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WRITING THE OTHER AND TRANSNATIONAL SENSIBILITY: PERILS
FOR THE NOVELIST
Inez BARANAY *
Who Is The “I”?
Who is a memoirist and a novelist “allowed” to write about? Who does she write about? Who
does she mean when she writes “I”? Who is the I who writes of “I”; who might I include in stories of
my own experiences; how are fictions based on the writer’s life understood as fiction and as
lifewriting; what are the writer’s responsibilities to those she observes and describes: how might one
represent those who are not only other than oneself but identifiably “Other”?
These are some of the questions that recur in a life of writing memoir as well as novels that,
however fictional, are based on lived experience. Memoir requires work much like the work that the
novels require; in some sense one’s novels can be seen as a kind of memoir.
But what kind?
Is it fiction? Fiction and self
There are assumptions made about writers. There are assumptions about their lives. Writers can’t
resist alcohol and adultery. Their work is driven by Inspiration. They have to live in garrets and
basements and suffer for their art. They have to have another job, also known as a ‘real job’? Or,
aren’t writers able to earn a fortune, keep turning up on television talk‐shows, rub shoulders with
celebrities? Or don’t they hunger for that?
Apart from all that there are assumptions about their work. People assume that a writer bases her
writing on her life, her narrator on her self and her characters on her friends. A novelist is always
asked about the autobiographical components of her work.
I came up with a reply I use over and over again. I say: All my work has to be imagined in order to
be written, so it is all fictional. And I say, all my work must be experienced in the mind to be written,
so it is all autobiographical.
It is generally assumed that any narrating character is the author, or at least a version of the
author. Therefore an Italian translator, who was working on an Italian‐language translation of my
novel With The Tiger, toiled over many of the novel’s initial pages before learning that the narrating
character is actually male, a famous playwright, openly gay and quite a bit older than me. As the
Italian language is very much a gendered one, I expect he had to rework those initial pages
considerably. I would also have hoped that anyone who knows me would recognise at once the
assumption of a different persona, a different voice, in the character of that novel’s narrator, but few
people read with such perfect foreknowledge and perfect attention.
Narrator or author?
The difference between a narrating character and the narrative agent is an important one in
narratology. The narrative agent in the novel is the author, that is, the person who writes. And,
actually in that case (With The Tiger) my narrator was based on the famous English writer W.
Somerset Maugham. His novel The Razor’s Edge was the basis for my novel With The Tiger. In The
Razor’s Edge, Maugham’s narrator is called Mr Maugham and can be taken as the author himself, a
technique or trick Maugham often employed. In my 60‐years‐later version, I follow his structure and
name my main characters for his. It is with my narrator Will Maugham that issues of intertextuality
*
İstanbul, Turkey.