Fiona Duncan Interviews Fanny Howe in New Issue of The White Review

Fiona Duncan interviews Fanny Howe for issue no. 29 of The White Review, occasioned by the reissue of Howe's five bundled novels, Radical Love (Nightboat). "Her humility is active, her obscurity intentional," writes Duncan in her introduction. "She rarely grants interviews and undermines the authority others might claim given her talents and family." Yet here we are, gratefully. An excerpt from their conversation:

Q THE WHITE REVIEW

 — In [a talk you gave in 1998] you propose ‘Bewilderment as a poetics and an ethics’. Regarding ethics, bewilderment’s vastness of perspective, decentring the ego, seems conducive both to writing poetry and to caretaking, reducing harm. I wonder if there’s another way to think about your central figure, as vulnerable, yes, but far from ignorant (‘lost by choice!’). If dumbfounded, what they don’t get is why customs of domination and territory are demanded of them in order to ‘achieve’.

A FANNY HOWE

 — There’s always some concealed social type you are meant to be. Psychoanalysis, religion, manners, business… each and all have a model of achievement. If you can keep your objectivity, it is interesting to see how these things work either from the bottom or the middle, the amount of lying and self-deception that’s involved. Someone did a study of poets, and most of them who are doing well now went to good universities and grew up with money – inherited money. But no one would dare have a conversation about that. White, white. Whiteness now has the pallor of cowardice. That whiteness quotient was hard to miss. Good fortune is the subject of fiction over centuries, and its connection to a culture – look at Dickens. By culture I mean production, the gathering of people around a central value, to produce it more efficiently and safely. Privilege is the guarantee of blindness to your own conformism.

The full conversation (with even more in print) is at The White Review.