History as Felt on the Body: an Interview with Sarah Bernstein

We met at the 2024 British Council Literature Seminar, where you were one of the participating writers. We found it a fun and intensive couple of days of readings, panels and workshops – what was your experience?

I had an amazing time. I was really dreading going because I’d spent most of the year on my own looking after a small child, so I had social anxiety going to a city for the first time in a while and having to speak to people and in front of people. The day before, I was like ‘I’m not going to go, I’m going to stay home, I can’t do this.’

And then I went and it was lovely. I’d been at Hay Festival with Eley Williams, so it was really good to see her again, and the rest of them, Camilla Grudova and K Patrick and Eliza Clark, and to meet Helen Oyeyemi. I just forgot how generous people could be; sometimes when you’re alone you think the worst of everyone else if you go on the Internet. Being with them made me feel awake, like I wanted to come back into the world a little bit.

We both really enjoyed your workshop about the logic of sound; there was a great mix of attendees. You teach literature and creative writing – do you often have this focus on sound?

Yes, I liked having people from really different walks of life and life stages in the workshops. Usually, I have some mature students in some classes, but most are in their early twenties. It was nice to have older people reading this work and to see the space we could create. That workshop is actually based on a week in a fourth-year class called New Narratives, which tries to get students to think through the component elements of fiction in a different way, because when they come through creative writing they can get very focused on the building blocks like plot. It’s important to understand how a story works, but the emphasis is sometimes overly on doing things ‘the right way’, and I have very little interest in forcing a specific approach to writing.

Sound is usually more of a concern when teaching poetry, which is baffling because the landscape of language, even in fiction, is a sonic one. In some fiction classes there seems to be more of a focus on what makes a ‘good story’ while the more granular and sensory aspects of language can get lost, which is such a shame.

Yeah, I think you’re articulating something I have been feeling for a while. I struggle with a lot of contemporary fiction because there’s sometimes a sense that nothing has gone into this sentence, that nobody has thought about its structure – in some books, of course; there are lots and lots of beautiful contemporary novels, but in some books the focus is primarily on story, or even on politics, in a very particular way. And I think losing that focus on language, it really misses something, and misses maybe even what for me is the point of writing. Publishing has flattened out some of the complexities of language, with things that are considered accessible being defined very narrowly, in terms of ‘readability’.

There’s a great essay by Rachael Allen called “Difficult and Bad” in Too Little / Too Hard. She talks about how publishers make assumptions about accessibility that are actually very classist, and how this has been imposed at a top-down level from publishing people who are themselves upper-middle class. There’s a long tradition of working-class autodidacticism and engagement with complicated work that is being lost because the publishers have this idea of accessibility as the use of plain language.

I loved the things you said about being against plot or at least against the primacy of plot. We need more of that.

Well, I think it’s strange – a lot of reviewers have such an emphasis on plotless novels, as if we’re doing something new when we’re not. First of all, there’s a difference between story and plot, and an emphasis on meandering internal monologue goes way back. I think about Tristram Shandy, which I mentioned at the seminar in Berlin. I’m interested in voice, which is an extension of my interest in sound; the way that somebody speaks says a lot about who they are, what they think of themselves or how they’re trying to present themselves. None of this is innovative in the sense that it’s the first time anyone’s done it, we’re just remaking it at different points. Sally Rooney has remoulded the nineteenth-century novel in a very contemporary way, so I think many people are interested in plot-based story as a result of that and come to expect this as standard in other novels.

In Study for Obedience, the narrator’s experience of time and of history is one of the central themes running through the book. This also links to the question of plot, as classic plot assumes linearity of time with a clear beginning and an end. Would you say the novel explores how different historicities produce certain experiences of time that exist next to each other?

That was one of the things that I was most interested in exploring. Around the time I started Study for Obedience I was reading Christina Sharpe’s In the Wake – it’s an amazing book – and that is all about the persistence of history in the present, the way that the past is not past, which I think is one of Sharpe’s phrases. For most people, most subjects the history of your family, your ancestors, and the history of your own socialisation is experienced in the body every day. That history lives on in a very material way; it shapes the present.

There exists this idea of history as something objective against which lives are lived out, that it’s the background and you’re standing in front of it, but that’s not it at all, right? History is the weather we live in, again to use one of Sharpe’s ideas, our sense of it is embodied – our movements in the world today are structured by that history and the orientations it allows us. Our horizon of possibility, what we think about our own agency, all of that is to a certain extent shaped by history. I was interested in bringing that into the present. This narrator in Study for Obedience is obviously very extreme, she’s not an everyday person – sometimes fiction has to take liberties.

The narrator repeatedly acts before thinking or despite herself: she’s signing her name, she’s weaving, she’s delivering objects. You once said you write from the body, so I’m curious about this acting from the body, especially in the context of Sharpe.

The sense of her embodiment is an aspect that I’ve never really talked about, so it is interesting to hear you bring it out. I think it happens in two ways. On the one hand, she’s always experienced herself as somebody who’s acted upon, rather than who acts in the world, and so for most of her life she’s given in to forces around her that shape her, and she works from there. But on the other hand, she has knowledge in her body, an agency in spite of everything, which grows in her, and which she needs to take responsibility for, as we all do.

And she does begin to see that she can act in the world, and that in fact she has been acting in the world all this time. Even if you’re acting in the world in a reflexive way, without really thinking about it, that too shapes the world. There’s a sense in which the idea of history as a series of catastrophes becoming embodied in a person – embodying the transmission of a particular history – you can be overcome by that and you can say, well, I can’t do anything about this, I have no power. But this character, she does.

The brother is portrayed as a wielder of language. He knows how to interpret and frame things, yet she insists on a certain inscrutability.

I was reading a lot of Glissant, and I was obsessed with his essay on opacity from his book Poetics of Relation. It’s about how in the West, we have this idea that in order to understand something, you have to render it transparent, and that’s an imperial attitude – the pursuit of knowledge as a rendering transparent. Glissant says that a more ethical form of relation would involve respecting the opacity of the other, and instead focusing on the texture and weave of relation, so that it’s actually in relation to other people that understanding happens; they can’t be understood as a singular object to be rendered transparent. I was really interested in that, and obviously it links up to naming and the capacity to name.

The brother is somebody who’s very comfortable using language in ways that objectify and categorise, and who’s comfortable naming things. She sees something troubling in how he writes history because it’s the capital-H history, the background against which things happen – he hasn’t allowed himself to feel impacted in the way that she has. I think she’s trying to find a way of relating that is different from her brother’s, but her not-naming is a bit pathological.

The tensions in the town seem to arise from that, too. The inhabitants have this capacity to draw a straight line from the past into the present; they are immersed in a sense of history that is continuous. At the same time the town is described as having lost out on globalisation and as having preserved a traditional way of living. Is there maybe a bit of romanticisation going on from the narrator’s side?

Definitely. Part of this is because she has always lived in urban areas, so her understanding of the connections between the rural and the rest of the world is limited. In this age people are not as cut off as you might think they are, no matter how remotely they live. And maybe because of the way that history persists for her, all she can see of the town’s inhabitants is their shared history.

The inverse also seems to be true, in that the villagers appear to perceive her presence as a haunting by the past. She takes their aggression be specifically about her, though, rather than a general hostility and antisemitism.

Yeah, and I don’t think that’s necessarily not the case, right? She may be exaggerating their hostility, but it exists. Her perception of things is going to be partly true, but it’s a question of emphasis and proportion. And she spends a lot of time in solitude, which exacerbates the sense that things are about her as a person rather than forces operating more broadly.

It’s refreshing to read a novel like Study for Obedience set in a rural area. Oftentimes stories around identity seem to be confined to the big cities.

Yeah, I don’t think anyone’s ever thought of a Jew in the countryside before. [Laughs] I’m sure that’s not true, obviously all of the old Yiddish stories about peasant culture are rural, but from the twentieth century on… But you’re right: stories about identity, the transmission of history, tend to be set in cities. This means that for example, there’s a real lack of literary representations of people of colour in the countryside, and that has an impact on the way people move, feel and experience the real world.

You had a really interesting conversation with Jonathan Garfinkel about the sense of having been raised to feel you’re between catastrophes. In your first novel it’s less prominent, but the title is, after all, The Coming Bad Days. I’m interested in this expectation of doom.

It is interesting that that has turned out to be a preoccupation for me. In Study for Obedience, the narrator has this melancholy expectation of catastrophe that’s inevitably going to arrive. Because of the way this cuts off her horizon of the future, she’s in a future that she thinks can’t come.

With The Coming Bad Days I was thinking a lot about environmental catastrophe and how that can and will erode certain social structures that we have and how it changes the way people think. At the core of it, I guess, is the same idea, the expectation that something really bad is going to happen. Because maybe it’s the contemporary world that we live in – something bad is going to happen, it is happening right now.

You also work the climate aspect into Study for Obedience through some of the calamities that happen. The town doesn’t stand apart from ecological concerns.

Yes, we might think of rural areas in the global north as relatively untouched by climate change (for now), but it’s not the case. There was really bad bird flu here two years ago, where people were told they had to keep domestic fowl under cover. There were lines of gulls on the beach all the time, dead birds everywhere. It seemed like something was ending. The world doesn’t end only in cities, it’s happening here too. I don’t know where I was going with that, I just wanted to talk about the dead seagulls.

We wanted to hear about them. Your short story “Steward of the Land” was recently published in Gutter – it’s more directly about land and rights and how they’re navigated. Is that part of a bigger project you’re working on?

“Steward of the Land” was a bit experimental for me in terms of voice. It’s a standalone piece, but I’ve just finished a first draft of a novel – which is not very good right now, but it has words in it and that’s the main thing – about the politics of land ownership. I’m still deciding how much to define the setting, but I’ve been thinking about Scotland – where in the Highlands most of the land is owned by about four people and there’s a complicated class relationship between estate owners and local people that is not always or necessarily oppositional. There is a lot to untangle, I’m learning, in debates about environmental regeneration, deer management, and so on, and yet it is so important to work to ensure the future of – or in some cases create, after decades of running down – diverse ecosystems. That’s been really interesting to learn about, just being around here. And the book is also sort of a haunted house story.

Your open practice of citing struck us, both in Study for Obedience and in The Coming Bad Days. We especially enjoyed seeing a reference to Malina by Ingeborg Bachmann, which has recently been retranslated into English.

Malina is a book that I would call a poet’s novel, right? I was reading books that you might call poet’s novels around the time of writing Study for Obedience – long-form prose texts that are primarily interested in language – and I was thinking about how we get a picture of the narrator’s subjectivity, those interests and the concerns that she has. It’s a grappling with language that is implicit in the way she writes, but also explicit, like in the epigraph quotation where she says language is punishment, which is so good. I like the provocation: language can be punishment.

And citing, for me, is just an acknowledgement that books come from other books, and they come from other people. I guess it’s also a way of saying I don’t believe in individual genius: to the extent that anyone is doing anything interesting, it’s in relation to other works of art, and the things that have come before. None of us has sprung out of nothing. I wanted to acknowledge that, and also where passages were paraphrases of quotations or ideas that aren’t mine. And I know that in fiction it’s not expected that you’ll have a bibliography. But I had read Canisia Lubrin’s The Dyzgraphxst not that long before, and Lubrin has a citational practice. She thanks – I quoted her in The Coming Bad Days – “those named and unnamed, because the mind does not always grasp its own maps as conscious”. For her, this is particularly important to mark out the footprint that comes from Black feminist thinkers. It’s valuable for any of us to acknowledge where our thinking comes from, because it represents that lineage more transparently. And it’s also an admission that my reading is limited, that I am conscious of this and working to widen my horizons.

This idea of lineage and relation seems to go against how the narrator in The Coming Bad Days engages with academia. There’s a hollowness to the novel’s depiction of her workplace.

In that instance, it’s directly about the degradation of thought that has happened with the marketisation of the university, particularly in the UK. Projects that get funding now, or projects that get you a job – because funding comes from funding, and jobs come from jobs, you have to have the job to get the job, you have to have the funding to get the funding that exists – those projects instrumentalise literature to a degree that really makes me uncomfortable and concerned that just by working in the academy you’re tacitly agreeing with those structures. It’s the unquantifiable nature and the ripple effect of literature that makes it important.

It’s not just literature that gets instrumentalised, either – in the novel, the university makes use of a psychoanalyst and therapy dogs to raise morale…

The thing about the gang of dogs really happened at a university that I worked in. I was on a ten-month contract, and I had an office that had a box of somebody else’s shoes in it. I was staying in the spare room of a speech therapist I met on the internet that had a tiny single bed in it. One of my colleagues lived far away and slept in a sleeping bag in his office. Anyway, I went down into the atrium one day and there were some dogs that were brought in to cheer us up. I think there’s a contrapuntal connection between the ways that things are actively getting worse and the ways that university management becomes interested in this idea of wellness. They won’t give you a secure job, but they will bring in some labradoodles.

I even saw alpacas once. Maybe that was just for the students.

You get superior animals. We just get average breeds, you guys get the fancy animals.

I enjoyed how you play on the ridiculousness of it. Do you feel that bringing out the absurd, as you also do in Study for Obedience, is useful?

I do. Because what it does is estrange; it estranges you and the reader if you highlight the absurdity of something, because these things are taken as given otherwise. And one of the things that humour can do – although very few people have accused me of humour, even though I think that these books are funny – is to dislodge that idea of things as common sense or as in any way reasonable to do in a situation where workers are really unhappy because they have no support or job security.

Übung in Gehorsam, the German translation of Study for Obedience, came out last month. Since the novel actively engages with the question of language and historical landscapes, were you in close contact with the translator? What was that process like?

The German translation was fascinating. I don’t speak German; the German writers that I read, I read in translation. Thomas Bernhard had an early and important influence on me in terms of what a sentence can do and how you can translate that.

When I came to Berlin I met the translator and the editor, and both were saying that German is a very precise language – you can’t have or you don’t commonly have words that might move two ways. And a lot of what happens in Study for Obedience is that words are hinges; they can mean one thing and they can mean another and they connect sentences in kind of ambiguous ways, so I had lots of queries from the German translator asking is it more this or is it more this? Which highlights the difficulties of translation and the kinds of choices that translators have to make when working in different languages.

Is there anything else you’d like people to know about Study for Obedience or the novel you’re currently working on?

I don’t want to over-determine or anticipate the ways that people might read it. The most important thing for me for Study for Obedience was thinking about the ways that history is not objective. And books can be historical even when they’re not about the Second World War or about Churchill. Readings of the book that have frustrated me are readings that say this is a book that flirts with history, that isn’t serious. It doesn’t flirt with history, it engages with history seriously, which is to say it engages with history as it’s experienced in people’s lives, not as a thing to be studied. It’s something that’s felt.

Flirting with history is such weird wording.

There was that whole thing where critics were calling every new novel by a person under forty who’s a woman or a person of colour a novel of vibes. They were like, where is capital H history in all of this? I think it really shows the shortcomings of the way a lot of people think about the historical. And to me, history is a vibe, obviously it’s a vibe. What else is it?

If vibe comes from vibration, that actually fits so well.

It does. It’s like Christina Sharpe, it’s history as the weather, right? It’s the atmosphere around you.

And it’s a really compelling atmosphere. We loved it.

Thank you. I’m very privileged to have books in the world that people are reading.