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Interview with Scott Esposito, of blog Conversational Reading, for THE CHATTAHOOCHEE REVIEW
SE: The first thing I wanted to ask you is, I really like first-person novels. I'm intrigued by the voices. So I'm curious where the voice came from for Emile, our narrator, this 84-year-old man who was a collaborator with the Nazis during World War II and sent thousands of Jews to Germany.
EM: I was thinking about my own tendency, if I’m guilty, to return to the scene of a crime. I also had my father's family in mind. He was born in Poland in 1930 but as a small child escaped to pre-mandate Palestine, while all the rest of his family was exterminated during the Holocaust. Though I’m from California, I wanted to address the Holocaust, as it colored the background of my upbringing, yet address it in a tangential way, as I did with my first novel. Though that first book is set in colonial Sri Lanka – Ceylon -- on another level it acts as an analogy about Palestinian and Israeli ideas of utopia and turf. Another motivation in Crawl Space was my question about how I would have acted had I been a nonJew living during World War II. Would I have been one of the people – say, the Catholic farmers -- who helped save people or not? This may be a question that continues to dog me, given our contemporary morass. So it became interesting for me to enter the head of evil as it justifies itself, and so set up a number of parameters for myself. Also, writing in the voice of an old man from another era comes much more easily for me than writing in the voice of a contemporary California woman.
SE: So you set these historical and thematic parameters and the voice sort of came from theme?
EM: Yes, similar to the way in which, when you write music, the rules of counterpoint form boundaries and then the music gains greater coiled, potential energy and springs out from within the rules.
SE: I'm interested in what you said about addressing the Holocaust tangentially. Reading a lot of the review coverage for this book, it seemed like a lot of the people said "Okay, this is a book about Jews in World War II." It seems that whenever you have a book or movie or whatever that touches on the Holocaust there's this tendency to—boom!—this is a book about the Holocaust. But clearly there's a lot more going on here. So I'm curious to your reaction to these reviews. Do you even read them?
EM: I do. I aim to read them and forget them, to not take the bad ones too hard and not get too puffed up by the good ones. I've always liked that concept of Benedict Anderson's—the imagined community—the community across the page. I love this feeling of the novel set out in the world like a little babe in a raft bumping downstream and finding its ideal readers, its unexpected community of readers who read it and get it. But getting back to your question, I wouldn't say this book is solely about Jews in the Holocaust. Certainly it explores that reality, but I wouldn't think that was the singular, definitive topic.
SE: It seems like this willingness to look at the book only in terms of the Holocaust is something very American. You have a quote in the book where the narrator is talking about an American character. "A happy explanation for everything. This must be the American trait I've heard about. Everything signed, sealed off. This person good, that one bad, this person evil, that one respectable." In Europe, they're more likely to see guilt in shades of gray, and things like the Holocaust seep in more to the everyday, whereas with slavery, it's something that we feel like we can consign to the past. As someone who's lived in France, what's your take?
EM: Well, I think it’s important to signify which population one speaks of. In different sectors of America, people will easily say slavery can be consigned to the past while others will see it active in every social interaction. More generally speaking, I think there's a great gulf between guilt and shame: as anthropologists will say, guilt is a very personal, lonely enterprise whereas shame is a socially held concept. So in certain areas of France, people will seem less concerned about guilt and more about shame. In the small village I lived in near the Pyrenees, social standing was so important, and gossip so important as its connective tissue, whereas here we seem less bound by those social strictures. In America we tend more toward being the lonely atomized person toting around guilt, as we have so few of those structures of shame binding us. You can see this issue of shame firing up Madame Bovary just as much as you can see it today. Not to be reductive, but consider Emerson next to Flaubert and you see what I mean.
SE: And your book makes it seem like the Holocaust guilt, or the collaboration with the Nazis, is something that's still felt today in France. So this is something you found while living in France? And did that loom larger than France's involvement in Algeria, which would seem to me to be the thing the French are more burdened with today.
EM: Well, first off, keep in mind that most of the book was written before 2001. At the time, while I was living in France in this small village, I was really distressed by the way the Muslim youth were spoken of. Of course, now this occupies the center of the discourse, given the recent attention to the burning cars in the banlieus of Paris and many other moments, but back then, as a creeping discourse along the margins, talk of the disaffected, unemployed Muslim youth had this insidious but accepted xenophobic tonality which gave me a useful, if sad, portal into seeing how Jews might have been spoken of in, say, 1937. Whereas the contemporary anti-Semitism I saw in France in the marketplace or at dinner parties had this humor-tinged frank air, as if it were empirical, like: bien sur, my friend, we know this is how Jews are, n’est-ce pas? Then again, the majority of commentators on, say the op-ed pages of the big liberal newspapers, say, Le Monde for instance, will often be Jewish, and each Jewish journalist bears his own relation to the Holocaust, either repressing it into unusual mutant forms or bringing it forward. So France’s actions in the 1940s always function as a kind of backdrop to discussion in contemporary France, even when the discussion might ostensibly concern Muslim girls’ right to cover their heads in the public schools. In 1999-2000, it did seem to me that there was a great lack of self-examination about xenophobia and attitudes toward the maghrebins, who are often third- or fourth-generation immigrants from North Africa.
SE: While now this seems to be a more central concern in France. There was a movie with Juliette Binoche, Cache, and there's been other movies in France about these issues, a movie on French public television about October 17, 1961.
EM: These things travel in cycles, the way they emerge into the zeitgeist.
SE: Yes, and in the book you kind of get into the mechanics of that. You have this group of people, Jews who were deported from France during the Holocaust, and you have this group of young people in their twenties, who are much more ambiguous about the Holocaust. They desecrate a statue of a Resistance fighter, and they seem not to even have much knowledge of wartime France. It seems like you were trying to establish a relationship between this one group carrying around guilt and another disconnected from it.
EM: Yes, I like that as a summation of the novel. In France I definitely got a sense of an ahistorical consciousness among the young, like: enough already, we have our own issues, we should move on. Yet I don't like to preach about this through the form of the novel; I much prefer for people to reach their own conclusions. From the younger generations in France, though, I did get a sense of people feeling that it did little good to be stuck in the past. These concerns flow in waves, and it seemed like a certain retro-hippie, anarchistic consciousness of anticonsumerism and so on – a la the protests against the World Bank summit meetings -- was just spreading through France as I was living there.
SE: I noticed that Cerb-X, one of the wastrels, the neo-hippie people, has a line of rings down her face. And this was her own kind of disfigurement, which was parallel to Emile's—he's born with a hump on his cheek, which is surgically removed and leaves a scar. Cerb-X says she wanted to do this because she wanted to see if people would look beyond her disfigurement. Cerb-X chose to have her disfigurement, whereas Emile was born with his, which is paralleled with Emile being pushed into his role as a collaborator and Cerb-X choosing to become a wastrel. Do you think people tend to "see the scar" and not look past it?
EM: I think we tend to come to people with lots of baggage. Cerb-X has an illusory sense of agency when she believes she’s the author of her own destiny or identity. And with her character -- not the world's most beautiful person -- I think what I was interested in was the sting of agency linked with this idea of one martyring oneself. There are many ways that Emile martyrs himself because of his hump, and Cerb-X willfully martyrs herself: these scars interested me in terms of personal agency. To what extent do you feel like you pull the strings in your own life? It's interesting that you point out the parallel. Looking back, it's clearly there, but when I was writing the book I wasn't conscious of drawing a comparison between them, though I did want the two to bump up against each other.
SE: Well, that's what makes reading so interesting, that people can see so much in books.
EM: Right, right, it's interesting what one gets out of it. At some point Cerb-X says something about being her own pornographer. So I look at the rings as her desire to seize control of how people interact with her, whereas Emile thinks himself a hapless victim of society, so for me, again, it remains a question of personal choice, but I like what you said.
SE: I wanted to ask you more about how the character of Emile and the novel came to you. Was Emile based on anyone, or how did you come to construct this history of him?
EM: This is what I love about the serendipity of writing. My original idea was to make the book about a male filmmaker who's coming to document the life of war refugees, as a search for his father. As an aside, I do think all stories are about some kind of search for the father -- detective fiction, ultimately, on some level. But anyway, so I got to France. I was in a train station -- incidentally the same station Salvador Dali in which woke up from a drug trip and said "this is the center of the world!"-- and this woman gave me this random tip that sent me to this small town in the Pyrenees, which eventually became the setting of the book. So I'm living there and suddenly there's this trial of Maurice Papon, a war criminal. I go to see it in Paris, and right away there's all these French journalists there because this 80-something-year-old man has skipped out on the trial. And this took over the novel. At first I wrote it from these multiple perspectives, but then I decided to make it just from Emile's perspective.
SE: Was this a major revision? Had you been at work on it for a while?
EM: Well, my process is that I like to just write and get lost in the story and then afterward I impose structure. I sometimes have students who like to save themselves time when writing and just start with the structure. But I feel that if you do that the writing just becomes illustrative, not painterly.
SE: That way it's always a surprise where it ends.
EM: Yes, and I think that when you're surprised as a writer, then your reader is also surprised.
SE: It seems like if you could map the whole thing out from the beginning, it would be a boring book. So in Crawl Space, the identity of the narrator is very slippery. He's trying to figure out who he was and who he is. When you were writing the book, did Emile ever just change on you? Did he surprise you?
EM: I think it's always a matter of making a character who is deep and full of contradictions, but you don't want to go too far to the point where the character is no longer that character. When I was writing Emile, sometimes I found myself feeling increasingly sympathetic toward him, which I liked because it would put the reader in a morally untenable position. And at that point I began to appreciate the possibilities.
SE: Anything in particular that made you sympathize with him?
EM: To write, I have to be able to really identify with the character, so with Emile I was growing really empathetic. And the more I wrote Emile, the more I felt for Emile as an older guy who has outlived his moment, living out his version of the right life but ending up an older man pushed around.
SE: Was that a problem? He is a war criminal . . .
EM: Exactly. What my hope is for the book is that the reader says "okay, I'm beginning to question some of my categories." I wanted to create an uncertain space around ideas of good and evil so that you couldn't just snugly fit Emil into one category or another.
SE: I definitely got that from reading the book, but I wonder if you could even put that in a review. The reviewers I read just called Emile a war criminal and that was that, even though the reality is much more complex. Do you think this is a case of people not getting the book, or people just not feeling like they can't sympathize with a war criminal in a review in a major paper?
EM: Well, if I had written it as a series of Socratic dialogues instead of a novel, it would have been a series of questions to try to get somebody to have this turn in their mind. So why is that not okay to do in a novel? Where you're asked to identify with a character and this kind of identification ends up making you question your assumptions.
SE: Right. And as I read the book, I thought it was a little arbitrary that Emile's the one that everyone dumps on. All the major characters—Izzy, Arianne, the wastrels—they all have these bad sides of them. Arianne and her husband Paul, who led the Resistance, they arguably sent some Jews off to die and definitely executed some Resistance fighters.