The Death of the Author: A Conversation with Ami Rao

14 Apr

Ami Rao is a writer with many strings to her bow, having won the Outstanding Sports Book of the Year in 2018 for Centaur, before turning her hand to fiction in 2021 with the brilliant David and Ameena. Her latest offering, Almost, is a thought-provoking literary novella, for which Ami has decided to donate her proceeds from the book to the charity Place2Be. Here, the talented author talks to us about literary voice, the nature of grief and Roland Barthes.

To date, you’ve written a sports memoir, a contemporary novel and your latest book, Almost, is a literary novella. Just one of those genres would be daunting for most people and authors tend to stick very much to the one field, especially in their first few books, so how did you come to have such a varied writing experience?

I’ve never been that concerned with genre honestly. For me, writing is a secondary habit that was born from a primary obsession which is reading, and just like I would read anything that interests me, whether its novels, short fiction, non-fiction, or French literary theory, it’s the same sort of motivation when considering what I’d like to write about… okay, maybe not French theory, but that’s on ability alone! But there’s not really a clear distinction in my head between different kinds of creative work, I’m just a storyteller, if the story is interesting, if it hooks me, I want to write it and when I’m writing, I’m just writing.

In terms of Almost, did you always have a novella in mind and what were the factors that went into determining using this form?

Life is short. The book mirrors that.

The book draws on the work of Barthes, where did you first come across his writings and what was it in particular that made such a mark on you?

I studied Barthes in college in a literary theory class, and just from that single collection of essays (Mythologies) I was immediately struck by what a visionary he was, so ahead of his time in the way that he thought. That book was published in the 1950s and yet I found his whole way of how we view the world so startlingly relevant. So then, I ended up reading all his books (as you do!) and was even more drawn in, it’s difficult not to be frankly – he’s such a wonderful writer, a beautiful, generous reader, definitely one of the greatest post-modern thinkers of our time. For me, he’s one of those writers whose work I could keep revisiting and each time find my own thinking slightly shifted. His ideas, his mind, his scrutiny of society and culture, his understanding of human nature, I find to be magnificent and intellectually sublime.

How did the idea of using Barthes in the novella come about; was he, or the character of the father, or perhaps the death of the daughter, the initial point of inspiration?

It was actually a quote from Susan Sontag that made me think of bringing Barthes in, and heavily so, in the capacity of a character or even (indulgently) a kind of co-writer, but basically in a way that made him part of the texture of the thing, inseparable from the rest of the text.

Susan Sontag wrote: “The writer is the exemplary sufferer because he has found both the deepest level of suffering and also a professional means to sublimate his suffering. As a man, he suffers; as a writer, he transforms his suffering into art.”

Both the father character and Barthes fit Sontag’s ‘exemplary sufferer’ description, but while the father is a fiction, Barthes was not. Barthes’ father died in WWI when he was a baby, and a lot of his work can be read as a kind of psychological delving-into of this trauma. As a young man, he suffered from tuberculosis, spending several years in the insolation of sanitaria, which as we all know from the experience of the last two years, couldn’t have been easy. When he lost his mother – the woman who had raised and cared for him and who he was completely devoted to, he wrote Mourning Diary, an intimate and deeply moving study of grief. So basically, Barthes ‘the man’ (per Sontag), was no stranger to suffering.

The father character in the novella similarly experiences loss twice, once in childhood and then again in adulthood, and as a result carries with him a whole lot of emotional baggage (identity, class, his relationships… with his father, his wife, the academic work that’s come to define him, etc.) that desperately needs unpacking.

I wanted to see if I could draw parallels between the two men, to see where that would take me. In many ways, I wanted to see how theory stands up in the face of reality. Is it helpful to write an essay about revolution where there are revolutionaries burning flags on the streets outside your door, or do you have to be a revolutionary yourself? Is it helpful to read someone else’s discourse on grief or do you have to go through it yourself? Those are the kinds of questions I was interested in exploring.

From that first idea, how did you then begin to weave the story together, to merge the different elements?

I don’t know. I really don’t know how writing works… I don’t know how you go from a blank page to something finished; it remains a mystery to me. I think many books start with a kind of juxtaposition or question you want answered and you go from there, but I still don’t fully understand how it all comes together. The American poet Jack Spicer talks about ‘the poet taking dictation,’ this idea that somebody else is speaking through you and you’re just writing it down. I think it’s true that many times writers are not in complete control of the creative process, the story takes over and sort of writes itself. Maybe this is one of the reasons why writers write, it’s certainly a big part of why I write… that element of discovery in the composition, you end up surprising yourself.

Literally as I’m writing these questions, something has just come to me: one of Barthes’ main ideas is the death of the author, and the point of departure that gives to the reader, for them to question, interpret, think about things anew. The death of the daughter in the novella is the catalyst for the father to begin to question his world, was this a parallel that you considered when you wrote the book?

Yes, it's hard to speak of Barthes without thinking of that extraordinary 1967 essay you mention (The Death of the Author). It’s the last line of the essay, I think, that’s so provocative, which is also by the way the point where Barthes (the theoretician) and I (the novelist) finally disagree! But to paraphrase it, it’s where Barthes says that the death of the author is necessary for the birth of the reader, which in turn is what gives writing its future.

The parallel in the novella as I conceived it, comes in the end, when the father no longer needs Barthes.

Ideas such as poststructuralism and semiotics can makes Barthes seem a little impenetrable, but the way you include just short, relevant passages of his texts opens them up anew, was it important to you to create this accessibility/interest in Barthes amongst readers?

So true, and I think it’s important to remember that underneath the terminology that our culture chooses to ascribe to someone, there’s just a person and their thoughts. I have to admit, it really depresses me when sometimes people dismiss something as being highbrow or pretentious without even giving it a chance. Sadly, this is true of Barthes and many of his contemporaries, Derrida, Foucault, Lacan etc. and it is a shame because some of what they’ve produced, I would count as being among the best writing I’ve ever read, not only for their theoretical incisiveness and precision, but also for the language. Barthes to me is like Bach, there is a sophistication and a complexity to the work, and yet there is an accessibility and a simplicity, which is what makes it so disarmingly beautiful. The excerpts reproduced in my novella are ones I love and those that best fit the parallels I was trying to draw between my character’s thoughts and Barthes’ own. But they are only preludes, and yes, absolutely, I would hope readers would be tempted to come for more.

And for anyone wanting to delve further into Barthes, what would you recommend?

I love all his books, as you can tell, but my introduction to Barthes came from Mythologies, so that’s the one I would recommend people start with. It’s insightful, elegant, clever and surprisingly fun… a kind of masterpiece really.

There’s also a really great short film that Richard Clay wrote and presented for BBC4 called 21st Century Mythologies that so expertly applies some of Barthes ideas to our contemporary world. I watched it on iPlayer and enjoyed it so much that I had to get in touch with Richard afterwards, which I’m glad I saw it, and I guess I did because he’s such a nice guy, and obviously incredibly smart and great at what he does! So yes, please do look it up, I highly recommend it, not only for academic reasons, because it’s an easy introduction to Barthes, but also artistically speaking, as a standalone piece of creative work, I feel it’s so extraordinarily well done.

The novella itself deals with a father’s grief and captures brilliantly his mind and emotions at work, how easy/difficult was it for you to access this character and his consciousness?

As with all my encounters with character, the key thing for me is about finding the voice. Once you find that literary voice, I think it sort of dictates the logic of the novel, it informs your consciousness and takes you to the time and space you’re writing about, the people you’re writing about. I clearly remember the moment I found John’s voice in this novella, it opened up a sort of vatic sense, as if suddenly I knew him, his mind, in some intimate way. I could hear him speak, feel him move, anticipate his thoughts. It’s a beautiful moment, I think, that moment when a writer finds the voice, a sort of wonder, like falling in love, it sweeps you away.

Despite the difficulty of the subject matter, it seems that embodying this character may have been a particularly creative and refreshing experience, as you delve into all sorts of mediums and questions, was that the case?

Well, I am neither a father, nor do I have daughters, so this one was definitely a creative leap. But then, that to me, is the entire point of fiction – I have no interest in writing about me or disguised versions of me, fiction, as I see it, is about other people. It’s kind of existential really, the fact that we have only this one life and writing is a way to live many different lives – that’s what enlivening to me. So, that’s probably the first thing.

The second thing that matters to me is to try and write in a way that really pushes the reader to think, to complicate consciousness, even at the cost of exasperating the reader at times. So, I guess all my work has this kind of philosophical underlayer that runs beneath the story. Maybe that’s just a nod to the way I view the novel conceptually, as a kind of vehicle for critical thought. Language is the medium of literature just like watercolour or charcoal or whatever is the medium of the artist, and the possibilities of individual expression are infinite, but there are still innate limitations of the medium which need to be obeyed. The thing with the novel, as Bakhtin said, is that it’s an incredibly capacious form, it can accommodate a lot, so in this case I was trying to push that idea by bringing in poetry or philosophy or history or politics or whatever, or even stylistically, in the exclusive use of the pronoun, lists, diagrams, graphs etc. to play with the shape of the thing, to try and animate the text, while still keeping respect for the basic ethos of the novel.

It’s a very different treatment and exploration of grief than is perhaps typical, what was the motivation for taking this approach and what do you feel is gained in doing so?

I’m not sure I know what’s typical or not…but the short answer is that doing it this way just felt right.

The more elaborate answer is that I spent a long time grappling with this idea that if I am going to be writing a story about the experience of trauma, how am I going to narrate it in a way that isn’t simply lyricising it or turning the weight of that emotion into a cultural object that’s bought and sold for money (i.e. a book). And I think this seemed somewhat more possible when I tried to move the experience from this temporal and isolated thing that happened to ‘this person’ in ‘that place’ and turn it into something that begins to feel like it might be a part of a larger and more complicated set of experiences.

This was not just for the sake of the reader but because the complexity of trauma and grief and loss and the way we deal with them are personal and private, and yet exist as part of our larger cultural and socio-political products. Therefore, writing about them with that complexity becomes not only an aesthetic act that calls for a very conscious and deliberate interrogation of language and words but also an ethical one. In other words, how do you give enough space and respect to the specific incident, while also trying to draw it out and complicate it and locate it into a sort of larger whole, for example, by bringing in and relating the father’s private trauma to the more public trauma of the Afghanistan war.

Basically, I wanted to figure out how to use the novel, which at its core is such an individualised form, to attempt to try and conjure a collective voice and bring to the surface the idea that even though individual experiences are unique, human suffering is universal.

Did writing about and exploring grief through the eyes of the father have any impact on the way you thought about the grieving process?

To be honest, I find it very hard to look for meaning in my own work… I prefer to find meaning in the fiction of others. Other people’s work is what nourishes and sustains me.

And finally, we touched on the different genres you’ve written in your first three books, do you have anything in mind for book four?

Yes.