ABOUT GRACE
Q & A | Further Reading
Q: What was the genesis of About Grace?
A: When I was a kid, I had a copy of Wilson Bentley’s 1931 book, Snow Crystals. For fifty years Bentley, a Vermont farmer, caught snowflakes on a smooth black tray, transferred them to a glass slide, brushed them flat with a feather, centered them over a low-powered bulb, and took photomicrographs of them. He never sold any of his prints; his neighbors made fun of him. Who would study something so ordinary and troublesome as snow? In all that time Bentley managed only about 5,000 successful prints. Two thousand of them are collected in Snow Crystals and to page through this graveyard of long-vanished crystals is to be astonished, once more, by the sheer inventive power of nature, and also by the man, the unique kind of assiduousness and devotion that Bentley possessed, an almost religious dedication to beauty. These are the things I’ve been drawn to for a long time: those miracles of the world that we sometimes need to be gently reminded to pay attention to, and the kinds of characters who are interested in them. That’s where the character of Winkler began.
Q: Your work—whether in the form of short story, essay, or novel—is tightly enmeshed in the natural world; In stories like “The Shell Collector,” where your blind protagonist is a retired professor of malacology (the study of mollusks), and certainly in About Grace, where your protagonist is a hydrologist, it seems your rendering of meticulous scientific detail is a vital ingredient. How do these branches of scientific inquiry into the natural world work their way into your fiction?
A: Science composes a whole host of ways to investigate the world, to probe mysteries, and the best scientists are comfortable working with uncertainty, operating in the unknown. This seems to me very similar to what fiction writers do. We find a thing/a person/a place/a feeling that we’re vitally interested in, and we pursue that interest through language. So I don’t see science and literature as separable entities, buildings that should be built on opposite sides of a college campus. I seem them both as useful—even vital—ways to try to understand what we’re doing here in the frighteningly brief time we have. For me the natural world is not something separate from the human world; the outside is not something we shuttle ourselves out into for an hour a day, before hurrying back indoors to our hand sanitizer and indoor plumbing. We are the natural world and it is us.
Q: I know when you’re teaching you focus a lot on defamiliarization. I wonder if you could explain what defamiliarization means in terms of being a writer, and how you use the concept in About Grace, and in all your work.
I’m fascinated by the dynamism of language: how it changes, how it evolves, how it’s prostituted. I argue to my students that (in most cases) verbal repetition has a blunting, even soporific effect. When a writer writes that, say, a character has her “heart in her mouth” or “a surge of adrenaline” or her “eyes sparkle,” then a reader, seeing combinations of words she has seen thousands of times before, glosses over the phrase, rather than seeing a vivid image. Over time a reader gets “habituated” to commonly-seen combinations of words like sidelong glances, and glinting eyes, and “a chill ran up my spine.”
This is true of phrases, and it’s true of narrative structures, too. Popular narrative structures which have been repeated often enough to be familiar can also have the same blunting, sleepy, familiar effect. How many evil villains are physically scarred? How many films end in a kiss? How many protagonists have a wise old grandfather? And this is fine! I’m not suggesting that this isn’t perfectly acceptable. I’ll go see the new Spiderman movie; I’ll tolerate the newest pop song, even though I know the narrative structure by heart; even though I know pretty much everything I’m going to get all the way through. There are no contradictions, no misfits, no real instability, no real formal tensions. A lot of care is taken so that the viewer does not get shaken up in any significant way.
But I do think that the role of art is to show us the familiar world in an unfamiliar way--to shake us up. The guy I always quote when I get asked about this stuff is an old Russian commisar named Victor Shklovsky, in an essay he wrote called "Art as Technique.” “Art exists,” Shklovsky says, “that one may recover the sensation of life; it exists to make one feel things, to make the stone stony. The purpose of art is to impart the sensation of things as they are perceived and not as they are known.” Writers like us—writers trying (and usually failing) to make art—are trying to use words, maybe the most used and familiar elements of daily life, and we’re trying to combine them to create transcendent aesthetic structures. We’re trying to employ language in ways that helps a reader see life in some ‘defamiliarized’ way.
Always, for me, art is slightly strange. Strangeness is what helps us crack apart our old eyes and see the world in a slightly new way. This is about empathy: strangeness helps us step outside of ourselves and into a stranger. It’s like Flannery O’Connor said, “A certain distortion is used to get at the truth.”