A Balkan State of Mind or Me, Me, Me: On Heteronyms and Works of the Imagination

A Balkan State of Mind or Me, Me, Me On Heteronyms and Works of the Imagination

Nicholas of Hitchin

A Balkan State of Mind or Me, Me, Me

Privately published in 2012 by Nicholas of Hitchin Š Nicholas of Hitchin 2012 The moral rights of the author have been asserted.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electrical, mechanical or otherwise, without first seeking the written permission of the copyright owners and the publisher.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the Central St. Martins library. www.nicholasofhitchin.com

A Balkan State of Mind or Me, Me, Me On Heteronyms and Works of the Imagination

Nicholas of Hitchin

Interview (n.)

From M. Fr. entrevue, verbal noun from s’entrevoir “to see each other, to visit each other briefly, to have a glimpse of.”

First question: what is a heteronym?

A heteronym is not a pseudonym, which is merely a false name. Heteronyms are invented characters with carefully developed biographies and modes of thought, invented by an artist in order to express another side of his or her practice, and thus to deepen the narrative behind a product.

They are effectively fictional characters whose doings are manufactured by the artist. The term was invented by the Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa, who had 72 of them, and therefore 72 modes of output.

Am I a heteronym?

No. You are merely a temporary literary device which I have constructed solely to help me communicate a dialogue that is happening in my head. I have created you but I 7

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haven’t even given you a name or any characteristics. And I suspect that, as a reader reads this, he is already disapproving of my disregard at not even giving you a name, which just goes to show the power of these things. They care for your feelings already, even though you are imaginary. And they are correct to do so.

Could I become a heteronym?

If I choose to use you again: to give you a name, a backstory; to establish your interviewing style; to create more substantial product under your name… it is all possible.

Is Nicholas of Hitchin a heteronym?

No. Nicholas of Hitchin is me. I am the curator, collector, reporter, presenter of many works of the imagination.

When I use heteronyms, they are the hero of the story.

I, as Nicholas of Hitchin, am both the storyteller and the hero in disguise.

Are you insane?

This is always possible. For me, for you, even for the reader.

Yet this is a narrow reading of a much more nuanced picture. I refer you to this abbreviated passage from Herman Hesse’s Steppenwolf: Every ego, so far from being a unity is in the highest degree a manifold world, a constellated heaven, a chaos of forms, of states and stages, of inheritances and potentialities…

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…The heroes of the epics of India are not individuals, but whole reels of individualities in a series of incarnations.

And in modern times there are poems, in which, behind the veil of a concern with individuality and character that is scarcely, indeed, in the author’s mind, the motive is to present a manifold activity of soul. Whoever wishes to recognize this must resolve once and for all not to regard the characters of such a poem as separate beings, but as the various facets and aspects of a higher unity, in my opinion, of the poet’s soul… …The Steppenwolf… believes that he bears two souls (wolf and man) in his breast and even so finds his breast disagreeably cramped because of them. The breast and the body are indeed one, but the souls that dwell in it are not two, nor five, but countless in number. Man is an onion made up of a hundred integuments, a texture made up of many threads.

So all your heteronyms are you? Or parts of you?

Of course. They come from me, and me is all I have.

So why not just be ‘you’?

You’re not getting this. I am ‘just being me’. Were I to manifest ‘a unified ego’ as Hesse would put it, a reader’s understanding of me may be loaded with expectation, perceived or received understanding, familiarity (or lack of it), like, dislike, and so on.

And of course it is just the same for me as the maker.

Every time I make a work of art I bring to it my own age, culture, race, sex, identity, experiences, fears, inadequacies.

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On Heteronyms and Works of the Imagination

But if I am making work in the character of a 17th century Albanian child nun, then I must make different work, as all my instincts and acquired practices become useless. A good heteronym is like a set of clothes worn by a performer: it clears the field for both maker and reader, at least in the first instance until the conceit is undone.

And what happens when it is undone?

Curiously, when discovery is a built-in part of a conceit, then people warm to it quite readily. It is theatre — acting and performance. And as with theatre one is not horrified when one discovers that the person who was recently murdered on the stage isn’t really dead, just as one does not read a novel and despair that it is not ‘true’: one does not feel ‘lied to’. The concept of a heteronym, when you take away the long word, is so readily understood as to qualify as a hard-wired instinct, fully appreciable even, or especially, to children: It is make-believe for the self.

What is the function of a heteronym as a tool?

One of the functions of art is to tell stories, and believable and reliable narrative is at the heart of this. In written or performed fiction the conceit has become such an accepted part of our lives that, in the heat of reading a good story, or watching a good performance, we may cease to recognise the characters as having been ‘created’ at all. We imbue them, without a second thought and without any rational cause, life. We care for them; we worry about them, hold 10

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our breaths when they are in danger, stay up late reading about them so we can be sure they are going to be okay.

And we do all this not just willingly, but necessarily.

Operas, novels, plays, movies and television dramas all work on this universally understood principle. So the use of imagined characters is a fantastically useful tool: to inspire this automatic concern that we can have for imagined people, even when the knowledge and evidence that they are imaginary is right in front of our eyes. This is possibly a subconscious acknowledgment of Hesse’s ideas: we are caring for and protecting a projection of a part of our inner selves that we have knowingly or unknowingly recognised.

Are your characters ‘real’, then, in any sense?

I would argue that ‘real’ is a function of how much something, or someone, matters to you.

When speaking, writers of fiction will often refer to their characters as if they were real people. The more developed a character becomes, the more they seem to find a way to impose their own thoughts on both the author and reader, who may understand that they wouldn’t, for example, attend a boxing match, or take a day off if they had a cold. So developed are their biographies that soon it becomes apparent how they ‘would’ or ‘wouldn’t’ respond in any given situation. As readers we become deeply attached to them and expect them to follow these implicit rules of character. We admire their bravery, or their compassion, or their humour. Again, we hope for their 11

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well-being and inconvenience ourselves to ensure that it is met. My characters are as real as Sexton Blake, Flashman, or Sherlock Holmes. But my characters, instead of solving crimes or enduring quests, make art, and the evidence of their doings is usually an art object, rather than an implicit narrative arc in a novel.

What set you on the path to working this way?

It started with reading novels. Like every reader I understand the established structures and the implicit conceits of literary fiction. But I wanted to see how far I could take these conceits in art.

So in 2010 I began to experiment with the idea of making art and design in a similar way. I would create and inhabit the characters of others, conjured from imagination, cast in immaculate roles and ignorant of my own personal history. I could move between modes without worrying about a ‘consistent’ output. I could ask — Who are they? What kind of artefacts would they make? And why do, or did, they make them? Such ideas allow both maker and reader to become immersed in the work more profoundly; enable us to care about the work beyond the pleasures of any surface aesthetic.

The chief benefit of this approach is that it frees an artist of his own prejudices. In terms of outcomes, the works may find their ultimate place in a greater variety of locations. Depending on the heteronym, and thus the type of work produced — a pot, a photograph, a typeface, an 12

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installation, a series of letters, a novella — the product may find a home in a gallery, as an online collection, or as a portfolio of graphic works.

It is perhaps easiest to think of me as an author of fictions. And when an author makes a character for you to read about, he can make anyone of any age and sex and from any period in time. I am, despite your confusion, not doing anything that unusual.

Where did your first heteronym, Roy Gold, come from?

From a dearly-held ideal of a maverick, massively intellectual and workshy professor, of the type now absent from much of academia. That he was an aggressor, surly, confident, spiteful and romantic, and also such a careful defacer of precious books, appealed to me greatly. These are all parts of me that, for whatever reason, I suppress, and thus admire greatly in others.

Who is George Razinsky?

No-one. Razinsky has no back story: he is a mystery known only by the ‘found document’ HinduReich. In this sense he is not the character — the book he is said to have made is the character, and we must therefore deduce or suppose everything else about him from it. So Razinsky is not a heteronym, but a work of the imagination. There is a difference.

It’s a deceit?

It’s a conceit that looks like a deceit.

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What’s the difference?

For our purposes a conceit is intrinsically implicit; a deceit is intrinsically explicit. The art I make is implicit but looks explicit, designed to push the limits of what we can accept as a conceit.

Take H.P. Lovecraft’s short story The Call of Cthulhu.

The text is presented in layers: an introduction explains that the following document was found among the papers of the late Francis Wayland Thurston. We then see this document: Thurston, as author, tells the tale of his having found some papers in his dead uncle’s office, papers which set him off on a terrifying psychological journey. Lovecraft assumes the role of editor, or presenter, of Thurston’s report. Correspondingly he subtly implies that the story is true.

But here in the real world, the story is held in a paperback book, with a nice scary cover and located on a shelf marked ‘fiction’ in the bookshop. It looks like fiction so we read it as such, but go along with Lovecraft’s conceit because its lack of absolute veracity is implicit: it is a story.

However, were Lovecraft to have presented the same text to a newspaper as a witness, it would have been an explicit deceit, a hoax. Yet Lovecraft was an artist who declared himself the author of purposefully equivocal writing, so that we as readers might have the pleasurable responsibility of never quite knowing the truth, in which case the story takes on another dimension, and in which tension and doubt contribute to the effect.

It is a conceit that Thomas More used for Utopia in 14

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1516: the author as reporter of a second-hand tale. Ricky Gervais used a similar conceit for The Office in 2001: a sitcom that looked like a documentary. These are all works of the imagination. And with both, as sales and cultural endurance have attested, we are still happy to accept and enjoy them as make-believe entertainments, even on discovery.

As an artist testing the boundaries of all this, I am doing what Lovecraft didn’t: I would present a work to a paper as a witness, but still call it art. I talk more about all this, if you’re interested, in a pamphlet entitled The Murphy Table.

What’s The Murphy Table?

It’s my proposed classification system for types of deceit and conceit in storytelling. The table begins with the explicit nature of non-fiction and moves through six types of ‘murphy’ before reaching the implicit nature of fiction.

It’s an attempt to broadly identify the spaces between what is manifestly ‘false’ and what can be understood to be ‘true’; the games people play in the shadows between these ideals; and the welcomes they are likely to receive.

Right. So back to heteronyms – what now?

To date I have over a dozen heteronyms, each creating different types of work, and many of them ‘known’ to each other. By this expedient the works are now evolving and diverging across surprising and unexpected Darwinian strands: each heteronym creates according to his or her experiences, prejudices, environment and limitations.

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On Heteronyms and Works of the Imagination

Tell me about some of them.

Conway Gold — no relation to Roy Gold — is the guitarist in the X-rated country group Big Dick and the Sweethearts.

The Sweethearts split up after just a few performances but have a small and devoted following. One of these is Peter Malburg, who has documented all of their memorabilia.

Malburg owned Raßendyll Phonograf, the now defunct German record label home to the Sweethearts as well as the Gustave Arenska Duo, Heavy/Bulky, You and Others Around You, and The Temporarily Five, members of which are also heteronyms. Additionally, Malburg inherited the publishing company GrauHaus Verlag from his uncle Luther Malburg, who published books on, amongst others, Marcel Castafiore, the self-declared Pan-Dimensional Map-maker; and Brook Sargent, the American artist and ‘aetherist’. Then there is Ted Hoy, Dallas Goldsby, Bill Littlefield, Bill Courtright, Dutch Charles, Pal Easton...

And will you only work with heteronyms from now on?

No. Heteronyms are one aspect of my works of the imagination, one available approach, one of several tools I can use to tell my stories in the way I think best for the story.

So in the end, does it matter who really ‘makes’ something? If so, how?

Who is the ‘maker’ when we visit the imaginary spaces of novels and dramas? The character, defining his own future?

The author, defining it for him? Or the reader, filling in the 16

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gaps and willing him on? It’s a little of each, as expressed previously. The author does some making, but the character does a lot, too, often without being asked. When you conjure something into existence, quite soon it starts conjuring for itself. As you and I should both know.

In my work, the motifs of literary fiction are merged with the making of visual art. What emerges is something else altogether. And as with fiction, the result is somehow — mysteriously, ironically — often more ‘real’ than a nonfictional voice can achieve. Realism, after all, has its limits.

So will your novel be a heteronymic work?

No. With the novel I shall be confusing the picture even further. But as I have tried to explain, it is only confusing if you try to understand it, rather than simply accept it as make-believe.

The novel is written by me, Nicholas of Hitchin. But it is a version of me, a parallel me. In the book I am in love with a little island called New Orcady, which I visited as a child. The island is a place where stories are important and have a mystical and religious value in and of themselves. As a result the islanders celebrate their folk tales on the designs of their coins, so the stories never die and remain in circulation — a melding of the metal and the moral, as I describe it. So the book is presented as an informal coin catalogue, with a coin for each chapter. Each chapter carries an illustration of the coin being talked about, and a numismatic description. Then begins the folk tale attached to it. It is 17

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essentially a book of short stories bound together by the ‘Macguffin’ of the coins.

Another weird word. What’s a Macguffin?

A Macguffin is a plot device that exists solely to drive a narrative forward: a briefcase (Pulp Fiction); a valuable artefact (The Maltese Falcon); enemy plans (Star Wars). The term seems to have been coined, or at least popularised, by Alfred Hitchcock. Sometimes the MacGuffin is unimportant — in Pulp Fiction the briefcase is used to get the plot moving but is soon forgotten as the characters develop. Sometimes it is central to the work — in Star Wars the securing of the enemy plans is essential to the security of the heroes’ future. A Macguffin can be unimportant, crucial, or anything in between. But it must offer a ready point of entry into the story for the reader.

On your website there’s a picture of you as Adam in the Garden of Eden, wearing a fig leaf. Explain.

That’s a new project called Milk and Honey, in which I inhabit all the key characters of the Old Testament.

I don’t know what to say to that.

Which must mean that this interview is over, and you must cease to exist. For now.

It’s too late. I already exist.

Now you’re getting it.

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Works mentioned in this text: Books from the Roy Gold Collection www.nicholasofhitchin.com/The-Roy-Gold-Collection

A Complete Record of the Document HinduReich, Credited to George Razinsky, 1944 www.nicholasofhitchin.com/George-Razinsky-s-HinduReich

Little Worlds: An Introduction to The Murphy Table, a Classification System for Types of Deceit & Conceit in Storytelling www.nicholasofhitchin.com/An-Introduction-to-The-Murphy-Table