Judgement & Reprehension: A Conversation with Julius Taranto
“A good book makes the juice worth the squeeze.”
First, I’d love to know more about your journey towards becoming an author – what inspired you to make a change and switch from a career in law to writing? And do you think your previous experience has influenced your work?
My career switch has been less a matter of starting to write than of finally stopping work as a lawyer. I was writing fiction in the background—occasionally in the foreground—for my whole legal career and for years before that. The choice to stop practising has been a bit of an experiment. Most writers need day jobs, even as we all dream about what it would be like to stop half-assing it and commit to writing with our entire, uninterrupted asses. I realised I was in the unusual and extremely fortunate position to be able to concentrate on writing alone for a while, and it felt artistically irresponsible not to take that risk while I could.
That said, law can be a great profession, and it would have suited me pretty well if I hadn’t had this pesky novel-writing thing that I always wanted to do even more. Lawyering has certainly influenced my work in ambient ways, both in terms of my prose style and in terms of the subjects that interest me. I think it has also helped me learn to advocate a little better for the realities of my characters. As a junior lawyer, you often have no control over who you work for: some client hires your firm, and it becomes your job to understand what the client wants and believes and then to convey your client’s side of things as persuasively as possible within the bounds of the truth. That’s not so different from trying to write a compelling character. In both contexts, we call what we’re doing “representation,” which strikes me as more than a coincidence. In fiction, part of the fun and the challenge—this came up a lot in How I Won a Nobel Prize—is trying to zealously represent not just one client but multiple characters, many of whom see the world in radically different and opposed ways. Writing certain scenes felt like litigating against myself.
I read that you were nervous about releasing a novel that explores controversial issues, especially being a white man. I’d love to know more about your motivation to write about this topic despite being apprehensive about its reception, and I’m also curious about your thoughts on the word controversial… It’s a word that I think tends to get overused, and surely controversy is subjective and ever-changing? And sometimes the most fruitful and eye-opening conversations are ones that would at some points have been seen as controversial? What are your thoughts on this?
You’re really onto something with that question! I do think we often use “controversial” to mean a subject or person that is interesting or complicated, and hard to judge while nonetheless provoking some people to strong judgments. The specifics of what’s controversial will be necessarily subjective and context-dependent, even as the existence of controversy—the existence of some subject or behaviour at the border of social acceptability—seems to be timeless. Every society has outcasts and behaviours that it cannot accommodate, even as no society has been immune to change.
Writers are not always the best authorities on why they write things, but I think I was attracted to these “controversial” issues for exactly that reason: they’re interesting! And they’re difficult. As nervous as I was about wading into this topic, some part of me had to try to work through these issues by writing them. The public discourse of the culture wars felt so tiresome and malnourishing and unnecessarily humourless to me. I wanted to see if I could write about these issues with both less certainty and more humour—which is to say more truthfully—than seemed to be possible in polemical writing.
As our theme of this issue is Innocence, I’d love to know how you approached ideas of innocence and guilt in How I Won a Nobel Prize? I enjoyed how you blurred the boundaries between this opposition, as some of your characters who could be seen as being innocent on the one hand, could be guilty in other ways. Could you tell our readers a little more about how you set out to express or even challenge the theme of innocence in your novel?
The novel is set at a university made by and for cancelled people—people who have been cast out from the mainstream progressive elite world for one reason or another—so you can imagine that innocence and guilt are major preoccupations of this community. Everyone there is presumed guilty. Into this environment comes Helen, the narrator, who is an innocent in more ways than one: she’s there for a noble scientific cause, not because she got cancelled, and she’s also as apolitical as it’s possible for her to be. At the start of the book, she doesn’t know much about the culture wars or care much about the politics of her environment, as long as she can get her research done. She’s sort of naïve and pure in this way, even as her spouse insists that her attempt to stay innocent of politics is something she should feel guilty about. He thinks she owes it to the world to come out of her silo and take a stand on the political and cultural problems of the day.
The rest of the cast of the book are characters who have lost mainstream respectability for one reason or another. Many of them feel wronged and resentful at the same time as they feel relief at no longer needing to daven to values that didn’t suit them. Nearly everyone in the book, including Helen’s righteously progressive spouse, harbours real uncertainty about their own culpability. They feel justified—even as they feel regret, too. I wanted the book to be able to accommodate that complexity and uncertainty.
One of the benefits of writing about cancellation and the culture wars in a novel, as opposed to an essay or an op-ed, is that the form frees us (writers and readers) from the need to pass judgment. We are constantly pushed toward judgment by all parts of the public sphere, by culture warriors and politicians and social media and the judicial system. A novel gets to move past that. It can do justice to the parts of people that resist judgment. It can explore the persistent humanity of the guiltiest and most despicable people, on one hand, and the most self-righteous and intolerant extremists on the other. Novels can dramatize rather than resolve a conflict between worldviews. So, one of my main hopes for my book is that it helps readers gain a new understanding of the humanity behind whatever “side” feels most foreign to them. I also want readers to feel that our civilizational dilemma—the truth that we have to love even the people we hate—can be pretty funny.
How much do you think our current way of living, and the amount of information and data we have access to, has influenced the political discourse we become immersed in?
I do worry that certain forms of communication, particularly short and quippy forms of social media, reinforce an unhealthy desire that all people have to make the world much simpler than it is. But overall, I tend to think that technological habits and media trends create new species of very old problems much more than they create genuinely new problems. People have always oversimplified. We have always struggled to get reliable information. Societies have always been prone to groupthink and tribalism, just as they have also strived at other times to expand their area of concern to encompass and protect new people who were previously considered enemies or outsiders. It has always been difficult to figure out the truth and follow one’s truest conscience. These challenges are not possible to measure in a precise way, so I don’t think anyone really knows whether any of this is harder for us than it was for people a century or a millennium ago. Given that no one knows, most days I choose to be an optimist about the human capacity to haltingly, stutteringly, get better.
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Read the full interview in the Innocence Issue.
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