Passage III

HUMANITIES: This passage is adapted from the article “An Interview with C. E. Morgan” by Thomas Fabisiak (@2010 by University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill).

All the Living is C. E. Morgan’s debut novel. Set in rural Kentucky in the 1980s, her novel follows a young couple’s struggles as they take responsibility for a family farm.

Thomas Fabisiak: In what way does the fact that your descriptive work in All the Living focuses on landscape make it a political act?

C. E. Morgan: I think it’s akin to the moral force that’s there in fiction in the presentation of character. Fiction asks us to bring sustained attention to the Other; when a reader choosers to continue reading a novel, regardless of the likability of a character, the sustained attention to that character has moral ramifications. Landscape writing——most especially when it’s done at length and in a style that deviates from prose norms, so that its very presentation is interruptive or “estranging” as the formalists might have said——encourages the reader to stop, reread, listen, imagine, reconsider, admire, appreciate with new eyes. The reader might complain that this king of writing draws attention to itself, but this kind of writing doesn’t merely draw attention to its own aesthetic strategies-it also draws attention to land. The land is imperiled; we know that. Land is always imperiled wherever the human puts his or her foot. The attention paid to landscape in a narrative is, I believe, attention that’s paid to land itself, not just to marks on a page. Deep appreciation can result from an engagement with that kind of beauty, and that can manifest in action. That is how it might be seen as a political act to do this kind of writing (particularly about a region, such as this one, rural Kentucky, that is continuously being ravage by corporations that consumers unwittingly feed).

Thomas Fabisiak: In addition to landscape, though, All the Living also involves a sustained focus on work, and specifically on work on the land, farming, taking care of animals, etc. Together these suggest an overarching pastoral quality. Without wanting you to interpret All the Living for readers, because you’ve told me that you hate imposing yourself into people’s encounters with the book, I’m wondering if you could say something about your focus on work, and whether and to what extent it is related to the focus on landscape more generally. One thing that occurred to me repeatedly as I was reading the book was that, as a writer, you work very meticulously, and take “your work” as seriously, perhaps, as “the work” itself in the sense of the finished book, etc. Would I be wrong to think that there may be a latent ethical, if not political, component to this aspect of your own commitment to hard work and in the ongoing presence of the theme of work in the novel?

C. E. Morgan: Well, while there are many novels I admire that depict working-class labor (Anna Karenina and In the Skin of the Lion and Germinal are the first that spring to mind), the presence of work——agrarian or domestic——in all the living was not a self-conscious choice. For that matter, even though I conceptualize landscape writing as overtly political, that doesn’t mean I self-consciously insert it in a text where it doesn’t belong. With All the Living, I don’t feel I made choices in the first draft of the novel. It felt like the book just came, and it came, and it came with an inborn temperament, tenor, and set of characters and concerns. I obeyed the book. Or perhaps, because a text is not a willful or sentient being (though it sometimes feels like it!), it might be more accurate to say I obeyed the hazy, deepest part of the brain, which bypasses the intellect as it constructs, meaning via image, myth, poetry: our essential languages.

For myself, though you’re right that I work intensely on any project when I have one, I don’t think of my writing as a job. I think of it as a vocation, and as such, there’s a huge gulf between what I do and capitalist notions of productivity, though the work is disseminated in the marketplace through a capitalist framework. I’m very wary of rigorous work ethic for the sake of rigorous work ethic——this idea that a writer should produce a novel every year or two years, that they should be punching a clock somehow. A lot of people seem to buy into that; it’s hard not to in this culture. But I don’t want to produce just to produce. I don’t want to write just to write, or publish just to get a paycheck. I see no value in that. Frankly, the world doesn’t up with notions of service, and as an artist you serve people by giving them you truly believe to be of value, not just what you’re capable of producing if you work ten hours a day every day for forty years.