Big Events and Small Lives: A Conversation with Susannah Dickey
“Neither of my protagonists is meant to be ethically unimpeachable, or irredeemably corrupt, but they do both suffer for a resected approach to their own lives.”
Photo Credit: James Dickey
Many people will know you as a novelist, with your second novel, Common Decency, following on from an incredibly successful debut, Tennis Lessons. However, as you have also written short stories and poetry, I wondered if you could talk a little more about your relationship with each of these forms and whether it has changed over time? I read that you previously said you “write poetry because I love language, and I write prose because I hate myself.” Is that still true and could you tell us a little bit more about what you mean?
It's strange looking back on the period around the publication of Tennis Lessons, because it’s all a bit like I was a gopher achieving sentience right at the moment of being dropped from the sky by a heron. Obviously something great had just happened (a book with my name on it was being published; the heron hadn’t managed to keep hold of me), but also my immediate surroundings felt incredibly tumultuous and beyond my control (I was accountable for thoughts and actions I couldn’t really remember having; I was a free-falling gopher). Luckily, this distinction I drew between poetry and prose is something I’ve had a little bit more time to reflect on since, and I still stand by it, with certain caveats. I think I’d say now that I write poetry because I love what language can do, when we choose to see what it can do. I think I still write prose because I hate myself. Alain Badiou said ‘It is better to do nothing than to contribute to the invention of formal ways of rendering visible that which Empire already recognizes as existent,’ and I guess I worry about my own complicity within that, but never so much that it stops me from doing it. Maybe that makes me a masochist.
I read a paper recently by Brian Massumi, where he talks about a study in which a film is shown to a group of children in three variations; one with no descriptors, one where the descriptors are ‘factual’, and one where they’re ‘emotional’. The children were asked to place the three versions on spectrums of ‘happy-sad’ and ‘pleasant-unpleasant’. The emotional version of the film was rated the saddest, but also the most pleasant, and Massumi talks about how uncontrollable feeling occurs where complexities of language, that digress / veer away from a straightforward narrative, create new interstices. It's in those places that non-intuitive depths of feeling happen, uncontrollable by the perceiver.
I guess a poem creates the visual deception of narrative, because I think we approach all reading from the same preliminary position – we’re incapable of reading in any way other than how we know to read. Language, unbridled in the way that it can be in poetry, can then create these uncontrollable avenues of feeling. The less that a poem confirms to prosaic expectations, maybe the greater the potential for elicited, uncontrolled response, which is something I find really exciting. I also think this appreciation of language’s indifference to us, which seems implicit in any good poetry, is important in terms of re-evaluating our position within the world – if language isn’t entirely ours to control, then maybe it’s time to stop thinking it authorises us to assume dominion over those that don’t use language in the way we do.
I love writing prose, but it feels less alchemical; it feels crueller. Narrativizing can be quite brutalising, quite mercenary. I feel like I have to grapple with this unwieldy thing, and it’s more of a battle. Francis Bacon considered his depiction of subjects to be an act of violence, and because so often I’m exploring my own thoughts, or the logical conclusion of my own thoughts, through my prose, maybe that makes me both victim and perpetrator. I haven’t finished ironing out the thought yet. After all, what do I know? I’m just a gopher, plummeting towards the earth.
Where did the initial inspiration and motivation come from for Common Decency when you first put pen to paper?
The initial inspiration, weirdly, came from ‘Landscape with the Fall of Icarus’ by Breughel the Elder. I was fascinated with how the arable workers, the fishermen, the sailors – all are living their lives unaware of this small catastrophe in the corner. I wanted to know if you could capture that in a novel: a person’s world falling apart unbeknownst to the people around them; how big events to small lives needn’t be all that big.
Both your novels centre on the interiority and quotidian lives of female characters – which I love(!) – and I wanted to ask whether any other authors who write in a similar way have inspired your writing?
I remember reading Monkey Grip by Helen Garner while doing the edits for Tennis Lessons and it was a revelation. That book achieves so elegantly what I’d always been trying to do, and to see it done so effectively showed me that it could be done, and done well, and was worth striving for. She writes in plain prose but with an occasional blistering and vivid image. The images never jar because they aren’t presented as events. They are folded seamlessly into her sentences, almost as though she doesn’t want you to notice them, but they make her lines linger and sing – she achieves a beautiful symbiosis between poetic, naturalistic, characterisation.
Miriam Toews, Mieko Kawakami, Lorrie Moore, Zadie Smith, and Hiromi Kawakami all inspire me for different reasons. Toews and Moore for their wit and maximalist approach to writing a character’s humanity; Mieko Kawakami for her searing introspection; Hiromi Kawakami for how she can imbue subjects with a perfect, eldritch quality that heightens the realist elements; Smith for her propulsive prose and expert handling of plot.
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