The All-True Travels and Adventures of Lidie Newton_ A Novel - Jane Smiley [262]
Take a central story in our society—the life and death of Jesus. You can focus on the crucifixion or the resurrection; both stories are there, and who you are somewhat dictates what you see. There are those comic sensibilities that see the resurrection, and the tragic ones that see only the crucifixion. Those that see the crucifixion are focusing on the body, while those that see the resurrection are focusing on the spirit. And I guess throughout my works I’ve always focused on the resurrection.
Q: The composer Giuseppe Verdi noted that "looking back is a real sign of progress," an observation that seems to characterize your oeuvre.
A: Well, often I’m looking back in an effort to find the meaning of the moment. It could be that I’m looking back in order to stop looking back; there’s a paradox there. I’ve not been able to consistently write in the present tense and say this is happening and that is happening without trying to find meaning in what is happening. In The Greenlanders, I tried to have a narrative that was pure action, and it succeeded pretty well, but the characters still had to ponder the meaning of their experiences in some way. And though Lidie Newton is filled with incident, there’s plenty of reflection.
It takes a great deal of wisdom to give up the past and to live consistently in the present. It takes more wisdom than most people have, and it takes the kind of wisdom that most people have to discipline themselves in some kind of systematic way to achieve. I certainly have done neither, though I’m trying. The things in my world become more and more immediate. I don’t really lead a literary life. I live a life very focused on my animals and my kids and the actual act of writing. Horses make you live in the moment, because if you don’t, you get hurt. Distraction can be deadly. I didn’t know how much I didn’t live in the moment until I started trying to get through the day with my horse.
Q: Do novels provide an entrance to or an exit from the present?
A: An entrance, definitely. I think we’re moving into a world that we’ll be able to live in but that we cannot currently imagine. And maybe learning to live in the present moment is our only refuge; so that’s what I’m working on. Writing or reading a novel allows you to get into that zone—the zone of the present, where the thing that you are doing is fully engaging. And riding or cleaning stalls are present moment activities as well; I’d like to live my whole life that way.
Q: I hear a faint echo of Virginia Woolf’s celebrated and sustaining "moments of being."
A: Yes, once some publication asked me what books made me cry. I named To the Lighthouse and Orlando. Woolf’s writing forces you to say, with her, that nothing exists except the present moment. She thought about things in a literary sense in a totally original way. She was in tune with something in a way that very few people are. The older you get, the more she knows; that’s why people keep going back to her work. The thing that she knows is a thing of the spirit rather than a thing of the world. That’s also true of Shakespeare and Dickens and George Eliot.
Q: How would you explain the enduring relevance of those writers’ works?
A: There wasn’t a single one of them who didn’t engage the social, cultural, economic, and political reality of his or her time. Not one. If you are a novelist and citizen of a certain time, your only option for engaging is with the social, cultural, political, and reality of your own time. If you have a view that those things aren’t timeless enough for you, then I don’t see what you’re engaging with, frankly. I don’t see how you’re engaging with others. I don’t see where your humanity is. So, why bother?
Q: How do you deal with the shadow of past writers and the expectations of today’s readers?
A: I always like to tell a good story, and there are pure