2017-01-03
57 分钟Richard Powers reads and discusses “A Visit,” by Steven Millhauser
This is the New Yorker fiction podcast from the New Yorker magazine.
I'm Deborah Treisman, fiction editor at the New Yorker.
Each month we invite a writer to choose a story from the magazine's archives to read and discuss.
This month we're going to hear a visit by Stephen Milhauser, which was published in the New Yorker in August of 1997.
Although I had not heard from my friend in nine years, I wasn't surprised, not really, to receive a short letter from him, dashed off in pencil, announcing that he had taken a wife and summoning me to visit him in some remote upstate town I had never heard of.
The story was chosen by Richard Powers, who's published eleven books of fiction, including the Gold Bug Variations and the Echo Maker, which won the National Book Award in 2006.
Hi, Richard.
Hi, Deborah.
Welcome.
So when you were trying to choose a story to read today, you said that it was important for you to choose a story that involved humans interacting with non humans, whether animals, plants, or other forms of life.
Why?
Was that something that you were looking for?
Yeah, you know, I've been thinking about something that I learned a long, long time ago, actually, back in misses Lippmann's 6th grade literature class, where she told us that there were three sources of drama in any story.
There was man against man, man against himself, and man against nature.
And I've been increasingly conscious in the last few years, as I've been working on a book about humans and trees, that that third source of drama has really kind of atrophied and disappeared from a lot of our fiction.
We've become incredibly good at talking about people trying and failing to get along with others who have different values, people at odds deeply with themselves and conflicted over what it is that they exactly want.
Somehow this notion that we are also at war with or contesting the world with other creatures who don't look like us, who don't think like us, who aren't in any way participating in our private dramas, has been lost.
And I've been very interested in writers who are finding ways of reviving that.
And the story involves not necessarily man against nature, but Mandev grappling with nature in perhaps unnatural terms, if that's a fair way to put it.
Do you think that that's typical of what Milhauser tries to address in his work?