Your story “Dwell“Does the primary point of view, a first cycle specializing in philosophy in Columbia, which becomes romantically involved with a teacher, Heiss. What made you want to explore the Prima and Heiss relationship?
I am often interested in the border of a changing standard. When I was a student, the relationships of the teacher-student had strictly became Verboten, but the students always fell in love with their teachers and even married them. I have always imagined that it would be simultaneously exciting and disturbing to be in a relationship that a large part of your imagine community is, by its very nature, manipulative or abusive. I am concerned with frustrating uncertainty around our evolving sexual policy – that our current ways to think of power are a form of wisdom or a form of blind. The ideologically intense university environment is a kind of petri box for this question.
Prima believes that her relationship with Heiss is remarkable, and she generally has confidence in her own beliefs. Why is it so launched by Ruth’s suggestion that is part of a model?
In recent years, I have noticed that there is a confusion, sometimes, of the desire to protect women from bad actors and the feeling that it is humiliating for a woman to realize that she was part of a series, a participant in the romantic model of someone else. It offends our feeling that “true love” is singular and that someone who really loves us will treat us because they haven’t called anyone else. What Prima wants the most is to grow. She is not obliged to have exactly the correct or happiest experiences. And, in the context of wanting to grow, being subject to the selfish models of another person is a fairly fundamental life experience. What Offense Prima is Ruth’s certainty that all those who are part of Heiss’s model will feel mistreated and that she and her classmates must be protected against Heiss. Maybe most of them do it; It may include prima, despite herself, but her feeling, at twenty, is that being treated as a person with protection is more degrading than any consensual sexual relationship.
The word “parody” appears twice in history: first, in Ruth’s voice, in reference to the authorized Heiss authorized after having business with students, then Heiss uses it to refer to prima considering a helpless child in their relationship, rather than a woman with her own agency. Why did you use it as a title in history?
The word “parody” expresses a personal feeling that a distortion or a transgression is so perverse that it is undeniable – that anyone who has a reasonable moral sense perceives it. And it is the basic tension of this story, that these two sets of opposite convictions – basically, to what extent prima is an adult – are both so complete that they are not really in conversation with each other. Instead, Prima is at the mercy of everyone in turn. In a way, it is the ultimate initiation to adulthood, which so often implies that we must be in relation to the visions of the world which have basically no meaning for us.
You were a student at Barnard, probably taking lessons in Columbia. “Trvesty” does it rely at all on your own university experience?
This is the case. I was an impatient student and I found Barnard and Columbia almost magical. Retrospectively, I think I was amazed at the idea that I was part of a concrete and chosen community in which I was connected by shared values to many other people – which was not a characteristic of the world in which I grew up. I thought that the whole premise of the college was incredible, and even now it has a utopian shine. This is a formative thing, I think, to be disillusioned with the university as an institution when you find yourself betrayed by your administration or your peers. It is more intimate than being disillusioned with your country and, in a way, more overwhelming. This type of sorrow is obsessive and present for me. Prima is just presented to him.
This story is taken from an in progress novel. Do you already know how it fits into the rest of the book? Is prima the protagonist of narrative throughout?
In my first attempt, this book concerned a former student and lovers of Heiss’s retrospective. Then, I wrote a project mainly from the point of view of Heiss, in which the “parody” was the only chapter that followed Prima. It took me a long time to recognize that the question of the way in which a student-protein relationship seems retrospective is in fact the most acute and threatening for the very young who is warned of what she can one day feel. It is more painful for prima than for someone older, like Heiss, who can contextualize him. The book in its current form concerns almost entirely prima, and on the frustration it feels – a frustration that I also experienced at the age of prima – on how and when it is taken seriously as an adult. In a way, it is a privilege to be authorized to make reckless or naive decisions and regret them.
Ruth wants Prima to make a moral judgment on Heiss’s behavior, to see him as an abuse of power perhaps an operator – a kind of judgment which had not previously come. As an author, do you also feel the pressure to see the situation through a moral lens?
For me, fiction is a means by which to unravel and undermine the moral pressure that I feel in daily life. I spent a lot of time writing this book through Heiss’s eyes because I liked the fact that Heiss is in the most guilty position – it is easy for us to assume that Heiss is blind, selfish or malicious. I resisted to write on prima because I feared that a character so young and inexperienced was interpreted as a vulnerable victim, and that there would be a kind of integrated sympathy for primary on the part of the reader – a sympathy similar to the condescending concern that Ruth feels towards her – which I really wanted to underestimate. But that’s exactly why Prima demanded that the project focuses on it, I think. The concern I felt that Prima was a character too vulnerable to my ends is the same concern that reinforces Prima herself. ♦