Philip Gourevitch
From an interview with Gourevitch -
"As a writer, and we'll talk in a minute about your book on Rwanda, it seems that your challenge is to move from the general notion, the general concept: What is justice? What is the nation state? What is a country? Questions that the people whose stories you tell ask in the course of your conversation. But at another level, you focus in on the detail, the real human being named Paul, for example, in the Rwanda story. Tell us about that movement as a writer from the general to the specific. Anything in particular?"
PG: "I think André Gide said it perfectly well: expressing the general in the particular, the particular in the general, that is the drama of our lives, and he was speaking as a writer. It's not hyperconscious. The one has to contain the other and vice versa. To talk about the general generally, to me it's simply boring, it's simply inaccurate and I don't trust it, I don't know what it means. People will say, well you know Rwanda the nation state, the da da da ... I don't know what we're talking about here. What are we talking about? What is the lived experience of that? What are the political calculations of that? Who's making that happen? On the other hand, if you just go to people's stories and the journalistic cliché, putting a face on the catastrophe, then there's this idea almost like a postage stamp. Then you're saying: here's the general and here's one individual. But it's not one individual. You have to develop the relationship between an individual and an ongoing public course of events. And that is the issue that most interests me in writing, that place where the private lives of individuals intersect with massive historical public events, and the two become confused. And in some way, one loses a fully private life because of public events."
It's interesting, about the loss of the private life. You often want it, it's the essence of the fantasy of becoming famous, and having an exciting life as things happen to you and you discover yourself. But it's also the stuff of tragedy, and it takes years to recover from a few instances of losing control even when you're not sure that's what you've undergone.
"As a writer, and we'll talk in a minute about your book on Rwanda, it seems that your challenge is to move from the general notion, the general concept: What is justice? What is the nation state? What is a country? Questions that the people whose stories you tell ask in the course of your conversation. But at another level, you focus in on the detail, the real human being named Paul, for example, in the Rwanda story. Tell us about that movement as a writer from the general to the specific. Anything in particular?"
PG: "I think André Gide said it perfectly well: expressing the general in the particular, the particular in the general, that is the drama of our lives, and he was speaking as a writer. It's not hyperconscious. The one has to contain the other and vice versa. To talk about the general generally, to me it's simply boring, it's simply inaccurate and I don't trust it, I don't know what it means. People will say, well you know Rwanda the nation state, the da da da ... I don't know what we're talking about here. What are we talking about? What is the lived experience of that? What are the political calculations of that? Who's making that happen? On the other hand, if you just go to people's stories and the journalistic cliché, putting a face on the catastrophe, then there's this idea almost like a postage stamp. Then you're saying: here's the general and here's one individual. But it's not one individual. You have to develop the relationship between an individual and an ongoing public course of events. And that is the issue that most interests me in writing, that place where the private lives of individuals intersect with massive historical public events, and the two become confused. And in some way, one loses a fully private life because of public events."
It's interesting, about the loss of the private life. You often want it, it's the essence of the fantasy of becoming famous, and having an exciting life as things happen to you and you discover yourself. But it's also the stuff of tragedy, and it takes years to recover from a few instances of losing control even when you're not sure that's what you've undergone.
posted by Katherine at 5:06 PM
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