Steve Himmer

...insist upon your right to go off on a tangent. Your right to put the spanner in the works. Your right to refuse to be labelled and to insist on your right to behave like anything other than what anyone expects. Your right to simply say no for the pleasure of it. To insist on your right to confound all who insist on regimenting human impulses according to theories psychological, religious, historical, philosophical, political, etc. . . . Insist upon your right to insist upon your right to insist on the importance, the great importance of whim.

Sometimes the progress of man is so rapid that the desert reappears behind him. The woods stoop to give him a passage, and spring up again when he has passed. It is not uncommon in crossing the new States of the West to meet with deserted dwellings in the midst of the wilds; the traveller frequently discovers the vestiges of a log house in the most solitary retreats, which bear witness to the power, and no less to the inconstancy of man. In these abandoned fields, and over these ruins of a day, the primeval forest soon scatters a fresh vegetation, the beasts resume the haunts which were once their own, and Nature covers the traces of man's path with branches and with flowers, which obliterate his evanescent track.

But still the question of a failed project—as it applies to the tiny unreal world of my fiction—is not entirely wrongheaded. It’s true enough that my novels were once sunnier places and now the clouds have rolled in. Part of this I chalk up simply to the experience of middle age: I wrote White Teeth as a child, and have grown up alongside it. The art of midlife is surely always cloudier than the art of youth, as life itself gets cloudier. But it would be disingenuous to pretend it is only that. I am a citizen as well as an individual soul and one of the things citizenship teaches us, over the long stretch, is that there is no perfectibility in human affairs. This fact, still obscure to a twenty-one-year-old, is a little clearer to the woman of forty-one.

And this is what is so oppressive in Hilbig. With horrific strength, with evocative sorcery, with obsessive precision, he described a world that is distasteful not only to Germans but actually harrowing for all of us who sense the unbroken strength of those ordinary events. He wrote his astounding novels about a world in which only the weak, the sensitive, those incapable of bargaining and in no way heroic, can sense the chaos and the surrealism. Because this world really does have its own rules, and there are those who realize and maintain its organizational structures, since this is their world, a world in which the aggressive, mean-spirited, cowardly, servile — namely the rat-person, running away from the monumental, the far-reaching, escaping from freedom — is the lord, pursuing at his pleasure those who are alien in his world, which he creates again and again; the alien, those who don’t belong there, whose existence cannot be legitimated — indeed, the unfortunates who cannot legitimize themselves.

There is one formidable advantage in obscurity. No one expects anything particular from you, so you can divert the tedium of writing by trying to tell each story in a different way. [...] This doesn't make the work any easier but I can recommend it if you like risks and don't mind losing the previous novel's publisher.

A novelist is thought to be a political novelist only when the politics of his novel are not the prevailing politics of his society. Then the politics stand out. We could discuss as a proposition the idea that all novels are political; all art is political, which seems to be endorsed in most countries of the world where the profession of novelist or artist is slightly more dangerous than that of high speed automobile racing. We have novelists who are put in insane asylums, who are tortured and put in cages, who are exiled. What does the rest of the world know that we don’t know, about fiction and about art? I’ve often made the observation that this is one of the few countries in the history of western civilization in which artists are not seen to be a danger to the state.

Fresh from the forest

Turnabout