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SOZOPOL FICTION SEMINAR LECTURES

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SOZOPOL FICTION SEMINAR LECTURES Handbook in Progress [2008 – 2011]

© Elizabeth Kostova Foundation www.ekf.bg Translation Boris Deliradev Editor Angela Rodel

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SOZOPOL FICTION SEMINAR LECTURES Handbook in Progress [2008 – 2011]

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PREFACE This handbook is an ongoing collection of the lectures held within the framework of the annual Elizabeth Kostova Foundation's Sozopol Fiction Seminars since their launch in 2008.

An advanced discussion among writers of fiction in Bulgarian and English, the Sozopol seminar hosts fiction writers from Bulgaria and English-speaking countries. In addition to the writing workshops, the program also includes distinguished guest lectures conducted by the seminar’s faculty.

This handbook gives you an opportunity to read all the lectures delivered to date. Some of them were originally written in English, others have been translated from Bulgarian. Each year the collection is enriched with two new lectures. They are presented in chronological order.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

KATE MOSSE

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THEODORA DIMOVA

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GEORGI GOSPODINOV

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ALEX MILLER

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KRISTIN DIMITROVA

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ILIYA TROYANOV

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KATE MOSSE Place as Inspiration for Fiction Lecture written for the Sozopol Fiction Seminars, 21-24 May, 2008 Eighteen years ago, my husband and I bought a tiny, biscuitcoloured house in Carcassonne. It nestles in the deep shadow of the battlements of the medieval Cité. We knew nothing about the place. It was one of those random, haphazard decisions that have unexpected and far-reaching consequences. I’d never even been to southwest France. I had vague memories of school history lessons and a medieval Crusade that had destroyed the independence of the Midi in Labyrinth is a time-slip adventure Biography Kate is the author of the bestsellers Labyrinth and Sepulchre. She read English at New College, Oxford. She is co-founder of the Orange Prize for Fiction and currently presents Radio 4's 'A Good Read'.

A Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, Kate was named European Woman of Achievement for Contribution to the Arts in 2000.

novel, set part in 13th century Carcassonne and Chartres, and partly in the modern day. Reworking Grail legend, it tells the story of a young girl, Alaïs, swept up in the brutal Crusade launched against a group of peaceable Christians, the Cathars, who lived in the southwest of France. Sepulchre, also set in two different time periods – the 1890s and the present day – is a ghost story, a Tarot tale.

The novels, although similar in

structure and for the strong female heroines, are very different in tone and scope and intention. Labyrinth is very much an epic novel, a story told against the broad backdrop of history.

Sepulchre, on the other hand, is more claustrophobic, more domestic, a tale of haunting and mysticism set against the stifling

backdrop of fin-de-siècle French society. What they have in common is that they both grew out of my love for the region and the history of my adopted home. Labyrinth is a love letter, if you like, to Carcassonne itself. Sepulchre, a little more ambivalent, is a homage to the ancient forests, lakes and mountains surrounding the antique spa town of Rennes-les-Bains, about 30 kilometres to the south of Carcassonne.

But, I am running ahead of myself. Back in 1989 I had no intention of writing a novel about Carcassonne or the Cathars or Tarot cards and ghosts and ruined tombs. Then, I just wanted to be more than a visitor passing through. In the long, hot summers that followed – in between the usual summer pursuits and caring for our two young children - I read everything about the Languedoc I could get my hands on – the Romans in the 1st century BC, the Visigoths in the 5th, Charlemagne and Dame Carcas, the 8th century Saracen queen after whom the city is named, the Albigensians in the 13th, the Nazi Occupation in the 20th. I collected guidebooks, history books, 5

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theology, even Occitan poetry and proverbs. I hunted down traditional festivals, such as the extraordinary – and enduring – medieval fertility rite of the Fête de l’Âne in Ladern-sur-Lauquet.

I graduated from English to French histories, more subtle, more complicated, more hidden.

So what of the place itself? Looking around the beautiful city of Sozopol, I think Carcassonne is a place where this audience would feel immediately at home. To the north lies the Montagne Noire, purple at dawn; to the east are the vineyards of the Minervois and, beyond the Narbonnais plains, the Mediterranean Sea; to the south lies the wild, rocky landscape of the gulleys and mountains of the Ariège.

Carcassonne itself is a town divided. The medieval Cité was restored (controversially) by Eugène Viollet-le-Duc in the second half of the 19th century – the scandal about which I make reference to in Sepulchre. The old town sits high on a hill on the right bank of the Aude. On the other side of the river is the Bastide Saint-Louis. First built in 14th century, it underwent a period of massive expansion and prosperity during the 19th century and was rebuilt on a gird of narrow cobbled streets. For over 600 years, the two halves have been linked by the perfect medieval stone-arched bridge, the Pont Vieux. A battered Jesus on a metal cross half way across marks the point at which the old and new towns meet.

From the moment they learnt to climb, our two children – now 18 and 15 years old! - treated the medieval Cité’s 3 km of ramparts as their playground. Every summer in the lists – the space between the outer and inner walls known as the lices – hosts a medieval joust. The sound of metal on metal, the thud of the quintain and splinter of wood, rings out much as it would have done eight hundred years ago.

The Cité has 52 defensive towers and was considered impregnable – imprenable. Viollet-le-Duc’s restoration didn’t always respect their medieval antecedents – grey slate rather than red tile, for example. But in the oldest surviving sections of walls on the northern side – the Charpentière, the Manuquière or the Moulin d’Avar – you can imagine the stonemasons cutting the original foundations.

My medieval heroine of Labyrinth, Alaïs, lives in the Château Comtal. Constructed on Roman and Visigoth foundations, the castle was built as part of the western fortifications in the middle of the 11th century by the Trencavel dynasty. Although many of the oldest buildings are gone – their stones scavenged to build the Bastide Saint-Louis – the main courtyard, the Cour d’Honneur, the smaller Cour du Midi and the distinctive watchtower, the Tour Pinte, remain. On the eastern walls of the Château, replica wooden hourds have been constructed, just as they were during the siege of Carcassonne in August 1209, to allow the defenders to hurl missiles down on the besieging army beneath.

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Unlike the Bastide, the Cité’s network of tiny cobbled alleyways and streets is more spider’s web than grid. The conflicts of history live on in the place names – rue Raymond-Roger Trencavel, rue Saint-Louis, impasse Agnès de Montpellier. There are houses and schools – one bilingual Oc / French – tucked away behind the shops, bars and restaurants. Many of the older inhabitants have lived within the walls for generations. Head for place Marcou, a small square in the heart of the Cité, or, for belle époque splendour and a beautiful ivy-covered façade, try the luxurious Hôtel de la Cité on the site of the old Episcopal Palace beside the Basilica Saint-Nazaire.

In 1989 there were few English tourists. Carcassonne had not yet been designated a Unesco World Heritage Site. Ryanair didn’t yet serve the tiny airport – now there are two flights a day from London alone. There was an air of loving neglect surrounding many of the monuments, despite the fact that, in the early 20th century, Carcassonne had actively set out to market itself as a tourist destination. The 19th century heroine of Sepulchre, Léonie, visits the Cité at the point in 1891 when tourism is just beginning to take hold. The first fixed tourist office opened in 1902, one of the first in France, repackaging medieval history as an alternative to the fashionable but idle resorts of Cannes or Nice. Postcards reproducing a line from Gustave Nadaud’s famous 1863 song – ‘Il ne faut pas mourir sans avoir vu Carcassonne’ – were mass produced. The campaign worked. More than 10 000 visitors arrived on the new railway line between July and October 1905. One hundred years later, a staggering 3 million visitors come to Carcassonne every year. It is the second most-visited site in France outside Paris (not to mention where the 1991 film Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves staring Kevin Costner was filmed.) Now, I admit, there are one or two tourists also holding paperback copies of Labyrinth and Sepulchre.

Read LABYRINTH extract (attached) Moving on from the spirit of place - which is my first inspiration – to the thorny question of genre. All authors resist the idea of being categorised into one genre or another. After all, what we seek, are readers who will enjoy our work, that’s all.

But publishers, agents, publicists,

journalists need often to put books in one box or another.

I, like all novelists, am therefore often asked what ‘type’ of books I write. I grew up reading some of the great adventure novels of the late nineteenth century from Rider Haggard’s King Solomon’s Mines and She to Jules Verne. What I enjoyed was the combination of action, landscape (extreme cold, to extreme heat!), mixed with a healthy dollop of cliff-hanging (literally, often) adventure, mystery and the sense that, whatever the trials and tribulations along the way, it would all end happily in the end. The spirit of place is all important, a clearly defined and described landscape. There is a clear sense of right and wrong, usually a quest or sacrifice at the heart of things, and the promise that the story will resolve. There will be no loose ends.

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As a novelist, I was attracted by the challenge of writing ‘old fashioned’ adventure, as it were, but replacing the traditional male hero with a female one! But the genre label – adventure – seemed to be invisible on the bookshelves. Did this mean that readers no longer wanted traditional adventures? Or was it just a question of categorisation? Of expectation? Of literary tradition?

Both male and female writers are constrained by literary expectations of what publishers believe readers want and always have been. Ever since Daniel Defoe created the confessional narrative with Moll Flanders, women have struggled to escape from the suffocating expectation of romantic intrigues, unrequited panting, passive forbearance as le repos du soldat and tragic purity. Further back in the canon, precedents were set in the myths and legends retold by Shakespeare and brilliantly laid bare by Lisa Jardine’s 1983 critique Still Harping on Daughters.

While Brutus, Octavius, Mark Antony and her husband Cassius go to war centre stage, Portia kills herself – the supreme self-abnegation – off stage by swallowing fire.

Literature needs strong, positive female characters – as well as gentle, reflective male characters - to emerge without being sublimated into, for example, the pantomime self-righteous blue stockings of Molière’s L’Ecole des femmes. And they have. But when Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley wrote the epic horror tale Frankenstein, was she continuing her mother’s battle for the rights of women in another medium, or falling back on an older pattern of gender roles? When women in fiction began to come of age and speak for themselves – think of Eliza Bennett and Becky Sharp – what was their goal, their dénouement? Was it authority and command, the desire for wider importance in a wider world? And when George Eliot’s Middlemarch was first serialised in 1871 and 1872, why was it considered scandalous for Dorothea to prefer the idealistic young doctor to the emotionless older academic Casaubon. In Coventry Patmore’s notorious early 20th century poem The Angel in the House, the 19th century domestic ideal was still lionised.Children’s writers such as Frances Hodgson Burnett gave their dreams of liberation to children precisely because those roles were not available to women. Even if the antecedents of the modern adventure heroine lie in the Victorian past, this still doesn’t make the novels they inhabit adventure stories in the classic sense.

Read SEPULCHRE extract (attached) So, when I asked what I write, I reply that I consider Labyrinth and Sepulchre to be adventure novels. The narrative rests squarely on the shoulders of two female protagonists: they have romantic and sexual adventures, have homes and domestic lives, but their role within the novel is to lead not follow. My heroines are not traditional adventure heroines, waiting on the mountain top waiting to be rescued, but instead masters (sorry!) of their own lives and, by extension, the lives of others. For me, it this intention – the decision to put the action centre stage – that separates straightforward historical fiction from traditional adventure writing.

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So, to return to where we began, with the landscape of southwest France that inspired Labyrinth and Sepulchre. Readers, visitors from all countries, are drawn to the Languedoc for the same reason I was. They come for adventure in the mountains and hills around Carcassonne, too. They come to hear the whispered folklore and tragic history of the region. They come for the gaunt silhouettes of ruined castles– Lastours, Quéribus, Peyrepertuse – which pepper the landscape.

And then there is Montségur, the spiritual centre of the Cathar Church in the Languedoc from 1204 until its final defeat at the hands of the French Crusaders. The ‘safe mountain’ citadel perches perilously on the top of the mountain looking out over the Pic de St-Bartélémy and the hidden caves beneath the Pic de Soularac, where Labyrinth both begins and ends. Half a day’s ride to the east, are the wooded hills around the spa town of Rennes-les-Bains where Sepulchre is set, where a quite different sequence of mythologies, of legends, of folklore hold sway.

When Montségur fell in March 1244, after ten months of siege, more than two hundred Cathars were burned alive in a pyre constructed on the lower slopes. Now, a small stone stèle stands in the Prats dels Cremats to mark the spot. Flowers, scraps of poetry and fragments of material are left at the foot of the cross in tribute. In the tiny square of Rennes-les-Bains, where once 19th century ladies and gentlemen walked arm in arm, now modern day tourists sit in the shade under the plane trees and listen to the voices of the villagers speaking still in the language of their childhoods, Occitan. This is the nature of narrative, the personal and tiny remainders, every day, of the way in which the land tells its story.

Despite the stream of visitors across the Prat dels Cremats, despite the overcrowded August streets of the Cité, the spirit of place is strong. The real Carcassonne – or Carcassona, to use its older Occitan name – can still be felt. Beyond the ice creams and plastic swords, it’s there in the hills, in the brilliant Midi light, in the violent summer storms and flash floods, the dry, evening wind from the north, the Cers, that blows down from the mountains, just as it did 800 years ago.

It is a land of secrets still. It is this I have attempted to capture in Labyrinth and Sepulchre.

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THEODORA DIMOVA Lecture written for the Sozopol Fiction Seminars, 21-24 May, 2008 Before I begin, I would like to express my gratitude to Elizabeth Kostova for what she is doing for Bulgarian literature. Establishing a foundation to support creative writing is unprecedented in our country’s recent history. With this gesture of respect toward literature, Elizabeth honors the country as a whole and especially Bulgarian writers. Elizabeth reminds us that despite a country’s size and the size of its language, literature is a reality of a different kind, a country of the spirit with no borders and with a completely different set of rules.

As writers, we inhabit this hyperreality and live according to its laws. Now isn't the time to discuss whether a life in literature is a comfortable experience or not, what it gives and takes from us, what sacrifices it demands, whether it makes us happier or more miserable, or whether we can enter and exit it as we choose. These are questions we can each answer according to our own worldviews. I personally believe that there are more cheerful ways of spending your life than being a writer, because in the end our job is to look at the darker, more sinful side of the world. Perhaps we will have a chance to discuss these questions informally later today and tomorrow; in fact, I have no doubt that we will. However, for the time being, I would like to concentrate on writing itself and specifically on the questions of how a book comes to be, what the writing process entails and what nourishes us as writers.

Coming up with rules about writing is not an easy task. Personally, I don’t believe that you can learn creative writing from anyone else or teach it. But I do believe that talking and listening to others talk about the writing process and the pitfalls, breakdowns, depression and despair that necessarily accompany it can provide young writers with the courage, strength and resilience that the profession demands.

I’ll begin by saying that each of my novels and plays have come into being in a completely different way. Even for the same writer, it’s difficult to say what generates the desire to create a work. I often compare writing to love, a sort of love at first sight. If we are able to discover the source of our feelings for someone, we will be able to analyze the source of our desire to write something, even if we have no idea what it will turn out to be. You know you want to write it, but you don't know what it is.

It's like falling in love – on the one hand, you know nothing about the person, yet on the other, you feel like you know everything, as if you've known him forever. It is on this very thin and delicate ice – which could crack at any moment – that the imperative to write is born. The urge to write is so intense and overwhelming that you sometimes feel you could reach out and touch it. We all are familiar with this absolute necessity to write! If it's not there, I never sit down to 5

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write. If the impulse is less than fierce and unquenchable, writing becomes a chore, a burden.

Yes, the desire to write! You follow it like a blind man, not knowing where you're headed, sensing it only by smell, by sound, by a voice, a word, a phrase, a situation. You feel your way around, and you wake up at night… from the pressure that's building up inside you, pushing you down an unfamiliar, unseen path. You could fall into a trap or an abyss at any moment, anything could happen, but you walk on, you give in, you surrender to the desire. It is a mystery, a secret, we shouldn’t try to analyze it too much lest it push us away. That’s what conceiving a novel is like – the darkest, most dangerous and intuitive stage of the writing process.

I started out writing plays. My first novel, Emine, came out eight years ago. Until then, I’d never thought I would write novels. Fiction had seemed beyond reach. I can now confidently say that that plays are the most difficult genre to write, but I didn’t know that then. Emine’s story was a simple, clear, chronological and – in my opinion – theatrical idea and I wanted to make a play out of it.

The most important thing for any genre, whether play or novel, is being able to find a structure, a skeleton for your story, the principle of the narrative. Once grasped, if only intuitively, the structure or skeleton will begin working of its own accord, as if propelled by an internal engine.

The structure itself will sort through the material, deciding what to keep and what to get rid of; in some paradoxical way it works in place of the author, taking priority over the author in the writing process. The structure becomes the master and you the apprentice, whose role is to tirelessly serve your master, constantly providing him with the necessary material. For this reason, I can never start writing if I don’t have at least a rough, intuitive idea of the structure.

So I had Emine’s story – a striking story – and I felt the absolute necessity to tell it. I also had a vague idea about the structure of my play. So I began. I felt that this time everything would run smoothly and there wouldn’t be much to agonize over, to search for, to discover. In a year and a half of almost daily writing, I’d completed a mere three scenes, a total of no more than 10 pages.

And the three scenes didn’t even fit together, not even with the most creative sequencing. They didn’t even have the same characters. It was painfully clear that I wasn’t going to be able to write this play, that I couldn't find the structure. I told myself not to worry; obviously, not everything works out the way we want it to. Just relax – so you won't write Emine’s story, but you'll write some other play, some other story. Just put it aside and move on. I walked around Sofia for days and kept repeating these things to myself, until I realized I was on the verge of a nervous breakdown. It wasn’t depression, but a very clear feeling that some of the wiring inside me was about to blow. The truth was that I could not write Emine’s story. It had possessed me, it was inside me, living some parallel life that I couldn't help but surrender to, yet I couldn't write it.

The feeling that you're going crazy. That you don’t know when your fuses will blow. That was 6

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the first time I realized that writing is a dangerous thing, a very dangerous thing. A thing that should be approached very cautiously. To be a writer, you must have something strong and resilient inside you to withstand the stories that enter you, to help you work them out. If you don’t, the stories will consume you, they will rework you.

This state, which lasted about a month, was difficult for me. It was even harder to explain to the people around me, to my family and friends. To a certain extent, it’s unsharable – it was a life-ordeath battle with an invisible enemy. I knew by then it would be very difficult to free myself from Emine’s story. The truth was I had accepted defeat. Defeat was everywhere.

Then one morning I sat down at my desk again and said to myself: I'll just write down everything inside me, without worrying about a structure, chronology, dialogue and scenes. I'll do it for myself, once and for all, so that I can be free of Emine and her story. I began writing 15 to 20 pages a day. I sat and began writing in long breaths, without believing in or understanding what was happening. I wrote the novel in less than a month – followed by a substantial amount of editing, of course. I didn’t know whether it was a short story or a novella or what; I had no idea where the novel's structure – that I had been hopelessly searching for in the form of a play for a year and a half – came from. When I finished the novel in a month, I was as happy as I had been miserable before I started it. How it happened is still a mystery to me. Many years have passed since then and I still don’t have an explanation as to what blocked my energy in play form (which I knew so well) and what had unleashed the energy in novel form. Not only had I never attempted to write a novel before – I’d been downright scared to do so.

I’ve told you the story of writing Emine in detail as a way for us to reflect on the force that exists inside us even before the moment we start writing, a force that gives birth to the writing process and drives the words out of us.

I will now describe how I wrote my second novel, Mothers, to encourage reflection on what nourishes literature, what supports it, grounds it. I wrote this novel in a fundamentally different way and for very different reasons, which I will try to explain.

Bulgarian society is going through a cataclysmic period – it is a very sick society. I believe that during such periods writers cannot ignore socially important topics. For me, child aggression, child crime and the general state of children are the scariest and most serious social problems Bulgaria faces. In these difficult times, I believe that it is a writer's duty to be the link between society and the individual. When someone spends ten leva to buy a book or a theater ticket, the book or the play should help him – in one way or another. They ought to be able to do something specific for the individual: to make him feel less lonely or confused or devoid of values and

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direction, to fill him with compassion and a sense of community. It’s precisely this lack of compassion and communal feeling in our society that nudged me towards writing Mothers.

I started writing it after a horrible murder in the spring of 2004, when two fourteen-year-old girls in Plovdiv killed one of their classmates. Other murders committed by teenagers followed in the fall in Pernik, Blagoevgrad and Stara Zagora. These were not ordinary crimes like the ones we are now used to seeing in Hollywood films or in the newspapers. They are a sign that something unprecedented is happening in our society. That we’ve crossed borders that we shouldn’t have crossed. Like the orphanage for abandoned children in the village of Mogilino and the BBC documentary about it. Incidentally, our politicians claimed that Bulgaria has no problems with its orphanages and labeled the film “an aggressive anti-Bulgarian campaign.” It is exactly the extreme cynicism of those in power that is ruining the moral fabric of our society. We keep repeating ad nauseum – our society is sick. Societies are living organisms and they can be sick. And this disease affects all of us, no matter how much we try to emigrate into ourselves.

I began writing Mothers simply because I wanted to figure out for myself what was going on. I didn’t know that my explanation would grow into a novel. And I didn’t know that an explosion of child crime was still ahead.

I tried to find the roots of this brutality. I don’t know whether I succeeded. However, I am sure of one thing – the kids are not to blame.

The two fourteen-year-old child murderers were born in 1990 – the year we really gained our freedom from communism. They are the children of the Transition. They grew up while their parents waited all night in lines for milk, cheered at political rallies, protested in demonstrations, tried to live on twenty dollars a month or lost their jobs, emigrated to America and then returned. They had parents who went under, got back on their feet, got rich or got drunk, who lost themselves amidst their money or the lack of it. These kids grew up with parents who felt like condemned sinners who had to pay for who knows whose crimes. These kids grew up around feverish restless red-eyed adults with meaningless lives who never took their eyes off the TV and were quick to pick a fight over politics as soon as they got home from work. If they didn’t pick fights about politics, they cursed at it. These kids, the children of the Transition, grew up in the company of adults who grew quieter, gloomier and more sullen by the day. In a few years’ time, they didn’t even want to look at the TV and they didn’t bother to curse. Then the kids went to school, where they saw their teachers with their shabby clothes and shattered confidence. And they saw their classmates with mobile phones worth their teacher’s entire annual salary. The kids saw the rich – their houses, their insolence and their self-destruction.

And they saw the poor – their wide-open eyes, their helplessness, their suffocation…

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I happened to overhear a conversation. “I don’t know what else to do for these kids!” a well-off mother of two was complaining to a friend. “They have absolutely no gratitude! I give them ten leva every single day, I take them to the sea during the summer and skiing during the winter… I don’t understand what else they could want!” Indeed, what else could a child need but money, skiing and the seaside?!

I heard another woman in an ill-fitting faded overcoat exclaim: “If I can’t even take care of myself, how can I take care of my children!”

We abandoned our children. We forgot about them, swept up in our own nonsense. We took away the cocoon of love they are supposed to grow up in. And without this protective layer of love and concern, children are exposed like bare nerves.

They soak up our energies. Our energies build up in them. Our discontent. Our dissatisfaction.

Our sullenness. Our Balkan bitterness. The aggression we somehow manage to live with.

But they can’t. Our kids are not built to cope with this enormous lack – a lack of joy, love, friendship, laughter, goodness and celebration. They don't have the defense mechanisms to compensate. Their isolation is greater than ours. Their ignorance of good and bad is greater. And their silence is scarier.

The truth is that although they were born in the year of freedom, we did not nourish them with freedom. Because communism didn't disappear then. It is still around now – in our inability to love. In our godlessness. In our lack of fire, energy and enthusiasm. Communism lives on in our malice, suspicion and envy. In the poisonous energy that the children of the Transition soaked up from their mothers, fathers, teachers, classmates, computers, TVs and big brothers. Our children are who we are. They are our achievement over the past fifteen years.

Mothers has received numerous awards in Bulgaria and abroad. It has been published in four languages and is being translated into another three. Its Bulgarian sales are unprecedented for a contemporary Bulgarian novel. Yet its success has made me realize how little influence literature has on society. Child crime in Bulgaria not only still exists – it increases with every passing day.

The social atmosphere and energy surrounding our children is the same.

Perhaps our only hope – as my colleague Deyan Enev says – is that although literature cannot influence society, it can influence the individual. And that hope is reason enough for us to continue writing.

I will end my lecture with an excerpt from Mothers about a writer who is the father of one of my protagonists. Unlike this lecture, it was written spontaneously and thus will give you a clearer idea of my understanding of writing.

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GEORGI GOSPODINOV What Are Our Books Made Of? Lecture written for the Sozopol Fiction Seminars, 4 –9 June, 2009

The honest way to start a lecture like this is to deflate expectations. Unlike in a classical detective novel, by the end of the lecture, and even by the end of the workshop, you won’t know all about the “literary crime” – how it is committed and who the perpetrator is. The secret will remain a secret, and there is something good in this.

I will begin with a few points that don’t ordinarily get discussed, at least not at the beginning. I am here to talk about how books are made. And the presumption is that I have experience. So here I am talking to you, standing on the uncertain and crumbly ground of this experience. And it is fair to admit, before I go any further, that I am in more and more doubt about the advantages of experience. It is simply the alibi of an older age. And like all alibis – it is somewhat dubious.

So here it is: I’ve written poetry and prose, plays and short scripts, literary criticism and history, a doctoral dissertation, columns and articles, and I’ve written copy for the advertising industry; for 17 years now I’ve been editor of Literaturen vestnik – the literary weekly, which since the 1990s has effectively been the workshop for new Bulgarian literature. I sometimes think I’ve read more manuscripts than I’ve read books; I’ve been to international creative writing courses and I’ve been taught to teach; I’ve taught myself. And let me tell you – from experience – that it never gets any easier. You always start from scratch, and the fears and anxiety and a good deal of uncertainty are always with you.

And that’s what I’d like to discuss first – uncertainty. That’s where it all starts for me.

We live in a culture that doesn’t tolerate uncertainty. You learn in self-help manuals that you must be confident, you must know what you want and you must follow it with dogged determination. There are many writers who say that once they set their hands to work, they know all they need to know about their characters; they know the beginning and the end of their books. They even know the first and the last sentences. That all sounds quite depressing to writers like me who belong to the opposite school.

If I could come up with any advice for you, it is this: don’t avoid uncertainty, don’t be afraid of it; examine your doubts and make use of them to develop your work and hypotheses. Try to tame your fears, but don’t chase them away. In my view, uncertainty is the natural state of man (and writer) and the sure sign of the most important thing in our common craft – sentience. Hence this praise of uncertainty. I don’t have much faith in people who know all the answers, who are always on the right course, who never hesitate. Certainty, at least in my view, is suspicious. We

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work, after all, with the most delicate, elusive and ambiguous material – language. Incidentally, one of the epigraphs in my Natural Novel goes like this: “I wish somebody would say: This novel’s good, because everything in it is uncertain.”

Speaking of language, let us dip a toe into its stream for a moment. I am certain that everyone in this room has had the happy experience of letting themselves be carried away by language. The sensation of its push and pull, its sweeping force, its energies. The only thing you have to do is keep afloat and follow it. It can be like rafting through dangerous rapids and whirlpools. Or slow and calming, penetrating far and wide.

There are those who say that language only matters in poetry, and that it is an instrument in prose, in mere service of the plot. That is not my experience. I come from poetry, and, in fact, I’ve never abandoned it. Before I wrote my Natural Novel, I’d already written two books of poetry.

Both were, I dare say, widely read and well-loved. Both are still in print, so I cannot complain.

Clearly, the writing of a poem and a novel are two separate and distinct disciplines. Poetry, in the language of sports, is a short-distance event. I can compare it to the 100 or 200 m sprint: there is an explosive start, loads of muscle and tendon work, movement at high speed, and intensity until the very end. Prose, on the other hand, is a long-distance event: you’ve got to distribute your energy evenly; there can be long and dull stretches, a lack of focus; but the most important thing is to keep a steady rhythm. And breathe. I used to do both events – literally, not metaphorically – and in the end I gave up both when I had to choose.

But in writing my Natural Novel I chose the strategy of poetry. I made sure I listened to the language and paid close attention to every word. I kept up the rhythm – which, in my view, is a very important aspect of prose. There are novels made from building blocks (like chapters and paragraphs) and novels made from sentences. I prefer the latter. I always notice the difference: the sentences, the phrases, the images.

I knew that my novel would not be a classical narrative. I had vague ideas of “wanting to make a novel out of all the things that don’t usually go into a novel”. And I was absolutely free. It was my first attempt, so it was OK to fail. Let me take a brief detour here. Make bold use of your right to fail while you are still starting out. It is a liberating experience. And remember that a literary career is just that: walking on the edge of failure.

When I sat down to write my novel one summer ten years ago, I knew that it would be about disintegration, private and public – the breakup of a marriage against the breakdown of society in the 90s, in Bulgaria. Without being a political book, Natural Novel is rooted in the events of that decade. It also contains flashbacks to the communist period seen through the eyes of the protagonist as a child. I’d collected notes, thoughts and ideas in notebooks over several years 12

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and the “anarchism of the novel”, which was pointed out by the New Yorker, probably has something to do with the anarchic nature of my notes. I wrote the novel in three months of daily work, but the notes which gave birth to it were gathered over seven or eight years. I didn’t make use of everything, but what was included certainly provided much of the book’s substance.

A happy discovery came through readings in botany and natural history. I was lead to this by Michel Foucault’s discussion of the natural histories from the 17 c. whose vision of the world was still one of unity and magic. Anything could go into those histories – legends, personal stories, rumors, scientific descriptions, recipes. And that’s how I chose the genre of my book.

Natural Novel is as much the title as it is its genre.

It’s a book about a personal childhood and the childhood of the world – the blessed 17th, 18th and even 19th centuries; about Carolus Linnaeus and the natural historians who so passionately sought to classify and label the world. I included excerpts from Linnaeus’ scientific manuscripts, which today sound like a work of fiction. I found botanical magazines with translations of his works from a century ago. Here are two of his titles: “Introduction to the Mating of Plants” and “The Sleep of Plants”. Excellent for a natural novel. So that’s where the strange and naïve gardener in my book came from – the botanist who tries to bring reality and words back together by looking at analogies between botany and philology. He looks at words and weighs them; he studies their pollination and dissemination.

If we unpack my novel or tear it up in the middle the way we tore up old toys when I was a child, these are the things that will come out of its belly: a natural history of the flush toilet with all sorts of facts, stories and examples; lists of the pleasures of the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s (the latter is the shortest); a bum who owns a rocking chair; a natural history of flies plus a bible of flies; an old Irish contraceptive recipe; overheard stories of marital infidelity; the notes of a naturalist; a novel made from the first paragraphs of famous classical novels, and so on.

So what could glue these assorted trinkets together? There is one straight answer: the personal narrative. Regardless of its subject – love, separation, death … There aren’t that many subjects to choose from. In my case, it was a story about the inability to tell your story. Stuttering in the narration of his own life, my protagonist seeks salvation in various lists and other people’s stories. He painfully needs to hear the material that novels and movies usually avoid.

“How can a novel be possible these days, when we no longer have a sense of the tragic? How can even the idea of a novel be possible when the sublime is gone and all we have is everyday life – in all its predictability, or worse, in the unbearable mystery of destructive chance?”

A few words about the meta-fictionality of Natural Novel. From the beginning to the end, the book constantly questions its making. “Yet this Novel of Beginnings will describe nothing. It will 13

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only give the initial impetus and will subtly move into the shadow of the next opening, leaving the characters to connect as they may. That’s what I would call a Natural Novel.”

So in that sense, this is a novel with a lot of space, with many silences and pauses, with areas of uncertainty.

It contains several different projects for novels, “a series of spontaneous abortions,” as the Village Voice calls them. The first such project is for a novel made from the beginnings of other novels: “My immodest desire is to mold a novel of beginnings, a novel that keeps starting, promising something, reaching page 17 and then starting again.”

More often than not, the characters of most novels are happy until at least page 17, there are no failures. What my protagonist does is collect such happy beginnings, almost like a true natural historian.

He also attempts a novel made exclusively with verbs: “No explanations, no descriptions. Only the verb is honest, accurate and aloof.” The hitch here is that he is unable to think of even the first verb.

Then there is the project for a novel written from the point of view of a housefly – a fragmented, multi-faceted narrative resulting from the complex structure of the fly’s eyes. A novel full of detail, as mundane as the fly itself. “What kind of novel would we get if a fly could write a story…” “In the ideal novel, individual episodes will be held together by the trajectory of a fly.”

In addition to these three aborted novels, there is also the Bible of Flies, which I mentioned earlier, and two Socratic dialogues, where Socrates himself is a fly engaged in a serious discussion on the 1960s.

There are also numerous other short stories and inserts. A French critic called my book “a machine for stories.” Between us, I now regret peopling it with so many unresolved beginnings.

But such is the genre of this unidentifiable literary object, the natural novel.

Of course, no novel is natural, and the expression “natural novel” is an oxymoron. I’d say that this novel is nostalgic for the 19th c. novel, or what we perceive it to be – a slow, dense development, with a clear beginning, middle and end, and unambiguous causal relationships.

Stendhal described it as a mirror you take on a journey to help reflect the world. According to my Natural Novel, the mirror has been broken and novels can no longer be anything but multifaceted. We see the world reflected in this broken mirror and we never get a complete and consistent story. Our own stories are stories of fragmentation and failure, they are made from silences. And so the theme and plot of Natural Novel, its trauma, revolves around the question of 14

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what we do with the stories we can’t tell. How we find a way to speak through recurring fracture and fragmentation. Our stories cannot stay the same. They’ve been truncated. Their point of view is made of various facets.

Reception and Translatability Natural Novel has had a good and, perhaps, inexplicable fate. In Bulgaria it was published at the very end of the 90s and has since been reprinted six times, with a readership that spans generations. It has been published in 12 languages, including English, and I am happy that my American publishers – Dalkey Archive Press – are here with us today. What matters even more to me is that the book seems to have found its readers. It was reviewed in the Guardian, the New Yorker, the Times of London, the Village Voice and by other publications, and it’s been included in the course syllabi of several European and American universities. A collection of short stories, which I wrote after the novel, has met with similar interest. It was a source of worry to me, especially before the first translations, whether my stories are universal enough to be understood by people other that those with whom I share the same history. Will they appeal equally to American, German, French, Danish and Italian ears? How do I properly convey the sense of timelessness of the 1980s in Bulgaria, for example? How do I provide the necessary background – the visible and invisible barriers, the prohibitions, the rules that had become part of us, of our lives and language?

I now know that our personal stories are universal. It’s a reassuring thing, especially for writers working in smaller languages. The act of telling a story is universal – it’s translatable and comprehensible for the minds and hearts of readers across the world. And that’s because all stories, in the end, are stories against death, even if they are not about death. Each story earns us another night, like in Scheherazade. And we add meaning to the world – a much-needed thing, as global resources of meaning are drying up fast, perhaps irrevocably. Literature is a slow medium, slower than radio, TV, the Internet, the movies and everything with a visual element in it. But the meaning it generates lasts longer and takes time to be depleted.

I’ve heard various answers to the question “Why do you write?”. One of the most sincere ones was: “I want to be loved”. And that’s a good enough reason. It was the driving force for me between the ages of 15 and 25. It is Gunter Grass, I think, who said that he writes against the passing time. One of my short story characters, Gaustin, says something to the same effect: “We’ve lost the game strategically,” he says, “but the empty moves of our story-telling will keep delaying the end”.

Thirty-three years ago I had a nightmare. It recurred for several nights. In it my mother, my father and my brother had all fallen into a well and couldn’t get out. I was outside, “safe.” I still

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remember that mixture of fear – the feeling that I was cosmically alone, separated from everyone close to me – and of guilt, the guilt that I’d survived. I tried telling my nightmare to my grandmother, with whom I was staying for the summer, but she told me that nightmares shouldn’t be retold, lest they come true. And so what I did in this dead-end situation was the only possible thing – I wrote the dream down in a notebook. It was my way of tricking fortune – I never told anybody about the nightmare but I managed to get rid of it. That nightmare was the first thing I wrote. And I can say that today, 33 years later, my reasons for writing are not very different.

There are many things I had to leave out of this lecture. I didn’t say anything about editing and self-editing. Chekhov said that one should be one’s own fiercest editor, to the point of tears. And I am not one to argue with Chekhov. I didn’t say anything about irony and self-irony. Or about reading. Or about the importance of a writer’s curiosity about the world and people, which is the basis of all literature. Every writer is one big curious ear. A hearing voyeur. And the world is full of untold stories, if only we have ears to hear them.

And yet, if had to conclude and say one thing that I think a writer couldn’t do without, it would be this: an infinite awareness of everything that incurs pain, that wounds and brings joy. And not just on your own body, but on the body of the world. That, plus a devilish way with words, with the wonder of language. Nothing more, nothing less.

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ALEX MILLER Writing & The Creative Imagination Lecture written for the Sozopol Fiction Seminars, 27 May – 1 June, 2010 I don’t have the time today for a thorough expression of my views on the imagination and its place in the work of writers, but I do hope there are some ideas here that you will consider worth thinking about. I’m extremely grateful to Boris Deliradev for offering to translate this talk into Bulgarian. While the need for translation might be seen as a difficulty, it is to my mind also an exciting difficulty and I welcome this unique opportunity to speak through Boris’s voice in your own beautiful and, to me, utterly mysterious language.

With a terrain as vast and tracked over as the creative imagination it’s not so much a matter of being right or wrong in our thinking, as of being invited to join the conversation. I would like to thank the organisers of this conference for doing me the very great honour of inviting me to join the conversation here in Sozopol.

In his novel, Invitation to a Beheading, the great Russian/American writer Vladimir Nabokov – who spent happy childhood summers on the Black Sea coast - has the following exchange between the executioner and the condemned man. 'This is curious,' said M'sieur Pierre [the executioner]

'What are these hopes [that you speak of], and who is this saviour?'

The

condemned man, Cincinnatus, replies simply, ‘Imagination.’ There could scarcely be a greater claim for the imagination than this.

Imagination is not the preserve of the few. We are all born with an imagination. The muse and mentor of the most famous of Australia’s artists, Sidney Nolan, reminded him that "Childhood means creativity."1

And it was Coleridge - in T. S. Eliot's view the greatest critic of the

imagination - who said in his Ode on Dejection, "What nature gave me at my birth/My shaping spirit of imagination". The image of children in a kindergarten sitting on the floor surrounded by their creations is not new. "Behold the child among his new-born blisses," Wordsworth wrote, " . . . See, where 'mid work of his own hand he lies."2 What happens to the imagination in adulthood - the degree to which we are unable or unwilling to forget our childhood liberties - is crucial to our mature creativity.

For most adults

imagination is no match for the onslaught of the demands of daily life and it tends to wither as these demands accumulate.

The imagination of the writer or artist, however, persists in

adulthood to demand the major share of the individual's attention and energies. It's not surprising therefore that we often recognise something rather childlike in the petulant selfcentred world of the artist, the poet, and the novelist. Creative people are compelled to strive to 1 2

Janine Burke, The Heart Garden, Sunday Reed and Heide. Vintage 2004 William Wordsworth, Intimations of Immortality.

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become their own universe, even though they know such a state is not achievable. They have an idealised inner world that demands expression. It is as if their childhood imagination grew up with their body to have large adult ambitions, to become the dominant mode of their existence.

The artist's attempts at a modest conventional life often fail in the face of these demands when they are combined with ambition and ego.

Imagination springs its surprises not in the crowded workshop of planning, but in the idle meander. The word meander, the dictionary tells us, has its meaning from the name of a river in ancient Phrygia, now part of modern day Turkey and not so very far from where we are today.

The river was noted by the Greeks for its winding course. Many of the most suggestive and fruitful ideas that strike our imagination, and which have a durable currency in our cultural reference, are based on such observations of nature. In referencing nature there is a feeling that we are touching on truth. In his Letters to a Young Poet,3 the German poet Rilke eschews advice and criticism but offers the encouraging observation, "If you will stay close to nature, to its simplicity, to the small things hardly noticeable, those things can unexpectedly become great and immeasurable." The human imagination, even in a digital post-modern world, finds sustenance in the assurance of nature's reality. In even the most fanciful of the imagination’s work it seems there must be a bedrock of reality from which it takes its flight.

There is, it seems, a close kinship between nature and the human imagination, and this kinship is deep, enduring and real. Is this kinship not an aspect of our humanity which not only withstands but deeply permeates the facts of human history and our urban cultures? The novelist may be said to activate the ambiguous space between history and myth.4 This is almost always what serious novelists attempt. To see the familiar face of their life and times as unfamiliar. And in this the response of the creative person is necessarily inward. For the artist and the writer address themselves finally in the act of creation.

To meander is seen as close to delirium, to be in a waking dream, to be led without apparent purpose or linkage of cause and effect from one thing to another. In meandering it is not the end of the journey but the going that is important. The joy of the meander is the hope of happy accidents and chance encounters, where connections previously unsuspected may be revealed.

To meander is to evade the conventional grid of responsibilities. One meanders in hopes of being surprised by the familiar. The purposeful planned direction, on the other hand, knows its end before it sets out and is unsettled by surprise. The meander is its own purpose. There is no destination.

3 4

Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet, trans Joan Burnham. P. 33. New World 2000.

Ibid. p.5 18

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The novel, no matter how realist its manner, is not a blueprint for "real" life but is artifice.

Fiction is finally invention, no matter how realistic or "truly" historical its claims to represent reality. The novel is a work of the imagination. Movement in art and literature is never forwards or backwards but is always towards a centre. Art seeks the center not the terminus.

Each age not only encourages and celebrates certain forms of art and literature but also suppresses regions of the psyche and the imagination. In its seeking, its meandering, our imagination is never wholly free from the fashionable forms of representation.

Creative

autonomy is a myth. Perhaps an ideal. But no matter how "original" a work, it is always of its own time and the passage of time reveals its complex temporal dependency.

Forms of representation are as fundamental to literature as they are to the visual arts. The greatest critic to have discoursed at length on this is Erich Auberbach in his magisterial work, Mimesis, The Representation of Reality in Western Literature.5 A book that was written not in Paris or New York but in Istanbul. "Dante," Auerbach says, "used his language to discover the world anew." That is, Dante did not create a new world with his imagination but revealed the unfamiliar in the familiar world. Writing a novel is re-writing; it is revisiting a familiar place time and again and seeing it anew each time. Beginning the writing of a novel is entering a puzzle, a maze whose centre is unknown to the author. In the beginning the novelist's material is without form. This does not mean the novelist is without subject, or is without something to say, but only that the novelist cannot know what he or she is going to come across before the intricacies of the work have been witnessed and it has assumed its final shape. With a novel, as with the exploration of a maze or a labyrinth, it is not a matter of reaching a conclusion, but of finding the centre. It is the centre that satisfies the form. When the centre is reached the novel is abandoned. It may look finished. But that finish is artifice. So-called craft.

So we want to write? We want to make art? But what is to be our subject? How are we to know your material? When I was a young would-be writer I felt I had a statement to make, but what was my statement to consist of? Having the desire to be a writer but not knowing what to write about is the principal dilemma of many young writers. What does our imagination have to do with knowing our material? It was all a mystery to me. When I was a young aspiring writer I thought that if my desire to write was authentic then I ought to know what it was I wanted to write about. If I were going to write, I believed I should not only have something to say, but should know what it was I wanted to say. All the great novelists whose works I was reading, Dostoyevsky, Iris Murdoch, Proust, Doris Lessing, Patrick White, and so on, seemed to have known what they wanted to write about from the beginning. This was my misunderstanding of

5

Erich Auerbach, Mimesis. Trans Willard R. Trask. Princeton, 1953.

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the process, my ignorance of what really happens. The Grass is Singing,6 that astonishing first novel by Doris Lessing. It read - and we all read it - as if it had been written in her heart before she attempted to set it down on paper. What did I have to say, I asked myself, that might correspond to such a work? I stared at the blank page and saw nothing written in my heart, except a yearning to write. Was I really a writer? The question tormented me.

On the perennial debate about the death of the novel it's worth remembering that the novel is just another way of telling our stories. It is story telling, not the form of the novel, that is the permanent aspect of our human endeavour in writing fiction. As human beings we will always find ways to tell our stories, if not through the form of the novel then through other forms yet to be imagined. I grew up in a family where story telling - though not story writing - was a nightly delight. Telling a story is an improvisational form, like jazz, and the form the story takes depends on the nature of the audience. The written story, however, is the product of reflection, like written music. Although it may contain long passages of spontaneous composition, the written story, especially the long narrative form, is essentially the product of endless re-writing and reconsidering.

From early childhood I had been a story teller, but as an adult it took me a long time to find my material as a story writer. I discovered it wasn't a matter of simply deciding what to write about.

There had to be some addition or the written work lacked a life of its own. As Simone de Beauvoir rightly said, "We cannot arbitrarily invent projects for ourselves: they have to be written in our past as requirements." The reason we can't simply invent projects for ourselves is that the imagination is ignited by something other than our conscious decisions. I think of writing as a conversation with the unconscious; being open, that is, to the promptings of the imagination. Like Klamm in Kafka's novel The Castle, no matter how hard we try we are never going to meet the elusive entity of the unconscious face to face, but we know its influence rules our lives. Its prompts, however, are not always forthcoming. "My work is resisting me at the moment," I wrote to a friend who had asked how things were going. "I dwell with it in a kind of anteroom of the imagination. I know it's down there but I can't force it." Craft will often suffice to get us by, but the imagination will not be coerced.

The discovery of one's material and the awakening of one's imagination are inextricably linked.

It is Proust, in his final volume, Time Regained, who most beautifully deals with this complex event in an inspired passage of something more than a hundred pages. I would like to quote the whole of it here. I will quote a short passage: "And then a new light, less dazzling, no doubt, than that other illumination which had made me perceive that the work of art was the sole means of rediscovering Lost Time, shone suddenly within me. And I understood that all these 6

Doris Lessing, The Grass is Singing. Michael Joseph 1950.

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materials for a work of literature were simply my past life; I understood that they had come to me, in frivolous pleasures, in idleness, in affection, in unhappiness, and that I had laid them up in store without divining the purpose for which they were destined or even their continued existence . . . And I began to perceive that I had lived . . . without ever realising that my life needed to come into contact with those books which I had wanted to write and for which . . . I had been unable to find a subject."7

Proust's frivolous meandering has brought him

unexpectedly, and by means of a brilliant prompt of the imagination, to a realisation of his material and at once his imagination is ignited and his lassitude and boredom are forgotten.

That the novel is about the intimate lives of us holds true from Proust to Joyce to Georgette Heyer. The novel may be about everything else as well as us, but at its heart it is about us and the trivial intricacies of our private lives.

Thank you for listening.

I’m afraid this is all I have time for today, but of course this

conversation continues among us as it does among all writers.

7

Marcel Proust, Remebrance of Things Past, vol X11, trans. Andreas Mayor. P.267. Chatto & Windus, 1970.

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KRISTIN DIMITROVA On Being a Bulgarian writer Lecture written for the Sozopol Fiction Seminars, 27 May – 1 June, 2010 Ten years ago, at a reading at the University of Chicago – where I was in the company of Fulbright scholars Vladimir Trendafilov and Vladimir Levchev – the poet Mark Strand, who was in the audience, asked me what it was like to be writing for eight million people.

His interest in numbers caught me unprepared. I did not have an answer ready, and I was later to find out that this was precisely the type of question that stays with you forever: it may deepen, widen or transform itself, but never really disappear. A bit like the effect of religious beliefs on your sex life. Or vice versa.

Without much hesitation, I replied that writing for eight million is the same as writing for three hundred.

I thought my experience with writing couldn’t be that much different from that of other writers around the world. In trams and buses, I hurriedly jot down observations. I try not to attract attention, but the pages rustle and people end up staring at me, thinking I am strange. Strange in a clinical kind of way.

Or: At night, when everybody else at home is in bed, I spend hours in front of the computer trying to figure out what my characters are going to do next. I reach a solution and I go to bed, but the next morning I wake up with the thought that I’ve just created an even bigger problem for myself.

Or: I use the break between two lectures at the university to revise a poem. I weigh each word again and I comb the invisible world for clever ideas. But the moment my students turn up at the door, I pretend I am grading papers. We all like to be called poets, but we don’t like to be caught writing poetry. Much in the same way many people want to be writers, but are never willing to spare the time to do so.

Whether you are writing for eight million or for 300, I imagine that the effort, the fear and the excitement are the same. One is bound to experience them even when writing a letter, and letters are usually addressed to one person only. That’s what I said to Mark Strand that day.

But if he were to ask me his question today, he would have to use a different figure. The population of Bulgaria has shrunk from eight to seven and a half million. And the real question, of course, is how many of these people read. A survey on reading habits in Bulgaria conducted by Alpha Research in 2009, found that 27.4% of all Bulgarians had no interest in reading at all and 14% believed that buying books was a waste of money. More and more young people are convinced that literature has nothing to teach them, and that reading is uncool. The glamour is 22

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on television, in movies, social networking sites and computer games. And while the first three of these are media [and offer a variety of content], the question remains as to what you can learn from a virtual battle in which a sword-wielding hero can run for days on end without signs of exhaustion and after each death comes back for a new life. Didn’t Socrates say that understanding is the greatest good, and ignorance – the worst of evils?

But let’s continue to stare down the well of statistics in order to find out what chunk of readers’ love Bulgarian writers can hope to claim. According to the same Alpha Research survey, the percentage of Bulgarians who read on a daily basis is 9.5%, while another survey, conducted in 2005, put the number of those with an interest in Bulgarian literature at 4% of all readers. I am unaware if and to what extent these figures still hold, but given that they do, we currently have a total of 28,500 people who are interested in anything written by a Bulgarian.

So how did we get here? Why is it that we are no longer interested in reading about ourselves in our own language? Certainly, we Bulgarian writers (if we could think of our highly autonomous selves as a group), are not without blame. Foreign literature has the reputation of something tried and true, something that’s been clinically tested on other people and good for consumption.

While Bulgarian fiction scares readers off with too much literary ambition. I’ve conducted my own little survey on the topic. People tell me that Bulgarian writers experiment with form too much and that their books are written to impress the judges in the various literary competitions.

They have also confessed to being unable to identify with the characters. That there isn’t sufficient mimesis, in the Aristotelian sense of the word. But why so much effort to undermine the literary cannon on our part? I believe it comes from a fundamental lack of faith that the reader exists at all. The good news is that in recent years some lessons have been learned and that both sides have started to seek each other out.

But there is a further reason for translated literature’s advantage on the Bulgarian market which is beyond the powers of the Bulgarian writer. Foreign books often come to us as messages from a higher authority, as deliveries from the high-speed lane of thought. I am by no means willing to doubt here the enormous contribution of so many translated writers to Bulgarian culture. I am simply looking at how the mainstream of foreign books is marketed in our bookshops. While Bulgarian books have to grapple for space on the shelves, translated literature is already comfortably there, with unbeatable tags like “translated into 36 languages,” “best book of the year according to this-and-this daily,” or “the most influential writer of his generation,” followed by the signature of another writer, no less well-known to us. This stamp of institutional approval carries such weight with readers that even when they are not sufficiently engaged by what they are reading, they are often willing to place the blame on themselves. They read and re-read, patiently and thoroughly, until they understand whatever is there to be liked. The truth is that 23

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although the centers creating literary value in the world often speak as if they know all the writers of the world, they only know some of the writers in the world. And the writers who happen to be outside their vision find themselves in the position of eternal students. I am not sure that the phenomenon of Joyce’s Ulysses would have been possible if Joyce had written his book in Bulgarian and if on June 16, 1904, Leopold Bloom had been walking the streets of Plovdiv.

What happens in the end is that we, Bulgarians, know more about the culture of the great nations than they do about ours. When Michael Cunningham writes about Virginia Woolf, for example, he doesn’t have to explain to us who she is. We have every chance of enjoying his book because she has been rendered in Bulgarian, studied at the universities and occasionally imitated. Read, extolled or unread, people just know who she is. While if a Bulgarian writer has a protagonist whose name is Ivan Vazov, the first reaction abroad would be: “Who is Ivan Vazov?”

And the answer is that he is one of the founding figures of Bulgarian literature. But this would hardly be sufficient help for anybody. I am now used to Americans referring to their Declaration of Independence without explanation, or British people asking me if I’d recognized the hidden Shelly quote, or Russians expecting me to deftly navigate the power struggles between Stalin and Beria. While those of us who hope to be published abroad often try to avoid including local personalities and events, unless they want to see their books awash with explanatory footnotes.

Being part of a small language teaches you to use details with an unpleasant kind of calculating prudence.

I was recently a judge at a literary competition for young writers. What I expected to see were stories about the world these young people lived in, about the experience they’d accumulated to this point in their lives. To my surprise I got acquainted, instead, with characters like Tom and Annie from the village of Little Hope, the old craftsman Uncle David, sick Lucas, little Emily, dead Eleanor, Alice Franklin who talks with her doppelganger, and the writer Chris Colven, who chooses money instead of truth. The names Alex and Emmy were particularly popular, as they throw a convenient bridge between the characters’ stated localness and their unstated foreignness. The strange thing was that Tom and Annie from Little Hope had apparently had an uplifting effect on the style of their author, since his/her other, locally-inspired texts were neither able to begin nor to end properly, wobbling high and low in their choice of words. A kind of hidden emigration was taking place there. The masque of English literature seemed capable of summoning the self-assurance of English language literature, along with the confidence that even the simplest story can outline an important problem. Such a travesty straightens out the characters. It uproots them from their daily lives, seen as grotesque, and gives them the chance at greatness by providing them with important dilemmas to mull over. Of course, the

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participants in this competition were just beginning writers and God-only-knows-what-kind-of readers, but even if they are questionable as a literary example, as a social example they are not.

An imported pen name can help with your sales, too. In the turbulent 1990s (when a good press run in Bulgaria was in the neighborhood of 100,000, a far cry from what it is today, which is 50 times smaller), many people made a living by writing gamebooks and astrological predictions.

Their books were signed with foreign names and sold just as well as translated literature. And the strangest thing was that this theft of authority went unnoticed. I never heard anyone complaining about a difference in quality. But, of course, borrowing the cloak of some foreign literature is nothing new in our part of the world, especially in genres with unstable traditions, such as crime fiction. Whatever it is we are talking about here, half of the answer is bound to be rooted in tradition.

But let us now see how our Bulgarian names are perceived abroad. I had a funny incident last year. Someone told me that a Spanish poet had translated a short poem about sailors by an Irish author, but later on he discovered that the real author was perhaps me. The Spanish poet wrote all about it in his blog. At the beginning, I was entertained. But I Googled the English translation of “Beliefs,” my only poem about sailors, and, indeed, I found it posted in an international poetry site, signed with the name of the translator of my Irish book, A Visit to the Clockmaker. This wonderful poet and person, my translator – may he rest in peace – had nothing to do with it. He had been dead for five years. It turned out that a friend of his had done him a dubious “favor” by crediting him with authorship of something he had only translated. But that’s not the point here.

The English translation of “Beliefs” had been on the Bulgarian website Liternet ever since 2006 and no one had shown any interest in it. Yet the moment it appeared under an Irish name, it got translated into Spanish. And into Turkish as well. I even found it as “poem of the week” on an Indian website. I panicked. I sent out various letters insisting that my authorship be restored or the translation removed. I received no replies from the Turkish and Indian websites, while the person who deprived me of authorship wrote to me that he was doing me a favor, since this was the only way my poem could appear on such a prestigious website. He asked me where my gratitude was. In the end, the story reached an acceptable conclusion. Friends of mine from the UK, Bulgaria and the United States bombarded him with letters of indignation. Meanwhile, I managed to get in touch with “the prestigious website,” which turned out to be Dutch. I asked them to delete my poem or move it to a Bulgarian section, which – much to my regret – I had not found on their site. I wondered what they would do. The next day my poem was deleted.

The Iron Curtain has collapsed but instead of revealing our faces, it has revealed a dim silhouette which has yet to outline its features. I am not convinced that the Bulgarian state is doing its best to overcome our cultural absence from the world. I am not even sure it’s aware of the problem. I 25

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am not sure if we are aware of the problem. Cultural presentations of our country abroad usually begin with folk singing and dancing and end with the Thracian gold treasures. So it’s either folklore or the Thracians. Everything which is the result of individual abilities and efforts slips somehow between them, dripping away like sand in a broken hour glass.

Years ago, a guy who was at another reading of mine in the U.S. asked me whether my poems were really Bulgarian. I replied that they were poems written in Bulgarian about things I had experienced in Bulgaria. I asked him if whether that made them sufficiently Bulgarian for him.

He wasn’t convinced. He needed something more than that. “You didn’t expect me to read in a national costume or something, did you?” I probed. “I guess I did,” he said with an awkward smile. “I must admit that’s exactly what I expected.” Did I have reason to be insulted by his words? No, if we look at the situation objectively. After all, as recently as the 1990s, when Bulgaria was the focus country at the Leipzig Book Fair, our group of writers was lead by a bagpiper. To bring the point home, just try imagining Philip Roth going to a reading accompanied by a klezmer band. It seems that some countries produce literature, while others produce anthropology.

Of course, the two things you need if you want to participate on an international level are a translator and a publisher. But regrettably, no translator from Bulgarian can make a living from what they do. Bulgarian philologists around the world are rare enthusiasts whose language of choice has extremely complex verb forms and much of their work is done on a voluntary basis.

As my friend, writer and translator Reynol Vazquez likes to say: “There are many sophisticated ways of starving yourself to death and being a Bulgarian scholar is one of them.” There is hardly a country around the world where readers are in a position to form a more or less thorough idea of what is being written in Bulgarian on the basis of what is published in their own language.

Moreover, publishers often resort to quotas: “We already got someone from this generation. Give us one of the classics and someone younger.”

Here is the place to say that I have, in fact, had many instances of interest in my work from various corners of the world. These were true gifts – invitations for readings, with fully covered travel and accommodation costs – which I’ve been unable to reciprocate. Not because I have not wanted to, but for the same reason why Bulgarian writers rarely get the chance to present their work abroad: there are no institutions and regularly organized events in our country which aim to promote our work on the international stage. So it must be clear by now how necessary I think the Sozopol Fiction Writing Workshop is and I would like to thank Elizabeth Kostova for organizing it. I am also grateful to my colleagues from Catalonia, Croatia, Germany, Ireland, the Netherlands, Serbia, Slovenia, Sweden, Switzerland and the United Kingdom for having extended their hospitality to me. I list the countries in alphabetical order, as it would be both impossible 26

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and vulgar to classify these gestures of good will according to who gave what. These people had no special reason to take interest in my writing, but still they did it. They didn’t read my texts as some kind of integration quota fulfillment, as a sample of the prevailing moods on the Balkans, or as an example of artistic work from the post-communist countries, but as a personal endeavor. As something written by a human being for other human beings.

In fact, this is the best definition of literature I can come up with.

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ILIYA TROYANOV Igniting the Narrative Engine: On the Interrelation between Research and Prose Writing Lecture written for the Sozopol Fiction Seminars, 26 May – 2 June, 2011 1.

Why Research?

Living in Trieste, James Joyce one day wrote a letter to his brother in Dublin. He asked him to check whether the house number of a certain pub was 16 or 18. It seems amazing that Joyce, who has never been accused of fastidious realism, would go to such great lengths to find out about such a minute detail. Such bureaucratic exactitude would seem ridiculous and superfluous were it just an end in itself. Suppose, however, that even an author of deconstruction like Joyce, who challenged the facile affirmation of language and perception, believed he had to use the bricks and stones of the existing world in order to construct his alternate vision. Suppose that without his belief in the prerogative of the exact detail, the 12-cylinder-engine of Joyce’s narration would not have jump-started. In this case, we might understand his urge to find out about the exact location of a particular pub, for only then could he enter it, only then would he be able to notice the ad for “Plumtree’s potted meat … stuck under the obituary notices.” He would hear Bloom’s thoughts, meandering from ham to cannibals, missionaries and the purity of meat in religion. Once the table has been properly set, the taste buds can go wild: “Peace and war depend on some fellow’s indigestion. Religions. Christmas turkeys and geese. Slaughter of innocents. Eat, drink and be merry. Then casual wards full after. Heads bandaged. Cheese digests all but itself. Mighty cheese.” The trampoline allows for the most miraculous flights of fancy, yet if it weren’t firmly bolted to the ground, the triple summersault with double rotation would end with a broken neck. Maybe this scene would not have been possible had Joyce not known whether the pub was located at No. 16 or No. 18. Pubs are mentioned eight times in Ulysses. One of them is called Davy Byrne’s, the others are anonymous, and not once is the location of the pubs given. By the time the vision had blossomed, the information had become redundant.

2. Virtues of Research The Writer’s Launch In literature as in criminology, inconspicuous details can turn the tide. Don DeLillo has described the initial impulse for his novel Underworld, which spans decades of US-American history and draws a psychogram of the nation. It seems hard to believe that this ambitious, wide-ranging book started off with a small newspaper article commemorating the championship-winning home run of the 1951 World Series. A few weeks later DeLillo decided to find out more about that game and its context. When he looked at the front page of the New York Times of Oct 4, 28

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1951, he saw two neatly balanced headlines. On the left it said: GIANTS CAPTURE PENNANT, and on the right: SOVIETS DETONATE ATOMIC BOMB. Sitting in the basement of a local library, the author felt the excitement of history. An interest awoke. A few days later he discovered that figures like Frank Sinatra, Jackie Gleason and Edgar Hoover had been present at the ballgame. In regard to this information, DeLillo speaks of “combustibility.” The names pointed towards different communities, working-class backgrounds surfaced, the three men becoming “a herald of themes and character.” Authors tend to live with certain ideas, motifs, which are vague and unfocused. They are clouds of methane – once a spark is added, they can explode into creation.

Richard Burton, the 19th century traveler of many talents, has fascinated me for many years, as part of my crucial interest in cross-cultural exploration. But only when I read of one weird scene in Cairo did the transformation of his life into fiction become feasible. Burton was walking through the bazaar with a few fellow British officers. They reached an open area, on one side a group of dervishes were celebrating detachment. Their ritual consisted of a technique of breathing, a canon of incantation and a style of whirling. Burton joined the dervishes, to the great dismay of the British officers and the bystanders. He seemed to be imitating them. But the Sufis, at least those who were not lost in ecstasy, realized that he knew all the elements of the ritual, that he had mastered a technique which was the privilege of the initiate. They welcomed him as a brother. After a while he took their leave and rejoined his fellow officers. “By Jove, Dick,” one of them is supposed to have said. “For one moment there I thought you were a nigger.” Combustibility is at hand. The dramatic shift, the double identity and the question which arises out of the remark: how will this multi-layered identity survive in a world of dichotomy?

The Reader’s Landing Strip If concrete details are launching pads for the quivering imagination of the author, they are also runways for the reader, guarantees of a safe touch-down after a turbulent flight. Even Science Fiction relies on the stabilizing authority of facts. I remember reading a Sci-Fi novel, probably set in the year 2314 in galaxy YXZ. In one scene, two non-human creatures were discussing the finer points of preparing Chinese Duck. This minute detail helped the reader to take the bizarreness of their world seriously, to feel interest and even empathy. On a comic, inconsequential level, this underlines the effect of details. The reader needs a reference point to understand and judge the peculiar, provocative vision of the author. You can get rid of the laws of gravity, you can expand the universe, but you cannot make the mistake of giving the wrong recipe for Chinese Duck. The duck is the saving grace, your passport to trust and persuasion.

Enter the Devil

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A German – and an English – proverb says that the devil is in the detail. It seems to have been coined for literary usage. Not only does it draw attention to the fact that sloppiness can wreak havoc, but it also seems to imply that skepticism is nurtured by competent knowledge. For the devil is – at least according to a certain Western tradition – the symbol of doubt, the good genius of heretics. Research gives the author access to a history behind the hidden official history. One example would be the subaltern historiography that has defined many post-colonial novels.

Another example would be how Milan Kundera exposed the Stalinist rewriting of history by comparing two versions of the same photograph: the first with the Czech foreign minister Gottwald and the second, after his downfall, omitting him. But these are direct efforts at unmasking official history. Literature is often more subtle, challenging the whole concept of history as a stable edifice of the past. Literature draws unusual connections through society and even from one epoch to the other – pylons of detail support these connections. I believe this to be the reason for the creative success of Rushdie’s Midnights Children and Shame. The later novels, devoid of such precise knowledge, are as brilliant and ephemeral as fireworks.

Incorporating the Body Writing encompasses many physical aspects, but the process itself seems to negate the body.

Some authors have written standing up, including classics like Goethe and Schiller, but also the contemporary Günter Grass; others have stressed the need to walk while composing their thoughts. Nevertheless, the author usually sits at his desk and only remembers his body when his back aches or his legs feel numb. Research gives the author a reason to use his body. A few years ago I followed Richard Burton’s footsteps through Tanzania, two tough months of hiking and camping. One evening we ran out of water. We went to sleep, we woke up with slightly parched lips and set off immediately, expecting to come across a river or some locals. By lunchtime we had not met anyone and started to panic. Eventually we reached a village, where we gulped down the water given to us and for several precious minutes splashed water on our faces. My body remembers this vividly and I am convinced that I have been able to describe drought and the absence of drinking water more convincingly.

Escaping the Author’s Autism “The passionate mastering of documentary material is a bracing cure for the self-spiraling and unremitting inwardness that a long novel can inflict on a writer.” (DeLillo again). You try to overhear conversations, to stare into a face in an effort to decipher it, you meet people who can guide you in certain matters, and you immerse yourself in activities you normally wouldn’t even dream of doing. Looking through my notes, I realized that the research on Richard Burton has forced me to interest myself in such diverse topics as witchcraft in Tanzania, the Hajj pilgrimage, opium, malaria, marble, the taxes in the state of Baroda in 1845, falconry, chronometry, sacred 30

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prostitution, surveying and cartography. Bizarre as this selection might sound, I would not want to miss the chance it gave me to embrace a variety of themes and thoughts that makes a writing life so exiting.

3. Fact Forms Form Beginning the Beginning The beginning is a root that stretches into the future. Antonio Lobo Antunes, a wonderful Portuguese writer, recently said in an interview that once he has found the first sentence, everything else unravels automatically. Allowing for some exaggeration, it is easy to see what he means when reading the first sentence of one of his many novels: “The family of the judge lived on the other side of the market, beyond the cypresses of the private school and the house of the doctor, supported by gillyflowers and shadows, in that part of the small town, that spread out around the ruins of the synagogue, suffocating in a labyrinth of hey stacks, in front of the swath of fog coming down the Caramulo Mountains.” MS Word Software immediately warns me that the sentence is too long, even though I have shortened it, leaving out two lines set in brackets, which establish the historical dimension. The novel, literally translated as Treatise on the Passions of the Soul, goes on to describe the interrogation of a terrorist by the judge, old school friends, reunited in adversity. As the narrative progresses, the childhood memories dominate over the political confrontation, and the accused becomes the prosecutor of a deeply rotten, “unchristian” society. One could argue that all this is encapsulated in the beginning, that the established choreography of urban exactitude foresees a rummaging in the folds of the bourgeois worlds. Social and architectural relations are established, which will dominate the rest of the novel. To achieve this, the text is laden with a factuality that overburdens this sentence. But at the same time, the sentence conveys a feeling of an old-world fatigue, of a room stuffed with defining paraphernalia, which cannot be discarded without throwing the reality they represent overboard.

The first sentence of the Richard Burton novel took a long time coming. I knew I wanting to start with his death. Throughout the years of my research, I had compiled a long list of non-connected sentences, idioms and proverbs. Sometimes I read through them, some of them stuck in my mind. One day, the opening sentence presented itself from somewhere: “He died early in the morning, before one could distinguish between a black thread and a white thread.” The image is based on an Arab proverb and in the unfolding drama his pious wife will force Catholicism onto him by having the last rites performed on him. But maybe he dies as a Sufi, maybe as a free thinker, maybe even as an Agnostic. His wife’s ambition is ideological, binary. She distinguishes between black and white threads – but only after Burton, the reader of shadows and shades, has died. I realize that these allusions will not be understood by the reader, certainly not on the first 31

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reading. But that is not so important. The opening sentence establishes a comfort level between the story and myself. It sets the tone for my version of fictional biography.

Perspective In A Thousand Mutinies Now, Naipaul asks a slum-dweller to describe the gully in front of his house. Naipaul juxtaposes this description with his own perspective and the result is a devastating blow against most travel writing. The most far-reaching decision yet to come out of my research concerns the narrative perspective. I realized that an African called Mubarak Sidi Bombay was one of the most experienced and fascinating figures of the epoch of imperial exploration. But his achievements are unsung. He was an active part of four expeditions, following and leading Burton, Speke, Grant and Cameron into the Dark Continent. His take on the achievements of these Victorian heroes would be illuminatingly different from the established perceptions. He would supply the negative to the well-known prints. Through his eyes the forays of Burton would find an unheard judgment. There was a similar figure in the India period of Burton’s life, his trusted servant Abdalla, who I renamed Naukaram because I needed him to be a Hindu. By placing part of the narrative authority into their mouths and trying to imagine their perspective, I had found a literary equivalent of Burton’s crossovers, his camouflages and his immersion into the unknown. On a different level I am taking a similar risk.

Lexical Törlü Gjuvetch Törlü Gjuvetch is the Turkish equivalent of Irish stew, but much richer and more varied than its poor cousin from the impoverished West. You can add everything to it, depending on the season, your means and the economy of leftovers. Therefore every törlü gjuvetch is by definition a unique composition. But good cooks will taste it and make sure that the combination is right, thus ensuring that the törlü gjuvetch does not become the culinary equivalent of “anything goes”.

The Richard Burton novel is a lexical törlü gjuvetch. I add foreign words – Hindi, Gujarati, Arab, Kisuaheli – without explaining them, in the hope that they will radiate through the narrative structure – in what ways, I do not know. On the Internet I found a list of Sindhi names. I have read this list several times and when I write the chapter on Sindh, I will start the day with this mantra of strange names, for they exude a certain rhythm and a certain atmosphere.

Responsibility Sometimes the responsibility one feels towards the researched material changes the form of a book. When I started researching a book on Bulgaria and the so-called revolution of 1989, I had a mixture of the literary travelogue of Chatwin and the precise reportage of Kapuscinski in mind. I ended up writing a factual statement of little literary leeway. I had planed to be brilliant, but when I sat over the depressing testimonies, which summed up the tragedy of wasted lives, I felt 32

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that I was not at liberty to change or alienate them. Their awful dignity was not to be touched.

My book eventually came to resemble a mixture between a chronicle and an oral history, with a dash of accusatory act.

4. Ethics of Writing “Narada said to the manasaputras: How can you create when you are nothing as yet? First travel around the earth, get the measure of it, then you will be able to create with discernment. The sons of Brahma agreed and set off. No one has seen them since.”

After the World War II, the ascetic, withdrawn artistic ideal of Adorno, the highly influential German philosopher, led to the dominance of a subjective, self-centered aesthetic in most of Western Europe. This concept, more appropriate for an Early Christian saint on a pedastal than for a modern artist, has produced two generations of soul-searching literature, of orgiastic sensibility towards one’s own perception of the world. Laws, warnings and instructions were taboo, legitimacy given only to the self-righteousness of the I. Peter Handke, the Austrian writer, formulates his credo: “As an author I am not interested in showing or overcoming reality. I am only interested in showing my own reality.” The more I have researched, the less interested I have become in my own feelings and my personal biography. I have been fascinated by the way one can overcome one’s own prejudices and limitations through writing, how one can be surprised and even bowled over by what emerges from the creative process. More and more, writing for me has become a process of subduing the ego. In dealing with the unknown, I am held in a state of glimmering uncertainty, an excellent state of mind for writing, for nothing is more crippling than the dominance of established facts and certainties. The more we live in a monoculture of fast-forwardness and three-minute-statements, the more the role of the questioning and meandering author is re-established.

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THANK YOU AND SEE YOU NEXT YEAR!

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