“I am really envious of those who can dance and can display their emotions in that embodied way”: An Interview with Jessica Widner

Jessica Widner’s Interiors, published by the 87 Press, is a novel that delves into the psychological and philosophical constraints of social and romantic relationships. Widner sits down with our editor Kashif Sharma-Patel to talk about psychoanalytic frameworks, the role of speech and not-saying, as well as the cultural significance of wine.

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Kashif Sharma-Patel: Where did Interiors come from for you? What influences or models were you looking towards?

Jessica Widner: This book was in the works for about a decade. It is a tricky question because my influences and models changed so much over that time. The book first came during a writing workshop when I must have been in my early twenties, so I was really young and immature in my writing. I wrote a short scene where the wife Lolita talks about the disappearance of her husband and his friend. I did not think too much of it but then those three characters became stuck in mind later. I wrote a complete unpublished draft of a novel that was centred more on the relationship between the two men, between Thomas and Owen. I felt like that was done and that it probably wasn't very good. But I felt like I hadn't fully exercised those characters and I kept coming back to them. I teach on the Creative Writing MA at the University of Edinburgh with lots of students starting out, and I find they are too casual - they say this is the beginning of a novel but they don't seem to understand how much work it is to write and finish a novel. I tell them that I wrote probably three or four different versions [before getting to final manuscript].

I was really excited about modernism when I was younger, and I still am. Nightwood by Djuna Barnes was a huge influence when I read it in my undergraduate degree for a modernism course. That novel made me want to become a writer. When I was writing for the final iteration of the novel I was reading a lot of Anaïs Nin, because I was writing about her for my PhD. Her and Barnes gave me that sense of serious, deep interiority which you find in Interiors. And Nin really gave me a psychoanalytic framework. Her fiction is so claustrophobically interior. I also loved Milan Kundera when I was younger. I don't know if it is still acceptable to still like him these days?

KSP: He's important, the same way someone like Joseph Conrad is an important writer. You do not have to endorse their views to learn from their craft necessarily.

JW: Yes, the philosophical novel is an influence, though I am moving in slightly different directions now.

KSP: To pick up on the psychoanalytic thread and this question of interiority: you do a lot with dreams – both the sleeping dream and the horizon of desire – as well as the play between the said and the unsaid, the past conversation, the conversation in the head, the imagined conversation and so on. Where can the word really go? You play this through Kitty, the psychotherapist, as she is picking up on certain triggers. Where is that coming from, how would you characterise that?

JW: First of all, my mum is a psychodynamic psychotherapist and she went back to school when I was a kid to train. So I do think this question of dreams, neuroses, interiorities came via osmosis. This was a language that I was familiar with. When I was exercising this framework this was something that was there already.

I had such an intense fantasy life as a child as I am sure many writers and creatives have. Whether I had a crush on someone or if I wanted my book to be published. You really have all this desire wrapped up in these fantasies. As I grew older I started to recognise that, on the one hand, having a rich fantasy and imaginative life is a wonderful thing for everyone, and for children in particular, but I started to realise the danger in that as well. That we can start to confuse our desires with reality, and hurt ourselves and hurt other people. So childhood was important for this path I have taken for a couple different reasons.

When you say imagined conversation I am reminded of this book called Infatuations by Javier Marias. It is about a woman who watches a couple at a cafe every morning, and she develops a fantasy about what their lives are like. Then, she sees in a newspaper that the man has been killed and she starts a friendship with the other woman. So much of the novel revolves around the imagination of the protagonist to the extent that the writer starts to confuse the reader. What is real and what is imagined is unclear. That captured my imagination. And I do think that we can become confused like that – all of us. 

KSP: It reminds me of theories of object relations where the idea of the object and the action  are balanced. Too much fixation of ideas ends in becoming a fantasist and can lead to dissociation and schizoid conditions, and on the side you are always acting and never reflecting as a narcissist or addict. It is more tempered what you are doing, but this framework affects us all in some way. In terms of who am I in the relationship to the world: it is an ontological thing. 

JW: Yes, in my day-to-day, truth and connection with reality is so important to me. We all have our blind spots. We are all in our subjective realities, but people can get confused between who they want to be against who we really are. If that continues to go unchecked then that gap between what we say and what we do becomes wider. That is quite a basic thing, but it is certainly something I am interested in. Even with Palestine, I am constantly thinking about how we can justify the privilege and comfort we live in. And seeing people remaining silent on issues that are clear-cut makes me think about the mental gymnastics they must be undergoing. I find it morbidly fascinating.

KSP: What about the other part in terms of not-saying?

JW: I am obsessed with ballet. I did a little bit as a kid but my mum decided I wasn't very good at it. She made me do piano lessons instead, which I didn't like, but now she regrets it. Maybe it was for the best because it is a harsh artform. Again, I noticed that a lot of my creative writing students write about ballet. I think it is very literary. There is something about the suffering associated with it. And I have also been obsessed with dance and ballet. It is narrative, it is storytelling but completely non-verbal, which is the interesting thing. I saw Will Harris read where he said writers are the people who have the most trouble speaking, with saying what they want to say, the most trouble with words. That really resonated with me.

KSP: Yes, you are processing your thought through the writing, and speech is a totally different process.

JW: Completely different! When I was younger in moments of argument I would reach these moments of deep inarticulacy that really affected me. I did this breathwork workshop recently - it is called Conscious Connected Breathwork, like shamanic breathing. You are guided for forty minutes and basically overload yourself with oxygen while lying down. It gets you into a transcendental state. It is very intense. Everyone around me was crying and sobbing, having these big emotional releases. It builds tension in the body and at a certain point it releases. I didn't have this release, instead something came to me which was asking me Why can't I say what I want to say. That was the frustration. This was a year ago and I had not really written much at the time. I went home and I wrote 40,000 words in a month. It had unlocked something in me. 

I went back to thinking about childhood. My mum said as a baby I didn't cry very much, and that I was an easy kid to raise in that way. She was very anxious and she thinks I was really attune to her, so I would hide my emotions as I could sense it. So that inarticulacy around negative emotion is a very early, powerful, embodied sensation. I enjoy moving, doing yoga and such, but I am really envious of those who can dance and can display their emotions in that embodied way.

KSP: Is that in your mind when you wrote Lolita as a ballet dancer?

JW: Merleau-Ponty in The Phenomenology of Perception says the body turns ideas into things. That was a big idea for the novel. This also goes to embodiment and sex also. First of all, young people, my students, are not writing about sex anymore. Mary Gaitskill was talking about this phenomenon. Now students never write about sex. 

KSP: Do you think it is to do with greater sensitivity to the topic?

JW: Well, lots of contemporary fiction – I am currently reading Alison Rumfitt's new book Brainwyrms for instance – does engage with sex and sexuality, but often in a negative sense. I am seeing a lot of writing about sex that is traumatic, about assaults, about consent. I am not sure they are treading more carefully as it is difficult to read, but I am certainly not seeing sex written about as pleasurable or joyful as much as it could be. 

KSP: Yes, I was thinking in terms of an issue of contestation rather than an affirmative issue in the current climate. And the politics of the body moving more in that direction.

JW: Yes, exactly. I liked Katherine Angel's book [Tomorrow Sex Will Be Good Again] on this. In my book, sex is the vehicle in which fantasy and desire become embodied and made real.

KSP: And perhaps it is an expression of neurosis, but that is not necessarily being a blanket negative thing in this respect. But more that exists and needs to be talked about on a more societal level. 

JW: This novel really developed with me throughout my twenties and throughout my studies. When I first proposed my PhD thesis it was based on this structuralist psychoanalytic framework, espoused by Irigaray for example, but by the time it was finished that had disappeared. It was mostly phenomenology by the end, carnal phenomenology. I actually ended up finding psychoanalysis limited. I was not able to use it to express myself. This novel is an important document of my maturing and moving from psychoanalysis to the language of phenomenology which allowed me to express what I wanted in a better form. 

KSP: I wanted to talk about dread, and boredom; the characters dread of being generic and needing an irruption where meaning is made. Wine as a trope through the book seems to symbolise this desire for living differently, and failing to. 

JW: I love that you mention that because I think it is important. It is a class signifier, but it is more than that. I specifically mention natural wine. As I was studying and writing this novel I was working in fine-dining and hospitality. I think alcohol in general is a way that people try to evade genericism – alcohol and drugs. They push you toward some irruption and something significant. The specificity of wine is important. There is a specific type of commodity fetishism happening with this wine in London. It is about money, because it is expensive, but also it is also different and unique, posturing towards sustainability and ethics. It is a social signifier but it is not just about wealth. If you wanted to say I am rich you could drink some old world wine. It doesn't just say I have the money, it says I have the taste. It is a specific kind of conspicuous consumption.

KSP: And in this way you are separating yourself out from the wider world of wine, as well as the wider world in general. And that is somehow meaningful for the characters.

JW: The characters in the novel are all alienated as they are all living in this specific Western, middle class, individualised identity. Having specific tastes and consumption creates an idea of community. It is a really shallow idea of community. But I would see it in my workplace. You can also apply it to the sustainable, local food against the more traditional haute cuisine. Yet this hyperlocal British cuisine is still prohibitively expensive. Perhaps it is just generational.

KSP: You are right. There is a self-consciousness about it - we are making something new. In the book it is a contradictory position which does not hold up.

JW: Yes, it doesn't hold up! When I started writing the book I wasn't thinking of it that critically. I just happened to be in that world [of fine-dining], surrounded by people who really valued aesthetics and image. They wanted to be seen. It is something I think about more and more. It is a community that you have to buy into, to feel a sense of belonging. So, the characters buying nice wine or clothes is an indication of their lack of community, their alienation and they are trying to find something to give their life meaning. 

KSP: And it is interesting that wine comes out at the exact moment of social interaction. It is literally there to bring people together, and yet is coded with this ideology. 

JW: I am actually addressing this more explicitly in the new book I am working on. I am thinking about people with this bourgeois comfort holding left-radical ideas are ultimately a contradiction, but when will this come up. I do think that fine things should be available to everyone but there is a class significance to be examined. 

KSP: Lastly, I wondered about the relationship between theory and creative writing for you. Those are two different forms, two different ways of expression and I am wondering how you shuttle between them.

JW: I was asked that a lot because I did end up finishing this novel alongside my PhD. It is very popular now for people to do the Creative Writing PhD. My thesis was about touch and the body in contemporary women's writing using carnal hermeneutics and carnal phenomenology. I was reading a lot of Merleau-Ponty, queer-feminist theory and affect theory. In my mind this novel is related to my thesis. I wrote about Anaïs Nin, Mary Gaitskill and Han Kang, an amazing Korean writer. To me, though, they both do different things. I cannot switch seamlessly. I would have to work on one for a month, then the other for a month. 

The theoretical ideas that I was exploring critically in my thesis quite naturally were enacted in the novel. I didn't really think about it consciously. It is a great way to write a novel, actually. A Eugene Ionesco quote comes to mind: Ideology comes from art, art cannot come from ideology. He is basically saying to avoid didactic art – it won't be very good. It limits. Fiction is for exploring complex things in a freer way. But one does feed into another, enlivening each side, though I am not doing it overly consciously to avoid that didacticism. You do need the luxury of time. In a perfect world I would just read theory and write novels. It is also very good as a teacher. You need to read critically and widely to be a writer and a teacher. 

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Jessica Widner is a fiction writer and academic. Her first novel, Interiors, was released last year from the87press. Her short fiction has appeared in the Edinburgh International Film Festival commissioned From Troubled Dreams Under a Glare of Sky, Extra Teeth, and Gutter Magazine. She is an Early Career Fellow in Creative Writing at the University of Edinburgh.