Anthony Doerr
AD: I'm fascinated by the dynamism of language: how it changes, how it evolves, how it's prostituted. l argue to my sntdents 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 he 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 vUlains 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, or the new James Bond; I'll tolerate the newest pop song, even though I know the narrative structure by heart; even though I know exactly what I'm going to get all the way through. In most Hollywood stories, everything is cause and effect; each element of a narrative obviously follows the last. 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. So familiar sentence constructions and familiar stories offer something safe and comfortable and sometimes our brains crave safe and comfortable. But 1 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 fee l 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 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 d istortion is used to get at the truth."
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KS: Thus far in your career, you've written a collection of short-stories, a 88
FUGUE#36