Let's stop pretending we're revolutionaries

André Forget on his Giller-nominated debut In the City of Pigs, and the many ties that bind art to power

In the last few years, literary critic André Forget has been dividing his time between England, Russia and Canada. His debut novel, In the City of Pigs (yes, it’s a play on Hogtown… and greed) came out this year in Dundurn’s Rare Machines series and immediately found itself on the Giller longlist. It’s an intriguing ficto-musical experiment with elements of noir and Bildungsroman, with four sections in four different moods. Forget was back in his hometown last week for the International Festival of Authors, so I used the opportunity to book us a chinwag. We started in medias res.

LP: How do we bring back our book criticism? Can we ever have an eco-system where praise, mixed reviews, bad reviews as well as the odd hatchet job all exist?

AF: My feeling is that Canadian literature has always been in a defensive crouch. Because of its relationship with Great Britain and America, there’s always been the sense that these are hothouse plants, that we should try to keep them alive in this inhospitable climate. So any criticism of Canadian books is often, I think subconsciously, read as not playing on the team. That if we want to have literature, then we have to be positive about each other.

Even in 2022?

I don’t subscribe to that idea. I think that first of all there is no such thing as bad press. When it comes to books, there really is no downside to a hatchet job. Even for a writer. How many hatchet jobs had actually ended careers? It just doesn’t work that way. I think the problem that Canadian books face is absolute silence. The book comes out and nothing happens. There’s no conversation about it. That to me is a much more dangerous thing.

But there’s so little reviewing space, everybody probably wants to cover the books that they like.

That, and everyone knows each other. That was my perception of Toronto. That everyone sort of knows each other and has been to parties with other people.

And if you try to extricate yourself from it all, you’re missing out on opportunities. Do you have a “village” that writers often need?

To some extent I do. Although I’ve been out of the country pretty consistently for 4 years. But I’m in touch with the people I like. Which I think is the sweet spot. But I was only able to get that community because I spent time going to readings every night, and plugging in and doing the schmoozing. You do the schmoozing and you meet the people you like and you can sort of extricate yourself to an extent because you’ve already used it for what it’s for. That’s how I approached it. But there are still people I think who think that that is the point; going to readings and hanging out with other writers and being supportive and positive about each other.

What’s your impression about the state of critical culture here?

Yes it’s bad, but who’s publishing reviews? Barely anybody any more. There’s the LRC, the CNQ (which is all off line), the Walrus occasionally does stuff, Maisonneuve occasionally, some newspapers occasionally. The Globe and Mail book coverage has been annihilated. There used to be book criticism written every week and now maybe once a month you’ll get a proper review. Much more common is the author profile; or what does this book have to teach us about climate change, or whatever.

And the lists. “The ten most anticipated!” And everybody’s working off the blurbs, without having read any of the books.

Having been on a couple of those, you look at it, and think This writer has never even seen my book. And fair enough, there are 15 other books they also want to highlight. But it’s not criticism. It’s advertising. So I think it’s worse than when I started. I don’t know how you would start as a critic right now if you were 25. I don’t even know what that the role would be. I feel like I got the tail end of there being critical culture. There are simply not enough outlets that will pay for criticism today.

And you look at the Booknet numbers and such, and what they show is that Canadians are not really reading Canadian books. We’re back to that again. Is it all connected, is it due to lack of media and criticism? There are also other factors probably. There’s a massive push for DEI in our cultural institutions and if that’s the priority, and not that the writing has the spark… Where do you stand on DEI as the ultimate value in arts?

I think it has to be put in the context in CanLit. It’s not that we have had the art for art’s sake literary or artistic culture, and then something changed. Canadian literature was set up as a state-building project in 1950s. I think it was tied in with movement towards Canadian nationalism.

OK but we should have a culture, no?

Yes, but in a way anything that people do within a certain territory is a culture.

We have a Netflix-watching culture then.

Yeah and in that way we’re no different than everyone else. But whenever I come back to Canada, I’m struck by the fact that we do things a certain way here and there’s a certain way we think, a certain way that we approach things. And I think the most Canadian thing about Canada in some way is the awareness one has when living here that while this is a very wealthy, developed country, it’s not an important country. But we speak the same language as the global superpower which is right next door. To me, Canadianness is about being both inside and outside, and my experience growing up here in the 1990s was that I knew a lot about NYC, I knew a lot about LA, but I didn’t know a lot about Toronto until I moved here. I think if you grow up in that milieu, something happens to your brain. You’re aware that the culture that you consume largely is not being created in the place where you live. And I think that does something. Whereas in the UK there’s an unselfconsciousness about English literature, in England in particular, that has to do with the fact that – it’s England, it’s where the language comes from, where Shakespeare is from.

Yes, it’s not a culture that feels under siege. Or didn’t. They’re starting to grumble about the Booker being open to American authors and things like that.

The American thing is starting to get to them now. But there is such a deep culture to draw from. But the cultural industries that allow art to be created in this country are very tied in with the attitude that we need to have these things because we’re a real country and this is what real countries have. And if we’re not going to become Americans, then we have to invest in our books culture and invest in having our own symphonies and all of those things. So that happens in the fifties and sixties and that coincides with the rise of Atwood, Munro, this whole generation of CanLit writers. I think now people don’t identify with that nation-building project. In part because it was successful.

And yet we don’t read our books or watch our own movies. It’s like the culture was created to be put on the shelf.

But the political concerns have changed. They are now the concerns for example of the place of immigrants in this culture, the place of people who are historically marginalized in this culture, and those conversations are happening across the western world. So the politics went from We need to preserve Canadian culture, and so we have to use affirmative action to make sure that Newfoundland writers or Manitoba writers are represented, and that was just as much affirmative action as we’re seeing now regarding the representation of minority ethnic writers and so on. I don’t want to be too critical of the DEI thing. In part because I think it’s actually the same approach to culture, which is that books have to be doing the work for them to be justified. And I don’t like that, I don’t like that idea. But it’s really deeply ingrained. But it’s different in Quebec, where there’s much more of a sense of the value of art for its own sake.

Anglo Canada doesn’t really practice that.

This is totally unscientific but I think it has something to do with the fact that the people who set up this project were Low Church, English and Scottish Puritans. Who didn’t have a lot of time for it. Who were skeptical of it. No one thinks that way now, but I think that’s deep in the culture. It’s in the cultural bedrock. Reading books is kind of a waste of time. You’re not being productive. So we have to find some reason why reading books is actually good. And at a certain point that was, reading books was good because you’re being a Canadian and you’re buying a Canadian product and that’s good for the country. And now it’s you’re reading books because it’s making you a better person. I don’t think there’s a huge difference between those things and I think that both approaches miss the mark. It would be interesting to hear your perspective from the time of Yugoslavia. In Russia I was blown away by the fact that ordinary people could quote Pushkin. People who I would never think of as being literary, were aware of the literary heritage of their country. And that’s not all good. There’s the chauvinism sometimes coinciding with that, but it’s just so different from what I grew up with.

There’s a show at Crow’s Theatre that uses Al Purdy’s poems in a play about home. Would Al Purdy be a national poet? If you stopped someone on the street – or polled a bunch of people – I don’t think a lot of them would say that Canadian poet X or novelist Y are fundamental to their self-understanding. Maybe the previous generation had that, this one doesn’t? Maybe the internet changed that? I don’t know. I have this weird sense of decline, and I’ve been here just 22 years. It’s changed dramatically over the two decades. Should we be concerned that we’re one of the US states, essentially, in our preoccupation, in our readings?

I don’t know… I don’t think about it too much any more. I think I end up being crudely Marxist about a lot of this stuff. In other words, where’s the market? We are 30+ million…

Yes, what’s the bourgeoisie reading and watching? But at least we have the donor component in culture still very much alive. The nation’s elite are donating, if not exactly reading and watching.

Yes, but it’s a mixed blessing I think. It keeps it going, but it also means that the stuff that gets funded is – in order to get funded, it needs to appeal to some other, non-artistic logic. Again, this is good for us because it’s telling Canadian stories. I don’t know. I feel the sense of decline as well. I think everyone does. I think the feeling that things are getting worse, things are more difficult, there’s less investment—not in the financial sense, but in a spiritual sense almost. That sitting on your couch reading a book is just a good thing that humans do, or sitting quietly and listening to music – that’s on the way out.

It’s also a pleasure. People forget that.

It’s a difficult pleasure. It’s not the kind of pleasure that brings immediate satisfaction. I’ve been trying to think, the way culture works now, I think it’s a lot like addiction. It’s a lot like: I just need to turn off. I want my mind to be blank.

Yep. Escapism, bingeing.

And I’ve worked a lot of tough jobs, and when I was working those jobs, you come back, you don’t necessarily have the energy to think. As more people find themselves in economic precarity and have more demands on their time, more demands on their energy, I don’t think that it’s surprising that people are turning to the sources of oblivion. And I think that Netflix is just oblivion. I’m obliviating myself. The part of England where we live, it’s very working class and there’s a long history of alcoholism. So yeah, when your life is difficult, you turn to oblivion. Oblivion has its appeal. But addiction also affects everyone. I think there are plenty of rich people who also just put on Netflix and obliviate themselves. So it’s not… that there’s a clear answer, “the problem with this is because of the economy”, there’s also the matter of spiritual poison, and a desire to be not present in your life. And that can affect anyone. I think we have built a culture that is just that, that is just seeking that kind of oblivion. Which is deeply troubling. I don’t know what the solution is.

Yes. I mean, depression is on the rise, addictions on the rise, and less room for enjoyment of the arts… but it’s not only sociological. I remember, for ex, that the Quebecois demanded that their theatres reopen during the long lockdowns. And none of that in Ontario. Theatres closed, live music disappeared? It’s fine.

Didn’t like going anyway.

LOL right? It’s a hassle. I was stunned by how fast we adjusted to a world without arts.

André Forget (Aaron Li)

II.

But let’s talk about your protagonist. The first part of your novel is very Russell Smith-esque. A young man comes to Toronto and is charmed by it. I haven’t read that in ages in CanLit. But then you completely change the register. And then you change it again. It is, as you say somewhere, a novel in four movements. Music plays a major role, the protagonist is a former musician… What was interesting for you in this tension between music and the novel? Why choose music as a tool with which to tell the story?

I really like music. One of the reason I like music is because, in my mental diagram of all the fine arts, music and literature to me are the furthest away. Literature is the most concrete – some meaning is bound to emerge when the words are around, even in fiction like Finnegans Wake. The kind of music that I talk about in the book, something like a Mahler symphony, to me there is a wrestling with meaning in that art form, but it’s so non-verbal, it’s different. You can write about what a symphony is, means, is doing, by using words. But the symphony itself kind of exist on another plane of meaning-making. And the kind of insights that you get when you’re sitting in a dark room listening to musicians play -- to me those insights are profoundly non verbal. It’s like an emotional insight. Something happens, and you go Oh, that feels great! Because I’m not really a musician. The only way I can approach that as an artist is through writing about it. Which is deeply unsatisfying and quixotic.

So of course Adorno would say – and I agree with you, to connect with music, it has to grab me, it has to be visceral – Adorno would say, yeah but that’s because you’re just being stupid listeners. You ought to analyze what it does to you emotionally, introduce distance etc.

Yes but analyzing it, all that means is you bring words into it. You’re removing yourself from it. You’re bringing another type of human understanding, a language-based human understanding into this thing that is much more physical, much more about the body. I’m just obsessed with that problematic. Words are always inadequate for things they describe. But I use words in my art. So I’m trying to push up against the limits of what you can do with words. And push toward music, which I love.

I don’t think it makes a lot of sense [laughs]. I think poetry does that a lot better than prose. But for some reason I found myself coming back to that again and again. I started the book as a short story, and just kept being drawn back to it.

You were never tempted to do a logo-musical section where you would use the words like dunno they’re used in the Molly Bloom monologue in the Ulysses, where they are employed for their own musicality. And then the ripples of meaning may appear or not.

That’s what I’m working towards. Eventually I would like to get there. I mean, it’s a first book. I wanted to see if I could do it. On a fundamental level, I didn’t know if I could write a novel. I’ve spent all these years as a literary critic and I wanted to see if I can play for the other side. The novel is a particular form and certain things have to happen for it to really work. There’s a lot of stage managing. I wanted to understand the art from the inside and to see what kind of pressures there are. The hardest part about the novel was all the plotting. You have to figure out OK, I’ve got about 200 pages… and at some point there’s got to be some kind of emotional arc, and you start to realize, that’s actually hard. How do I do more than just write these scenes, how do I make it all add up to something. I was really invested in the technical exercise of how to make a novel and that I’ve done that I feel a little freer for what comes next.

It’s interesting what said about music and the novel… it occurred to me that some musical forms that emerged around the same time as the novel – read a bit like the novel. Symphonies for ex, if you look at Beethoven’s Pastoral which is like a novella. Do you think these forms influenced one another? They must have.

Yes. Again, to be a crude Marxist about it, it’s partially about the rise of the bourgeoisie and this class that has the time and the resources…

And a private life.

And a private life. It’s always fascinating to me looking at those big nineteenth century figures and how many of them are turning to literature. And are writing symphonies – not operas – symphonies that are based on Faust and so on.

Not to mention Berlioz’s Fantastique, which is like a serialized Balzac novel or something.

That’s right. Cross pollination was definitely happening. Which, more of that please.

But of course, in our era, it would be television and the internet influencing the novel more than anything, probably.

Yeah, yeah… I think there’s a really interesting argument about modernism, forgot who made it first. That modernism is responding to film. You have a scene, and then you cut, and then another scene, and a short cut, and today we take it for granted that you have someone walking down the street and half a second later they are in a completely different setting. So modernists, having been exposed to film, realized they could do that in their own work. Whereas if you read, say, Flaubert – his scenes are much more continuous. There aren’t these kind of quick cuts.

And other technologies I’m sure influenced – planes, trains. Photography! We don’t really have thick descriptions of furniture and clothes (or they read quaint to me) in novels any more.

Yes. We are not reading a book about London and being like, I’ve never seen London, describe it in greater detail!

III.

So this underwater organ business. I think it’s a weirdly moving section, and not a little mystifying. It tells us that there’s kind of an in-built failure in innovation, in music most of all, in other forms probably too. Tell me more about this chapter about the underwater organ which cannot be heard – except as perhaps gurgling.

Or perhaps it can? That’s the debate. I’ve gotten so much feedback about that section. Some people really liked it, some people went What the hell was this about. It started with a composer friend of mine. He called me up and asked me if I wanted to write a story about “an underwater organ” for his arts organization. I said sure. I was working as a journalist at that time and was really interested in the way that language gives us these conditions how to respond to something in a certain way. So when you pick up a piece of print and the piece of print starts by saying On Aug 14, three men were hit by a car in NYC, you’re assuming that’s non-fiction, because of the linguistic keys, and how it’s presented to us. In the long section that starts that story, I wanted to use my journalistic and academic skills to write about something as if it were true. And if it were true, how it would have been written about and what kinds of conversations would exist about this underwater organ if it were real. How would academics respond to it. They’d be a society immediately; and arts councils would say, well we need one too, where do we put it, put it in Halifax, they need an economic boost. Etc. Those sorts of things. I was playing around with that. How do I use a certain tone to create realism, or a sense that this is real.

Over an absurd thing.

Over something that couldn’t exist. How could you actually put this together?

No the seriousness of everybody in that section is extraordinary.

This friend and I, for a long time we’ve been talking about what happens when someone goes into a concert hall, sits down and listens to an hour of music, being played on an organ. What is actually happening in that person. Are they – they’re certainly not hearing everything that he’s hearing as a trained organist. He knows everything about this instrument and is hearing all the mistakes and all the flourishes. When a regular audience member listens to music, what’s happening, is their mind wandering, is it just the place to sit down. How many people in Roy Thomson Hall are engaging with the music. It’s kind of an unknowable thing. Maybe you’re arrested by a certain passage, then your mind wanders, then you’re back. For a performing artist, that’s a big challenge: what are you actually creating for people who are here, and to what extent are you communicating something with that. I think with music that’s an especially acute thing because the way meaning is communicated is already so nonverbal. But as a writer, and you mentioned before that people would get mad about something that I’d written, I’m always surprised when people get mad. I always think I’m being very clear. And you may disagree with me but if I’m doing my job as a writer it shouldn’t be possible for someone to misread me. Often when people have gotten mad on social media about something I’ve written, the feeling is, Well you just didn’t understand what I was trying to do. Why? Why didn’t you understand? Why did I fail to communicate with you? So that idea, failure of communication, failure of perception, that we can all look at one thing and see different things, or nothing at all. These people who say they hear underwater organ music, are they cranks? I wanted the main person who hears the music, Rebecca Schumacher, to be absolutely serious about this. She hears the music. She’s a serious person, this is her life’s work. The story presents her as being a credible individual. So what does it mean that this credible individual hears something that we can’t imagine hearing. To me, that’s just a very human problem, a very human reality. That touches on art of course, but also on a great number of other things in human life.

I have to ask you about real estate in Toronto, a big topic in your book. The avant-garde in your book, or what’s presenting itself as such – this society of musicians that perform collectively in secret locations – is, it turns out, a development project, a real estate marketing project. Are you really that pessimistic? And there are elements of noir there. These people are all-powerful. They pull all the strings.

I was very irritated when I started writing that book in 2017; culture had just gone off the rails because of what happened in 2016. There was this almost fetishization of the artist as a kind of exemplary figure – speaking truth to power, standing outside the system, “the resistance”. In the west, we so love a dissident. If you’re some sort of artist and come from an oppressive regime, we absolutely love that. We love it in part because there is this idea that this is pure truth, this is the real shit, these people are telling it like it is. There’s a terrible Margaret Atwood poem about that. Just dreadful. To me it’s just so obvious that artists have always worked for someone. We have to. There’s no money in it. And living with my partner who grew up in Russia and having spent time there myself and in Turkey and being interested in the eastern side of Europe I suppose, these countries that are culturally similar enough, but also shaped by these different empires, the Austrian Hungarian, the Ottoman, the Russian then Soviet empire… the art in those empires it seems was always court art. It was always tied in with the powers that existed and people had to make their calculation about I guess whether or not they were willing to work. And the rise of romantic nationalism and the artist as this kind of revolutionary figure changed some of that. But in the Soviet Union very quickly the artist as a revolutionary figure becomes either a dissident who leaves the country, and is able to continue being an artist because they’re basically working for the other guys, or you’re working for the Party. To me there seems to me something true about that: if you want to create art, you’re always going to make some sort of accommodation with the powers that exist. Because art needs to be distributed in a certain way, certain infrastructure has to exist for it to be received.

Even here? We’re submitted?

The success of the western world has been creating the illusion that that is not the case here. And that is the hypocrisy of the west. So here we have freedom. Well, what freedom do we have? If you’re an artist here in the city, you have to pay your rent, you have to buy food… if you want to be a professional artist, it’s going to be hard to keep doing that because non-artistic jobs will be the ones that pay your bills and allow you to fulfill your obligations etc. So… artists are in a position where they have to make accommodations. I was on the long list for the Giller Prize. I thought it’s OK getting on the Giller list, it’s good for your career, it means I’ll be able to write another book, etc. All of that is underwritten by a terrible bank that is doing terrible things in the world. I just can’t get away from that. In order for me to earn enough money that I can keep doing it, I have to get in bed with these people.

OK but what’s wrong with them giving away the money?

Because they’re putting their name on it. It’s Giller Scotiabank. It’s not that these people are necessarily… in the novel I didn’t want it to be that they’re telling the artists what to do. They are not telling artists what to do. They’re just seeing a mutually beneficial relationship and taking advantage of it. And I’m ok with making those kinds of calculations in my own life. But I don’t’ want to pretend that I’m a dissident, standing outside the system, pointing out everything is wrong. I’m in the system. And I’m benefiting from the system. So I don’t mind all of that. What I was going after in the book is the idea that you can get the benefit of the closeness the power, and the resources that come from that, while also maintaining the moral purity of being able to say that you’re revolutionaries.

I’ve recently been to the Gagosian – you’ve probably been, this private gallery in London. But not just anywhere in London: it’s in Mayfair. There was this exhibit Haunted Realism, about “capitalism”. That was a surreal experience. Walking through Mayfair to get to that thing, and then looking at some photographs and installations on the topic of how bad capitalism is. How utterly pointless all of that looked in the middle of Mayfair.

But I guess, it’s better that wealth gets spent on the arts than on any number of other things. Artists should just work with institutions and donors that they can stomach. And those you can’t, don’t work with.

I see it very much that way. It’s yet another part of life where we have to make these kinds of moral calculations for ourselves. But we shouldn’t pretend that’s not what we’re doing. We are in it. Be honest about it.

I love it when the people obsess about statues and removing books from the library. When the U of T says it’s working to “decolonize” itself. It’s absurd.

The statues thing – I’d like to compare it to the eastern world, where you tear down the statue after the revolution succeeds. You win, then you can take down statues. But this “we’ll tear down the statue before the revolution” just seems to me so Anglo. We can have our cake and eat it too. If we tear down the statue, that’s the same as having the revolution. Same as actually redistributing  the wealth or the land. The greatest cause of despair for me about my society is that we’re captured by these symbols in such a profound way that the symbols are the only thing that’s real. And changing the symbol is the same as changing the thing that the symbol exists to represent. No. That doesn’t change anything.