54
PARTISAN REVIEW
which in primitive societies is a kind of husband-partaking in the child–
birth experience by sort of vicariously experiencing the same pain as the
woman, and that was why the husband stayed in there, to help his wife.
In
fact, his sacrifice in a way was necessary to allow her to survive. I was
rather pleased with myself with that interpretation. l thought it was
pretty damn good compared to all the other interpretations I made fun
of in my article.
50,1
was pleased in a way to get that kind of attention
from a big shot like Kundera, but I felt he really didn't know what he
was talking about, and that it was arrogant of him to think that he
knew more about Hemingway than Hemingway's biographer.
Lauren Groff: I'm
doing a thesis on autobiography right now. Just by
definition, biography is based upon memories and the past. But in the
old recitals of life, there is also a pressure of the future on it, which has
not yet been addressed. 1 would like to know what all three of you think
when you are writing, and whether you feel the pressures of the future.
Michal Govrin: I
can try to answer that from the point of view of a
writer of fiction and not of biography. I was happy and impressed to
find in my recent reading of Norman Manea's prose a technique which
I use as well, of shifting from the first-person pronoun to the third-per–
son pronoun. When you write, you are not sure of your distance from
the story; there is a fluctuation in how you situate yourself and the nar–
rator in relation to the experience which is told. Through this rhetorical
subtlety of shifting pronouns, you can somehow portray the fluctuation
of your own instability and the instability of a character, and the emer–
gence of a character from a biography.
About the future: when you start creating a character, which is a he
or a she who does not yet have a future or an end, there is that startling
moment when suddenly the character stands there, with his or her own
life and his or her own logic. This is an extraordinary moment.
In
my
own writing I experience the feeling of the whole story written in a
flash, quickly, and then spend the rest of the time, and usually it takes a
long time, understanding and rebelling against this first story, when the
story was simple and could be seen at a glance. During this re-writing,
the character takes hold of the plot and its end, in a way which was
unperceptible from a distance. Through the writing itself, we come back
to the question of truth-the truth of the moment of writing, of reveal–
ing another reality, not the reality which was observed from outside, but
the reality which is constantly discovered through the work of memory
and of imagination combined together. And then there is the reality of
