AUTHOR: TAMARA FAITH BERGER

Beneath the explosive scenes and subjects that fill Queen Solomon is a delicate process that tiptoes across so many hot button issues: from the role of Israel in the Middle East to sexual consent and religious awakening. Almost too careful a process, Tamara Faith Berger’s novel typifies that line from Oscar Wilde: Everything in the world is about sex except sex. Sex is about power. She is the author of Lie With Me, The Way of the Whore, (republished together by Coach House Books as Little Cat), Maidenhead, and Kuntalini. Queen Solomon was released by Coach House Books in Fall 2018.

How do you approach the art and craft of literature? And how do you see yourself juxtaposed within literature, historical and contemporary? And in particular with writers you return to again and again, is it competitive, familial, a lively conversation, no influence, a mixture, or something else entirely?

I came to literature from a visual arts background. The work of making paintings, drawings and sculptures has influenced my practice of writing in that I use the techniques of art like sketching, erasing, and layering to write. It is a process of visual thinking to carve out meaning. I find that things on the page either work or they don’t. Stuff looks bad and sounds bad and means nothing—just the way things always did when I was trying to make art—and then somehow, in the process of just being with a piece and trying to stay with it and make sense of a scene, for instance, things ineffably, eventually change and get more pleasing. Writing takes a lot of time. I always imagine a kind of 3-D space in my mind for a text to play itself out in. I look for and long for the moments when words together accumulate substance and power, even though these moments can be few and far between.  

I see myself as coming out of a feminist writing practice with a particular affinity for the tradition of literary experimentation by women that emerged throughout the 70s, 80s, and 90s in both North America and Europe. I am thinking of writers like Gail Scott and Kathy Acker, Luce Irigaray, Dubravka Ugresic, Elfriede Jelinek, Toni Morrison. It’s a ‘messing with the pipes’ kind of practice, one that wants to fuck up thought and language from the inside. It’s also, sometimes, about having one’s female eye in sacred male spaces. In my case, it’s an urge to participate in traditional male spaces like pornography, like religion. I know that the tables have turned in many formerly exclusively male fields and women absolutely dominate contemporary literature in my mind, but it is the past that still needs a kind of rehabilitation and feminist assessment and sometimes the only way to do that is to mess things up. Lately I have been researching the history of smut in The Invention of Pornography (Zone Books, 2002) which tracks the historical shift of pornographic materials from private realms into a more mass forms of consumption alongside Bookleggers and Smuthounds (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002) which details the history of Jewish immigrants who ran the erotica trade in early 20th century New York. I want to know why so much literature, pornographic and otherwise, has been discarded. In Queen Solomon, this issue of which books get forgotten is important in terms of my narrator’s interest in ‘unacceptable’ books about the Holocaust. I too want to know why the work of writer Ka-Tzetnik 135633 (1909-2001) has been excluded from the canon. Why has his Holocaust ‘pulp’ been thrown away, in contrast to the survivor’s memoir which has been elevated? I think there is a slipperiness in fiction, especially in texts written through trauma (of which I think there is a huge amount of stifled female voices from the past) that play with the fiction/non-fiction boundary in order to tell the truth. Issues of trauma and truth multiply themselves in a book like Ka-Tzetnik 135633’s House of Dolls (1947), about forced prostitution in Auschwitz, because it is written by a survivor and uses tragic real-life material about the Holocaust while it slides into titillation, fantasy, and pulp. It bothers me that Ka-Tzetnik’s work has been thrown away for these slippages, these cross-genre offenses. I place my book Queen Solomon right here, alongside House of Dolls, in the grey slippery space of trauma and imagination, in a kind of solidarity. 

Lately I have been returning to manifesto-like non-fiction that I read a long time ago in order to help me continue to refine and rethink my theoretical parameters as an artist. I like to re-read the polemical preface of The Sadeian Woman (1979) by Angela Carter about women potentially being liberated by pornography and more recently the essay “Porno Witches” in Virginie Despentes’ King Kong Theory (2006) which lays down wisdom like: “Porn is the method men use to imagine what they would do if they were women, how they would apply themselves to satisfying other men, what good sluts they’d be, what prick-devourers.” I also sometimes like to revisit Andrea Dworkin’s epic refusal Pornography: Men Possessing Women from 1981: skewed feminist disruption at its finest.

I’d like to return to “pulp,” the role of religion and pornography, and “rehabilitating” historical injustice, but first let’s talk about the canon. In Harold Bloom’s The Western Canon, I found one of the most succinct approaches for judging a piece of literature: “One breaks into the canon only by aesthetic strength, which is constituted primarily of an amalgam: mastery of figurative language, originality, cognitive power, knowledge, exuberance of diction.” How do you determine what should be canonical?

Instinctively, I find Bloom’s definition problematic from where I stand. It’s missing some primary considerations: variations in dialect, form, and region; the inclusion of writers from countries that have had stricter routes to publication. And what about class, gender, and race, in general? All these things and more seem like necessary considerations in tandem with aesthetics. There is no such thing as an even playing field for getting into the canon and there never was. It takes time to write. There is so much trial and error and failure in order to arrive at “exuberance of diction.” I like that! I feel that women, in particular, have not been afforded this time to make literature in a historical sense, never mind men and women of lower wealth. I really feel that there is a huge amount of text out there—whether real or projected—by people that wanted to contribute to the world’s body of literature but could not. Don’t know if this is a moot point or not. To me, it feels significant. 

What do you think is the cause of so much literature being “forgotten” or “thrown away” throughout history? Today, we could point to the inundation of stuff being produced from seemingly every corner of society (content seemingly meant to pacify more than anything else) and allows so much to be devalued or otherwise forgotten, but what do you think were the factors in the case of Ka-Tzetnik 135633, in particular? Though isn’t the survival of House of Dolls to this day a testament to its recognized value, which in the end is what makes a work canonical?

House of Dolls hasn’t survived heartily. I found my beat-up copy at a garage sale and I’d never heard of Ka-Tzetnik 135633 before. Most Jewish people I know have never heard of Ka-Tzetnik. He remains in the margins in both the Jewish literary canon and wider literary canon. Recent Holocaust scholarship has mostly discounted Ka-Tzetnik’s work as trivial, kitschy and full of untruths. Yes, there was a heyday for his work in the 1950s and 60s because in the early days after the war, Ka-Tzetnik’s books were believed to be insider testimony about the concentration camps —plus, the sex helped! Now, we don’t want to read anything consciously titillating about the Holocaust—for reasons of taste, in my opinion. Yet the fact that Ka-Tzetnik 135633 has a body of work that straddles the lines between fiction and non-fiction and religion and atheism and that revolves around issues of the sexual abuse of both males and females during the Holocaust, as well touching on mental illness and healing is wholly unique. What’s most known about Ka-Tzetnik 135633 is that he was a witness at the trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem, had a seizure during his testimony and had to be taken off the stand. Ka-Tzetnik 135633 was not an acceptable witness. What was needed at that moment was a lucid survivor, a so-called perfect, lucid survivor. Ka-Tzetnik, ultimately, had no ‘exuberance.’ He was tired, mentally ill, and traumatised. He was a bad husband and father, he could barely be a citizen of the Jewish state. He was an artist who wrote this wholly unique oeuvre about the Holocaust, which is not easy to read, in fact it’s unreadable at times both in content and form. It definitely does not meet Bloom’s criterion of literary excellence! There is a new book of scholarship that just came out, Holocaust History and the Readings of Ka-Tzetnik, (Bloomsbury, 2018) which I am really looking forward to getting my hands on. So maybe Ka-Tzetnik’s work due to its uniqueness is in the process of being admitted to the canon—but it would have to be on the basis of its weirdnesses and weaknesses, I would think, not its strengths. 

Having not read Ka-Tzetnik’s body of work, what you describe seems to speak to an originality and nuance of experience not thoroughly explored elsewhere. And while I don’t know how Bloom would judge the work, for what it’s worth, he does write in the Preface to The Western Canon: “to ask what makes the author and the works canonical. The answer, more often than not, has turned out to be strangeness, a mode of originality that either cannot be assimilated, or that so assimilates us that we cease to see it as strange.”

Thanks for sharing that! 

And to reflect on this as it relates to your own writing and being in traditional male spaces, this is very much what is at play in Queen Solomon. It calls to mind a Baffler article by Soraya Roberts:

When bad art is still heralded as good—or “necessary” —because it represents the sort of diversity we currently crave and so rarely find, that is cultural tokenism. And cultural tokenism is the enemy of criticism. As Baffler contributor Lauren Oyler recently wrote in The New York Times Magazine, “When applied to bad art with good politics, ‘necessary’ allows the audience to avoid engaging with a work in aesthetic terms, which tend to be more ambiguous and difficult.” 

On the other hand, in Queen Solomon, you are “messing with the pipes” and playing in spaces like religion and pornography, forcing readers to engage with realities that do not have easy answers. This is one of the things that makes the novel so potent. Queen Solomon walks this tenuous line, surrounded by pitfalls aplenty, raising the stakes the more it subverts expectations, avoiding on one side two-dimensional characters that become stand-ins for sloganeering; and on the other sacrificing all structural tension to fully develop the field of opposing ideas. How conscious were you of this balance? 

Thanks for your way of describing the book. I was conscious of the extreme trickiness of representing Israel and the Holocaust in my book, for instance, in both didactic and experiential ways, because it came out of a conscious and possibly ambivalent desire to enter the minefield of it all without getting blown away. Writing is the way I take risks, stand my ground. Like Lauren Oyler, like Soraya Roberts, I am probably also against the idea that art should be ‘good for you.’ As Jerry Saltz writes in a piece for Vulture that I just read this morning: “for almost its entire history, art has been a verb, something that does things to you or for you, that makes things happen.” I see my fiction in this mode of trying to make something happen. A text is a place for mind-altering thought. 

How/does pornography and pulp provide you with the tools to create that thinking space and a space that can elicit action?

The genre of pornography, both visual and written, does super-sensory very well! I like to use porn’s sensorial, auditory, unmasking techniques, e.g., going in close-up on genitalia and other parts like hair, skin and pits; also, using repetition, noting and returning to smell, fluids, moans, etc., and most important: no cut to black! Porn always stays for the climax. Porn likes to stay after the climax. Anyway, all these techniques of arousal that are features of that form are totally applicable to literature. When the body is aroused, the mind is more suggestible. You can slip in radical thoughts when one has an ‘easy’ erection. I’m not so experienced with modes of pulp that I can use them, but I admire how pulp has had accessibility cross class. I don’t think literature should be a high art, or maybe it’s just that I think cheap thrills should not be discarded. Cheap thrills arrest the unconscious. I like to tickle the reader; I like to be tickled as a reader. Once you’re tickled open, things happen.