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PN: It reminds me that in the story called ‘Madame Realism’, the narrator decides that ‘Anything can be a transitional object. No one spoke of limits, they spoke of boundaries. And my boundaries shift, she thought, like ones do after a war when countries lose or gain depending on having won or lost’ (MR, 39). The reference to Winnicott’s concept of ‘transitional objects’ seems to have a relevance to your sense of how fiction operates—perhaps as (to use another concept from Winnicott) a ‘potential space’ somewhere between psyche and world where a certain ‘play’ can take place? LT: In criticism you always have to make one argument, and you have to support that argument against other arguments. In writing a novel or a short story there are arguments going on too, but there you have the possibility of different voices and different characters. You don’t have to argue as if there’s one truth, or one way to see something, you can allow for a lot of ambivalence. In some way writing fiction for me is about anxiety and being extremely insecure, and having between me—and maybe this is Winnicottian—between me and the world a space where I say, this is not me, and it is me, ambivalently, but this is also not Truth. PN: Motion Sickness suggests that national identity is like armour; in Haunted Houses are we meant to conclude that gender is similarly a kind of defence and constraint? LT: Yes, I think I very much felt that when I wrote Haunted Houses. All my books are in a way about limits, and about fighting those limits. Haunted Houses definitely was about the limits of gender and of being a girl, how you took it on, how you wrestled with it; then with Motion Sickness it was national identity and nationalism. But you never want to celebrate your limits, you don’t want to celebrate being an American, to celebrate being a woman. That’s making a virtue out of something that’s neither a vice nor a virtue. It’s a given. You’re born into something and it’s a matter of what you do with that. PN: Relations between self and other seem to be played out visually a lot of the time—in Haunted Houses, for example: ‘there was a chance of being looked at, which was better than being spoken to: it was as if she were being taken, unaware and involuntarily, and not taken’ (H, 62). LT: Being looked at—again this would be an interesting argument that pornography is not rape—looking at something and having a fantasy is different from being thrown into the bushes and raped. This could also lead into a discussion about aspects of female desire and whether a woman’s desire to be looked at is passive or active. I tend to feel those terms, ‘passive’ and ‘active’, are—well,
DOI link for PN: It reminds me that in the story called ‘Madame Realism’, the narrator decides that ‘Anything can be a transitional object. No one spoke of limits, they spoke of boundaries. And my boundaries shift, she thought, like ones do after a war when countries lose or gain depending on having won or lost’ (MR, 39). The reference to Winnicott’s concept of ‘transitional objects’ seems to have a relevance to your sense of how fiction operates—perhaps as (to use another concept from Winnicott) a ‘potential space’ somewhere between psyche and world where a certain ‘play’ can take place? LT: In criticism you always have to make one argument, and you have to support that argument against other arguments. In writing a novel or a short story there are arguments going on too, but there you have the possibility of different voices and different characters. You don’t have to argue as if there’s one truth, or one way to see something, you can allow for a lot of ambivalence. In some way writing fiction for me is about anxiety and being extremely insecure, and having between me—and maybe this is Winnicottian—between me and the world a space where I say, this is not me, and it is me, ambivalently, but this is also not Truth. PN: Motion Sickness suggests that national identity is like armour; in Haunted Houses are we meant to conclude that gender is similarly a kind of defence and constraint? LT: Yes, I think I very much felt that when I wrote Haunted Houses. All my books are in a way about limits, and about fighting those limits. Haunted Houses definitely was about the limits of gender and of being a girl, how you took it on, how you wrestled with it; then with Motion Sickness it was national identity and nationalism. But you never want to celebrate your limits, you don’t want to celebrate being an American, to celebrate being a woman. That’s making a virtue out of something that’s neither a vice nor a virtue. It’s a given. You’re born into something and it’s a matter of what you do with that. PN: Relations between self and other seem to be played out visually a lot of the time—in Haunted Houses, for example: ‘there was a chance of being looked at, which was better than being spoken to: it was as if she were being taken, unaware and involuntarily, and not taken’ (H, 62). LT: Being looked at—again this would be an interesting argument that pornography is not rape—looking at something and having a fantasy is different from being thrown into the bushes and raped. This could also lead into a discussion about aspects of female desire and whether a woman’s desire to be looked at is passive or active. I tend to feel those terms, ‘passive’ and ‘active’, are—well,
PN: It reminds me that in the story called ‘Madame Realism’, the narrator decides that ‘Anything can be a transitional object. No one spoke of limits, they spoke of boundaries. And my boundaries shift, she thought, like ones do after a war when countries lose or gain depending on having won or lost’ (MR, 39). The reference to Winnicott’s concept of ‘transitional objects’ seems to have a relevance to your sense of how fiction operates—perhaps as (to use another concept from Winnicott) a ‘potential space’ somewhere between psyche and world where a certain ‘play’ can take place? LT: In criticism you always have to make one argument, and you have to support that argument against other arguments. In writing a novel or a short story there are arguments going on too, but there you have the possibility of different voices and different characters. You don’t have to argue as if there’s one truth, or one way to see something, you can allow for a lot of ambivalence. In some way writing fiction for me is about anxiety and being extremely insecure, and having between me—and maybe this is Winnicottian—between me and the world a space where I say, this is not me, and it is me, ambivalently, but this is also not Truth. PN: Motion Sickness suggests that national identity is like armour; in Haunted Houses are we meant to conclude that gender is similarly a kind of defence and constraint? LT: Yes, I think I very much felt that when I wrote Haunted Houses. All my books are in a way about limits, and about fighting those limits. Haunted Houses definitely was about the limits of gender and of being a girl, how you took it on, how you wrestled with it; then with Motion Sickness it was national identity and nationalism. But you never want to celebrate your limits, you don’t want to celebrate being an American, to celebrate being a woman. That’s making a virtue out of something that’s neither a vice nor a virtue. It’s a given. You’re born into something and it’s a matter of what you do with that. PN: Relations between self and other seem to be played out visually a lot of the time—in Haunted Houses, for example: ‘there was a chance of being looked at, which was better than being spoken to: it was as if she were being taken, unaware and involuntarily, and not taken’ (H, 62). LT: Being looked at—again this would be an interesting argument that pornography is not rape—looking at something and having a fantasy is different from being thrown into the bushes and raped. This could also lead into a discussion about aspects of female desire and whether a woman’s desire to be looked at is passive or active. I tend to feel those terms, ‘passive’ and ‘active’, are—well,
ABSTRACT
PN: It reminds me that in the story called ‘Madame Realism’, the narrator decides that ‘Anything can be a transitional object. No one spoke of limits, they spoke of boundaries. And my boundaries shift, she thought, like ones do after a war when countries lose or gain depending on having won or lost’ (MR, 39). The reference to Winnicott’s concept of ‘transitional objects’ seems to have a relevance to your sense of how fiction operates-perhaps as (to use another concept from Winnicott) a ‘potential space’ somewhere between psyche and world where a certain ‘play’ can take place?
