The Center For Fiction welcomed Pulitzer Prize-winning author Adam Johnson (The Orphan Master’s Son) to The Center for Fiction this fall to celebrate the release of his new novel, The Wayfinder. This must-read novel urges us to consider how struggles for resilience mold our individual and cultural legacies. Amitav Ghosh, author of The Ibis Trilogy, served as the evening’s moderator.
From the conversation:
[Audience Member]: As you said, you’re writing, from or into this culture that has a great oral tradition. Obviously, with writing a novel, authorship is very modern, with the Eastern European or European idea that there’s the story and then there’s a story as your uncle tells it.
What I noticed after talking to many people was one thing: they told their stories in little pieces.
You mentioned how going from the oral story to written was a strange translation. Could you talk a little bit more about that?
Adam Johnson: What a wonderful question. I do believe that narrative is a meaning-making machine, and that it works on all these levels of meaning of, linguistically, of memory, of emotion, of chronology, of causality, of structure. It has all these elements that add up to meaning. And I do think, when writers first deploy that machine, we do it on ourselves.
It’s autobiographical. Who am I? What does my life mean? You write stories, right? You write about your family. You write about your journey, your culture, right? And my first two books were very much like that. And then the book gives you the answers, and then there’s a moment when you wake up and you realize, oh, my God, I’ve got to go write about something else, which is fiction.
Like, not me. And then the serious questions begin, at least for me. And I remember writing The Orphan Master’s Son, and when I would talk to defectors—which I can talk about North Korea all night, literally. I’m sorry—I made this observation, first, from reading their stories online, very raw interviews before I finally met my first defector who had been an orphan in North Korea.
His story was very powerful, but his story came out of order in fragments. And I realized it was a very painful story. And what he was trying to do was share his narrative, achieve the catharsis of externalizing it. But when you tell a story, the meaning-making machine brings the pain back.
And that’s the dilemma of the hurt person. How do you tell the story without your story re-hurting you? When I suffer a setback and I tell a story, I weep. But what if your story is so serious it might incapacitate you? And what I noticed after talking to many people was one thing: they told their stories in little pieces.
And I don’t know if you have a grandma who tells you a bit of a story about the old country every holiday. And it’s your job to put them all together. She isn’t going to tell you the whole story. So stories that came in bits that came out of order, stories that came in the third changing of point of view.
I’ll never forget a guy who talked about crossing the Yellow River, and he said he was in the first person plural. He said, oh, we were scared. There were guards. We didn’t know when to go. The river was strong. We were afraid. We got out of the water. There was a dad. He was by us. His daughter started to float away.
I put her on my back. I was swimming, but then he lost her. He tried to get her. He tried to get her back. He couldn’t find her. And when he got to the other side, she was gone. And I said, who is he?
And he couldn’t answer that question. And then I realized it was because he didn’t understand that he had done that. Does that make sense? And so, I am trying to answer your question. When I tried to write about North Korea—and why I did that is another question or mystery. Still a mystery—I just knew it could never be like a “beginning, middle, end” western sensibility.
And the book had to fragment. The book had to change point of view. It had to leave it to the reader to put the story together. If I was going to be true to the people who had shared with me, it made the story less accessible. I know people have told me that like, why did you mess it all up?
The book had to fragment. The book had to change point of view. It had to leave it to the reader to put the story together.
And I get that, but it just felt true to me. And when I started reading oral histories and—listen to that, “reading” oral histories.
I put a post-it note on my monitor. It said, forget the word novel. That’s a word with a tradition, with conventions, with a history. And I was like, if I ever think of this thing, if I ever categorize it or name it, it will never have a chance to become the closest thing it could be to the material that’s informing it.
Amitav Ghosh: Very interesting.
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Adam Johnson is the author of Fortune Smiles, winner of the National Book Award and the Story Prize, and The Orphan Master’s Son, winner of the Pulitzer Prize, the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, and the California Book Award. Johnson’s other awards include a Holtzbrinck Fellowship at the American Academy in Berlin, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Whiting Award, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, and a Stegner Fellowship; he was also a finalist for the New York Public Library’s Young Lions Fiction Award. His previous books are Emporium, a short-story collection, and the novel Parasites Like Us. Johnson was born in South Dakota and is an enrolled member of the Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe. He now lives in San Francisco with his wife and children and teaches creative writing at Stanford University.
Amitav Ghosh is the author of the bestselling Ibis Trilogy, composed of Sea of Poppies (shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize), River of Smoke, and Flood of Fire. His other novels include The Circle of Reason, which won the Prix Médicis étranger, and The Glass Palace. He is the author of many works of nonfiction, including The Great Derangement, The Nutmeg’s Curse, and Smoke and Ashes. In 2018, Ghosh became the first English-language writer to win the Jnanpith Award, India’s highest literary honor. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.
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