Arnon Grunberg
PEN Blog

Semantic Disagreements

By all means, the author Ilija Trojanow is a true cosmopolitan. He was born in Bulgaria, grew up in Kenya, then lived in South Africa and India before settling down in Vienna. He writes in German, and is fluent in English—and I assume in Bulgarian and a few other languages. His most famous novel is The Collector of Worlds (Der Weltensammler) about the British explorer, Richard Francis Burton.

I met Trojanow in the fall of 2010 in the Dutch city of Groningen. He was giving a lecture about climate change and I had been asked to be the second speaker.

The situation was a bit awkward. I cannot remember whether Trojanow spoke in English or German, but I’m pretty sure that I spoke Dutch. Trojanow had to read the English translation of my text while I was speaking. There was no room for discussion afterwards, so the whole event ended where it should have begun.

But Trojanow took this as a gentleman.

He spoke about the need for the novelist to be politically engaged, and about the preparations and research for his latest novel EisTau (a neologism in German that roughly translates into something like Ice Dew). I was skeptical about his ideas on the possibility of authors changing the world. Yes, every serious novelist has the ambition that readers will see the world differently after finishing their novel, but such a change is not necessarily political.

Despite our differences, we had a pleasant talk afterwards over dinner. Trojanow took an interest in my journalistic pieces. He asked to edit and publish them in Germany.

This month I traveled to St. Louis, where Trojanow is teaching in the German department at Washington University. St. Louis was much more pleasant than I’d expected. The weather was gorgeous and Washington University reminded me of an expensive sanitarium where I would have loved to stay a couple of months.

We discussed our project in a bar on the top floor of the Hilton Hotel, from which we could see all of St. Louis.

The next day I joined Trojanow for his final class. He had just finished giving a course on dystopia in recent German fiction.

Trojanow and I followed up on our discussion we had started in Groningen, about the political responsibilities of the author.

It turned out that many of our disagreements were semantic; everything depends on how you define the word “political.”

On one thing, we agreed wholeheartedly. Fiction is everywhere. One task available to novelists is to make clear that our belief in our own rationality is very often just another kind of fiction.

Or to put it differently: you cannot find meaning; you can create meaning.


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