{"id":3653,"date":"2012-12-07T20:54:19","date_gmt":"2012-12-08T01:54:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/julijasukys.com\/?p=3653"},"modified":"2013-02-14T11:05:02","modified_gmt":"2013-02-14T16:05:02","slug":"cnf-conversations-an-interview-with-essayist-chris-arthur-part-i-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/julijasukys.com\/?p=3653","title":{"rendered":"CNF Conversations: An Interview with Essayist Chris Arthur, Part I"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Chris Arthur, On the Shoreline of Knowledge: Irish Wanderings. Iowa City: Shoreline Books, 2012.<\/a><\/p>\n

The carefully crafted, meditative essays in <\/strong><\/em>On the Shoreline of Knowledge<\/strong> <\/strong>sometimes start from unlikely objects or thoughts, a pencil or some fragments of commonplace conversation, but they soon lead the reader to consider fundamental themes in human experience. The unexpected circumnavigation of the ordinary unerringly gets to the heart of the matter. Bringing a diverse range of material into play, from fifteenth-century Japanese Zen Buddhism to how we look at paintings, and from the nature of a briefcase to the ancient nest-sites of gyrfalcons, Chris Arthur reveals the extraordinary dimensions woven invisibly into the ordinary things around us. Compared to Loren Eiseley, George Eliot, Seamus Heaney, Aldo Leopold, V. S. Naipaul, W. G. Sebald, W. B. Yeats, and other literary luminaries, he is a master essayist whose work has quietly been gathering an impressive cargo of critical acclaim. Arthur speaks with an Irish accent, rooting the book in his own unique vision of the world, but he addresses elemental issues of life and death, love and loss, that circle the world and entwine us all.<\/em><\/p>\n

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\u201cChris Arthur is among the very best essayists in the English language today. He is ever mindful of the genre\u2019s long literary tradition and understands\u2014as did his great predecessors\u2014that the genuine essay is grounded in the imagination, in our quest for art and beauty, as deeply as is poetry or painting. Every young writer who wants to experience the creative possibilities of the essay form must read Chris Arthur\u2014it isn\u2019t an option.\u201d\u2014Robert Atwan, series editor, The Best American Essays<\/em>.<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Chris Arthur<\/strong> lives in Fife, Scotland. He has published several books of essays, including Irish Nocturnes, Irish Willow, Irish Haiku, Irish Elegies, and Words of the Grey Wind. His work has appeared in <\/em>Best American Essays, American Scholar, Irish Pages, Northwest Review, and<\/em> Threepenny Review, among others. He is a member of Irish PEN, and his numerous awards include the Akegarasu Haya International Essay Prize, the Theodore Christian Hoepfner Award, and the Gandhi Foundation\u2019s Rodney Aitchtey Memorial Essay Prize. Visit www.chrisarthur.org<\/a> to find out more about the author and his writing.<\/em><\/p>\n

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Julija \u0160ukys: Your essays often take the meditation of familiar objects as their starting points. For example, you reflect on a seed found in your mother\u2019s coat pocket and use it as way of contemplating her passage and of wondering about sides of her personality that you never saw. In essays that follow that first (I must say, masterful) piece, you take a pencil, a family painting, your father\u2019s briefcase (a varied \u201csilent symphony of objects\u201d) as starting points. Your contemplation of these things then takes you on journeys of remembrance, of speculation, of mourning, and of historical clarification (by this I mean the ways in which you translate the Troubles and your experience of growing up in Ulster through seemingly trivial material objects and inconsequential places). The result is this incredibly rich and dense collection, <\/strong>On the Shoreline of Knowledge<\/em>. I confess to being a slow reader on the best of days, but it took me forever to finish your book. This is not a because of some fault in your work, but rather a function of its density and richness. Each essay is a kind of polished stone, or perhaps like that drop of dew you write about with so many images and stories contained within it. Congratulations on an extraordinary accomplishment. <\/strong><\/p>\n

This past fall, I\u2019ve been leading a writers\u2019 workshop on the personal essay. We\u2019ve talked a lot about the ways in which the best essays contain the large and the small \u2013 or rather the large within the small. Your essays seem to me to be some of the most dramatic illustrations of the principles that I\u2019ve come across. I wonder if you could talk a little about your approach to writing and thinking your way from the small to the big and back again.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Chris Arthur: <\/strong>I\u2019m fascinated by what I suppose you might call the dual nature of things \u2013 though that\u2019s something of a misnomer. The duality is more apparent than real and lies in us, and how we observe things, rather than in the things themselves. I guess in some ways it\u2019s a kind of defense-mechanism to stop ourselves being overwhelmed. What I mean by dual nature is the way in which something can be seen in such different perspectives, how we can measure it according to such enormously varied scales. For instance, my first book, Irish Nocturnes<\/em> (1999) begins with an essay entitled \u201cLinen.\u201d Its point of departure is a small piece of embroidered linen cloth. At first glance it seems entirely ordinary \u2013 something easily overlooked or just dismissed as uninteresting. But when you start to examine it, think about it, you\u2019ll find that it\u2019s densely packed with all sorts of interrelated stories \u2013 the story of flax and its cultivation; the story of the individual who made it; the story of linen manufacture, in particular the ways this developed in the part of Ireland where the piece of linen is from; the story of the metaphors and symbols that can be derived from linen; the story of this fabric\u2019s use from ancient times until the present. Teasing out some of the storylines embedded in this one small piece of cloth you soon find far wider vistas opening up than are immediately apparent when you first look at it.<\/p>\n

I was pleased that a reviewer specifically flagged up the way \u201cLinen\u201d moves from the small-scale to the large-scale. Writing in The Literary Review<\/em> (Vol. 44 no. 3 [2001], pp. 602-03) Thomas E. Kennedy said this:<\/p>\n

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I started the first essay, “Linen,” with a fear that I would be subjected to one of those wearying parsings of technique too often serving as essays (how neon is made; how the horned beetle mates), in which one learns industrial or biological detail one is never likely to have use for and which, in the words of Dylan Thomas, “tell us everything about the wasp but why.\u201d But no, Arthur moves from the tradition of linen to the strands of history and the sorrows of those who have come before us\u2014a movement back in time that he conjures on the flying carpet of a single piece of antique linen … In a mere fourteen pages we have surveyed the history of mankind through a piece of stuff that lies beneath the author’s computer, and we\u2014I\u2014find a new way to meditate existence.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Of course it\u2019s not just bits of linen that offer the essayist flying carpets by which to get to interesting places. All sorts of objects and experiences have this same potential. In fact I\u2019m almost tempted to say that everything has. I love John Muir\u2019s comment that \u201cWhen we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe.\u201d From an everyday, commonsense perspective, of course, we turn our back on Muir\u2019s insight and behave as if we can consider things singly and separately. My essays are in the business of reminding us about their hitching to everything else. I try to highlight and follow for a way some of the intricate mesh of connections in which things are embedded.<\/p>\n

Your point about essays containing the large within the small is a good one and points to an important theme in many essayists\u2019 work. But moving between the scales is not something I try to do consciously. I don\u2019t have to think my way from the small to the large and back, its more like noticing a rhythm or a dynamic that seems implicit in things \u2013 or in the way I see things. It\u2019s almost like the heartbeat of perception. Maybe writing essays is a kind of taking of this pulse.<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve learned a lot from what reviewers (and interviewers) have said about my writing. They\u2019ve often made me aware of things I\u2019ve been doing without consciously realizing I\u2019ve been doing them. For instance, when I read Graham Good\u2019s review of my first three collections considered together (this appeared in the Southern Humanities Review<\/em> Vol. 41 no. 4 (2007), pp. 390-94), I thought \u201cAh, so that\u2019s what I\u2019m trying to do\u201d when he said:<\/p>\n

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Arthur’s aim in his essays is to move from immediacy to immensity, from the vivid concrete particulars of an incident, an object, or a sight, to the most universal ideas: the human condition, the infinity of space and time, the complexity and connexity of the world.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

John Stewart Collis talks about \u201cthe extraordinary nature of the ordinary.\u201d Georgia O\u2019Keefe refers to the \u201cfaraway nearby.\u201d I like to start with nearby, ordinary things \u2013 what lies close to hand and seems commonplace and familiar \u2013 and then see the incredible faraway destinations that are led to as soon as you start to think about what\u2019s involved. I\u2019m just amazed at the complexity and depth that\u2019s wired into the everyday things around us. I suppose my essays try to open a window onto that. But it\u2019s not as if I set out to do this. I don\u2019t sit down at my desk and say \u201cRight, it\u2019s time to move from immediacy to immensity,\u201d it\u2019s more something that just happens because of the way I read the world, because of how things fall on the fabric of my consciousness and how I want to write about them as a result.<\/p>\n

But when someone like Graham Good comes along and points out what I\u2019m doing, I\u2019m pleased to have what I\u2019m about identified so clearly. (I have, incidentally, been incredibly fortunate in the reviewers who\u2019ve commented on my work. There\u2019s been a real generosity of spirit evident alongside the many perceptive comments they\u2019ve made.)<\/p>\n

Just before leaving the movement between small and large, let me make a couple of book recommendations that I think should be on any essayist\u2019s reading list: Henry Petroski\u2019s The Pencil<\/em> (1989), and Jan Zalasiewicz\u2019s The Planet in a Pebble <\/em>(2010). These are both wonderful examples of how, starting with something that\u2019s seemingly completely ordinary, you can reach all kinds of unexpected destinations. Both of these books exemplify what Alexander Smith called \u201cthe infinite suggestiveness of common things.\u201d \u00a0That\u2019s something I think essayists need to be alert to. I guess in a sense it\u2019s what they try to transcribe. Smith \u2013 whose Dreamthorp: A Book of Essays Written in the Country<\/em> (1863) is well worth reading for what he says about the genre \u2013 also suggested that \u201cthe world is everywhere whispering essays and one need only be the world\u2019s amanuensis.\u201d Not infrequently I feel like a kind of harassed scribe attempting to note down the whispered symphonies issuing from the things around me.<\/p>\n

You write that essays are like bicycles, \u201cin that they allow us to get close to elusive things.\u201d How does this work in practice for you? Do you sneak up on an idea or does it sneak up on you?<\/strong><\/p>\n

To some extent, I see cars and motorways as emblematic of the objective\/academic approach of an article; bicycles and meandering country roads as emblematic of the personal\/reflective nature of an essay. This is not to say I always prefer the bicycle \u2013 if I want to cover a lot of distance quickly I\u2019d opt for a car. Bicycles are good when you\u2019ve got a shorter journey, when you\u2019ve time to look around and consider things. Just as different vehicles are good for different types of journey, so are different modes of writing. The way an essay unfolds itself wouldn\u2019t fit every occasion. I guess the comparison was in part occasioned because of the way in which cycling allows you to follow all kinds of unnoticed paths and unfrequented byways; how you can easily stop to look at and investigate things, or wheel round and retrace your route to enjoy the view again. If there are roadworks and a red traffic light, you can walk, or cycle on the pavement, instead of waiting in a queue. Cycling seems more in tune with the essay\u2019s individuality than the anonymity of a car. Its pace seems more attuned to the genre\u2019s reflective mood. You can hear things and smell things you\u2019re not aware of when you\u2019re enclosed in a car. But I\u2019m not sure how far the bicycle\/essay comparison can be pushed. Maybe I\u2019m particularly susceptible to it because I like to start my writing day by cycling.<\/p>\n

As for whether I sneak up on ideas or they sneak up on me, it\u2019s probably a case of my being initially ambushed by an idea and then, when I start to write about it, it\u2019s me who\u2019s trying to hunt down related ideas \u2013 though of course it\u2019s not as neat or predictable as this might make it sound. I\u2019m frequently ambushed by ideas that have sneaked up on me as I\u2019m writing. And using \u201cideas\u201d here maybe gives too intellectual a view of things. My essays often start from things rather than from thoughts, albeit things that are laden with ideas. If you asked me for the ideas that lie at the root of my writing, I\u2019d be hard put to answer (a reviewer like Graham Good would be a better person to ask). But if you asked about the things that spark my writing, that would be easy. Among the objects that have led to essays are: pencils, old photographs, pieces of linen, briefcases, a pelvis bone, the ferrule at the end of a walking stick, some fragments of willow pattern china \u2013 all sorts of things.<\/p>\n

Adam Gopnik, who guest edited the 2008 edition of that wonderful annual series, The Best American Essays<\/em>, identifies three types of essay: review essays, memoir essays and what he calls \u201codd object\u201d essays. This third type, which he claims is \u201cthe oldest of all essay forms,\u201d is the kind that \u201ctakes a small, specific object, a bit of material minutia\u2026.and finds in it a path not just to a large point but also to an entirely different subject.\u201d Many of my essays are indeed concerned with finding paths to unexpected destinations in \u201cmaterial minutia\u201d \u2013 we\u2019re back to the large-in-the-small. But, for me, it\u2019s not so much the \u201codd-object\u201d that needs to be emphasized, more the ordinary object that, once examined, once made the focus for a piece of writing \u2013 once essayed \u2013 comes to seem odd. Estranging the familiar, helping us see the extraordinary in the everyday, is more what I\u2019m about than offering some kind of peep show into what\u2019s just plain weird.<\/p>\n

When you think in terms of things rather than ideas, it\u2019s certainly more a case of objects creeping up on me than my doing so on them \u2013 or, since this might seem to bestow an improbable intentionality on what\u2019s inanimate, maybe it would be better to say that it\u2019s more a case of my stumbling across things that have something about them that sparks the desire to write. I don\u2019t go out to look for them in any kind of deliberate, systematic way \u2013 they\u2019re all accidental discoveries.<\/p>\n

This is Part I of a two-part interview with Chris Arthur, Click here to access Part II.<\/a><\/p>\n

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