{"id":14776,"date":"2011-04-19T11:42:25","date_gmt":"2011-04-19T15:42:25","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=14776"},"modified":"2011-04-20T00:17:23","modified_gmt":"2011-04-20T04:17:23","slug":"geoff-dyer-on-otherwise-known-as-the-human-condition","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2011\/04\/19\/geoff-dyer-on-otherwise-known-as-the-human-condition\/","title":{"rendered":"Geoff Dyer on ‘Otherwise Known as the Human Condition’"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"

Photograph by Lawrence Impey.<\/p><\/div>\n

\u201cWriting, for me, has always been a way of not having a career,\u201d Geoff Dyer explains, by way of introduction, in his new essay collection <\/em>Otherwise Known as the Human Condition<\/a>. His goal in such a retrospective, he adds, is not to illustrate the coherent themes of his work. Rather it is \u201cto serve as proof of just how thoroughly my career had avoided any focus, specialization, or continuity except that dictated by my desire to write about whatever I happened to be interested in at any given moment.\u201d Dyer\u2019s readers will find that sentiment unsurprising. He is the author of four novels, a critical study of John Berger<\/a>, a book of photography criticism<\/a>, and several books inexplicable in blurb form (e.g. <\/em>Out of Sheer Rage<\/a>, a National Brook Critics Circle Award finalist ostensibly about D. H. Lawrence but largely about the process of Dyer attempting to write about D. H. Lawrence; and <\/em>Yoga For People Who Can\u2019t Be Bothered to Do It<\/a>, a travelogue as easily filed in humor as it might be in philosophy). <\/em>Otherwise Known as the Human Condition is a curio cabinet of reviews ranging across photography, art, and literature, combined with Dyer\u2019s experiential approach to topics as wide as forays into the foreign world, and his search for the perfect cappuccino-and-doughnut combination.<\/em><\/p>\n

How does one approach selecting from a life\u2019s work for an essay collection like this?<\/strong><\/p>\n

My editor, Ethan Nosowsky, and I both independently turned up with a provisional list of what we\u2019d like to see. And we were pretty gratified at how, in a Venn diagram sort of way, there was so much overlap between the two. I\u2019ve written a real lot, including things I\u2019d forgotten about. The general rule would be that they had to at least raise some question\u2014I\u2019m thinking of the pieces about books here\u2014something that transforms it from being a review to a sort of essay in its own right. People either are or are not interested in Denis Johnson, say, but there are a few things in that essay which are worth raising about people other than Denis Johnson. The better the piece, in some ways, the more irrelevant it would render this issue of whether or not you had read the book in question. The pieces also aren\u2019t chronological, so you get a juxtaposition of a piece written maybe twenty years ago with a more recent one\u2014and the slight contradiction that emerges because of that.<\/p>\n

Most of these essays are personal at some level; do you look back on the sentiments and feel like the they hold up for you over time?<\/strong><\/p>\n

What I\u2019ve really liked doing is combining what you might call art criticism or music criticism with something that is happening in real life. Something like \u201cBlues for Vincent,\u201d where I combined what is in a photograph with something in a love letter. So to answer your question in the most prosaic, literal-minded way: Of course I\u2019m not in love anymore with the women to whom these love letters were sent. But I think there is an enduring truth in the sentiment, even if the sort of cast list has changed.<\/p>\n

More generally\u2014and I say this only because I\u2019m struck by how much in life all one really does is confirm to some sort of actuarial norm\u2014if I look at one of my novels or one of these early essays, there is really a lyricism which verges at times on the sentimental\u00ad. And I\u2019m aware that that impulse is much less pronounced in me now than it was then. But that\u2019s entirely in keeping with the actuarial graph, the route everyone takes through life.<\/p>\n

Interviewers never tire of asking whether your fictional characters represent some thinly veiled version of you. But I\u2019m more curious to what extent the persona in your nonfiction<\/em> represents you?<\/strong><\/p>\n

It\u2019s funny, because people always say when they meet me having read me\u2014or they read me having met me\u2014that they are struck by how the tone is pretty similar, in real life and in the books. It\u2019s not the same persona in every book. The Lawrence book contains a particularly irritable one. That\u2019s partly a phase I was in at that point in my life. But more importantly because, stylistically, I was under the spell of Thomas Bernhard. But that kind of dry humor, that sort of back and forth between the really serious and the funny\u2014without putting the funny bits in italics, as it were\u2014that\u2019s something which I think is common to my life and my writing.<\/p>\n

Try as you might to have a book centered around themes, I did find some jumping out at me, one of which was a tension in various places\u2014a review of Susan Sontag\u2019s work, an essasy on nonfiction approaches to the Iraq and Afghanistan wars\u2014between the relative merits of fiction and nonfiction as catalogues of the human condition. Of course, you\u2019ve written both; but is nonfiction on the rise, so to speak?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Again to talk about actuarial norms, it really is the case that as you get older you read less fiction. And then by the time you are my age, it\u2019s really quite minimal the amount of fiction that one reads. As I\u2019ve joked before, the next stage along that path is that you only read military history. I\u2019m kind of looking forward to that. Generally, I\u2019m not anti the novel. As you say, I have written them. What I am anti is this assumption that the novel is the only proving ground\u2014that you are really more of a writer, as it were, if you are writing a novel. Really for me, there is no difference. It\u2019s not like I really want to be a novelist and then there is other stuff I do in between novels, one subsidiary to another. In terms of fiction, the gap between what happens in life and what\u2019s on the page is no greater or less, really, in the fiction than the nonfiction. Because some of it is made up in the nonfiction as well. It\u2019s not like the books are depending for their interest on my having claimed to have some James Frey\u2013like experience. It\u2019s all pretty ordinary stuff. But I\u2019m keen on this idea of\u2014I guess I\u2019d use the term the nonfiction work of art<\/em>\u2014being judged by all of the criteria used to judge novels.<\/p>\n

In a way that\u2019s reminiscent of Tom Wolfe\u2019s original impetus for pushing New Journalism, using fictional tools in nonfiction. Is that a genre which you find commonality with?<\/strong><\/p>\n

When I was a teenager that sort of Tom Wolfe\u2013New Journalism stuff was around. But I\u2019m not sure I would dignify what I do as journalism. With New Journalism there is a degree of reporting, isn\u2019t there? Albeit from a very unusual time. Whereas my writing is more experiential. I would like nothing more than to do a book of reporting on something, albeit in a highly personalized way.<\/p>\n

Your mention of James Frey has me imagining some fact-checker attempting to verify your\u00a0assessments\u00a0of the perfect cappuccino and doughnut (eventually found at a deli in New York, with offerings from the Doughnut Plant) to which you devote an entire essay.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Things change, unfortunately; it would need to be constantly updated. That place, I can\u2019t remember what it\u2019s called now, when I went back there, the\u00a0cappuccino\u00a0was just awful. And my wife came back from New York recently and reported that it had become incredibly difficult to get the standard vanilla cr\u00e8me Doughnut Plant donut. These are the issues that I will be getting to the bottom of when I get to New York.<\/p>\n

You should be staging readings at which these doughnuts are offered.<\/strong><\/p>\n

I\u2019m really surprised in terms of the structure of the publicity that I\u2019m not holding something at the Doughnut Plant. Except that I have been to the Doughnut Plant, so I know that it\u2019s not sort of a great destination restaurant. I was on a radio program where I mentioned the Doughnut Plant, and it was broadcast on the BBC. I took the CD in, thinking that might count for something, and the guy gave me a couple of free doughnuts. You know English people love to freeload, so I was really happy with that. Unfortunately I\u2019d already had a couple of doughnuts that day.<\/p>\n

You quote Amis saying \u201cwriters lives are all anxiety and ambition,\u201d but it seems to me that you could add, from your work at least, \u201cand happiness.\u201d You are often found to be pursuing it through those kinds of small moments.<\/strong><\/p>\n

There\u2019s that old line, I can\u2019t remember who uttered it but I know Amis quotes it, that \u201chappiness writes white.\u201d That\u2019s always seemed to me not true. I\u2019ve been interested in writing about what is happiness, and really preserving my happy moments in the form of verbal snapshots.<\/p>\n

Often, for you, that happiness seems to be found in the nature of the writing life itself.<\/strong><\/p>\n

If you come from a working class background, as Lawrence did, it was just fantastic for him not to be doing a job like his dad did. For me, I went to Oxford where you had to turn up just one hour a week for tutorial. And then I left Oxford and signed on the dole, first once a week and then as unemployment mounted, only about once every month\u2014or even every two months in the worst of the Thatcher era. Basically from the age of eighteen onwards, in one way or another, I became a member of a sort of leisure class. I became used to having infinite amounts of time to do what I wanted. Partly because of my<\/em> background, I think, that\u2019s always seemed just an incredible boon. And although like all writers I whine about all the stuff that you would expect, at the deepest level it\u2019s just such a fantastic thing to be able to arrange your time as you please. What that doesn\u2019t mean is that you just want to lie around all day smoking dope or drinking beer. It just means you are responsible for yourself. And of course then after a certain number of years of leading a life like this, you become absolutely unsuited to do anything else.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201cWriting, for me, has always been a way of not having a career,\u201d Geoff Dyer explains, by way of introduction, in his new essay collection Otherwise Known as the Human Condition. His goal in such a retrospective, he adds, is not to illustrate the coherent themes of his work. Rather it is \u201cto serve as […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":161,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[907],"tags":[478,2167,364,1039,2163,71,1761,2164,2165,2166,2064],"class_list":["post-14776","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-at-work","tag-criticism","tag-doughnuts","tag-essays","tag-ethan-nosowsky","tag-evan-ratliff","tag-fiction","tag-geoff-dyer","tag-graywolf-press","tag-nonfiction","tag-nonfiction-persona","tag-otherwise-known-as-the-human-condition"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nGeoff Dyer on 'Otherwise Known as the Human Condition' by Evan Ratliff<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"April 19, 2011 \u2013 \u201cWriting, for me, has always been a way of not having a career,\u201d Geoff Dyer explains, by way of introduction, in his new essay collection Otherwise Known\" \/>\n<meta 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