Garth Greenwell visited the University of Michigan in early September to read from his most recent novel, Small Rain, and to give a craft lecture on St. Augustine. A book both like and unlike Greenwell’s earlier works (What Belongs To You, Cleanness), Small Rain takes place almost entirely during the narrator’s unexpected stay in the hospital, mostly in the intensive care unit. The following interview touches upon Greenwell’s early and recent fiction as well as some of his critical essays exploring the intertwined political, moral, and aesthetic possibilities of art and literature. It has been condensed for length and clarity.
Daniel Weaver (DW): Last night an MFA student, Alejandro de la Garza, gave this really wonderful introduction for you. And you said that it’s really rare for your work to be described, to be read, so responsibly. Immediately it made me think of two of the review essays of yours in the Yale Review that discuss this idea of art and a moral education, something which also bubbles up in Small Rain. So, I wanted to ask, what does it mean to you to be read responsibly?
Garth Greenwell (GG): That’s interesting. I mean, it’s a funny word. I feel like it’s a word I don’t usually use because in some ways I think great readings, great responses to art are free, like, not responsible. But maybe if we think of responsible as being, instead of responsible –– I wonder if if I was intending to say responsive.
It means that I think engagement with the text should be collaborative, you know. Something that frustrated me as an academic, when I was doing a PhD, and also something that frustrates me in a lot of the criticism I read today, is that it doesn’t feel collaborative. It feels instead like one is engaged in some kind of power struggle with the text. I think that is bad for our souls, by which I mean I think it’s kind of degrading both of us and of art.
I think, as with another human being, engagement requires a kind of openness and not a sense that one is imposing on the other. That’s what I’m interested in when I think about art’s relationship to morality and moral education. I think that relationship is totally deformed by moralistic accounts of art’s responsibility. What I mean instead is that engaging with an artwork profoundly is an engagement with the other. It engages the same, or not the same, but it engages similar questions as any engagement with the other. And in that sense, it gives us an opportunity to practice ––I don’t know that discipline is the right word –– but to practice habits of openness and engagement.
DW: Yeah.
GG: That absolutely accommodates disagreement, I mean, even strenuous disagreement, or questions, bafflement, all of those things. It’s not that I think negative criticism is bad or critique is bad. But I do think the posture towards the other should be one of openness.
DW: So then there would be some type of relationship between moral education and an openness, a generosity?
GG: I think that’s right. You know, what does it mean? What does education mean? Something I believe really strongly, and think about a lot right now –– because most of the time I live in a small Midwestern college town, a little blue dot in a very deep red state. I know among my neighbors there are Trump voters and, even if they are Trump voters, I mean, even if they are committed to a project that I think is antithetical to American democracy, they are still my neighbors. I think any face-to-face encounter with another human being is necessarily a moral encounter, and any moral encounter becomes an opportunity for education.
Just thinking about the etymology of the word: to be educated is to be led, to be led out of one space into another. There has to be a kind of openness and vulnerability in that. Any encounter with the other is an opportunity to be taken from one space into a new common, shared space. That is also true of any encounter with art. They are not the same, but there are lots of analogies between how we engage with art and how we engage with other human beings.
DW: I think generosity is a great word for it because in your essay on Miranda July you talk about a hermeneutics of generosity, which you counterpose to a hermeneutics of suspicion. Anyone living in an English department will immediately recognize this, right? In that paragraph, it’s very interesting, because you say: let’s bring a hermeneutics of generosity. But then later in the paragraph, you break a sentence to remind the reader that the narrator is dealing with ugly feelings that they have been trained into. The reason I think it’s interesting is because there’s still a certain degree of suspicion in there. There is an awareness of a hierarchy and a power structure. You’re using generosity as a way of undoing a training that has happened.
GG: Well, that’s interesting.
DW: In your work in general is there—if not a suspicion of the way that things initially appear to us, the way that we’ve been trained—an implicit belief in something else? A faith in something other than what we’ve been trained into? So here is the question: is your hermeneutics of generosity a way of doing something similar to what people who are doing a suspicious or negative critique would like themselves to be doing? Or do you see it as fundamentally different?
GG: Oh, that’s interesting. I think there are really deep and intractable questions that I don’t know how to solve. When I talk about openness toward the other, I don’t know how to articulate for myself how one balances such openness, which is necessary to the possibility of being led into a new shared space, while still holding fidelity to one’s own values. In any encounter that can be potentially educative, something has to be up for negotiation. You cannot come to such an encounter without a willingness to be changed. Yet also, clearly there are certain values I hold that are not up for transformation. I don’t know how to articulate that, but I think about it.
I am actually not sure how propositional our moral thinking really is. And I wonder if there are other ways of being together that are more amenable to being brought into a new shared space. In Small Rain, you know, thinking about neighborliness and Midwestern nice, these banal, seemingly impoverished ways of being with each other. Are they actually something richer than the narrator has previously allowed them, allowed himself to understand them to be?
But this question of the hermeneutics of suspicion. I mean, look, I do…in some sense there is much I share with someone utterly devoted to kind of Nietzschean genealogy and a hermeneutics of suspicion. I share much more with that person than what separates us. We are both convinced that hyper-attentiveness to a text is a valuable thing.
If we think of Nietzsche –– I mean, I shouldn’t say that, because I don’t know anything about Nietzsche. If we think of Foucault, who I know a little bit more about –– but I think this is also true of Nietzsche –– there is fundamentally a humanist conviction there. There is a commitment to human value. The attempt to deflate what seems, to a hermeneutics of suspicion, to be false illusions of value in order to reveal structures of power. I do think that is fundamentally a humanist impulse. So yes, I do think that a hermeneutics of generosity and a hermeneutics of generosity skepticism are very close. I would never want to draw a clear line between them, because you’re right, all of us, always have to be skeptical of some things. I think all of us, always, are generous in some ways.
The narrator of Miranda July’s novel, All Fours, has certain ideas about what it means to be a woman approaching menopause and what it means to have a certain kind of body as opposed to another kind of body. I don’t think those are ideas that she has rationally evaluated and chosen. I do think they are ideas that she has been trained into.
A kind of skeptical impulse about the structures of meaning in the world as they are given to us is, of course, necessary to any kind of thinking. You know, we have to wonder: are we in the cave looking at shadows on the wall? But that skepticism, I mean, I want to think about it in terms of phenomenology and the idea of affordances. What stance allows us the kind of movement we want to make through a text? These are a repertoire of tools and moves and strategies and we all pick from all of them. What I think is deadly is if what presents itself as a suspicion is actually a conviction. What I respond very strongly against is a sense that someone is approaching a text already sure of what they’re going to find when they strip away what they think is illusory.
DW: I have a follow-up question that I think may be related to affordances. If part of our moral education has to do with encountering the other, in the way that you are describing it, is there then something about writing about sex that is suited to that? Either because of a physical intimacy that’s being represented on the page or –– and I don’t know if you think of yourself as someone who writes about sex more than other novelists. I guess I would say I think that’s true. And you can obviously feel free to disagree with me if you’d like. But let’s just say when you are writing fiction about sex, do you think that as a topic to be represented or an action to be represented, it links up with this project of art as a moral education in a way that might be better or even just different than writing about other dimensions of human experience?
GG: Yeah, you know, I want to be totally incoherent and say, yes and no. Like, yes, I think art, or I think sex is a particular pressure point for questions that are endemic in any encounter. I mean, anything you say about a fundamental human experience, the opposite can also be true. But I think that sex is an experience of particular vulnerability.
I talk about this a lot, my idea that sex is a crucible of humanness because it engages these contradictions that make up the human. It is hugely performative, it is also hugely vulnerable. It is productive of consciousness, of language, it is cerebral, but it is also when we are most in our animal bodies, closest to the biological. I think it’s where we are most thrust into our own experience and also, if it’s interesting sex, most attuned to the experience of the other.
Those interlocking contradictions make it really interesting for the writer and potentially revelatory of these kinds of questions and of what it means to engage with the other. I also think revelation inheres not so much in an object of contemplation as in the quality of contemplation. So, I think, and this is the underlying current of all my criticism, currently we are really off balance in our engagement with art toward subject matter as opposed to form. Revelation or literature or art making is more about a way of seeing –– seeing standing in for all kinds of perception –– then it is about an object seen.
DW: Do you have any suspicions, or generous suspicions, about where that imbalance has come from? Why it has happened?
GG: I do. I think a lot of it is very generously motivated. In the communities I care about most, I think it is bound up with the hermeneutics of suspicion and the sense that the stated values of aesthetic thinking, thinking about art, have hidden structures of power that have been structures of exclusion. Structures that have especially excluded certain –– I really hate this word –– but “marginalized communities.”
I’m thinking thinking about, say, queer art. And the idea that attention to subject matter in that sense, attention to the object of aesthetic contemplation in a work of art, needs to be redirected as a way of redressing those structural imbalances, which are imbalances of power. Obviously, that is a project that I am really on board with to a large degree. And yet, again, it is always this question of balance.
What I feel sure of is that any human experience has a value that is infinite. Human value is infinite. That is why it doesn’t matter where you look, it matters how you look, it matters that you look in a way that opens yourself up to the perception of that value. Anything, even something generously motivated, that closes us off to such value, is deforming of ourselves.
I talk about this in the Philip Roth essay. If we say –– and in all of this, I’m thinking of myself, I’m thinking about me hanging out with my friends in the bookstore and being like: ugh, another book about a straight guy having an affair, like, cheating on his wife. Can’t be bothered. That is a degrading way to think about art. Because of course, the experience is revelatory in an infinite way. It’s full of infinite value because it is a human experience. It’s as though we take for granted that there is a limited store of attention or of value.
What I would like is to recuperate from theology, which I’m an atheist but I find theology very helpful, is the idea of a treasury of grace. We must live as though our ability to attend to things is infinite and that the more we attend to something the more attention we have to attend to the rest of the world.
The idea that structural imbalances are redressed by imagining there is some finite resource of value and that we have to diminish it in one place in order to augment it in another place, that is what I think is a mistake. I actually think, like in love, like in God’s grace, in the idea of the treasury of grace the more it is given, the more there is to give. You know, I haven’t really, I haven’t articulated that before. And I wonder if I really think that’s right? But right now that seems sort of workably plausible to me.
DW: I have a very different kind of question. I was listening to you read last night and it felt like there was a plausible connection between the way that you read your work and the voice that is in the writing itself. Not that they are the same thing, but that they are related. Have you ever listened to other people read your work? And if so, what has that been like?
GG: I have. The audiobook for What Belongs To You, in the US they wouldn’t even let me audition for it. They just thought authors are terrible at this and they shouldn’t do it. They had an actor do it and I actually couldn’t listen to it. The actor is great and people really liked I, though they’ve now swapped it out because my UK publisher let me do the audiobook. I’ve heard on other occasions people reading shorter bits. Sometimes you feel that they’re not inhabiting the sentences and it feels very odd. The sentences are not moving –– it is not just that they are not moving in the way that I imagine them moving –– it is that, actually, they are not moving in any plausible way.
It’s hard to read. Last night it was the most beautiful thing when that high school student asked the question [editor’s note: a student from an Ann Arbor school, where Greenwell used to teach, asked a question about memorizing Shakespearean sonnets]. And I sort of said: it’s work. You have to prepare it. When people do, it can be revelatory. Because you hear things you hadn’t heard before because a sentence is weighted plausibly, in a way that is compelling, but is different from how you weighted it. When it comes to audiobooks, to this point, I don’t like recording the audiobooks. I find it really grueling. But it has felt important to me for there to be a kind of document of the sentences as I inhabit them.
The big experience I’ve had of feeling my sentences inhabited in a different way is the operatic adaptation of What Belongs To You. Hearing both how the composer David T. Little imagined the sentences or my language and then also how the incredibly brilliant singer did, Karim Soleman, whom I’ve known Karim since I was 18. We had the same voice teacher at Eastman School Music. That was an overwhelmingly moving experience.
Because watching the opera, which I think is really great, I think it is just an extraordinary inhabitation of the book. I really did feel like this thing I had made was given back to me or presented to me in a way that was utterly new and also utterly faithful to what I had imagined. That was overwhelming, I mean, it was almost impossible to process.
DW: How did the opera come about?
GG: It was like making art with my friends. In some sense it came about because a very, very close friend of mine is the conductor, Alan Pearson. We met at the Eastman School. For many years it was the central relationship of my life, we really grew up as artists together. He was the first person who read my poems, he was the first person who read my fiction. I watched as he transitioned from composing to conducting. He was, to use a phrase from James Baldwin, for many years he was the primary witness of my life.
He conducts a new music ensemble, his whole life is working with composers, and he really wanted the book to be an opera. He was very thoughtful about who among the composers he had worked with would respond to the text. He gave the book to David T. Little, who just had a response to the text.
Really, all of my narrative resources come from opera. In some ways it felt to me like What Belongs To You was finding its proper form and being transformed.
DW: What is one of those narrative resources?
GG: Small Rain, I think, really has a recitative aria kind of structure. But in What Belongs To You specifically the chamber operas of Benjamin Britten, the way that narrative material is, in my experience of the book, very condensed. You know, it’s really quite minimal. But then maximal use is made of it. And that’s something that I encountered first in the operas of Britain.
Also, Britain was really my literary education, although I didn’t know it at the time. My first encounter with Henry James was seeing Britten’s The Turn of the Screw at the Kentucky Opera when I was 14 years old. And my first encounter with Thomas Mann was Britten’s Death In Venice. My first encounter with John Donne was the The Holy Sonnets of John Donne. My first encounter with all the Romantic poets were the two song cycles in which Britten sets them.
In those chamber operas, narrative is constructed out of moments of emotional intensity. That was very compelling to me.
DW: Going back to this question you got yesterday about the sonnets, it was asked by a student who was from Greenhill?
GG: Yeah, Greenhills School.
DW: Something that struck me about your response, and the way he asked his question, is that he was very sincere and your response was also very sincere. It got me thinking about how there is –– or I would say there is––very little irony in your novels. But novels in general have tended to have a lot of irony.
GG: Yeah, think of The Magic Mountain. That is hyper-ironic.
DW: Especially if you’re thinking about the end of the 19th century or in the early 20th century, there’s even more irony. Do you think of yourself as not going in for that kind of thing? Is that a deliberate choice or is it just not in your artistic nature?
GG: It’s temperamental, you know, and I am a terminally earnest person. It is something I worry about. Thinking about something like The Magic Mountain. I feel envious of the resource he has for irony. Fundamentally what I want to do is find value, and irony is often about the puncturing of value. I do see the value of irony.
So what is irony? Irony is an ability, fundamentally it is a tool or technique, I think, of detachment. The fact that human beings have that capacity is a crucial fact about human beings and something very much to be cherished. I think it often results in a kind of deflation of value. I don’t think it necessarily does, but I think it often does. It certainly does in something like The Magic Mountain, which is just constantly puncturing the great ideas of love, of humanistic vocation, of all of those things.
I think it is really fundamentally a question of temperament and not something we choose. I think we all want to be the writer we’re not. When I’m reading Thomas Mann, there is a lot of stuff where I just think oh, I wish I could do that. I was going to say it is hard for me to see that changing, but maybe it actually is not that hard. I do think Small Rain has a lot more humor than my first two books. Although I also think those books have some funny moments that some readers haven’t seen.
There are things that make me laugh in all my books. But Small Rain, I think, is funny. And that’s part of the style and the apertures, that letting in the air. There is more irony in Small Rain. Irony in the sense of that detachment that allows the narrator to see himself as ridiculous.
The other thing is that I do see my narrator as standing on a fault line between a way of looking that sees infinite value and a way of looking that sees existence as utterly drained of value. Very often he’s standing on a precipice. And, you know, that’s something that is dramatized in the second chapter of Cleanness, “Gospodar,” where he really does fall into that abyss. And then the very last line of that chapter, or story, recuperates, you know, human value with the idea of human face. In my work there is often this possibility of a kind of nihilism. In all three of my books, meaning wins. And I do think I have to write something in which meaning doesn’t win. I don’t think that will be ironic, exactly.
I’ve just made it propositional. It’s not really propositional. It’s like I feel some space I want to move into. But also, I’m terrified of it. So, yeah, anyway, the answer to your question is it’s temperamental, I think.
But I do really value irony, and I value works of art that exist ironically, and I also think it’s not a clear line. All of the art that I love best is motivated I love. All of the books I love best, love the world of the book. That doesn’t preclude irony. Henry James is a supremely ironic writer, but he loves his characters. And that’s really compelling to me.
DW: Where do you see irony operating in today’s literary culture? And do you see it operating productively, or do you feel it’s one of those unproductive cancellations of meaning? The ironic writers working today, in other words.
GG: That’s a really interesting question and I wonder if I can answer it. I mean, I immediately think of writers who I think have ready access to irony, whom I really love. It’s funny, they are Jamesian writers. Like Alan Hollinghurst, you know, has access to irony.
When I was studying poetry and first becoming a poet in the late 90s and early 2000s, it did feel that there was –– and this also has to do with who my teachers were and what I was encountering–– that there was a kind of ironic mode that was prevalent, that felt to me really…I don’t like irony when it feels like a defense. And there are a lot of writers, actually, I’m thinking: what do I actually think of contemporary writers? I think there are a lot of writers who are terrified of real feeling. I mean, all of us are terrified of real feeling.
That is hard for me to engage with. I do have to feel maybe a fundamentally earnest sense of stakes, a sense that something is at stake for the artist. If I feel that, you know, someone doesn’t really care or that someone’s stance toward their material is fundamentally one of superiority…there’s nothing I hate more than feeling like a writer has created a world in order to scorn it.
And again, there’s a theological background to that. But I’m not interested in a creator who just wants to scorn her creation. That feels gross to me. It feels deforming of the things I value in the human. And I do think there are writers like that, but I don’t think it’s exactly about irony, or not only irony, because irony can be part of a deeply humanistic endeavor.
DW: Do you ever feel like you are circling around the same, fundamental story that you’re trying to tell? And maybe getting closer to or getting at from a different angle again and again and again. Or is that an alien way of thinking about your work?
GG: No, it’s not. It’s interesting. I know a lot of people felt that way about What Belongs To You and Cleanness, which clearly intermingle and are occupying the same world, the same time. But those books, felt so different to me. They are different structurally, but also writing the chapters or the stories in Cleanness I felt that I was becoming a better writer, learning things about writing fiction. Those were years of real education for me as a fiction writer. I wrote several of those stories while I was at Iowa. And I don’t mean –– the education was not happening in a workshop but it was happening. I became obsessed with Zola and I could never have written “Decent People” without having been obsessed with Zola, the great writer of crowds. I could never have done that in What Belongs To You.
Cleanness felt to me like a book of growth in that sense. And in Small Rain, too, I am mostly aware of how it feels to me very different. And different in a way that feels exciting to me. But also, I do, of course, see continuities. I see that I have my obsessions, I have my temperament. You know, the kind of fundamentally phenomenological project is there and, you know, again, I don’t see that changing. Maybe it will, but I don’t see that changing. So, I mean, both things seem true that, yes, I am circling the same things, I’m still trying to reach the same thing. But when I compare What Belongs To You to Small Rain, it’s like, I don’t know, like looking at a basement room versus being outside, which is funny because Small Rain is all in the hospital room. But just the movement. You know, I could never have done that. You learn and you grow through the books that you write, and I feel like…I don’t know. On the other hand…yeah, I don’t know what I think.
DW: Maybe it’s too soon to say! GG: Yeah, also I fundamentally believe everything we say about our own work is we’re either excoriating ourselves or consoling ourselves. You know, it’s all a story.
