Sarah Manguso Interviews Kate Zambreno at Paris Review

"As for publishing a 'small, minor book,' to quote you from earlier…" Sarah Manguso writes at the beginning of her interview with Kate Zambreno, "maybe we could start there?" Within their conversation, the two discuss (among other topics) Barthes, motherhood, and the concepts of success and failure. "I keep trying to write a Big Book, a grand book, a centerpiece around which the rest of my books will gather, but either my fear of death or my general inability to be grand prevents this," Manguso continues. Let's pick up there: 

And I’m almost always more interested in the small, minor books of people’s oeuvres, anyway. You also work in small forms — the appendix, the miscellany, the essay formed from small compositional units and assembled over a long period.

ZAMBRENO

I am more interested in the fragment, the notes, what is ongoing or continue. My desire in this new writing life of the past few years has been to be small, to stay small, thinking of Robert Walser. To write about what is ephemeral, the daily, and to use it to attempt to think through the crisis of the self and what is beyond the self. When I moved to New York (now six years ago), I felt paralyzed by the prospect of a first-person novel, which I was under contract for, and anxious about publishing’s desire to have the new “big” book, one that everyone talks about, that is on all of the lists, that is part of the conversation, where the self written is assumed to be the same self as the author, and the self is stable, charismatic, and articulate. I felt blocked from the novel for years, I just took notes upon notes, and eventually the novel became about block and paralysis. I thought for a while my sudden longing towards smaller forms was a lack of ambition, before realizing that it is my ambition.

I began really writing again once I became a mother, and I think this is parallel to a sudden intense fear of death and renewed grief that completely transformed me. I could not imagine the complete devastation of motherhood, and how that would make me suddenly return to the grief and desire for the ritual of working over that grief that were the impetus behind the Book of Mutter project. I think that’s why so much of Appendix Project is thinking through Barthes’s work from the last two years of his life, when he is grieving his mother, when he longs to write a novel he only ever writes about theoretically in his lectures, which Kate Briggs has translated and also wonderfully writes through in her reflection on translation, This Little Art. We think of Camera Lucida, his book on photography, as the major text, but I am more drawn to how his lectures, his diary project, all of it is consumed by grief, and how these texts form a constellation of his thought.

MANGUSO

I’ve always loved Walser’s insistence, once he was institutionalized that, “I have not come here to write; I have come here to be mad.” And then he wrote his Microscripts,in code, on scraps of garbage that he picked up off the floor. I looked him up again just now and noted something that blew right by me, when I was first reading him, in my twenties: His mental breakdown occurred after his books slowly became less popular and he finally became unable to support himself.

The ambition to write smaller is anti-capitalist and therefore impossible to reconcile with the rules of the marketplace, where, like a hopeful idiot, I continue to bring my small and constrained work to be validated. I also continue to feel the frisson of shameful desire to be glorified, nonetheless, as the marketplace’s great big grand next thing. Yet there’s an icy solace in not being glorified, and a useful freedom, too.

Read more at Paris Review.