Cinema, fiction and Kazuo Ishiguro

I saw Kazuo Ishiguro on stage as part of Festival Letteratura in Mantova on Friday (at least 800 people there by my estimation, possibly more than 1,000) and the subject was Telling Stories: Cinema and Fiction.

The conversation started about memory and what film does well and what it doesn't do well. According to Ishiguro, memory is one thing that film, so far, hasn't managed to crack in a satisfying way. True, characters have flashbacks or memory is used as a plot device (they talked about Hitchcock's Marnie and the final reveal where the entire motivation and secret's she's harboured is exposed with an image), but the act of recreating a memory is one that is difficult, if not impossible, to weave in with the present narrative. If we jump back in time, it becomes a realistic portrait, it's part of the movie, it's no longer really a memory in a certain way.

I want to think about this because it might be argued that fiction, too, has a similar limitation. When one thinks about the work of Ishiguro, memory is key to the characters and their motivations. But the memories can reside quietly in characters on the page, we're not necessarily pulled out of the action of the present to reflect on or remember the memory.

To me what makes this interesting is the question of trauma. How does the memory of trauma operate in fiction vs. cinema? After all, trauma is a flash, an image, not necessarily an entirely constructed narrative. And in cinema, trauma can operate on a more "real" level in a certain way: it has the emotional punch that trauma can have in real life (or some approximate emotional punch). Think Taxi Driver and all the stark shocking images. Or Twelve Monkeys and its frenetic moments of emotion.

After memory, the conversation drifted to what cinema can do well vs. fiction: and according to Ishiguro, one thing that cinema does well is action. He claims, aptly, that we tend to dismiss action in film because we think it's simple and that it lacks complexity (we, being, deep thinkers, I guess). But that action actually can be quite complex and done for a variety of reasons. He cited the Bourne Movies (I, too, am a huge fan of these films) and how the action operates on a defensive level from beginning to end. This as opposed to other movies where the action is offensive. According to Ishiguro, this distinction is key to how we as the audience react to and identify with the characters.

All of this is very interesting for me since I am just as interested in movies as I am in books. And,

A++ defensive action: why we love Bourne

happily, the conversation ended with a statement that I had to consider: the writer ended his talk by asserting that movies and books (cinema and fiction) are linked together creatively in a way now that they never have been before. They are vital to one another. People have been predicting the death of the novel since the beginning of the novel but as an art form it continues to be incredibly important in how stories are told and, more precisely, in how movies are told. After all, a movie can bring an enormous amount of publicity to a novel (too many examples to note here) but movies and movie makers need novels to create new and original stories. Without novels we have merely Hollywood formulas repeated an infinitum (we are almost there already and are well beyond there in Hollywood).

This is a particularly positive way to end a talk about movies in the midst of an important literary festival. Obviously I think a lot about books and the role that books play in public life. It's easy to get pessimistic. It's easy to feel that books are more and more relegated to the margins. Books and literature are niche occupations, no question. When I'm out in the world and talking to people who aren't necessarily readers or thinkers, I'm often shocked at how little they know about contemporary writers. Even huge stars that every reader must know, in the world of non-books, they mean little to nothing. And I forget that this is the majority of the world, of the US, of Canada. Most people don't read.

Tippi Hedren as Marnie: bad at memory

But, that said, books and literature have a wider berth than we give them credit for. They are used in movies. They are read on subways in the mornings and on lunch hours. They are stashed into beach bags on summer holidays. They are tossed into the back seat of cars on the way up to the cabin for the week. But because books and the act of reading doesn't "photograph" well, they aren't represented easily on screen (think about, for example, how rarely people watch TV on TV: it's not a cinematically pleasing thing to watch), they exist on the margins of all that. In the end, reading is a solitary act and one that's hard to discuss or share in the same way the TV is or movies can be. (Not that we can't discuss books but it's so personal and individual what people choose to read.)

I've said it before and I'll say it again: everyone should read. It makes smarter people even smarter. It makes not so smart people more interesting. It helps us see worlds and ideas in a way no other art form can. We can empathize, sympathize, imagine other ways of living, thinking about new ideas. Without exception: every single person who reads regularly that I know is more interesting because of it.

So turn off the Internet and go read a book. Without the phone at the fingertips.

On Difficult Books

I had a professor once in graduate school who used the word "accessible" to insult a writer's work. This tendency in certain circles that books must be dense, difficult to read, complex was one of the most annoying things, in fact, about graduate school. This doesn't refer to advanced vocabulary or overly complicated plots, but to works that, in fact, may have no plot. Or that intentionally obfuscate. It used to irk me when he'd dismiss a book by simply asserting that it was "simplistic" as if complexity made for a good read. This was true of not only fiction but of literary criticism or theory. And, let's face it, a big chunk of literary theory that has been so fashionable in the last generation is simply bad writing. Perhaps the writer has some novel or fascinating idea but the idea should be clear.

Not difficult.

I am of the school of straightforwardness. I don't have any issue with books that have unusual form or where the author's ideas on a topic are integrated into the plotting. But I detest books whose soul aim is to show off how smart the author thinks he is. Or "creative." A novel should essentially be a good story in my view and that doesn't mean the author can't take risks (he should, in fact) or can't play with form or style or do something new or unusual. But that should always be in service to the story, in my view. And there certainly are "simplistic" books (the story has no dimension to it, the themes or ideas are pat or trite).

That said, certain popular critics often dismiss a writer's work as "unreadable" or a "hard read" which I often find curious. When people call Kazuo Ishiguro's "hard" I don't see it. Though some of his books (like The Unconsoled) don't really have a straightforward plot, the language is fairly clear and straightforward. Virginia Woolf is another author often put in this camp. Or Borges.

I was very surprised that some people called Jenny Erpenbeck's book Visitation "undeniably difficult" which I definitely deny. Again, if one sits down with every book and excepts a straightforward sort of plotting arc, perhaps that's where one senses the challenge. But having read enough German literature (another author called difficult is Herte Mueller, and though that word might cover one aspect of her, it doesn't cover her writing!), I guess one comes to except a certain kind of approach. Same with Argentine writers.

I wonder if the rift between what academics find "good" and what the public find "good" has to do with the breakdown of high vs low culture. When I first started my undergraduate degree, I think, the remnants of this distinction were still visible but just barely: TV was still widely treated with disdain, popular writers were totally ignored (you'd never be caught dead with any living author who'd ever had a best-seller and, in fact, "best-seller" was an insult), but slowly this distinction has blurred. That's not to say that there aren't popular writers who are ignored in academia or "respectable" literary institutions: many are. But popular success doesn't necessarily mean a work is instantly trash. In fact, I've heard many people, many serious readers, say that they read Twilight or Fifty Shades simply because they wanted to see what the buzz was all about, they wanted to understand what these books' popularity said about our culture today, etc. Yes, they ultimately trashed the books but the assumption was that even trash should be part of the conversation in understanding where we are as a society of readers today...

I guess I wouldn't go so far as to read that kind of work mainly because I have so many other books vying for my attention. Good books. And difficult ones.

Reading Places

Because of my upcoming European trip, I am trying to read a few books set in Munich or Berlin. It makes traveling to a city much more interesting if there is a bit of context in the streets or parks where you walk. Berlin is a city rich with art  - whether, literary, cinematic, performance-based. Munich is less so but there are still several novels set there which I have on my short-term list.

First and foremost is the work of Thomas Mann. His stories and novels often take a real world place and invert it or give it a dreamlike quality: the Swiss sanatorium in The Magic Mountain, the erotic and desolate canals (and beach?) in Death in Venice. Though he doesn't do much with place, his works still feel like they are integrated in a unique way with place.

Looking for Borges in Buenos Aires

It's interesting to me how certain writers need to ground their writing in real life places, that naming streets and parks and specific buildings anchors the setting, gives it tangible real world moments that make readers ( or at least me) want to see the actual corner, the building, the park (Google street view is excellent for this and often highly distracting). Orhan Pamuk does this with Istanbul. Roberto Bolano with Mexico City (among other places). Theodore Dreiser (and Henry James and Edith Wharton and many, many other writers) with New York City. Then there are writers who set their works in real life locations but the settings somehow don't reflect the reality of the city, don't capture its essence: I think of Thomas Mann but also of Kazuo Ishiguro, Borges, Juan Carlos Onetti, Julio Cortazar. These writers create alternate versions of their cities or settings or their writings reflect more internal concerns and they are less interested in the concrete, trees and earth of actual physical location.

Right now I am reading The Traitor's Emblem by Juan Gomez-Juraldo, largely set in Munich of the early 20th century, and sensing how Munich operates in his book makes me really look forward to putting my own feet down there in a few weeks.

If anyone has any good books set in Berlin to recommend, let us know on our Facebook page!