I’m Anna Kim, I’m a novelist and essayist.
Dizziness is a normal state for me. At the beginning of every piece I write, I feel super dizzy. Trying to bring order into your thoughts by making them into the shape of language: This is a dizzying process. I try to deal with it by organizing everything. I always start out with as little things as possible; if I have a lot of stuff lying around or even an interesting view from my window, it interferes with my imagination. When I start working on the white page, my desk must be completely empty except for the laptop. I don’t even have anything hanging on the walls in my office: I’m sitting in a white cube.
I think dizziness is already inside language. You can’t say everything you want to say in language. Nowadays there’s also this phenomenon of shortening or simplifying: Everything is being summarized. But for this to work you need to build on a common ground. And I think the idea that we all live in a global village where we rely on the same language is an illusion. It leads to a lot of misunderstandings. This is why I believe we need to make language more individual.
The wish for controlling language is a very prevalent one, especially in authoritarian regimes. The idea is: If you control language, you can control thought. Authoritarian regimes often use and repeat certain phrases as a way to infiltrate the mind. The manipulation of language is becoming stronger these days because of social media. There’s a thorough dissemination of catchphrases.
But language is such a beautiful thing, and it shouldn’t be restricted. Yet, it’s been made smaller and smaller. Of course, it’s important to be thoughtful of what language we use. I just don’t think we can instigate real change just by forcing everyone to use certain words. Instead, we should be discussing the real issues that lie behind using these words. Why are we diverting from the matter of gendering by talking about whether we should use a little star or a colon in German language? This dizzying process is a diversion of attention.
I think in every novel lies the risk of failure because every novel is made up of language. I’m a follower of Wittgenstein who believed in the vagueness of language, that it will never communicate exactly what you want to say. There will always be a missing piece, or something that doesn’t work. Failure is part of language.
In every novel of mine, I tried to find a different solution to this problem: In the first one, Frozen Time, I tried poetic language to emphasize the subjectivity of every individual in the novel. In the second one Anatomy of a Night, I did the opposite: I used neutral language. In the third one, The Great Homecoming, I tried to mimic historical writing. I tried many different angles, but the quest is not complete. As Samuel Beckett said: “Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Trya gain. Fail again. Fail better.”
You only get dizzy if you want to avoidfailure. You want to keep dizziness out of your life. It usually takes me fouror five years to write a book. Most of these years I spend in a big cloud ofdizziness, trying to see the ground beneath my feet.
I find it very odd that there are people who believe the world is stable. They must be very happy people! On the other hand,it makes sense: Narration has this function of un-dizzying. It tries to bring order into chaos. And we are craving stories. We want to bring order into our chaos in the shape of a story because the story follows a path that we are familiar with.
Of course, everyone has their own narrative. Conspiracies connect a group of people, just as the alt-left have their own narratives. Repetition plays a crucial role in the acceptance of such narratives. You need someone to agree with you in order for your theory of the world to be stable enough. You need the acceptance of your narrative in order to get rid of this cloud of dizziness that you find yourself living in.
Narration is always also simplification. Even my beloved Dostoyevsky presents a simplification of guilt and punishment. Even if you were to write the longest book, you could never bring the whole, complex world into it. Milan Kundera said: Every novel is the celebration of complexity. Yet literature is also simplification. Yes, we try to depict a part of complexity, but it’s only a little window into what that part could actually mean.
Therein lies a danger: People often want to believe the simple story. And if you want a story to work, the simplification of the narrative also has a function. It offers a shape, a way to keep the reader invested. If you only offer insecurity, asking too many questions, you could lose your reader. You have to pretend there is some sort of stability. Isn’t it also cowardly if you don’t give any answers? In the framework of a novel, it sometimes takes more courage to give answers than to ask questions.
It’s a dizzying experience to stand at the beginning of a novel: There are so many possibilities. You don’t know where the story will take you. The state of mind at this stage is very unstable and dizzying.
As a novelist, navigating this dizziness together as in collaborating on a novel feels like an impossibility. It’s very much an individual work. You try to create writing that is clear and as non-dizzying as possible so that you are understood. But your mind doesn’t work that way: It’s chaos. By trying to put your brain into order, so much is lost already. I find it a little sad, I wish there was more chaos on the page.
The world is dizzy in itself. With the help of social media, we are uncovering more and more that we’re all in a state of dizziness constantly. The fact that a multitude of voices now can be heard is very hopeful. Twenty years ago, they would not have been heard. I find this dizziness very productive: You can use the little moments of clarity in-between dizziness to work through certain structures and understand the workings of things.
That’s what I’ve been doing for twenty years now. Originally, I started with writing poetry. Maybe it’s the natural progression: You start with idealism, and then slowly divert into reality. Until you give up. You’ve reached the end of language. You have nothing more to say.
