By: Ben Andoni
“The Echo Maker”, published by OMBRA GVG, has had great success in Albania. The story you present is very complex but also extremely original, and rare. It is also so human and natural to everybody. How does a writer come up with such an amazing story where cranes seem to have the same time-life as we humans?
The book began when I saw a short film about a young man who had been injured in an automobile accident and who consequently became convinced that his parents were impostors. All the rest of his cognitive ability was intact, including his recognition of other friends and acquaintances. In fact, he produced very elaborate intellectual explanations about why his parents couldn’t be his real parents. The effect was indescribably strange: it didn’t seem possible that the brain could split off from itself in this way. I began to study his malady, Capgras Syndrome, and learned that it is a rare but well-documented condition.
I was astonished to discover that the Capgras failure to recognize is always directed exclusively at those people the sufferer knows best: parents, children, spouses, or close friends. These patients only fail to accept those who they love! And rather than admit that something has happened to them, the sufferers always insist that they are still intact, while something inexplicable has happened to the outside world. This seemed such a poignant insight into the fragile nature of the self that I began to read voraciously about other kinds of damage to human consciousness. And as I read what neuroscience has learned about the brain’s need for stories, I began to see how a novel might try to represent how fiction and fact come together to create of self.
Not long after that time, I was making the long drive from my home in Illinois to Arizona, where my mother lives. I’d been driving for nine hours and was passing through central Nebraska near sunset, when I looked out into an empty field along the side of the highway and saw this carpet of birds, one meter tall, spreading in all directions. I thought I was hallucinating from highway fatigue, and I almost drove off the road. I didn’t know what I was looking at, but the sight was ancient and thrilling. These creatures looked prehistoric, something absolutely indifferent to human time. I pulled off at the next town and rented a room in a motel. Asking around, I learned that half a million birds0 percent of every migratory crane in North Americaسtopped on this short section of the Platte River every March, like clockwork, during a migration of thousands of kilometers. I got up before dawn the next morning to watch as the massed birds dispersed for a day of foraging. The experience was as spiritual as anything I’ve ever felt: these huge bipeds dancing and singing in an enormous, weirdly intelligent, communal act.
I read everything I could about the birds. It’s a long and haunting literature, with lots of great prose by writers all the way back to the ancient Greeks. I learned that cranes mate for life, that a crane will sacrifice itself for its young, that they learn by example how to fly across an entire continent, that they navigate the route by very particular local landmarks, and that they are largely solitary, until this annual gathering into a huge city of birds. I began traveling everywhere to see them, and I began seeing representations of cranes everywhere I traveled, from Central Europe to Japan.
Cranes became strangely human to me, and at the same time, totally alien. I discovered stories in many different folk literatures about cranes and people turning into each other. The combination of familiarity and strangeness that the birds made me feel reminded me of Capgras syndrome. What a Capgras sufferer did to his loved ones suddenly seemed to me very much like what the entire human race does to these other large intelligent creatures that we share the planet with: we see them, we recognize something familiar, but we deny that they are in any way related to us. And yet, the core parts of our brains still preserve structures in common with theirs. Our estrangement from them, then, struck me as somehow analogous to our estrangement from our own internal selves. Setting my story in this little town in the middle of nowhere, whose central claim to fame was this annual massing of birds, gave me a way to open up the story to all kinds of ecological traces and ancient memories. And with that idea, I began to write my book.
Nowadays, the audience seems very confused with contemporary literature. It needs always specific people (critics or intellectuals) to connect writers to people. Are you worried about the lack of direct communication between the writers or creators and the public, yourself and the readers? Do you think the role of critics and intellectuals is indispensable for this communication to occur?
I believe that the web, portable devices, and other digital developments are profoundly changing our relation not only to words, but to time. To immerse yourself in a novel requires that you lose yourself in a solitary activity for an extended period of time. But our new technologies are being designed to keep us always connected, always present in “real time.” We concentrate differently now, in the age of multitasking and nanoseconds. We may be in danger of losing an entire way of thinking and being, an entire way of relating to long, continuous, serial, uninterrupted flows of words. I’m not sure that any number of critics or intellectuals is going to be able to preserve those old styles of private focus and concentration in large numbers of people, once we migrate over completely into instant messages and hyperlinks. Reading will become something else, of course. But we are in danger of losing a fluency in being able to read old style novels that demand an immersive commitment from us. Can intellectuals help preserve and extend those skills into the digital age? Yes, I believe they can, if they write for the general intelligent public rather than strictly for each other.
How did you become a writer? Was there a particular moment or did you always know you were going to write?
From the youngest age until about 20, I always thought that I would become a scientist. The only question was: which science? That varied for me. One year it was oceanography, one year it was paleontology, one year it was geology. I had a generalist’s temperament, one fascinated with the connections between all things. I didn’t want to close the door on anything, but really wanted to keep studying all things forever. When it was time to go to college, I settled on physics, thinking that, because it was in some ways the most fundamental science that lay at the base of all the others; that it would allow me to get a kind of aerial view and give me the “big picture” of how things fit together. I loved studying physics, but the deeper into it I got, the more (inevitably) I would have to specialize, and the more doors to other interests and connections I was forced to close. I knew that successful scientists had to devote themselves to specialized fields so small that only a few could follow what they do. Just when the increasing specialization of my own studies was beginning to make me claustrophobic, I met a professor of literature whose sweeping command of human knowledge was such that it gave me the sense of connection and aerial view that I had been longing for in my own education. At that point, I realized that literature could include a study of science much more than science could include a study of literature. And that’s when I made the switch. While I have often felt some nostalgia for my engagement with math and science, I have always felt very lucky that the life of an author allows me to spend years in a vicarious study of a profession, whether it be genetics or computer programming or neuroscience.
What are your working habits and how would you describe one of your normal days?
My writing habits have changed a lot over the last quarter century, especially as email and the Internet have begun to invade my life. And I end up traveling more these days, as well. But my ideal dayشhe kind of day I long forآegins early, with revision of yesterday’s materials. I compose by computer speech and handwriting recognition, and I will begin right after an early breakfast (6 or 7 am) to revise and expand on yesterday’s passages. I work lying in bed. After an hour or two, I begin to blend into new composition. I will work for 4 or 5 hours, then break for lunch. In the afternoon, I return to writing, doing small amounts of research as I go. I generally stop around 4 in the afternoon, take some exercise, and start to read. After dinner, more reading for some hours before falling asleep. I find that’s a great way to plant the seeds in my imagination for the next day’s work.
“Maybe every novelist wants to write poetry first, finds he can’t, and then tries the short stories, which is the most demanding form after poetry, and failing at that, only then does he take up novel writing”. Did this quotation of Faulkner’s happen to you too? Or is your story as a writer different?
I don’t think for one minute that Faulkner was serious about this! I think he was just being amusing, and perhaps talking about his own admiration for other forms by placing his own chosen genre at the bottom. I did write poetry before writing novels, but that was only because, as a shorter form, it was easier to do while I was busy studying or working. But I have also blended that genre into my fiction, and even explored the use of shorter set-piece fiction inside the container of the long novel. My only theory about the relative worth of genres and the proper relation between them is that these supposedly different art forms are always calling out to be creatively combined, blurred, and blended. The best work makes us reconsider the boundaries between such genres.
You have said in an interview in “The Minnesota Review” with Mr. Jeffrey Williams that: “I’m intrigued by the idea of communicating between disciplines that operate at different magnifications, fields that would seem to operate under incommensurable axioms”. What does it mean and do you believe that is possible for literature to interfere with our brain? Could you explain this quote further for us?
We have evolved to live on a certain scale, at a certain size, and the stories we tell most concern phenomena at eye-level: individual lives, trying to understand marriage and career and parenting and the struggles of local community. All the while, there is grandeur and terror on scales so much smaller and larger than ours we can’t even see them: the worlds of the micro- and telescopic, huge social and historical processes, the teeming complexity of the genome, the life and death of stars. I’m moved by the stories of individuals and groups of humans who struggle to understand life at these different levels of magnification, who get and then lose and then find again slight and qualified glimpses of how little and big depend upon and shape each other. We are many things, the result of many tangled processes, and our stories need to remind us of just how many levels life proceeds on.
What has influenced you the most: what period of American or other World literature, what thinkers…Proust, Mann, Joyce…or other writers and thinkers?
What are you reading these days?
I first discovered my own possibilities as a writer when I fell in love with European Modernismشhe writers from around 1900 to 1930 who, jarred, I think, by revolutions in scientific understanding, began to rethink time and space and consciousness in a series of remarkable experiments in focalization that can still seem shocking today. But as an American, I have also been shaped by that long dialog between Transcendentalism and Pragmatism, those versions of idealism and realism that have played out on the American continent. I am continually fascinated by the maximalist experiments of writers like Melville, that carry forward today in the works of writers like Pynchon, Gaddis, and DeLillo, and the more intimate tradition of Hawthorne that comes down through Hemingway into the work of Carver and minimalism. I want to write a kind of fiction that shows the connections between the encyclopedic and the hermetic traditions, and so I am always looking in two directions, toward Walt Whitman, but also toward Emily Dickinson.
How representative is the story of “The Echo Maker” for the contemporary middle class American? Can they easily identify with the situations and existential issues that your characters are facing?
The Echo Maker tells the story of Mark Schluter, a man suffering from a misidentification impairment which leaves him convinced that the people he most loves have been replaced by impostors. In a sense, his high-level cognition gets split off from his emotional ratification, and he is plunged into a world where the most recognizable things become strange. He can look at his sister and say, “She looks like my sister, sounds like my sister, acts like my sister, dresses like my sister, and thinks like my sister, but she’s no one in the world that I recognize.”
At the same time, the book opens just after the attacks on the World Trade Center and concludes just after the invasion of Iraq. All the characters in the book, in one way or another, feel, in the face of Mark Schluter’s estrangement, a surprising kind of recognition. I think a great number of people in post-9/11 Americaئrom those who live in the big cities and ports of the coast to those in the vast, rural, emptier, religiously and consevatively oriented states in the middle of the countryئor years after the attacks carried around inside themselves a daily sense of bewilderment: “This looks like my country, sounds like my country, acts like my country, but it’s no place that I can recognize. It must be an impostor.” Mark’s condition is not so much a metaphor for their own defamiliarization as it is a reflection of it, an instance of just how easy it is for the continuous narrative of identity -personal, religious, familial, national – to be torn apart. We define ourselves as parts of larger political, cultural, religious, and ethnic groups, thinking them to be more stable than we are. But they are not as stable as we think. I think that’s a feeling that lots of Americans from all classes and walks of life have felt in recent years.
As the cranes don’t find their way back from the chaotic development-at the same way your personage beginning from Mark, his sister, his close friends and others are missing. This kind of brain disorder, Capgras syndrome, is in fact a metaphoric element for the lack of communication of all forms, isn’t it? Do you see it as a normal feature of our society? Quo vadis, our society according to powers?
We think that we are solid, whole, coherent, and continuous, and that the story we find in the outside world is definitive and reliable. But contemporary neuroscience tells us that the brain is a noisy, chaotic parliament hashing out negotiations among hundreds of neural subsystems all at once. And it’s the job of consciousness to create, from that multiple and messy negotiation, an illusion of singularity and solidity. Self is, in fact, a fluid improvisation. A break between two brain subsystems can upset the entire construction of reality. People lose the ability to identify familiar objects. They can no longer tell whether pencils are smaller or larger than logs. They lose the ability to tell the difference between two faces. They deny that their left arms belong to them. They can believe that their own houses are actually substitute copies of the real thing. They think that they are blind when they aren’t, or that they can see when they’re actually blind. And even without brain damage, we all experience transient, weaker forms of these same syndromes as part of ordinary consciousness.
Does that mean we are stuck in an anything-goes, hall-of-mirrors relativism? Not really. But it does mean that our truths, like our senses of self, will always be produced, stabilized, and destabilized in common, as parts of large, contingent, and constantly unfolding negotiations.
Weber is a kind of magician more than a doctor. His line is awesome. David is working at another part, but to adapt itself everywhere. Karin is fighting from beginning to be understood from her brother and to keep alive. They often alternate territories with each-other. Did you have difficulties administrating your personality in the novel? Do you think of those moments, where you miss the connection with your personality? How connected do you feel with your characters and their awesome brains and lines of thinking?
I now keep individual notebook sections for all of my characters. In these notebooks, I draw pictures, accumulate photographs, sketch out biographies and resumes and letters and documents – all the ephemera that each of my characters might produce. And all day long, as I listen to people and the extraordinary things that we say to one another, I jot down quotes into these notebooks, building up the voices with which each of these people invent and perform themselves. The trick is how to understand very different kinds of people from radically opposite walks of life, and how to occupy them emotionally while working: how to be, for several months at a time, a neuroscientist who feels himself slowly coming apart, and then switch, for several more months, and become a working class uneducated meat packer who is recovering from brain damage.
All the characters in this book share one thing in common: they are all in the process of losing their sense of self. I’m not sure how successful I’ve been in conveying that fear and disorientation to the reader, but I will say that the act of trying to empathize with these vulnerable people, day after day, really changed my own sense of solidity. I can recall trying, after long hours of work and psychological immersion, to go to social gatherings and interact with people, and being completely unable to answer even the simplest of cocktail-party questions!
Ana Akhmetova has often said that there is no literature after Freud. What is your opinion on the importance of the subconscious in the life of an individual and in his connection with the society? Doesn’t the unseen and unrevealed, the subconscious, have a bearing on the truth about an individual?
I think that if contemporary brain science tells us anything, it’s that the cerebral cortexشhe portion of the brain responsible for consciousness and high-level cognitionةs a real latecomer, pasted over a much older and more fundamental brain that is really in charge of the organism. Not only is the conscious mind not in the driver’s seat, it isn’t even always that good at following along afterwards. Some commentators on brain function have used the image of a rider trying to steer an elephant: he ends up having to let the elephant go where it wants, and then pretend that that’s where he told the elephant to go.
But far from invalidate the uses of fiction, I think such a vision of how the mind works makes fiction all that more important. By seeing characters struggle to make sense of the world and watching them try, not always successfully, to piece together narrative continuity out of perpetual near-chaos, we get a unique reflection of the limits and inescapability of our own constant, reality-editing consciousness. In this way, fiction is almost more realistic than non-fiction, with its pretense to knowledge that transcends or exists independently of a focalized knower.
What are your thoughts about Albania? Any particular item you know about this country that seems interesting to you in some way?
Speaking as one who has never traveled to the country (but who would very much like to), I have an image of Albania as a long-suffering victim of history and other people’s empires. Of course, the Albania of most of my life was Hoxha’s state, that singular exception standing slightly outside the ordinary alignments of Cold War oppositions that made it play a unique roll in my imagination, true or otherwise! It has been fascinating to see the path the country has taken since 1990, a road with many challenges, I am sure, but I wish it well with EU membership and beyond. The most fascinating thing about Albania for a writer, of course, is the incredibly high literacy rate and the intense seriousness with which Albanians engage literature. It seems to me that books are still a part of mainstream, consensual culture in a way that they have ceased to be in many other parts of the globe, east and west. I hope that whatever political and economic paths that the country takes in the years ahead, that somehow it manages to preserve this centrality of the book and the printed page’s connection to life on other scales and other gauges of space and time.
*Taken from Wikipedia
