Creative Digest #12: On Endings, A Review and a Remembrance, Fiction and Politics
The latest edition of our departmental Substack looks at how to end a novel, an appreciation of John Burnside, and thoughts on writing politics.
Welcome to the twelfth edition of Creative Digest, the Substack from the Creative Writing team at City, University of London, where we teach on undergrad and postgrad degrees in the School of Communication and Creativity. We hope you enjoy it.
On Endings
by Deepa Anappara
Isabella Hammad’s Enter Ghost and Recognising the Stranger: On Palestine and Narrative must be the two books that I have recommended the most this year. I have been listening to Hammad’s interviews in the ‘Between the Covers’ podcastwith David Naimon, and I was struck by what she said about endings.
Characters in Enter Ghost, who are staging Hamlet in the West Bank, can be seen wondering about the role of art. If the aim of a tragedy is to prompt pity and fear in the audience, as Aristotle writes, with the conclusion offering the viewer relief from these emotions, then can “art deaden resistance”? This fictional question speaks to Fargo Tbakhi’s essay ‘Notes on Craft: Writing in the Hour of Genocide,’ published in Protean magazine, wherein he quotes Augusto Boal in Theater of the Oppressed, to point out that traditional Aristotelian narrative structures purged an audience’s anger and, with it, “the obligation to intervene in an unfolding narrative as an active participant”.
Hammad notes in the interview that Enter Ghost ends in media res, thus denying the reader that very catharsis. “I think that we shouldn’t close down how readers respond to texts,” she says.
Her words made me think of Charles Baxter’s essay ‘Against Epiphanies’ in Burning Down the House. Baxter finds the expectation that stories end with an insight ‘baffling’ because (a) such insights are rare and (b) if they do occur, they are, in his experience, ‘dead wrong’. He links the contemporary appeal of insights to the popularity of conspiracies; the notion, widely prevalent, that everything on the surface is illusory. Even the construction of a conspiracy, its ‘plot’, resembles ‘the mechanism of literary production’, he writes.
As readers our expectation often is that the writer will offer us closure, either in the form of a twist or a neat, joyful resolution. A conflict ends; estranged characters make up; a death brings a family together; the criminal is unmasked. While acknowledging the artifice of fiction, I am interested in writing that resists these tropes to mirror different realities in which there are no conclusions or answers. Some readers of my first novel, about the disappearances of children in an impoverished neighbourhood in north India, thought its ending was disappointing, so perhaps I am biased about this subject. Still, I would argue, as Baxter does, that stories can “arrive somewhere interesting without claiming any wisdom or clarification”. And perhaps the lack of catharsis may leave us thinking about the fate of the characters, and their circumstances, long after we have closed the book.
A Review and a Remembrance
By Rebecca Tamás
As the year heads towards its close, it is inevitable that, as well as thinking about our favourite literary discoveries and books of the year, our minds will also turn to the writers whom we lost in 2024. In May, the award-winning Scottish poet John Burnside died at 69, leaving behind his luminous final collection, Ruin, Blossom, published the same year by Jonathan Cape. John Burnside was, to my mind, one of the finest poets of his generation, and with his death we find poetry much the poorer. As a poet myself, it’s useful to remember than the poets who mean a lot to you often write work nothing like yours. Writing from far beyond your own sphere can still feed your creativity and love of the genre. Burnside’s unshowy, stark, deeply serious and sometimes formal poetry is a world away from my own writing, and I like it all the better for that.
Ruin, Blossom has everything I’ve come to expect from Burnside’s poetry – lyrical reflections on Christian themes, snow and stillness; as well as a potent attention to the momentariness and grace of the self as it meets the world: ‘Close to invisible now, my shadow wakes/to juniper and new snow in an empty/ garden, fox-prints trailing off to what might be/infinity…’ The collection’s central poem, Bedlam Variations, considers the experience of psychosis and treatment – ‘We drift into the grey/of evening, while the trolley makes its rounds,/bringing the sweet hiatus of Largactil…’ communicating the strange mixture of agony and hope that can typify recovery. Burnside’s sharp, suturing language allows us to know the world as it is; ragged and broken, yet full of impossibly fragile beauty: ‘shuttered kiosks, windows bleared with dew,/house martins threading the streets/in the fretwork of dawn.’ I will miss seeing the world through his eyes.
Fiction and Politics
By Joe Thomas
Playboy, n., Brazilian Portuguese, slang: rich young man
The beloved Brazilian musician Tim Maia, once said: ‘Brasil is the only country where – in addition to whores cumming, pimps being jealous, and drug dealers being addicted – poor people vote for the right-wing.’ This is the epigraph to my novel, Playboy, the third part of the São Paulo quartet, published in France as Brazilian Playboy in the new year. In my MFA class, we’ve been discussing how politics manifests itself in our work, the different ways we approach this, how it can feel urgent or prescient – and how to avoid, or embrace, being polemical.
Playboy unfolds during the political turmoil of March 2016. The anti-Dilma protests were the biggest in São Paulo history; my novel opens with a fictionalised version of a pro-Dilma rally. The protests, on both sides, were against social inequality, against corruption, against exploitation – and there was also a wider feeling of protest, a defiance, which was as much about taking control of political life as it was a railing against the conditions of it.
In a scene in Playboy, a character states an opinion that the corruption investigation of the government, and its consequences – economic, political, and in terms of a perceived loss of faith in all parties and attempts at democracy – will lead to a populist leader, one who might promote the hard-line position of the former military dictatorship:
Her point: you have to vote, you have to vote for someone. And in a system that preyed on fear and division, relied on corruption and sleight of hand to maintain a political majority, that someone will one day sooner or later be the populist demagogue type, will, in fact, very closely resemble the promises and government of the military dictatorship. And it’s hard not to vote that way when you have nothing, when you’re invisible and erased, disenfranchised and underrepresented –
And there are an awful lot of people like that in Brazil.
I wrote this in early 2017. In April the year before, Dilma Rousseff was formally impeached. She was charged with criminal administrative misconduct and disregard for the Federal budget. The Lava Jato investigation paralysed government; the investigation obstructed business. The country faced a devastating recession. Dilma’s successor, Michel Temer, from the centre right party, proved even more unpopular than Rousseff, surrounding himself with politicians implicated in the corruption scandal. The economy worsened; faith in the political system was eroded. In October 2018, the far-right, populist Jair Bolsonaro campaigned to be elected President. He promised to unite the country, purge the corrupt leftists, and fight crime with a ruthless and brutal no mercy, no leniency policy. He is renowned for his misogyny, and his racist, homophobic views. Weeks before the election took place, Bolsonaro was attacked and stabbed while speaking at a rally. He survived and won the election in a landslide.
Playboy is about the roots of how this happened in São Paulo – about the political structures of the city that reinforce inequality and social injustice, whether through corruption in government, the kickbacks and shakedowns of the construction industry, or the brutality of the military police. And Playboy is about the brazen scale of corruption, the cheek of it all. As another character says:
‘The difference between zero and 60 million dollars is vast and fucking easy to see. The difference between 120 and 160 is fuck all… the question that your average Joe wants answered is quite simple, really: where the fuck is all our money?’
Thanks for reading! Do get in touch if you have any questions or comments. If you want to find out more about the programmes offering Creative Writing teaching at City, University of London, then do explore here:
You can find details of open days and evenings, and taster sessions, here
Contributing writers:
Deepa Anappara is the author of Djinn Patrol on the Purple Line and co-editor of the essay collection Letters to a Writer of Colour. Her next novel, The Last of Earth, will be published in 2025. She is a Lecturer in Creative Writing.
Rebecca Tamás is a Lecturer in Creative Writing at City, and is the author of Strangers and Witch, and co-editor of Spells: 21st-Century Occult Poetry.
Joe Thomas is a Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing and is the author of White Riot, Red Menace, Brazilian Pyscho, Bent and other novels.
Department news:
Joe Thomas’ latest novel, Red Menace, was selected as one of the Best Books of 2024 by the Irish Times. Details here.
 | A guest post by
|
 | A guest post by
|