Andrzej Tichý’s Wretchedness is a complex, formally-daring novel about class. It is woven from layers of intersecting narrative that are full, by turns, of love and camaraderie, deep sensuality and utter abjection. Here, Tichý and his translator Nichola Smalley discuss shifts in register and teasing out references between languages, influence and interconnection, and the work of Svetlana Alexievich and The Walt Disney Company.
Nichola Smalley:
Will Ashon compared your book to ‘a holy/unholy meeting of Thomas Bernhard and The Geto Boys’. How does it make you feel to have your work viewed as being on this boundary of music and literature?
Andrzej Tichý:
It makes me happy that the book has found its readers, so to speak, when it ends up in the hands of someone who appreciates The Geto Boys and Thomas Bernhard.
My books are often about structures, and these exist in many different places – they unite music and literature, Austria and Houston, Texas.
Smalley:
What do you mean by ‘structures’?
Tichý:
An example would be that Thomas Bernhard and The Geto Boys have something in common, like maybe: rage. This common denominator is analogous to form, if that makes sense?
Smalley:
That the truth of something lies partly in its connections with other things?
Tichý:
Yes. There’s a book by Juliana Spahr, an American poet, which just came out in Swedish: This Connection of Everyone with Lungs – a great title for a book which deals with exactly these ideas.
Smalley:
I’m interested in authors who write across different forms, and I’ve enjoyed reading some of that in your essays. I think your way of blending different voices, references and themes would make for illuminating non-fiction, though maybe it wouldn’t be that different from your fictional writing . . .
Tichý:
Essays aren’t something I write much, mostly just on commission. I find it hard. I was a writer and critic for a few years, but increasingly I’ve gravitated towards forms that don’t have a clear, ‘pure’ voice. But you’re probably right – there’s a real tendency towards the essayistic in my earlier novels.
Going back to this music / literature connection again: another aspect is maybe what I wrote about in my story ‘Den läsande tjuven’ (‘The Reading Thief’) that this stuff – music, literature – is something universal, something accessible. That’s really empowering if you’re poor.
Smalley:
I’ve been reading Renheten, your new short story collection, which includes ‘Den läsande tjuven’. I was impressed by the title story and the way it uses the accounts of people who are mostly nameless and unseen in society – it’s kind of a series of fictionalised interviews. Is that approach something that interests you formally?
Tichý:
Yes, I think it’s really nice, this polyphony. There’s an amazing book by the Danish author Peer Hultberg, made up of more than five hundred short monologues by different characters. Requiem, it’s called. From some time in the 80s – though I don’t know if it’s been translated into English.
Smalley:
Have you read Marit Kapla’s Osebol? It’s an 800-page novel of vignettes, centred on the residents of a remote Swedish village? It’s beautiful.
Tichý:
No I haven’t. It’s based on interviews, right?
Smalley:
Yes. It won the August Prize (one of Swedish literature’s biggest prizes). And someone told me recently that Penguin Press had bought the English rights, which seems pretty astonishing. I’m curious to see how an 800-page interview ‘novel’ from a Swedish village will do in translation.
Tichý:
I’ll have to read it. I don’t know how Kapla works, but Svetlana Alexievich’s books have given me some of the most incredible reading experiences of my adult life. And thinking about how she also uses interviews, and somehow keeps her text free from its concrete context, I wonder how they compare.
Smalley:
There’s definitely a link there – I think with Alexievich some people had an issue with the idea that interviews could be used in someone’s semi-fictionalised narrative, like it was an abuse or an exploitation of their truth.
Tichý:
Isn’t that just a formalisation of something all authors do? OK, maybe not all, but many. Listening, interpreting, reformulating . . .
Smalley:
I recently read Jonathan Lethem’s essay ‘The Ecstasy of Influence’, which you told me about, and I was quite taken with it. During the editorial process for Wretchedness we discussed quotes often – there are many direct and indirect quotations and allusions in your novel, and I think it’s something you felt really strongly about – the permeability of writing, the way ideas get filtered, recycled, borrowed. I was taken back to that process when by Lethem’s quote: ‘Any text is woven entirely with citations, references, echoes, cultural languages, which cut across it through and through in a vast stereophony.’
Tichý:
That essay is brilliant. It’s also interesting that this isn’t in any way a ‘new’ or ‘postmodern’ perspective, it’s an ancient way of viewing text – something that becomes obvious if you trace the etymology of the word text. I also think this idea of the stereophony is where music comes in.
Smalley:
As a translator, that borrowing can trip you up. It’s hard to always catch intertextual references, especially when they might have been translated from another language by the author in their text. I was proud when I caught an Arab Strap reference in Wretchedness – Philophobia was a record I listened to a lot in my late teens, and there was an image in the book that I couldn’t get out of my head – then at some point the Spotify playlist you made to accompany the book sent me off down an Arab Strap wormhole and I said to myself: ‘That’s it! That’s where the image comes from!’ The suddenness of it! This total ‘fuck you’ reaction.
Tichý:
Yes, there was an Arab Strap scene. I don’t remember how that came about, but I just couldn’t help stealing it.
It’s better in the song of course, because he’s so lethargic when he sings. You understand exactly what’s going through the woman’s head.
To go back to borrowing – I’m reading Mo’ Meta Blues by Questlove from The Roots at the moment, and I’ve just been reading a section where he writes about discovering samplers, about how important they are in the history of hip hop. In many ways, every author is a kind of extremely complex sampler.
Smalley:
Maybe you could even say every human is an extremely complex kind of sampler? As Lethem says, language itself is the product of constant exchange, sampling, reproducing, reframing.
Tichý:
Exactly. That’s how we work isn’t it? Mimesis, mimicry – we imitate each other. And when we imitate two apparently incompatible things, that’s where the magic comes in.
Smalley: Ah, back to ‘structures’ again?
Tichý:
Yes, structures! I have to share a George Steiner quote on this:
Ours is the ability, the need, to gainsay or ‘un-say’ the world. To image and speak it otherwise . . . We need a word which will designate the power, the compulsion of language to posit ‘otherness’ . . . Perhaps ‘alternity’ will do: to define the ‘other than the case’, the counter-factual positions, images, shapes of will and evasion with which we charge our mental being and by means of which we build the changing, largely fictive milieu of our somatic and our social existence. [ . . . ] It is unlikely that man, as we know him, would have survived without the fictive, counter-factual, anti-determinist means of language, without the semantic capacity, generated and stored in the ‘superfluous’ zones of the cortex, to conceive of, to articulate possibilities beyond the treadmill of organic decay and death.
And that’s where I think the best art and literature is created, there in the combination of imitation and those fictive, counter-factual positions.
Smalley:
Do you have any favourite examples?
Tichý:
Alexievich is a great example: her insanely rigid, scrupulous, lovingly attentive studies seek to depict reality and history as precisely as possible, and at the same time the text is working at a level where it’s faithful only to itself, like a work of fiction, a vision. The result is something reportage could never be. And maybe a novel couldn’t be that either, because the ‘classic’ novel can no longer be written without becoming some kind of pastiche.
I think I read somewhere that she sees herself as working in the tradition of writers like Dostoyevsky, but she’s realised that that approach requires a different method today.
Smalley:
I feel like I see pastiche everywhere I look right now. What do you think separates the borrowing Lethem talks about from pastiche?
Tichý:
Maybe it’s hard to find a clear borderline. Maybe it’s easier to see it if you look at music. You can use sampling to do something fantastic and unique, but that doesn’t exclude the possibility of using sampling to make something derivative.
Smalley:
I guess the borderline can come about through vision – if you know what you’re doing and have a real sense of what you’re trying articulate, does that stop it being pastiche?
Tichý:
Yes, vision is important. But it’s complicated by the fact that pastiche can be a legitimate form. Pastiche can, in itself, be a way of saying something. One example is the Russian author Vladimir Sorokin, who used pastiche in a novel called Blue Lard, where chunks of the book are written as though by various classic Russian authors.
But I think what Alexievich meant was that the tradition wasn’t tied to the form, or the method, but to something else. This is also true of a certain modernistic tradition that I myself probably belong to. Even working in this tradition, you can’t write like you might have done a hundred years ago, because much of that idiom has been appropriated by, let’s say, capitalism, publishing, the ‘culture industry’, and so on. The Situationists already had a word for that process sixty years ago: ‘recuperation’. But the most important thing about Tzara, or Mayakovsky, or Woolf or Kafka, wasn’t exactly how they were writing, but what they were trying to achieve.
Smalley:
I get frustrated with phrases like ‘experimental writing’ or ‘avant-garde writing’ being applied to contemporary work – there’s nothing to ‘innovate’ any longer because the modernists did all the deconstructing a hundred years ago. Still, you have to find your own personal way of expressing the things you need to express, and that might require you to use unconventional forms.
Tichý:
I understand what you mean. I don’t see what I’m doing as avant-garde at all. It is often experimental, in the sense that I never know in advance what it will result in, what form the text / book is going to take.
Smalley:
I’ve been thinking about this idea of borrowing and the question of power – when does it become appropriation?
One specific example might be the Argentinian writer Pablo Katchadjian, who was sued by Borges’s estate for his book El Aleph Engordado. Essentially, he took Borges’s story ‘The Aleph’, and ‘engorged’ it with his own commentaries and additions. There are plenty of instances where a creative reworking of another’s text has been framed as plagiarism, but this particular lawsuit was pretty ironic given Borges’s own approach to writing. I was thinking about it all the way through reading Lethem’s essay. But there’s a flipside. What about when the author doing the borrowing is the one who holds the power, and they’re borrowing from someone who has little, or none?
Tichý:
Maybe you can actually find the answer to both these questions in this Borges case. The lawsuit is so stupid it could only be about one thing: greed. Lethem’s equivalent example would be Disney – turning ancient tales and cultural commons into copyrighted products.
Smalley:
Disney, the last word in appropriation.
Tichý:
Right? So absolutely, the question of power is central. And complicated, because in some ways I think it’s also intimately connected to writing in itself. If your story involves other people and their stories, you’re always taking their words from them, or putting your words into their mouths. But still, I don’t think it’s the act of loaning, or ‘stealing’, that’s the problem. It’s the power structures that are always founded on material reality beyond the realm of art.
Andrzej Tichý’s Wretchedness, translated from the Swedish by Nichola Smalley, is available from And Other Stories.
