Between the Lines with Janice Pariat

Everything that Janice Pariat writes brims with a graceful radiance, and her conversation with us is no different.

Talking about her award-winning, breathtaking novels Everything the Light Touches and The Nine-Chambered Heart, Pariat discusses how the best stories spring from love, and how her own writing has benefited from her understanding of the simple truth that everything the light touches is indeed connected. Read more below:

Q. Since its publication last year, Everything the Light Touches has won many prestigious awards and has been critically praised by readers and critics alike. As the book celebrates its first birthday, how do you feel about its phenomenal journey?

Janice Pariat: Grateful, of course, for all the love bestowed on the book. Sometimes, I‘m taken aback by how insightful someone’s response has been to the novel—the kind of response you dream about while you’re working on the book, and also the kind of response that surprises you because it is truer and more powerful than anything you’d imagined.

If you’re inspired by the “long perspective”, the kind found in “Everything the Light Touches” then you might feel that a year—while more than worthy of celebrating—is very brief in the lifetime of a book. Or at least you hope it is. At first, along with gratitude, I’d feel impatience—more people should be reading ETLT now, now, now! But I’ve come to realise that the more meaningful wish is for longevity. That the book travels well and long, and endures, and offers all that it does here and now well into the future.

Q. ETLT begins with the idea that a story tells itself, taking forms and shapes like billowing smoke—on its own. The novel itself experiments with “structure” and form—including an entire section in verse. Tell us about this structural experimentation—if it may be labelled as such!

JP: This structural choice is the result of long deliberation with my editor Rahul Soni about how this story, this vast, epic, ambitious story, could best be told. Would it work if one narrative were placed after another? That seemed to us too “blocky”, each narrative existing too singularly in water-tight containers. Could I alternate the stories of Shai, Evie, Goethe, Linnaeus? That honestly felt too muddled and confusing. But the nested structure, employed most famously by David Mitchell in Cloud Atlas, seemed just right. It allowed for gentle entanglement, for surprise, for a sense of endless continuity. It allowed the long perspective, offered by Shai, to cradle all the other narratives.

There are several reasons why I chose to include Linnaeus’ narrative as one of lyric verse. Linnaeus’ own writing (little read now I think), which took the form of lists, looks like poetry on the page. I also chose to employ a form of poetry called erasure that allowed me to “converse” with Linnaeus. To negotiate, as erasure demands, with a pre-existing source text (in this case Linnaeus’ Tour of Lapland translated by James Edward Smith in 1811) and create new work—though new work that’s constantly haunted by the old. Fitting, I thought, for a world that is still haunted by Linnaeus’ way of seeing. But poetry also because this is a book that’s hoping to challenge our penchant to label, our habit of conveniently categorizing—and what better way to surprise a reader, to disrupt their idea of what a novel is or should be than by placing a lyric narrative in the centre of the book, bound on either side by prose. I’d like the ground to shift a little under their feet, I’d like for their certainties to be challenged, their definitions exposed for falling short…

Q. In both The Nine-Chambered Heart and Everything the Light Touches, you have used character narratives to tell interconnected stories through different perspectives. Tell us about your affinity with this Rashomon narrative style. How does it help your stories?

JP: What has truly helped me as a person, as a writer, is being able to access therapy, and coming to learn how to loosen the grip of reality on one’s self—by this I mean being able to throw off (and sometimes it’s not easy) the conviction that there is no other way to live, to see the world, to interpret and respond to a situation, other than your own. The realization that we exist amidst many (often contesting) narratives was transformative for me, and this greatly informed my writing of The Nine Chambered Heart. It allowed me to explore this multitude of narratives that surround a woman at the heart of the novella—whose narrative is truer? Like in life, it’s impossible to say really…

In Everything the Light Touches, multiple narratives exist, entangle, echo each other, inform each other though perhaps for different reasons than in The Nine Chambered Heart. Here they unfold to remind us that, clichéd as this may sound, simply everything is connected. That as much as we may try to separate, us from them, this nation from that, plant from animal, nature and us, these stories show us otherwise. Also, that stories exist unequally in the world—depending on where they arise and who tells them and who documents them—and hence they lie here, deliberately, and literally, on the same page.

The multiplicity of narratives in both these books, I hope, reminds us of the multiplicity of narratives we inhabit and must necessarily negotiate in our attempt to make sense of the world.

Q. In both these books, I also feel like the nucleus of the stories lies in the exploration of tenderness in interrelationships between characters, or characters and their environment. In other words, both the books testify to the power of love, in its varying philosophical shades. Would you agree that all the best stories are fundamentally about love? How would you define love?

JP: I don’t know if the best stories are about love, but I do believe that the “best”, most powerful writing springs from love. And perhaps that then makes for the best stories too?

And why does the best writing spring from love? Because love expands you, allows you to inhabit with sensitivity, with tenderness, the griefs, the joys, the shortcomings of your characters, who really all are extensions of your own self in some way or the other. And so, to show them love is actually to show yourself love—and in this way we may write stories that travel beyond ourselves, that exist for a larger purpose than the here and now, that embrace their readers, that create kinship, community. That last well and live long. Despite everything, love is at the heart of all that is meaningful to us, as individuals, as a species.

To love is to pay attention.

Q. How do you deal with creative blocks?

JP: I don’t! In that rather than being quite singularly a writer, I try and lead a “creative life”. I bake, and knit, and make soap. I play the guitar (badly). I paint (even more badly). I watch movies. Take walks. I like visiting art exhibitions. Rather than placing all the pressure of creative production on my writing, I involve myself in other artistic activities until I am drawn back to my writing desk. I prefer to cultivate a creative ecosystem. Not a monoculture, but an entangled, permaculture garden, where all these habits and hobbies feed into, and support, each other.

Q. Globally, there is a rise of majoritarian politics and authoritative regimes. As a poet and writer, what responsibility and/or influence do you think literature has to confront and challenge these systems of power?

JP: Writing is an act of hope. And the strongest resistance, the most powerful challenge to majoritarian politics and authoritative regimes is to offer hope that the world can be otherwise. That these ways of being live on despite the silencing and suppression. I think a writer’s responsibility is to be true to the stories they wish to tell—and in that authenticity lies the power of a story to reflect a larger picture, and to transform it.

Q. What would be your advice to aspiring writers?

JP: No one else can tell your story.

In conversation with Kartik Chauhan for HarperBroadcast.

Everything the Light Touches is now available as a gorgeous paperback. Get your own copy today!

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