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Sunday, Nov 22, 2009
The grass is always greener.
I guess. So they get Tiresius and he says women have more fun, and she loses. Because she's angry at Tiresius, Hera makes him blind, but then she or another god gives him foresight, prophecy. So it's all connected with omniscience. And I certainly play with these ideas in a comic way with my narrator Calliope, who is endowed with a certain knowingness that's impossible. She's probably inventing the story of her own family to understand herself.
You don't often come across the first-person omniscient narrator. Usually the omniscient narrator is third-person, what we think of as the voice that tells classic or old-fashioned Victorian novels, this unidentified person, maybe the author, who sees everything. With the first-person narrator, you know who it is, a character in the story, but it's a limited point of view and only knows the things that he or she has seen and experienced personally. How did you decide to go with this different sort of voice?
That's what gave me such trouble and why it took me so long to write the damn book at first. It took me two years to get this first-person omniscient narrator. I was sure I needed a first-person narrator for many reasons. I wanted the story of Calliope's transformation to be intimate. I also wanted to avoid -- and this is a very practical writerly point -- to avoid the pronominal problem with he/she that we're having in this interview. I wanted it to be "I." And the point is also that we're all an I before we're a he or a she.
So it seemed important to have this "I," but in order to tell the story of the grandparents and the parents, if I remain in a first-person narrative voice, I can't go into their minds and tell you what they're feeling. It becomes very dry and voyeuristic. It took me a long time to figure out how to have a first-person that could also switch into the third-person. I had to basically give myself permission to do that, and I had a lot of scruples against doing it for the first couple of years. So I wrote the story many different ways -- sometimes all third-person, sometimes all first-person. I knocked my head until I finally realized I could have the narrator do both things and give the sense to the reader that Cal, telling the story years later, is possibly inventing things and maybe knows things that he can't but that's all right. I worried that the reader would resist certain things that Cal knows, but I've found that actually readers don't bother themselves with the details as much as I do. In general, readers don't worry about things like, how would he know this about his grandmother?
Did you know about Tiresius being a seer starting out? That almost seems too fortuitous.
I took Latin for seven years, and in 10th grade we read Ovid's "Metamorphoses" and the argument between Zeus and Hera. That was an interesting class that day -- we never usually got such information. I got to read about Tiresius early on and was interested in a figure with that kind of power and amazing experience of being both genders.
And then you had to put yourself through something like that, imagining what it's like to be a girl for the first 14 years of life. How did you go about doing that? It's very convincing. In fact, I had a harder time thinking of Cal as a man than I did in believing in Callie the girl.
Well, you can vouch for the girl part and I'll vouch for the man part! Obviously I was hoping that would be the case. I did it by following my basic belief, which is that our experiences as male and female are not so different. Any novelist has to be hermaphroditic in a certain sense, in that he or she wants to go into the minds of characters of both sexes. I took the elements of being a young boy and slid them over into a girl's experience. I mean, she's in a locker room, she's not developing, she's embarrassed about it. I was once in a locker room, developing slowly, late blooming, and remember the embarrassment of it. I would just use things that I knew and put them in a different arena.
Then when Callie decides to become Cal, she has to learn how to act like a man. Was that like being a teenage boy?
I guess. Certainly, boys try to be manly at a certain age and you ape behaviors that are masculine and I tried to remember those times. And I just imagined what it would be like now. I remember crossing my legs. You were never supposed to cross your legs at the knees. You always had to do it with your ankle resting on your thigh. I remember being very scrupulous about crossing my legs over the knee, but then I went to this new school where somehow all the men were these preppy Ivy League guys who crossed their legs like, I thought, women did. I was really shocked. I remember the different codes. Suddenly it was permissible to cross your legs at the knees, and it did feel better than putting your ankle on top of your knee.
So many people want to believe now that all those things are innate and not learned.
I don't think leg crossing is innate; I really don't. There's a certain amount of genetic determinism in our lives, but the way you check your nails to see if they're clean isn't innate, or the different ways of moving. Hips are bigger in women and so they move slightly differently, but I know women learn to walk in a certain way self-consciously, and so do men.
