In your story “The Honest Island,” a man named Craint finds himself living in a hotel on an island where he doesn’t speak the language. He has no memory of how he got there, or of his life before this sojourn. How did the story come together for you? Did you begin with this premise and then seek out an explanation for it, or did you have a full sense of the story’s world and its rules before you sat down to write?
I wrote this story just a few months ago, and now I’m struggling to remember how it came together. Maybe it’s more literally autobiographical than I realized.
I believe I had the setting in mind before anything else, since the island was inspired by an actual place I visited. I imagined a foreigner on the island with no memory of when or why he had come. From there, I sorted out the rest while writing the story. (Its human world, as opposed to its geography, is—I hope it’s clear—entirely made up.)
When I have a concept for a story, part of the pleasure of writing is figuring out just what about the conceit appealed to me, why the situation felt pregnant. This usually means identifying points where the idea connects to my emotional life or my experience of the world. At the end of Donald Barthelme’s story “The Balloon,” the narrator explains that the eponymous balloon—massive, mysterious, hovering over the city—“is a spontaneous autobiographical disclosure.” I feel that there is something of this in “The Honest Island.”
The story offers a quite specific geography for the island and the area that surrounds it. Why are the details of the place so explicit, when the larger question of what it is, where it is, even if it is, is left to the reader to decide?
The protagonist, Craint, is somewhat opaque and unknown to himself. He’s a bit like a sketch that hasn’t been inked in. Much of how we come to know him, and how he comes to understand his situation, is through his interaction with the world around him: Budger, the other principal character, and the island itself. In fact, I think it would be fair to say that the island is the third principal character in the story.
It’s probably unnecessary to point out that our life, our language, our character all emerge from the confrontation of self and environment. For young children, who do not generally experience the world through a metalanguage of explanations and abstractions, this is even more apparent. Their encounter with the world is not “preprocessed,” so to speak. Having lost his memory and, with it, some of this explanatory mediation, Craint shares something with a child negotiating the world for the first time. I was struck, while writing, by the extent to which simple words we use to describe human actions or activities presuppose the environment we’re embedded in: “walk,” “climb,” “swim,” “breathe.” Our words take account of the enveloping world, the impossibility of isolating the individual.
Beyond that, the story accepts a blurry boundary between physical reality and internal or emotional reality. The atmospherics of the island—hot, stagnant, glassy, bright—mirror Craint’s state of mind, his confusion, bewilderment, blindness, apathy. Writers are cautioned to steer clear of the “pathetic fallacy”—to avoid imbuing nature with the emotional baggage of character or story—but I don’t know who makes these rules or by what authority they feel entitled to enforce them. Literature has been pathetically fallacious since it got going, and I think this only reflects, naturally and organically, the fact that it’s not a scientific document but a space in which to meditate on the intersection of inner and outer, mind and world.
You, as the author, know what’s going on in “The Honest Island,” and you dole out hints throughout the story, but do you want us to see a bigger picture?
I wouldn’t say a bigger picture, singular, but I do hope that readers will come up with their own ideas about what’s going on. I was quite careful about how much definite information to supply in hints and clues. I hope, in the end, that I’ve given enough to make speculation fruitful without compelling a reductive interpretation.
I fear I’ve said this before, but I don’t believe that writers have the final say or even unique authority to stipulate what their stories are about. A lot of writing proceeds by intuition rather than by “encoding” a meaning for readers to puzzle out. That is to say, fiction should, to my mind, slightly eclipse the author’s own understanding of it. And, while I’m all for people sharing their interpretations of stories, I think authors should tread lightly when it comes to their own work: their words simply carry too much weight and risk foreclosing other ideas and tampering with art’s essential open-endedness.
You drew my attention to an answer that Haruki Murakami gave in a recent Q. & A. with you, which summed up my feelings perfectly. After saying that readers should find their own response to his story, he writes, “As the author, of course, I have an interpretation, but it’s not necessarily the right one. It’s simply one hypothesis and nothing more.”
We learn in the story that Craint, and then a second man, Budger, go to the island willingly, and, in advance, are aware that they will lose their memories of their previous lives. Why, having been forewarned and chosen this form of oblivion, is Craint then so resistant to it?
We all experience regret in life, having made decisions we thought were good only later to wonder whether we made the right choice, or whether following our desire was in fact conducive to our happiness. Given the extreme consequence of his choice, I think it’s natural that Craint would feel ambivalent, uncertain, torn. The question is why he, in particular, can’t let go of the past or accommodate himself to his decision, and I’m not sure the story answers this, except to say—as the prefect who administers the island does—that this happens occasionally. The fact that it happens to Craint is what makes him the story’s protagonist. I don’t think Budger could take his place, since he seems unlikely to have second thoughts. But even in this I could be wrong. Maybe there’s more to Budger than I see.
Craint isn’t a common name; in fact, I don’t think it’s a name at all. In French, it’s a word for “fear” (and, at some point in the story, we discover that Craint’s probable family members have French names). Did you choose the name for that resonance? And Budger, although he clearly speaks the same language as Craint, speaks it with an intonation and with idioms that are recognizably British. Should we take these names as clues to the mystery of the story?
I don’t want to tell people how to understand these names, but I will say that I chose them intentionally. They’re supposed to be last names, and although they are unusual, they’re also quite close to fairly common names. Readers, in any case, should feel free to view them and other bits of information as “clues”—not to some solvable mystery but to the themes and subtext of the story.
I’m guessing that your mentions of lotus flowers are also a kind of clue, a reference to the lotus-eaters in the Odyssey.
The connection to the lotus-eaters occurred to me only after I had written the story, when I was revising it. I’m not sure whether it snuck in subconsciously or whether it’s simply one of those archetypal stories that permeates culture. In the oldest telling—only sixteen lines in Homer’s Odyssey—Odysseus and his men have been blown off course and, after several days at sea, make landfall on a strange coast whose pacific inhabitants subsist on the lotus tree, a plant whose abundant fruit and flowers have, in those who consume them, a pleasing, narcotic effect that causes them to forget about their previous lives and saps them of any will to return home. Eventually, Odysseus must have the men who partake of the lotus dragged back to the ship, crying, and bound beneath its rowing benches.
Later writers revisited this story, notably Tennyson in his poem “The Lotos-Eaters” and Joyce in the fifth episode of “Ulysses.” Although Odysseus and his men face many trials on their voyage, the brief sojourn among the lotus-eaters cuts perhaps most perilously against the epic’s fundamental logic and theme—that of nostos, or the journey home, from which we get the word “nostalgia.” In an essay on the “Lotus-eaters” episode in “Ulysses,” Maud Ellmann writes, “The lotus flower, by inducing forgetfulness of home, undermines the logic of nostalgia—the longing for home—that governs the epic. The lotus therefore represents a counter-odyssey, opposed to the idea of homecoming and even to the sense of an ending—the teleological principle of narrative.” There is, in short, something so foreign, so alien, so dangerous or destabilizing about forgetfulness of this sort that it undermines the very foundations of storytelling, which, like life, draws meaning from struggle and conflict, the effort to confront and act willfully against one’s circumstances.
In the “Nestor” episode of “Ulysses,” Stephen Dedalus famously describes history as “a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.” In “Humboldt’s Gift,” Saul Bellow has Von Humboldt Fleisher quip that “history was a nightmare during which he was trying to get a good night’s rest.” You could perhaps understand Craint’s dilemma or ambivalence in light of the tension between these two accounts, although I don’t mean to suggest that it is history at issue here. Life itself, with all its toil, drudgery, tragedy, and pain, is weighty enough. The question concerns the precise enmeshment, or inextricability, of nostalgia and homecoming—the unrelenting awareness that induces longing and suffering, that opens us to tragedy and hardship, but that also guards against the oblivion and the apathy that rob life of the possibility of meaning.
Without giving too much away, how do you imagine Craint’s future after the story ends? Or don’t you?
One reader of an early draft told me she expected the story to end with Craint getting on the boat and leaving the island. She was surprised it continued for a few more paragraphs. I can only say, for my part, that it felt important to take the story just a bit further and end it where I did. But that’s as far as I imagined it, and I don’t have an idea or theory about what happens next. I’m not sure, in fact, that I’ve ever had a clear idea about what happens after a story I’ve written ends. I think the honest truth is that I’d have to write on to find out. ♦