IN CONVERSATION
JESSICA
WIDNER
Jessica is a writer and academic. Her novel, Interiors, was released by the87press in 2022. Her short fiction has appeared in Ludd Gang, Extra Teeth, and Gutter. Her critical work centres around contemporary Korean women's writing, and creative writing pedagogy. She is a lecturer in English & Creative Writing at the University of Strathclyde.
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"I desire violently — and I wait."
Anaïs Nin
Sindhu Rajasekaran: I love this quote and deeply admire Anaïs Nin. Was excited to find out that you explore her texts in your work. What is it about viscerality that interests you? You consider the depictions of the body and carnal senses in modern & contemporary fiction; how the body engenders and responds to socio-economic & political pressures. These concepts interest me and intersect with my work as well. What drew you to these themes?
Jessica Widner: I think I was always very interested in the body and the flesh as a space of mediation, that is, where interiority and exteriority can converge, and also as a dialectical space across which things can be, sometimes simultaneously, concealed and revealed. Like, we cannot know what the other is thinking or feeling, but we are always reading bodies in the attempt to.
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Looking back even on very early writing, I think I was always interested in this and what reading and studying gave me was the correct language to explore it, which ended up being that of carnal phenomenology, of understanding the flesh and the senses as sites of transformation and mediation between interiority and exteriority.
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Nin is such an interesting figure for this, because she is deeply concerned by interiority, and her writing is hugely informed by psychoanalysis. She’s usually read in feminist and psychoanalytic contexts which makes sense, but in reading her diaries and her other works on writing, like The Novel of the Future, I felt that her methods were phenomenological. Maurice Merleau-Ponty said, in The Phenomenology of Perception, that “the body turns ideas into things.” I think that sexuality and desire are great ways of animating this concept and Nin really is at her best when writing about these things – yes, she is a great writer of interiority, but also of sensuality and sexuality. Her erotica is incredibly sexy, but also dark, sometimes even violent, and she isn’t afraid of exploring taboo and transgressive sexual acts. When I was researching Nin there was a time during which I thought I’d never tire of her. But I recently returned to her work after a few years away, to write a chapter for a new volume on her, and I found her a little tiresome. There’s a lot of bourgeois idealism in her diaries, which makes sense given her social and economic position. But there’s also so much about her writing that’s genuinely exciting and subversive, and I think she’s always a great writer for people to discover.
SR: Tell me about your book Interiors — which shifts between the perspectives of three characters who are haunted by the ghost of a drowned man. Do you find that your critical praxis informs your creative work? If so, is it conscious or (un)conscious?
JW: I wrote Interiors while I was writing my thesis, which was on the sense of touch in contemporary women’s writing. Interiors is, in most ways, a companion to this critical work and a way of exploring via fiction some of the theory I was learning about. My critical and creative practice is consciously intertwined, though perhaps it started out more unconscious and became conscious over time. A lot of this is just the work of academia and writing, where you’re always in this weird position where you have to justify your creative work and explain it. But to me, writing fiction is just another way of being critical. Why do we write, or create art? At least for me, it’s not just about the end goal of being published – of course I want the work to be read by people and I want it to be in the world, and be changed through encounters with readers, and of course I also want the means to continue writing and paying my bills, but what is art ultimately about? For me it is a way of understanding the world. I always come back to this thing Amiri Baraka said in an interview, he said that writing is all about finding the “causal connections of the world” and asking why the world is like it is. “It is understanding that people want,” he said, “it’s not just talking about yourself. It’s some understanding about the world and how it works.” So, writing creatively is another way of trying to raise my own consciousness, and then to raise that of others’, to critique and intervene in this process of being human.
SR: You are interested in embodied resistance in contemporary South Korean women's writing, alongside Korean feminist movements. I have read a lot of South Korean books about books, coffee, and finding the self (in translation). Haven't read Han Kang yet (on my TBR). So, anything you tell me will be highly appreciated. In your Conversation piece, you speak of contradiction, "between acts of violence and those of love, [which] lies at the heart of Kang’s work." Can you speak about this, and feminist underpinnings in Korean women's writing.
JW: I’m always happy to talk about this topic! The first novel of Kang’s that became widely read in the Anglophone world was The Vegetarian. People love to talk about how dark and horrific that novel is, and it is, but the third section of the novel, which is told from the point-of-view of the main character Yeong-hye’s sister In-hye is also filled with this very strong sense of love and care which leads to an ending that is equally bleak and hopeful or, at least, I think it is. Human Acts, which details the very real events of and after the Gwangju Uprising, doesn’t spare us the horror and the breathtaking violence and cruelty of the Western-backed Korean military government, both during the events and also in their systematic covering-up and censorship of the events in the years that followed, but amidst this she describes small, human acts of love and kindness that allow us to, I think, glimpse what the students and workers in Gwangju were fighting for, which is a more just and equal society in which these acts of violence would no longer happen. In her Nobel lecture she talks about this incompatibility, between these acts of extreme violence and evil, and those of love and care: “Is this the act of one human towards another?” Kang says that writing is her way of regaining her trust in humans, and in facing the above “impossible conundrum.”
More broadly, I hope that my work allows for others to better understand the modern history of South Korea, especially as Korean culture becomes more and more popular. It’s important to understand the specific history of Korea – a country which, really, is in an interrupted national liberation struggle, but also to understand how we are implicated in the same systems of neoliberalism and capitalism, and how these systems function globally.
There is some really great feminist Korean literature being translated and I want to particularly shout-out Honford Star Press and Tilted Axis. Tilted Axis recently put out Park Seolyeon’s novel Capitalists Must Starve, which is about a real-life resistance fighter and labour activist, Kang Juryoung, a novel that shows the essential place women have held as drivers of Korea’s national liberation and labour struggles since the outset. Honford Star also put out an Anton Hur translation of Kang Kyeong-ae’s The Underground Village, set during a similar time period.
SR: "Dream, Fantasy and Illness: Exploring the Carnal Imaginary" resonates deeply with me. I remember doing a lot of body writing whilst recovering from Covid. Dreams were central to my imagination and reality back then. Can you tell me about how you conceive carnal phenomenology and why it's so entwined to women's writing?
JW: So, phenomenology is the branch of philosophy that concerns perception of phenomena. Basically, what does it mean to be a human experiencing the world. Carnal phenomenology looks specifically at sensual experience, particularly those of the “carnal” senses of touch, taste, and smell. In his brilliant essay “What is Carnal Hermeneutics?” the Irish philosopher Richard Kearney discusses Aristotle’s conception of the flesh, and the sense of touch as spaces of mediation (this is opposed to other philosophers like Plato, who denigrated touch as an “immediate” sense), which I talked about a bit above. What is perhaps most essential to the sense of touch, as conceived of in carnal hermeneutics and carnal phenomenology, is its transformative qualities. Edmund Husserl has a great image for this which is one hand holding the other – in this gesture, one is both touching and touched at the same time, both active and passive. And according to Husserl, touch is the only one of the five senses that has this dual potential. To me, this seemed like a great metaphor for the reading process itself which is, more often than not, described in terms of the visual and auditory senses rather than the more carnal senses. But reading is (as Wolfgang Iser tells us) a transformative act that goes both ways – we act on the text as the text acts on us and in this exchange the literary work is created.
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To go back to Nin, her work illustrates this wonderfully. The perpetual interplay, the back and forth of interiority and exteriority. The body turning ideas, turning desire, into acts. Acts igniting new desires. Even though all the texts I wrote about in my thesis were by women, I think that this applies to works by writers of all genders. There is, of course, a historical association between women writers and the body, and I didn’t want to necessarily perpetuate this. It’s something I’m still thinking about but, with writers like Nin, Kang, and Mary Gaitskill, I was very interested in how they used literary techniques of shock to evoke embodied responses in readers, the way that these texts literally acted upon the bodies of readers, and these techniques are present in works of erotica and horror, desire and disgust (and in the uneasy middle ground between, which Gaitskill is particularly good at inhabiting).
SR: You also experiment with different disciplines and forms. You have published poetry, fiction, creative criticism, creative nonfiction, and collage. What draws you to shift between forms? As a CW lecturer, do you encourage your students to break/push the boundaries of form and discipline?
JW: Like I said above, writing is a way for me to try to understand, and to participate in the world. Exploring different forms is a way of finding different methods for furthering these interventions. What can one do that another cannot? That said, I think fiction, the novel, to be more specific, has become my preferred creative form. The novel, and third-person free indirect voice in particular allows for “one Mind’s imagining into another” (to quote Keats) that other forms do not.
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And yes, I do! We are particularly proud of the way that, at Strathclyde, we allow for our creative writing students to work across different forms and genres and experiment with new things. I teach a class called “The Made Project” in which students use their creative work to create something tangible like a zine, podcast, short film, etcetera. It’s a really fun class but what I try to do is encourage students to approach and intervene in existing forms and medias critically and think of the ways in which creative writing allows us to participate in different conversations about art, literature, history, politics, and so on.
SR: "Le Fou: On Touching, in four acts" was experimental prose poetry, and was shortlisted for the John Byrne Award. Can you tell me a little bit about this piece? What inspired you to write it?
JW: I wrote this one a very long time ago so I had to go back and look at it again! I was inspired to write this because I watched the Godard film Pierrot le Fou with someone I was seeing at the time and during it realised that I didn’t know that person at all and also that I kind of hated them. There’s more to it, of course, but I don’t want to get into it here! But as you can see it’s also all about touching, and is really a poetic exploration of carnal hermeneutics. I think I was thinking a lot about Merleau-Ponty’s model of the chiasmus, a shape that expresses the way that touch crosses back and forth across our flesh, allowing for simultaneous closeness and distance with the other. I guess it’s about how you can get really close to someone but still feel really far away from them. And, also how you can not really know someone at all but still feel very close to them, if even just for a moment. There’s a bit of an ethics of touch there too – what does it mean to touch well, to touch tactfully, without extracting from or exploiting the other.
SR: Finally, what do you enjoy most? Critique, creative writing (is all writing creative writing?!), theory or experimental prose? I remember you mentioned in Glasgow that you also once wrote videogames! So, you really have worked the entire gamut of form(s).
JW: I certainly have, though sometimes, as in the case with the video game writing, it was out of necessity rather than love! I love critical writing – it feels satisfying, like fitting the pieces of a puzzle together or solving a small mystery. And I love writing fiction, as I said above, though it is much more difficult and less satisfying than critique. What I don’t enjoy is writing about myself or using the ‘I’. Art is where I go to disappear and participate in something myself.
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There is a small part of me that will always wish I could have been a dancer. I do yoga now, which lets me explore and express myself through movement. And I always write about dancers.