I'm really interested in the formal aspect of characters who are channeling language, who are speaking the words of other people, and in characters who are aware of how little agency they actually have, who have passivity forced upon them, who perhaps even embrace their passivity to a certain extent but eventually seek out where they can enact their agency.
Katie Kitamura is the author five novels, most recently Audition and Intimacies, which was named one of the New York Times 10 Best Books of 2021, longlisted for the National Book Award and the PEN/Faulkner Award, and a finalist for a Joyce Carol Oates Prize. She is a recipient of the Rome Prize in Literature, fellowships from the Cullman Center and the Lannan Foundation, and many other honors. Her work has been translated into twenty-one languages. She teaches in the creative writing program at New York University.
THE CREATIVE PROCESS
I’m so excited to speak to you about Audition. As I was reading, I thought of an old Zen koan–any fool can appreciate flowers in their season, but it takes a finer sensibility to appreciate the beauty of the grass beneath the snow. And there is really a lot going on under the surface of your novel on a subconscious level. Throughout, there is a doubling, alternate worlds, there's a character named Hannah, and another character named Anna. They are kind of mother/lover figures, and then the main character, it’s all through her point of view. The main character is an actress, so you’re examining reality, illusion, performance, and the creative process. You write about what we see on stage and the interpersonal stories that happen between the actors that the audience isn’t privy to. There is a great sense of mystery throughout Audition. There isn’t a murder. Or what dies could be a loss of youth or the loss of a role as an actor moves on. There are actors who are in their prime, and then through old age, they lose something. So there's that loss, I think, without there being a murder in the traditional sense.
KATIE KITAMURA
I love that interpretation. I think one of the things that I was interested in in this novel was to think about whether or not it would be possible to create, through structure and form, some of the same tension we generally associate with plot. So, when you said that there's not a murder but you feel like there could be one, I was hoping that I could use the structure of the novel to create momentum and tension.
Even though nothing seems to be happening, the gap between the two halves, I hope, would create that kind of sense of dread and anxiety. I hoped that through that structure, I could create something that might even be considered a quote-unquote plot twist in a way. I'm always thinking about what are the tools that are available to me as a writer. And of course, plot is a major tool that we can use, but so is structure. So I was interested to see if I could press structure into service to do some of the work that plot does.
THE CREATIVE PROCESS
Yes, and she's sort of a mystery to herself. At one point, because you suggest so many things, you're not spelling it all out. Toward the end, I was thinking, "Oh, is she actually entering a kind of Alzheimer's?" Does she not know what's happened in her life? At one point someone tells the unnamed narrator, "You were a monster," but I saw no evidence that she was a monster at any stage. It's interesting because you talk about her. Yes, she is in the middle of her life. She's not a young woman, but she's an actress and because actors are always reinventing themselves. There are stories being put upon them. So again, it's a different kind of translator too, because they all just interpreting. It’s like agency and a lack of agency at the same time. But I didn't see her as being someone who was withering with age. I see her as being sexy and mature. Her husband, Tomas, seems older to me, more staid and set in his ways.
This seems like a kind of strange question to ask a novelist because a novel is not necessarily to teach readers a lesson or to change them, but I had a dream last night, and I think it’s like my subconscious wanting me to ask this. I was talking with an environmental journalist when I said, "But it isn't enough to just inform; we need to inspire action and transformation." I'm wondering, what might you want readers to experience or realize about themselves? Or what did you realize in the writing of the book?
KITAMURA
This novel is the third in what I see as a little set of books that all feature unnamed female protagonists who have experienced varying degrees of passivity and agency in their lives. They're all women who speak the words of other people. The first one I'm speaking of, A Separation, features a central character who is a translator. In the second one, Intimacies, the central character is a simultaneous interpreter. And in this one, the central character is an actress who is interpreting parts, but again performing parts that she's given to play by other people.
I'm really interested in the formal aspect of characters who are channeling language, who are speaking the words of other people. I'm also very much interested in this question of passivity because I think there is a tendency in fiction—or certainly in the way we talk about fiction—to place a lot of emphasis on agency. I teach creative writing, and often in my workshops, a student will critique another writer's work by saying this character has no agency. The implication is that a character without agency is implausible or not compelling in narrative terms. But my sense is that the reality is that all of us live with a limited amount of agency, yet we might live under the illusion that we have a great deal of agency.
I'm very much interested in characters who are aware of how little agency they actually have, who have passivity forced upon them, who perhaps even embrace their passivity to a certain extent but eventually seek out where they can enact their agency.
THE CREATIVE PROCESS
Absolutely. I think that it's a sign of maturity to realize that there's more than one truth, so many different perspectives. If you look at us from a distance, human beings, like the way we observe animals? Think of ants. From a distance, it looks like they're repeating the same path that was just passed onto them. They have a sense of fate; that's it. Likewise, if we looked at ourselves from afar, we're like that. We're like the ants or the birds that follow the same migration. It's only us who obsess over the details that we feel we have control over, and we may to a degree, but just a degree.
KITAMURA
I think in our culture we are encouraged to relate to story and narrative in a somewhat passive way. Even the vocabulary that people use—for example, binge-watching—implies that you kind of gorge yourself on stories in some way. But I actually think reading is one of the most profoundly interactive experiences that exists. It is most rewarding when we are fully engaged, doing a lot of interpretive work, trying to understand possible meanings. My hope would be that readers engage with the book and see engagement as fundamental to reading.
There is no clear lesson in the book. There's not even a fixed solution or outcome. It's a book with a lot of ambiguity. It asks a reader to make choices and decisions about what they think it is. I hoped to create a reading experience where readers feel they have quite a lot of agency to make the book.
THE CREATIVE PROCESS
In Intimacies, I'm just wondering about the narrator’s sense of displacement and how that shapes her identity. Do you see this theme of uncertainty as central to your work as a whole? How have you been changed by the places you've lived and the languages you've inhabited?
KITAMURA
I have, of course, lived between cultures, but I almost think of it in terms of not just between cultures, but that I’ve lived much of my life in the United States while not being solely oriented toward American culture as an influence. From a very young age, I was reading books from a lot of different places. One of the wonderful benefits of growing up as a child of immigrants is that my parents did not have a sense of what the American or English literary canon was. They chose the books that interested them and gave me a lot of fiction in translation to read. The set of influences I grew up with was quite widespread.
Of course, I grew up between languages as well. I had a very powerful sense from a young age of how language plays a central role in shaping character. For example, I would see my parents feel like different people depending on whether they were speaking English or Japanese. I saw how language was related to power. I understood very early on that if you spoke the primary language of the place where you were, you had more power and earned more respect almost immediately. I saw how having an accent caused people to attribute so many narratives and identities to you. I saw that first-hand. Those are all themes that were very much in play in Intimacies and, to a certain extent, perhaps less directly, also in Audition, where the central character is an Asian American actress.
It's a very interesting time to think about Asian representation in film, movies, and television, in particular. For a period of her life, she was not given the parts that provided the requisite material for her to make her work. She was given parts that felt thin, that felt like stereotypes, and often, quite literally, speechless. At a certain point, she hits a cusp where something in the culture shifts, and then she is given different parts to play. That's where this novel falls. But I think the question of how language and other people's perceptions both restrict and allow a certain kind of movement and articulation of identity is something I'm very interested in.
THE CREATIVE PROCESS
Yes, it's beautiful, and we should also say that you live in New York. It's the first time you've written about New York.KITAMURA
New York is kind of a scary place to write about because there is such a huge canon of books set in New York, including very important works to me, whether it’s Henry James or Rosemary's Baby. Powerful works have been set in this city. For a long time, I hesitated to write something here, yet I have lived here for 15 years. I think having written so many characters who are displaced, literally arriving in a new location and trying to understand the world around them, I felt that gap was inside the character. It’s a kind of schism, that sense of distance two things—it's internal to the character rather than between the character and New York City itself.
In Intimacies, the character arrives in The Hague, and she feels very displaced. She feels very much that she does not belong to this city. Similarly, in The Separation, the character goes to Greece trying to find her partner from whom she is separated, and the landscape is bewildering to her in some way. In this novel, the landscape of New York City is not bewildering to the central character. It’s where she has lived for many years; it's actually her internal landscape that is confounding her. I think that's part of what allowed me to write something in this city where I’ve lived for quite some time.
I also realized that instead of thinking about it as writing against a canon or with the weight of the canon on me, I thought, well, the canon of New York novels can actually lift you up in many ways. It is so deeply evocative; people have a powerful image of New York. I can lean on narratives of unease found in works like Invisible Man or Rosemary's Baby and use that to create the texture and atmosphere of the world I was trying to write.
THE CREATIVE PROCESS
Yes, the arts help us understand ourselves and the world. For you, what is the importance of the arts, and how have you learned about the world through books?
KITAMURA
I like to quote an old professor of mine, Michael Wood. He said that “half of what I think I've experienced in real life, I've only read in a book.” Much of how I understand the world, not just intellectually but also directly, is through reading. I strongly feel that reading is one of the most intimate acts we can do. Every time I pick up a book, I'm opening my mind to the mind of another person. It’s an act of tremendous intimacy, an act of hope and vulnerability. There's real communion in reading. When we are atomized, things really fall apart; social structures lose their power.
To me, reading is a way of connecting to other people in a very powerful way. There's nothing about reading that feels frivolous or unessential in any way. There's nothing about fiction that feels like it isn't serving a purpose. I think it brings people together in community, and I think that's one of the most powerful things that art can do.
