of the Top 100 Public Intellectuals by the Foreign Policy magazine.

This interview was conducted by Mia Funk & Lexi Kayser with the participation of collaborating universities and students. Digital Media Coordinator is Phoebe Brous.

Mia Funk is an artist, interviewer and founder of The Creative Process & One Planet Podcast (Conversations about Climate Change & Environmental Solutions).

IAN BURUMA - Public Intellectual & Erasmus Prize-Winning Author of The Churchill Complex, Murder in Amsterdam, A Tokyo Romance

Ian Buruma is the author of many books, including A Tokyo Romance, The Churchill Complex,Their Promised Land, Year Zero, The China Lover, Murder in Amsterdam, Occidentalism and God’s Dust. He teaches at Bard College and is a columnist for Project Syndicate and contributor to The New Yorker, The New York Times, and other publications. He was awarded the 2008 Erasmus Prize for making "an especially important contribution to European culture" and was voted one of the Top 100 Public Intellectuals by the Foreign Policy magazine.

This interview was conducted by Mia Funk & Lexi Kayser with the participation of collaborating universities and students. Digital Media Coordinator is Phoebe Brous.

Mia Funk is an artist, interviewer and founder of The Creative Process & One Planet Podcast (Conversations about Climate Change & Environmental Solutions).