Hanif Kureishi - Collected Essays

Surely, then, if politicians cannot possibly do the trick, artists might do it. Speaking from themselves and sensibly refusing to do advertising, they do nonetheless speak for some of us, and they take the punishment on our behalf too. In the absence of other convincing figures, like priests or leaders, it is tempting to idealise artists and the culture they make.

Nevertheless, in the end, there is no substitute for the value of one’s own words, of one’s story, and the form one has found for it. Sartre, in his autiobiography Words , says, ‘When I began writing, I began my birth over again.’ There is something about one’s sentences being one’s own, however impoverished and inadequate they might feel, which is significant, which makes them redemptive. If you wanted to tell someone you loved them you usually wouldn’t get someone else to do it for you.

If there are to be a profusion, or multiculturalism, of voices, particularly from the margins of expression, then the possibility of dispute and disagreement is increased. The virtue and risk of real multiculturalism is that we could find that our values are, ultimately, irreconcilable with those of others. From that point of view everything gets worse. There is more internal and social noise and confusion, and more questions about how things get decided, and by whom. If the idea of truth itself is questioned, the nature of the law itself is altered. It can seem conditional, for instance, pragmatic rather than divine, or at least subject to human modification or intervention, if not control.

There are always good reasons not to speak, to bite our own tongues, as many dissidents, artists and children will testify. It will offend, it is dangerous, hurtful, frightening, morally bad, others will suffer or they will not hear.

But the good thing about words, sentences and stories is that their final effect is incalculable. Unlike violence, for instance, which is an unmistakable message, talking is a free form, a kind of experiment. It is not a description of an inner state, but an act, a kind of performance. It is an actor improvising — which is dangerous and unpredictable — rather than one saying lines which have already been scripted. ‘The thought is in the mouth,’ as Tristan Tzara put it. It is not that we require better answers but that we need better questions. All speaking is a demand, at first for a reply, proving the existence of communication, but, ultimately, for an answer, for more words, for love, in other words.

You can never know what your words might turn out to mean for yourself or for someone else; or what the world they make will be like. Anything could happen. The problem with silence is that we know exactly what it will be like.

From a certain point of view it’s almost irrelevant who the protagonist of a novel is. What one wants as a writer when planning a piece of fiction is to find a position from which one can see. So what a novel does, for the writer, is to bring together the numerous notions that have been cooking in his unconscious for the previous weeks, months or even years. A book then will be a kind of imaginative diary, an account of what the writer wasn’t quite aware of but would come to know as he proceeds.

When I wrote Something to Tell You , I chose to make the protagonist a psychoanalyst because writers and Freudians, though they may have presented themselves as rivals, were, during the twentieth century at least, interested in the same thing.

Modernism in literature and the discoverers of psychoanalysis were looking in similar places. So the three most significant works of the early twentieth century — which are Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams , Proust’s The Remembrance of Things Past , and Joyce’s Ulysses — are all concerned with sleep, dreams, childhood, sexuality and jokes. They are, in other words, fascinated by all of that which cannot be apprehended and examined by consciousness. The mystery of the human subject, and its elusiveness, are common to both psychoanalysis and literature.

You might also say that the difference between psychoanalysis and literature is of course that psychoanalysis is therapy, that there is some notion of human good and the undoing of certain fixed ways of seeing the world behind the careful listening. But at the same time Freud would have considered it to be a very strange thing indeed if most of the population had decided to take to the Freudian couch. The place where another, more extensive form of therapy takes place is in the culture. This is embedded in drama (Freud was of course fascinated by Sophocles, Shakespeare and Ibsen), in prose literature, and of course in conversation.

One of the reasons I may have selected an analyst as a protagonist is because for me analysis is an enviable profession. As I get older writing seems to me to be perhaps too solitary, and I require more the presence of others. So how can I not envy those who have the opportunity to listen to others all day? I think it is that curiosity that writers and analysts have in common. And of course Freud and writing always proceeded side by side. Freud of course did win the Goethe prize for literature.

In the post-war period there has been a separation of psychology from psychiatry. The psychiatrist medicalises and therefore objectifies the human body, which no longer speaks as it did from the Freudian point of view in hysteria and in psychosis, but has become in the psychiatric idiom something like a malfunctioning machine.

To remain interested in psychoanalysis is an attempt to try and remember that primarily we are speaking beings and it’s not only in our words that we speak. There’s the great danger that much of the huge research done in psychoanalysis in the twentieth century may be forgotten or even buried, and the fact that writers today are taking analysts or their patients as subjects for fiction is a tribute to the desire to keep the human mind in the forefront of humanistic investigation, particularly when practices such as CBT, the spread of psychopharmacology and talk of brains and chemistry, may lead us away from the human being.

It is been said that Freud, his followers and their work are old-fashioned and have been superseded by other more successful and effective and more rapid practices. But there is something still startling in Freud’s invention. The idea of two people sitting in a room with one another day after day, week after week, for as long as it takes for some clarity and understanding to emerge is an extraordinary innovation in psychology, because it places human discourse at the centre of understanding the human crisis. It is therefore not a matter of seeing what is ill or even wrong with the subject, but seeing what the person has made of his or her own history, or what they have turned it into as a matter of psychic necessity. It is a deeply humanistic insight that this necessity may be modified by conversation. And it is conversation, in the subject, in the culture and in colloquia like this, which is deeply important.

If you read John Cheever’s The Journals alongside these stories, getting a sense of the man and what he made at the same time, you will be presented with a dark unease. The Journals themselves are one of the great confessional works, and I would rate them with Rousseau and Pepys as exemplifying the inner combat of a complex man never content with himself or others. As Cheever puts it, ‘I’ve been homesick for countries I’ve never seen, and longed to be where I couldn’t be.’