{"id":75104,"date":"2014-08-07T17:04:55","date_gmt":"2014-08-07T21:04:55","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=75104"},"modified":"2014-08-07T18:05:45","modified_gmt":"2014-08-07T22:05:45","slug":"the-comic-voice-an-interview-with-christina-nichol","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2014\/08\/07\/the-comic-voice-an-interview-with-christina-nichol\/","title":{"rendered":"The Comic Voice: An Interview with Christina Nichol"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Christina-Nichol\"<\/a>

Photo courtesy of the Overlook Press<\/p><\/div>\n

Last month, Brooklyn\u2019s powerHouse Books hosted Norman Rush, Marco Roth, and Christina Nichol to discuss Nichol\u2019s debut novel, <\/em>Waiting for the Electricity<\/a>. Set in a post-Soviet Georgia, rife with power shortages, the book stars Slims Achmed Makashvili, a maritime lawyer navigating the perplexing, often hilarious vagaries of life in a corrupt republic. Slims yearns to visit America\u2014he writes letters to Hillary Clinton and applies to a business program she sponsors\u2014where he hopes to discover a land of stupefying efficiency. But when at last he arrives in the U.S., the vision of progress is not what he\u2019d hoped.<\/em><\/p>\n

Nichol has taught English in India, South Korea, Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, Kosovo, and, of course, Georgia; her experiences abroad inform much of <\/em>Waiting for the Electricity\u2019s observant wit. With Rush and Roth, she discussed the direction of the comic novel, fiction\u2019s bearing on foreign policy, and a State Department official with a ukulele.<\/em><\/p>\n

ROTH<\/p>\n

Christina, how did you end up in Georgia? How did you join the great English-teaching enterprise that is this new American century?<\/p>\n

NICHOL<\/p>\n

As a kid I went to the Soviet Union with my grandfather, who braved a hundred Americans and a hundred Russians on a boat down the Volga River. This was during the eighties, and I sort of fell in love with Russia\u2014I continued to go back to witness the transformation of communism into capitalism, which I saw as an amazing and tragic story of the twentieth century. I\u2019d been to Kyrgyzstan, too, and as an adult I was trying to get back. I applied through this foundation, and they said, Well, we have Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Georgia available. I\u2019d once seen some Georgian folk dancers, and they were really amazing, so I decided on Georgia, knowing nothing about it.<\/p>\n

ROTH<\/p>\n

And Norman, you spent some time in the Peace Corps.<\/p>\n

RUSH<\/p>\n

Not technically. [Elsa and I] were co-country directors in the Peace Corps in Botswana from \u201978 to \u201983. But the formative effect of being outside the country for a long period of time is certainly the same\u2014having that be a catalyst to a kind of uncheckable literary impulse, looking at a different part of the great evolution that\u2019s taken place. But Christina, you said something intriguing\u2014that you thought the conversion or the evolution of communism to capitalism was a great tragedy. That\u2019s certainly not the State Department opinion. Are you a Bolshevik?<\/p>\n

NICHOL<\/p>\n

I suppose I\u2019m thinking of how it was done to hold up America as an example. In communist nations, they\u2019d heard all these terrible things about how capitalism works\u2014someone gets money and then doesn\u2019t provide the service he\u2019s been paid for\u2014and they\u2019d say, Well, that\u2019s the free market economy for you! Then, under capitalism, they began to live the kind of ideology of the propaganda they\u2019d been brought up with. It was actually an even worse form of capitalism than ours.<\/p>\n

RUSH<\/p>\n

Yours is a glorious comic narrative, and there\u2019s something slightly odd in talking about it in the midst of terrible political tragedy, the murder and carnage taking place around the world\u2014a kind of carnage in which, as humans and as Americans, we\u2019re all to some degree implicated. But it isn\u2019t strange, actually, when you think about it. Comic narrative, especially high comic, in textual form, is very important for two reasons. One, it relaxes us and returns us. It disengages us from the essential tragedy, the base tragedy, and the unnecessary tragedy that we encounter as human beings. And it teaches a kind of distance. It has a way of recharging, of remaking our willingness to be open, to have strength in the world, and to work within it. This novel is a remarkable entry into the world of comic fiction. If you look at the history of what\u2019s considered funny in terms of narrative fiction, it\u2019s been pretty much a male reserve. Examining, say, English Anglophone writers\u2014novelists, not short-story writers or nonfiction writers\u2014there\u2019s Stella Gibbons\u2019s Cold Comfort Farm<\/a><\/em>, but suddenly now there\u2019s Lydia Davis, Rivka Galchen, and an explosion of the comic subject. <\/p>\n

NICHOL<\/p>\n

I was in Kosovo last year, and they love Facebook. They\u2019re constantly posting aphorisms. One that I read recently was by a man. He wrote, \u201cHumor requires intelligence and honesty. That is why women love men who are funny.\u201d And I wanted to write back, Well, what about women? They didn\u2019t know how to deal with me in Kosovo. They didn\u2019t understand that women can be funny.<\/p>\n

ROTH<\/p>\n

Were you worried at a certain point that your reader would only be laughing at the malapropisms and the funny folk ways of this dorky character? The short way of referring to this is the Borat<\/em> problem. Did you ever have this moment of crisis when you feared you were betraying your Georgian friends? Or did you feel like they\u2019d understand, because what you saw there led you to believe that comedy could work in the ways that Norman suggested?<\/p>\n

NICHOL<\/p>\n

I\u2019d started to have some crisis if I\u2019d been away from Georgia for too long. I\u2019d think, How is this possible? This country actually exists like this. They actually do<\/em> hang their paintings upside down. For me, comedy is about the disruption of power. It\u2019s about taking the formal and informalizing it, taking the informal and formalizing it. That\u2019s the power that Georgia understands, and that\u2019s the way they\u2019ve been able to live, to stay sane\u2014by turning their suffering upside down, turning what they have no control over upside down. I always felt that I was laughing with them. When I\u2019d show parts of the book to them, they would always feel so honored. They\u2019d say, You\u2019ve captured our spirit.<\/p>\n

RUSH<\/p>\n

I want to recommend a book called The House of Nire<\/a><\/em>, a long Japanese novel by Morio Kita, published in the nineties. It\u2019s based on a family that runs an insane asylum in Japan, in the period of about 1905 through the Second World War. You can see what a wonderful metaphor that is\u2014the only sane people are the ones running the insane asylum. But I was going to ask about your influences.<\/p>\n

NICHOL<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve discovered that Georgia, until recently, didn\u2019t really have a strong literary tradition. They had a strong finger-puppet-theater tradition, a strong singing tradition, and theater and film. But they did have a few writers whom they were really proud of. One was this Nodar Dumbadze, and another, this Abkhazian writer, Fazil Iskander. Andrei Bitov, too. A lot of Russian Soviet writers. And what I noticed is that they can\u2019t help but write in that comic tradition. When you get to Georgia, it just infiltrates you. You take a walk on a mountain and you feel this comic voice infusing you.<\/p>\n

ROTH<\/p>\n

I wanted to ask both of you about writing in the voice of the opposite gender or sex. Christina, your novel is told in the voice of a male narrator. And Norman, \u00ad\u00ad\u00adMating<\/em> is famously narrated by a woman, and parts of Subtle Bodies<\/em> are narrated in the voice of a woman. Slims is looking for the center of national Georgian identity, right? The essence of Georgia. And yet, here you are, a Georgian male impersonator. Do you think there is a Georgian national identity? Do you think this notion of national identity gets overplayed, particularly by Americans?<\/p>\n

NICHOL<\/p>\n

\"WaitingElectricity_Cove\"<\/a>The male voice came to me with the phrase, My name is Slims, and I live in the twelfth century. Once I had that phrase, I had the voice. I couldn\u2019t really escape. This person was living with me, and when I came back to America, he was constantly sitting on my shoulder, making snide comments about American culture. As for the Georgian national identity, when I was there they were recovering from living under the Russians, whom they did not like. They were trying to find an identity. As Slims\u2019s line suggests, they thought of the twelfth century because that was when they owned the most land, and they thought, Well, that was our most noble time. I think they were trying to portray themselves to me, an American, as a noble people. For example, I went to Tbilisi with this friend of mine, and he insisted that he buy me a sword. We were walking down the street, I was holding onto this sword, everybody we passed applauded. We got to his apartment, on the twelfth floor, and starting cutting potatoes with the sword, and I noticed there was one bed and one blanket, and I start getting a little bit nervous about the sleeping arrangements. I guess he noticed, because he took the sword and threw it on the middle of the bed, and he said, If I cross that sword, kill me with it in the morning. I don\u2019t know if he would have done that to a Georgian girl.<\/p>\n

RUSH<\/p>\n

It\u2019s exceeding the extended narrative fiction form for comic purposes that represents such an unusual change. I think there\u2019s a confidential war between men and women that\u2019s been going on for a long time. Great gains are being made incrementally along the way. Taking over contested spots in literature is part of gaining expressive property. But I think it\u2019s only the beginning. This kind of comedy is also part of what we call the media advance of comedy. That\u2019s been huge, too. So it\u2019s happening not only in print, in text, it\u2019s happening elsewhere, on YouTube for example.<\/p>\n

ROTH<\/p>\n

In some ways, you could say that female comedy came to TV and movies first, and only latterly\u00a0has gotten into the novel. But there are some examples. Ivy Compton-Burnett\u2014<\/p>\n

RUSH<\/p>\n

She\u2019s actually a good example, because she\u2019s not really funny. She\u2019s super ironic, but she\u2019s not funny the way Christina is. The other great American woman comic writer, it seems to me, is Flannery O\u2019Connor. But she has written a lot that\u2019s quite Gothic to an extent that\u2019s it\u2019s kind of funny. Again, though, it\u2019s not quite the same. This is the real thing. This is humor like Twain did it, or Dickens. Different.<\/p>\n

NICHOL<\/p>\n

When I was applying for this job in Kosovo, I didn\u2019t really know much about it. I thought it was a Slavic country. The embassy called and tried to sell me on it. They said, Oh, it\u2019s like The Sound of Music<\/em>, fruit trees and wonderful people, happy. They didn\u2019t ask me a single question, so at the end, I thought, Well, I should probably talk about myself. So I said, Oh, I think I would really fit in there. I really understand Slavic humor\u2014the light at the end of the tunnel is actually a train coming in your direction. And there was this silence. And the man said, No, we are not a Slavic culture. This is Albania. They are more optimistic.<\/p>\n

ROTH<\/p>\n

You\u2019re at the cutting edge of what could be called a form of American imperialism, in the way that in the nineteenth century, the British Empire would send missionaries to far-off lands. When you were teaching English, did you feel like you were, in a quiet way, supposed to be an evangelist for the great American way of life?<\/p>\n

NICHOL<\/p>\n

I did feel conflicted about the idea of teaching English. I would secretly tell my students, I\u2019m teaching you English so you can protect yourselves against us. They would admit it\u2014We want the English, but we don\u2019t really want the values that come with it. In Kosovo, tourists would think, Oh this is where the Serbs fought. That was the image they wanted to keep, a picture of the Serbs bombing a particular house. They weren\u2019t noticing the texture of life\u2014what about this guy who\u2019s really upset because his boss keeps taking a picture of his bald head and putting it on Facebook? What I found in Georgia was a kind of emotional intelligence. Their depth of commitment to one another was so deep that I wanted to portray it. Teaching English in these other countries has always been a means of hearing their stories, of humanizing them, and of disrupting the pervasive mainstream image.<\/p>\n

ROTH<\/p>\n

Is it fair to say that Americans don\u2019t realize the extent to which we\u2019ve saved the world from the perils of fascism and communism and bombing only to present them with ordinary humiliations? And it\u2019s those ordinary humiliations that add up to ideologies\u2014<\/p>\n

NICHOL<\/p>\n

When I got the job, I didn\u2019t realize how much they wanted us to introduce American culture. They wanted us to talk about Halloween. Why a Muslim culture needed to celebrate Halloween, I\u2019m not sure. And there was a time when the embassy invited a gay couple to the library in Kosovo to talk about gay rights. The library director said, Okay, the embassy\u2019s coming to give us a talk about gay rights. We need to collect a lot of people. Just make sure nobody understands English. I do tend to kind of demonize our foreign policy, but I have this former boss at the State Department who would e-mail me, and really what he wanted to talk about was his accordion. I realized that they\u2019re bureaucrats, but they\u2019re really craving that lightness, craving some sort of meaning amid these bureaucratic jobs. As you were saying, comedy is a way in. He found out that I had published a book, and all of a sudden he wanted to sponsor me to read at all the different American embassies around the world. I was like, Great, but you haven\u2019t actually read it yet. Just a couple days ago he got to chapter 10\u2014the book is filled with a lot of proverbs, and he found one he really liked. It inspired him to write a little song. The proverb is, The tall one wouldn\u2019t bend, the short one wouldn\u2019t stretch, so the kiss was lost. Imagine this guy in Washington, in the State Department, on his ukulele, just playing this song.<\/p>\n

RUSH<\/p>\n

I think that\u2019s so wonderful that you do something with that. There\u2019s nothing like it. There\u2019s actually a kind of a developing, it\u2019s not exactly a genre, but there are some good novels by Americans about the transition from communism to capitalism. I don\u2019t know if you know Caleb Crain\u2019s Necessary Errors<\/a><\/em>. It\u2019s about a young gay guy teaching English in Prague after the Velvet Revolution. It\u2019s quite good, quite sad. The common theme of all of these novels is a baffled sadness about the way things turned out\u2014very moving. And true to feeling.<\/p>\n

ROTH<\/p>\n

I wanted to ask about the use of folk songs in the novel.<\/p>\n

NICHOL<\/p>\n

It\u2019s quite something to be eating dinner and then to have the entire dinner table erupt into some perfect harmony. The people get up and start to dance. They all know these songs. I can\u2019t vouch that they\u2019re perfectly translated in the book, because I was usually in a slightly inebriated state when I heard them\u2014which is the way you\u2019re supposed to hear them. Here we pair wine with cheese, there they pair wine with song. It\u2019s a very emotional experience. I\u2019d never lived anywhere that honored sadness as much as they do. A lot of these songs are sad, but they allow time to feel that sadness. They don\u2019t try to run away from it. The songs are a kind of guide for the sadness.<\/p>\n

[Nichol\u2019s editor, Mark Krotov, interjects.]<\/em><\/p>\n

KROTOV<\/p>\n

You said something to the effect that you didn\u2019t want to write a novel that was going to have a kind of traditional\u2014whatever that might mean\u2014Western teleological direction. You didn\u2019t want a novel that would begin and end in ways that we\u2019re used to. Could you talk a little bit about the plot and resisting it as you were writing?<\/p>\n

NICHOL<\/p>\n

I had the sense that the traditional Western narrative sustained capitalism in a way\u2014it was all about the hero overcoming the obstacles. This individual, internal quest. I wanted to portray a character where the internal and external were in alignment, because the external was his commitment to his community. To have some sort of schism there seemed so Western to me. So what I was trying to do was to create a voice of community.<\/p>\n

RUSH<\/p>\n

Would you object to its being called a shaggy dog story? I\u2019m saying this with all respect, because you succeeded to achieve. Your character is not someone who sets out with a problem, solves it, and then finds a community to enjoy sweet success. He has nothing to do with the arrival of electricity, which, in the novel, changes the fate of the future. It is very brave to write a shaggy dog story. It\u2019s something that people are going to have to get used to, because a lot of them are in print now, including a very long one, not yet finished, by Karl Ove Knausgaard. In a way, you\u2019re part of a turn among writers against identifiable preconceived plot. More power to you.<\/p>\n

Norman Rush<\/a> is the author of<\/em> Whites, a collection of stories; and the novels<\/em> Mating,<\/em> Mortals, and<\/em> Subtle Bodies.<\/em><\/p>\n

Marco Roth is the author of\u00a0<\/em>The Scientists: A Family Romance, and a founding editor of <\/em>n+1.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Last month, Brooklyn\u2019s powerHouse Books hosted Norman Rush, Marco Roth, and Christina Nichol to discuss Nichol\u2019s debut novel, Waiting for the Electricity. Set in a post-Soviet Georgia, rife with power shortages, the book stars Slims Achmed Makashvili, a maritime lawyer navigating the perplexing, often hilarious vagaries of life in a corrupt republic. Slims yearns to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":735,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[907],"tags":[14907,71,221,4912,14906,1132,11732,813,747,534,14908],"class_list":["post-75104","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-at-work","tag-christina-nichol","tag-fiction","tag-georgia","tag-hillary-clinton","tag-httpwww-theparisreview-orgblogwp-contentuploads201408christina-nichol-copy-jpg","tag-interviews","tag-marco-roth","tag-norman-rush","tag-novels","tag-soviet-union","tag-waiting-for-the-electricity"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nThe Comic Voice: An Interview with Christina Nichol<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Norman Rush, Marco Roth, and Christina Nichol discuss Nichol\u2019s debut novel, \u201cWaiting for the Electricity.\u201d\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, 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