The Detonator: The Best of BOMB Magazine

I totally consider myself an American writer, and that has been my big battle: to get to realize that my roots as a writer are no longer, if they ever were, among Indian writers, but that I am writing about the territory about the feelings, of a new kind of pioneer here in America. I’m the first among Asian immigrants to be making this distinction between immigrant writing and expatriate writing. Most Indian writers prior to this, have still thought of themselves as Indians, and their literary inspiration, has come from India. India has been the source, and home. Whereas I’m saying, those are wonderful roots, but now my roots are here and my emotions are here in North America.

I’m not writing like a Richard Ford or a John Updike, that’s not the only America. It has many pluralities. I’m writing about an American immigrant group who are undergoing many transformations within themselves. And who, by their very presence, are changing the country. America is not the America that, until recently, has come through in contemporary popular fiction.

—Bharati Mukherjee, BOMB 29/Fall 1989

Edward Said: But the other thing I find troubling is how the world has changed as a result. People began to think xenophobically. The worst evidence being what happened in Lebanon: Christians versus Muslims, Palestinians versus Arabs. It’s the whole problem with Israel, where people think in terms of identities.

Phillip Lopate: You talk about that in Culture and Imperialism: the curse of identity politics.

ES: That’s ruined a lot of lives, and that’s why I’m so resolutely against having this tremendous sense of where you belong. It’s overrated. It doesn’t give people enough of a chance to feel different, to feel like the other, which is an important feeling to have, and it’s slowly disappearing.

PL: I would agree.

—BOMB 69/1999

Gregor von Rezzori: What is reality?

Bruce Wolmer: What is reality and what is fiction and what are the transformations and negotiations between them? You plainly dislike the society of information, the society of media, where people think they’re getting reality from newspapers, television, and magazines. Instead, you’ve said that Anna Karenina—now there’s reality!

Gregor von Rezzori: Do you remember in Abel there is a long, long, perhaps much too long passage on the narrator’s having an affair with a girl who lives in one of those postwar high-rises. He visits her and thinks about the fictitious reality forced on us by the media and how you lose your identity because you don’t know who you are to cope with all these things which are much beyond your reach, beyond your personal sphere. I mean everything in our time is done, is given, to lose your identity. Then, of course, you have to go look for it, to put it primitively.

—BOMB 24, 1988

Paul Auster: The one thing I try to do in all my books is to leave enough room in the prose for the reader to inhabit it. Because I finally believe that it’s the reader who writes the book and not the writer. In my own case as a reader (and I’ve certainly read more books than I’ve written!), I find that I almost invariably appropriate scenes and situations from a book and graft them onto my own experiences—or vice versa. In reading a book like Pride and Prejudice, for example, I realized at a certain point that all the events were set in the house I grew up in as a child. No matter how specific a writer’s description of a place might be, I always seem to twist it into something I’m familiar with. I’ve asked a number of my friends if this happens to them when they read fiction as well. For some yes, for others no. I think this probably has a lot to do with one’s relation to language, how one responds to words printed on a page. Whether the words are just symbols, or whether they are passageways into our unconscious.

—BOMB 23, 1988

Ameena Meer: When I was in India, I did an article on English-language theater in Delhi and I found there was a great dearth of writers writing in English, and not just plays, anything.

Salman Rushdie: I’ve changed my mind about all this. I used to think that English would remain a very vital artistic language in India. I now have serious doubts about that. You’re right, there’s very little. When I say that there are one or two writers around, literally there are one or two, and we all notice when they arrive. There’s nothing else so you notice a new building because there was an empty space.

AM: I thought it was strange that people weren’t writing in English because most of my Indian friends don’t speak Hindi, or the local language, very well. Most of them failed their Hindi exams at University.

SR: There is that educational divide, between English medium and Hindi medium. English is the language of the University-educated class, really. But I’m not optimistic about the future of English as an artistic language. English has to remain in India at certain levels, it’s very important in business, the legal system. It’s very important in science and technology. It’s indispensable in those fields. As a result, it’ll survive. But for it to survive as a language of song and poetry, I can’t see it.

—BOMB 27, 1989

Patrick McGrath: The best moral thought?

Martin Amis: The best moral thought. The representation of humanity at the crest of itself. Something like that. In fact, I’ve never understood why the idea of literature as religion was demolished so quickly. It seems to me that would be a tenable way of looking at it. It’s a constant, making something out of the present and the past at the same time. Certainly an elitist thing, there’s no question about that. But it’s an elite open to everyone.

PM: Do you see it decaying alongside everything else?

MA: Literature? No. I mean, they say the novel is dead. Well, try and stop people writing novels. Or poems. There’s no stopping people. I suppose it’s conceivable that no one will know how to spell in fifty years’ time, but not while the books are still there. You don’t need a structure. The autodidact is omnipresent in fiction.

—BOMB 18, 1987

Phillip Lopate: On the other hand, your whole presentation of self, your mode of being, fits so comfortably into New York Jewish intellectual life. Part of my affinity for you as a Jew is that I am also disloyal to my tribe at times. I don’t like tribal chauvinism. But at the risk of sounding sentimental, isn’t there something Semitic that makes a bridge between Arabs and Jews?

Edward Said: Certainly, that’s been true in my life. I noticed it first in my father, who would always sort of pick out and develop Jewish colleagues. Don’t forget, Cairo and Palestine were full of Jews.

PL: Very often when I go to Israel and go to the Arab sections, I feel an immediate warmth, so there must be some connection. But you seem to be implying that you needed intellectual mentors who wouldn’t like you.

ES: Not mentors. One of the things I have never felt, and I’m rather proud of it, I never was anybody’s disciple. These are people I admire, but who I never knew. Conversely, I’ve never wanted to have disciples. The last thing I’d want are people who try to do what I do.

—BOMB 69, 1999

David Carrier: Perhaps this is a real difference between France and America?

Michael Roth: What struck me when I went to France for the first time was seeing streets named after historians. On the second page of Le Monde there were debates about Foucault and Derrida. Complex ideas in the humanities seem to matter in France—that doesn’t happen in the United States. Here there is a healthy suspicion of mere ideas. Part of this is American pragmatism. What’s the cash value of an idea? If it is just an idea, it is not worth much. A certain amount of skepticism is healthy. Too much, though, is stifling. After all, you want ideas to be tested even when their practical value is unclear. There is not as much space for that here.

—BOMB 73, 2000

Oscar Hijuelos: There is much discussion about the “dumbing down of America.” Living in London, do you see this as being true? Or do you think that an old truth is just finally coming out?

Guillermo Cabrera Infante: It is not a dumbing down but a dumping ground. Gertrude Stein once said that the glory of England was their literature of the small village. She was probably referring to Jane Austen, but that no longer pertains. English literature lost, at least for me, with the death of Burgess, Waugh and Wodehouse, what was known as the English sense of humor. Now is the time of the Anglo-Indian with Rushdie, Seth and Indian women writers. Of course the best of them is V.S. Naipaul, a master of the English language. Was it Napoleon who said, “England is a country of Indian shopkeepers?”

—BOMB 70, 2000

Patrick McGrath: But it’s clearly not painful for you to sit down and write novels.

Peter Ackroyd: How do you know? (laughter)

PM: I assume so.

PA: No, it’s absolute agony from morning to night. But I’m a martyr to it. I thought Imight as well be a martyr to fiction as anything else.

PM: It’s altruistic then?

PA: It’s altruistic. If I didn’t get a penny for it I’d still do it.

PA: That’s right. I’m rather like a collector of other people’s trifles, other people’s bits and pieces.

PM: A rag-and-bone man?

PA: That’s it, I’m a rag-and-bone man—though not a rag-and-bone man of the heart!

—BOMB 26, 1989