Seriously funny Jacobson

Sex and words don’t go together. Shame is what makes you a writer. Appreciation is the new form of imperialism.” Sample a few of Man Booker Prize winner Howard Jacobson’s one-liners, which carry a world of meaning within.

In a fun-filled conversation at JLF with novelist Chandrahas Choudhury, during a session sponsored by The Tribune, Jacobson said writers “can be serious only if they are funny”. So, in the context of his latest novel Live a Little, as also other books, he abhors all those who tell him, “Your book is funny but also serious.” For, it’s always the other way round, he adds. “All great writers are funny in some way. You can’t survive without comedy.”

On the same lines, the author of award-winning novel The Finkler Question doesn’t take the readers’ response — “I saw myself in the book” — as a compliment. He turned to writing books precisely to lose himself, not to find himself and certainly not to relate to the “judgmental me”. He would be happy if the readers instead of trying to discover themselves in his characters would feel for them. “All great characters in fiction,” he reminds us, “are not likeable. We just see and hear them. What fiction does to us is open our imagination to the world. A good novelist at best can do justice to one’s imagination, not to real life people who may delude themselves that they are there in the book.”

Among many things that make a writer, he asserts that shame and humiliation at not being good at other things is certainly one factor. Of course, when he sets out to write a novel, he doesn’t take big themes or grand subjects as the starting point, for that would be an easy way out. For instance, he would not write anything like say a concentration camp novel. Rather, he would create tragedy out of nothing, arrive at something through small things of life.

Language, too, in his scheme of things, is not accidental but the mainstay of all writing, something that connects us to now and past. Thus, reviews that pay glowing tributes to the beauty of his language beat him completely, for “isn’t that the rationale behind writing anyway?” He is equally piqued by the assumption that he deliberately talks of discrimination to either deepen it or remove it. Even when he wrote Shylock is My Name, dubbed a brilliant reimaging of Shakespeare’s enduring character, there was no preconceived agenda on his mind. And when he was questioned on challenging anti-Semitism, he said he did not think Shakespeare “who lives through our souls” was anti-Semitic precisely for he saw Jews as human beings. “Once you see/write about people as human beings, you stop discriminating” is the firm belief of the Jewish British novelist.

His books might be described as largely exploring what it means to be a Jew in today’s world, but Howard Jacobson would hate to pigeonhole himself or his characters. — TNS

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