Forgetting How to Breathe - Interview with Kenneth Harvey

The following interview was first published in Birmingham Words Magazine issue 2, July 2004.

Published to critical acclaim in Canada in 2003, applauded by Nobel Laureate J.M. Coetzee and published in the UK this year, Kenneth J. Harvey’s The Town That Forgot How to Breathe is currently creating quite a stir. Unable, on the Birmingham Words budget, to afford a visit to the small Newfoundland outport where Harvey lives, we settled for an e-mail interview. Here we talk to him about fiction, technology, the power of storytelling, and the dangers of forgetting.

BW: Could you begin by giving a little bit of an introduction to yourself and to your writing for those readers who do not already know your work?

KJH: I am the author of fourteen books, including Directions for an Opened Body (The Mercury Press, 1990), a finalist for the Commonwealth Writers Prize, Brud (Little, Brown, 1992), shortlisted for the Amazon.ca/Books in Canada First Novel Award, The Hole that Must Be Filled (Little Brown, 1994), and The Town That Forgot How To Breathe (Secker & Warburg, 2004), winner of the Raddall Atlantic Fiction Prize. My editorials have been published widely in most major Canadian newspapers, and I have held the post of Writer-in-Residence at both the University of New Brunswick and Memorial University. I live in an outport in Newfoundland.

BW: This Newfoundland landscape is the setting for The Town that Forgot How to Breathe, which in a small coastal village. It is a book that has a profound sense of place, and this seems to be a landscape – not just a physical landscape but also an imaginative and perhaps even a spiritual landscape – with which you are very deeply familiar. What is your own connection with this part of the world, and how is this connection reflected in the book?

KJH: It is very true what you say about the imaginative and spiritual landscape. No one has pointed that out yet. I firmly believe that we have these inner maps that are created by landscape, that make us feel as though we fit with a certain area and feel out of place in other areas. I remember going away to Ontario for a summer to look after a fellow writer’s house while he was away, and I felt a touch edgy for the summer. It was in the countryside, but the trees were much larger than where I come from and there were huge flat fields of farmland. I didn’t realize what was causing my irritation until I arrived back home and stepped out of the airport in Newfoundland and the salt air filled my lungs and I saw the stunted evergreens and it all came together inside of me. It all melded and clicked, like a huge jigsaw, and I felt at ease again.

BW: When I read your novel I was reminded of the South Asian tradition which speaks of the sea of stories, a motif used more recently by Salman Rushdie. Of course, being set by the sea, the sea looms large in this story, but is there a deeper connection between the sea, as a metaphor perhaps, and the practice of storytelling?

KJH: A number of people have mentioned Rushdie in relation to this book. I’m ashamed to say I haven’t read anything by him, although I’ll have to now. Yes, of course, there is a deeper connection with the sea. Life comes from the sea and we’ve practiced our trade as murderers quite well upon it. We’re killing everything that lives in it. It’s a horrible shame. The industrial revolution created greater ease, but this ease will play a profound part in eliminating us as a race. The ease of remote controls and instant access. To manipulate words and items by expending the least amount of force. The press of a button. Speech and text transmitted across the world in an instant. It’s our dangerous magic.

And, of course, there’s the biblical significance of the sea; the apocalyptical draining of life from the waters, and the fact that we are made mostly of water, as though we are draining ourselves away.

BW: The inhabitants of Bareneed, the outport where the book is set, are struck down by an illness in which they forget how to breathe, hence the title of the book. Breathing is something we rarely notice: it happens as a matter of course. In the book this forgetting how to breathe has a peculiar character: it is not that those afflicted stop breathing, but that they have to remember how to breathe, every breath has to be taken consciously for them to breathe at all. It is a kind of forgetting that demands that they must remember, consciously, how to do that which before they have done unconsciously. What is going on here?

KJH: It’s as if they’re trying to remember who they are. They have lost their sense of self. They must focus to remember, sort of like the art of storytelling. If you forget the stories you forget who you are, you dissolve away.

BW: This forgetting that you write about, a forgetting both of the self and also of the art of storytelling, is linked in the book to the growth in communications technology. It seems paradoxical that an increase in the means of communication can lead to the impoverishment in that which is communicated. What is your own view on this?

KJH: I believe television is a curse. In the years to come, I hope it will be looked upon with disbelief, with a baffled shake of the head. When we realize that our children are growing fatter by the moment from inactivity and wearing brand-name clothing because they are being told to do so by huge corporations, when we realize that our children tell us nothing except lines they repeat from television, when television – other people’s scripted lives – becomes our own reality, then we might step back and say: Where have our stories gone?

BW: The German philosopher Heidegger in his later writings claims that we have forgotten how to dwell, that we ‘turn the day into night and the night into harassed unrest’, if I remember the quote correctly. ‘Dwelling’ here means not just living here or there, but being rooted in a history, a community, a landscape, perhaps also within a web of stories and myths. This idea of forgetting of how to dwell seems to encapsulate the central theme of your book. What are the implications of this forgetting? Is this forgetting something that you have witnessed yourself?

KJH: Yes, I see it all the time. One of the things that struck me when I moved, twelve years ago, to the small community where I live was that I’d hear teenagers in this Canadian outport speaking like Americans, using all the slang and sayings plucked from television. I saw a teenager wearing a leather jacket with the American flag on the back. This was a boy who came from generations of fishermen. However, I’m not completely pessimistic. I believe, as we age and veer away from fashion (which includes an unhealthy preoccupation with the fashion beam of television), we seek out the stories that belong to our families, the true stories. I’ve often heard that once all the old-timers die, our stories die with them, but I see old-timers around my community who still tell stories. I’ve noticed that as grow older, I have become less interested in urban distraction and become more immersed in rural introspection. I believe this happens with writing, as well. When I was young I wrote gritty urban stories. I enjoyed hanging out in the city. As I grow older, I tend to be drawn toward creating larger novels about where we come from. I believe this happens to quite a few writers. I can’t make a sweeping generalization, of course, but I’ve seen it happen. As we age, we lose our testosterone and, with it, our egocentricity, so that explains having more patience with the long, detailed yarn as well, I guess.

BW: Your book ends on what might seem an optimistic note, in a move from forgetting to remembering. The final pages of the book invoke a return to an almost idyllic community of the future in which storytelling plays a central part. The people of Bareneed return to their houses after the catastrophe with which your book ends (I will not give things away by writing about the cataclysmic events at the climax of your story), the seas fill again with fish, and the only lights to be seen are those of the candles and the fires around which those who are telling tales and listening to stories are crouched. It is an optimistic and beautiful picture, but it also seemed to me to be, perhaps deliberately, an almost impossible dream of a world where stories are once again told, where they become the basis for a renewed community. What signs do you see of hope for a return to a deeper sense of community and an end to the fragmentation and alienation with which you seem to be concerned? Do writers such as yourself have a role to play in this?

KJH: I have written a book about the death of storytelling and it has been my most successful book to date. This is a very good sign of hope. It means that people are interested in a deeper sense of community. They’re connecting with the book and, in a sense, are taking heart in what it has to say. They believe in it. This is extremely encouraging.

As for writers having a role to play, I think we do. We try to make comments on present-day society. Some writers try to be the conscience of the world. This is necessary, while other writers try to simply entertain. I believe you really must entertain people at the same time. Nobody likes being preached to.

BW: I believe that you have sold the film rights to the book. Are you excited, or perhaps even a little apprehensive, at the prospect of The Town that Forgot How to Breathe coming to the big screen?

KJH: I’m excited, but hoping that the film remains true to the novel. That’s an extremely difficult feat to pull off, considering so many people try to push their vision (be it artistic or financial) on a film project. However, the producer Catherine Gourdier, who is also writing the script, is a wonderful person and is keeping true to the spirit of the book. The co-producer, Don Carmody, has been involved in Good Will Hunting, Chicago, Gothika and many other films, so I know the book is in good hands.

BW: What involvement do you anticipate having in the film?

KJH: None. The author generally has no involvement. As a matter of fact, the director becomes the author of the film, regardless of who wrote the book.

BW: Finally, what is your next big project?

KJH: My next book is a collection of stories called SHACK. It’s due out in Canada this fall. I’m not certain when it will be out in the UK.

Kenneth J. Harvey’s The Town that Forgot How to Breathe, is now out in the UK. It is available in hardback for £12.99. Published by Secker & Warburg, London 2004. ISBN 0 436 20638 2