Stijn Vervaet
Literature makes you feel and it can get you thinking too. But how do you move from signs on the page to thoughts and feelings? And why does fictions sometimes feel more real than the world around us? My name is Stijn Vervaet and together with my colleagues from the Literature, Cognition, and Emotions project, LCE for short, we will discuss these and other questions in the coming weeks. Today's guest is Karin Kukkonen, full professor in comparative literature at the University of Oslo and convener of LCE. Karin's research stretches from cognitive literary studies and narrotology all the way to comics. The topic of our conversation today is her latest book, Probability Designs. Literature and predictive processing. Thank you for joining us, Karin
Karin Kukkonen
Thank you for having me.
Stijn Vervaet
My pleasure. Your book, Karin, is very much, or first and foremost — at least that's how I see it — a book about reading literature. One of the key questions you discuss is, to put it simply, how we as readers respond to an experienced literary text, and how meaning making arises in our nonlinear interaction with the text. But what kind of reader does probability designs have in mind? Is it a kind of universal reader, a reader with scholarly training? Or a beginning reader who has only had some experience from listening to stories? Or is it any experienced reader? Do all of this more or less follow the same patterns you describe when reading fiction?
Karin Kukkonen
Well, yes, well it is very much a book about reading and about what it is to read literature and be taken by the experience. Uhm, to specify what kind of reader... that's quite difficult. I mean my most immediate response would be to say that the books or the novels, that I discuss in probability designs, are my favourite novels. So in a way... Yeah, I've picked out things that I find most interesting as a reader myself. And then I've tried to figure out, what is it that makes them special?
Stijn Vervaet
But at the same time, you've distinguished some patterns that could also — or do also — apply to other novels, right?
Karin Kukkonen
Yeah, I mean, the idea is that any kind of novel has this thing I call probability design, that there is a design in the text that changes your expectations as you move through it. So that there is an ongoing development between the reader and the text, as you go page by page from the beginning to the end — or sometimes you might skip a chapter, or you read the ending before you start, that kind of thing. So I'm interested in the sort of ongoing development of what happens between a literary text and its reader.
Stijn Vervaet
Because... a text's design — because your title is probability design... So literary texts have a kind of design, which then manipulates readers — if I understood it correctly — or at least you start from the text's design for theoretical discussions, right? So how do readers then navigate this literary texts? And how does the text, then, maybe manipulate the reader, or maybe we as readers, we want to be manipulated, I don't know. Because the text caters to our expectations by providing cues or triggers or information that leads to predictions on the side of the reader, but also to what you call prediction errors that will invite us to reassess earlier predictions. Is that right?
Karin Kukkonen
Yeah, so it is. It's always a give and take, or a kind of tango, if you will between the text and the reader, where you have a certain kind of expectation based on, you know, what's on the cover where you find it in the book shop, maybe you know the author. And what the text then starts giving you... And as that develops, certain patterns are established, so you can run your predictions and you can have the sense that you make progress through the narrative, but then inevitably, in any interesting narrative, there will be a point where you're wrong in your predictions, and that's when it gets interesting. Because then you start wondering, why am I wrong? Uhm, where can I find an explanation for what's going on here? That's when real intrigue starts in a narrative.
Stijn Vervaet
And when the texts become perhaps interesting also to read, yeah? If everything is predictable, then why would we continue reading, right?
Karin Kukkonen
Then you don't need to finish the book, no.
Stijn Vervaet
To get back to this probability design of the text, is it something we can understand best at the level of plot or style or genre, or does it friction on different levels simultaneously, perhaps? You devote quite some space to plot, which you call quite aptly the ugly duckling of narratology. So perhaps we could start our investigation, or your investigation plot, as a way of exploring how this predictive processing works more specifically.
Karin Kukkonen
Yeah, it's quite interesting that in the scholarly tradition devoted to narrative plot, at least in recent years, has not gotten a lot of attention. Part of that might have to do with the fact that it's generally considered to be more advanced to think about character development, round characters, to think about phenomenological depth, to think about the realness of experience. Whereas plot is always something that is a bit too contrived, that is too made. That smacks of the artificial.
Stijn Vervaet
Or of detective fiction, or?
Karin Kukkonen
Of detective fiction. Whereas, of course, if you look into the longer tradition of theorising about literature, at least in the Western tradition, if you start with Aristotle, plot is central, plot is everything, and plot — at least as far as I understand it — is sort of... It sort of gives the trajectory, the drive to a narrative.
Stijn Vervaet
Yeah, I guess plot is also, for quite a few readers, the main reason why they're reading, right?
Karin Kukkonen
Yeah, I mean they want to know what's going to happen, how a situation gets resolved, what a character will do, how someone will respond. All these very basic questions that — I guess — in real life we don't always take the time to ask, but when we're in a probability design, we're sort of forced to ask that question, because otherwise we can't follow the story as it goes on.
Stijn Vervaet
Yeah, but you relate probability design not only to the level of plot, but also move on to style and what do you call the mental library — right? — to intertext... So could you say something about how this thing works on these other two levels — If I may call them levels?
Karin Kukkonen
I think levels, different steps in a cascade of reading. I guess one of the things that hasn't helped plot is the fact that we usually take very simple narratives in order to illustrate plot, and I've done the same thing in the book. I've taken a fairy tale, Cinderella, as an example of how plot works, and how all the different transformations of the coach into the pumpkin and all of that... How all of these work as prediction errors that drive the sequence of the narrative — literally in the case of the pumpkin coach — that drive it to the end. But on top of that, of course, you do have all the linguistic features and the French version — the Perrault version of Cinderella — that I discuss has some, yeah, quite specific linguistic features that build suspense, for example, that mark certain characters in a particular way, which then makes you, as a reader... Well, either you like them because you think you're kind of like them, or you despise them. So there is a lot going on on a second order level through the use of language that constantly interacts with the plot, that constantly puts your attention on different aspects of the story.
Stijn Vervaet
Yeah, so it is completely impossible to disentangle language or formulate in the literary text from plot, right? We as we readers, we respond both to the plot and to the language that is used, whether it's the language of the narrator or the language used by the characters themselves.
Karin Kukkonen
Yeah, I would say so. Uhm, I guess perhaps the best way of thinking about it is, that we're when we understand the narrative we constantly run on different levels, and sometimes the plot level is faster than the style level. Sometimes it's the other way around. Sometimes the style level is quite dominant. I'm thinking of a book that came out I think two years ago, which is called Ducks, Newburyport by Lucy Ellmann. It's an 800 page book.
Stijn Vervaet
OK.
Karin Kukkonen
Which is made of, I think, 8 sentences. And they all run in the same pattern, "the fact that, the fact that", and then you then that gets filled out with different descriptions. So their style is kind of everything.
Stijn Vervaet
And not an easy read, I can imagine.
Karin Kukkonen
Well, I think... I don't think it's actually a very difficult read because you do have... I mean it does get repeated. I think what makes it difficult is that you don't know where to leave it, because you don't usually read 200–300 pages in one go, which is what you kind of would have to.
Stijn Vervaet
If you want to finish the sentence.
Karin Kukkonen
Well or get to a point where you can... It's quite difficult to tell where you can leave it and then get back into it. So I think in that sense it's a difficult book, yeah, but not necessarily. I mean, if you let the language take you, I don't think it's particularly difficult to read, but the interesting thing there is that elements of, you know what happens to that character — whose stream of thought we're following — that starts to creep in and after a while you understand, okay here is something happening that she doesn't explicitly talk about in that stream of consciousness, but that obviously is what is going on here. So their style runs, if we take this multiple speed metaphor, their style runs a lot faster and then plot comes later. But it can of course be the other way around.
Stijn Vervaet
But in this, in addition to plot and style, you distinguish something you call third order probability design, and this you call the mental library or how we relate to other texts, right, when reading? So could you tell us something more about this third order?
Karin Kukkonen
This third order, the mental library, yeah? Uhm, it is perhaps close to what has been called a sort of horizon of expectation. And it's a horizon of expectation that's based on basically all the other things that you've read. All the other things that inform how you understand what you read. So the Ducks, Newburyport, a lot of people have compared it to Joyce or Virginia Woolf.
Stijn Vervaet
OK, yeah.
Karin Kukkonen
So you would read it with that frame of mind. But Ellmann does something quite different, which you start noticing after a couple of 100 pages. So the mental libraries is sort of the... it's the books that you have around you in your mental space as you read, and they will guide your attention, they will inform what you're looking for when you're reading within the text.
Stijn Vervaet
So the books you have in your backpack when you're reading, and you sometimes you have them in your head, sometimes your consult them and then you come up with another interpretation or another, or you adjust your expectations of the texts you're reading.
Karin Kukkonen
Yeah, or if you've just read something quite striking and then you read another book, quite often, the second book will be coloured by what you've read before.
Stijn Vervaet
I see, yeah.
Karin Kukkonen
If you read Anna Karenina after reading War and Peace, you will read it quite differently from how you would read it after Crime and Punishment.
Stijn Vervaet
OK yeah, but when you use the notion of probability design, what about reader's agency then — is everything already fixed by the design of the text, or is there something left to the individual reader's choices, predilections, preferences, character, or reading? Yeah, I don't know how you see this — Is everything set in stone and you just, as a reader, you have to go through this design and...?
Karin Kukkonen
Well, I mean it's not set in stone, it's written in ink, if anything... Well, I think the really interesting thing about literary probability designs is that even though this is a structure that you go through as you're reading, and there are certain things that happen in a story, and there is a driver trajectory to it, it's nevertheless also flexible in the sense that depending on how you go in. You can choose to focus on different things. You can choose to draw your own inferences. You can choose to decide that you really like the villain, of this novel, for example, so you can...
Stijn Vervaet
Yes, Raskolnikov?
Karin Kukkonen
For example, though is he the villain?
Stijn Vervaet
Yeah, that's a question for another podcast.
Karin Kukkonen
But, as you see, I mean, even though this is a probability design, uhm, different readers can have different opinions. You can have different emotional investments, you can read the ending, I think, of Crime and Punishment quite differently depending on your own convictions.
Stijn Vervaet
Yeah, or plans.
Karin Kukkonen
Or plans, well, or how you feel about Napoleon... So there is a lot of flexibility in the probability design, which I think goes a long way to account for why literature appeals to many different people. And also why we can, you know, come back to texts after, well, in the in the case of Crime and Punishment, 150 years, or even much longer periods of time.
Stijn Vervaet
Now, when discussing reader's agency and who's in control of what, then I would like to turn to an important topic. You — at least as far as I can see... An important move, that you make in your book, which is bringing intentionality back to the debate. Because, after New Criticism, influential rejection of authorial intention as a fallacy, I think this is really interesting to see how you rethink intentionality. So how should we understand this and how does it intertwine with probability design, in your view?
Karin Kukkonen
Yeah, I mean intentionality is obviously a highly complicated topic, and I think there are very good reasons that literary criticism said, uhm, let's not ask what the author had for breakfast. But at the same time it's also undeniable, I think, when you're reading, that you have a sense that you know someone did this for a reason — That it's not entirely coincidental that I'm reading this event after another event. Someone put it there for a reason. And of course, when you look at authors' manuscripts, you can see that they spend a lot of time adjusting how they express themselves, what the sequence of events is... writing in and out characters, giving the story a new ending, all of that... So there is, I think, an intention or an intentionality there, but it's one that is not very easily described in terms of a simple proposition.
Stijn Vervaet
But now that you mentioned manuscript and manuscript studies...Wouldn't some of your claims or insights about intentionality and intentional design move also well beyond the reading process and into a discussion — a broader discussion — of creative processes more generally? So couldn't perhaps some of the concepts or the dynamics you describe also be used to study the writing process?
Karin Kukkonen
Yeah, absolutely, that's actually what I'm working on at the movement because that sort of seems to be the next logical step.
Stijn Vervaet
Yeah, so I made a good prediction here.
Karin Kukkonen
You made a very good prediction, yes. This question of how do you build a design that's not there yet... How do you develop that sequence of words, events, etc, so that it makes sense... Uhm, that it makes sense, that it has a coherence, but at the same time that it is also flexible enough to allow different readers to see different things... And here I think, yeah, looking at how authors themselves experimented in manuscripts is very interesting. I've done some work on manuscripts for my previous book, How the novel found its feet, where I look at Frances Burney, an 18th century author, who is famous for her novels, but who also had the ambition to write plays. And there are some early manuscript drafts for her plays, uhm, that we still have. And I remember this moment sitting in the library and you get the box — and it's just small pieces of paper with individual lines and some slightly bigger pieces — and then you sort of... you try to reconstruct, you know, what the author was doing quite materially, quite physically, how she went from that to a written set of dialogues or a scene in a drama. And I think you can see why... it is a question of intentionality, but it's a very playful intentionality. You're sort of trying to figure out what it is you want to say. So you're developing your intentionality as an author as you work with the material. And with Burney, after a while, I managed to figure out that she actually would rearrange these individual lines — so they were lines from the dialogue — but she would rearrange who says them and in what scene may appear. So it's kind of like... it's a bit like a puzzle or it's like the sort of cut up technique that you have in in some of the 1960s, 1970s American poets.
Stijn Vervaet
But this, yeah, this interaction between an author's intentions and the materials is also more complex, right? You call this back and forth process the effect of — I quote — a coupled system where a cognitive process emerges, that depends on the mind, the body, and the materials. Could you elaborate a bit on this? I mean, we've had the intention and the materials, but what would the mind and body...?
Karin Kukkonen
Well, the mind and body is of course the thing that keeps them together. Uhm, I guess, as far as the intention is concerned, I would say the intention only emerges after you have this coupled system of an author and her papers. And the idea there... So this is a term that comes from philosophy, when people talk about the extended mind, this idea that we can sink further if we have some materials, some technologies to help us. And then obvious technology is of course pen and paper.
Stijn Vervaet
Yeah, and also the possibility of rearranging things when you have it on paper, which would be perhaps much more difficult when it's just going on in your mind, right?
Karin Kukkonen
Yeah, yeah, I think one of the things that these little slips of paper allowed Burney to do, is to say, well, does this character need to say that or could someone else have said it? And I think that allows new possibilities and developing of character, for example. So there is something in the very materiality that allows for developments in style, in this case in the mind of the author and then later of course in in her writing as well.
Stijn Vervaet
Could we say to a certain extent that we have a similar dynamics on the part of the reader as well? You talk a lot about the embodied reader. So as readers, we all have bodies, and even though we might sometimes wish to escape them while reading, we inevitably involve our bodies in the process of meaning making. So literary theories and empirical scholars have approached this question from different angles, often stressing the importance of motion verbs, indications of direction and descriptions of bodily states that invoke a kind of embodied simulation or resonance in the reader. So could you explain this a bit further and tell us how you link embodiment in reading to predictive processing?
Karin Kukkonen
I shall try. I guess in a way you can think of the reading process as similarly, but not equally, creative as the writing process, because you start with some expectations, some predictions, and you then get these pieces that either fit the pattern or they don't. And if they don't fit the pattern then you need to adjust your expectations that the probability... the sense of probability that you have, or you need to find other evidence that either confirms your own predictions or disconfirms there's other evidence, that you have found. So you as a reader you are constantly scoping, you're constantly exploring and discovering in a text. Uhm, some of that is the question of where you direct your attention, and here the bodies of characters often tend to be attention grabbing, especially when they're in movement. So one of the ways, in which predictive processing and embodiment is connected, is that the very movement of characters, but also the movement in rhythm of sentences, for example, is something that adjusts what you pay attention to, where you direct your scoping of your exploration.
Stijn Vervaet
Yeah, because working rhythm is such a bodily thing, yeah?
Karin Kukkonen
Absolutely yeah.
Stijn Vervaet
But when we read we can we can experience a sense of presence even though we cannot —different from a piece of visual art — walk around a literary text and observe it from different sides. So how do literary texts then help us or lure us into in the fiction of presence? And what does then happen to our body in this reading process?
Karin Kukkonen
It's quite right that you can't... Yeah well, you can walk around the book, but it's not going to do much good, it's not the same as taking different points of view on the painting — or a statue, I guess the statue is an even better example. But what you can do is to develop different senses of how the story could have developed, that would be on the sort of plot level, that you open a counterfactual space where different things are possible — and each of these possibilities has its own probability. They're all likely to a different extent, to a different degree.
Stijn Vervaet
Do you think of fanfiction here, or not necessarily?
Karin Kukkonen
Not necessarily. I think fanfiction is one of the phenomena where this gets most obvious, that you actually would have wanted this character to survive or to fall in love with someone else, but the author doesn't give you that, so you write it yourself. I think that is the most obvious example, and that's the example where that is taken to the greatest length. I think that happens all the time when we read, that we work with these counterfactuals, either because we think this might actually be a more interesting option, or because we haven't read the novel before, now we want to read it differently. So one of the things you could do, for example, is if you read Anna Karenina, you read it as if Karenin is the hero, and you will have a quite different reading experience. So when you create this counterfactual space, which engages you in a new way... that idea of opening up different angles is also something that works on the level of very simple embodied verbs — since you asked me about the link between presence and embodiment – and one of the things that has been shown and discussed in cognitive literary studies is that the parts of texts, that we find have the greatest presence, are the ones where we get verbs that describe bodily stage states, both from the inside and the outside. So you see how someone, I don't know, blushes and you also get the description that her breath stops or something like that. And then you might get, I don't know, a couple of sentences of what goes on in their minds... So in that sense, on the one hand, you get what goes on in their minds, but on the other hand you also get this emotional basis which is rooted in the body and which readers will quite likely experience of resonance to. You sort of get to have multiple angles on the same experience. Again, that is something that helps with presence, so I think that works in in multiple contexts.
Stijn Vervaet
And we have empirical studies about how readers respond to these motion verbs, to the ways in which texts lures us into this bodily states, right?
Karin Kukkonen
Yeah, yeah, I mean that has been done. I expect it's very difficult to do with a literary text. It's most often done with short texts that have very clear examples of these are inner states, or these are very clearly a set of words that describe a particular bodily experience. So in order for this to work, I think in an experimental setting, it has to be very clean. Whereas in literary texts it tends to be more complicated.
Stijn Vervaet
Yeah, a few minutes ago you mentioned opening up a counterfactual space in our minds when reading a fictional narrative. In your book, at some point you note — and this is one of my favourite one-liners — "literature is a place where you can watch yourself think". So scholars have often used metaphors, such as immersion, absorption, transportation, or being in the flow of reading, to describe the experience of reading that we were discussing a minute ago. But how does this "observing ourselves thinking", you refer to, work when we are completely observed in the in the work of fiction, or in the fictional world we're reading about. So does this thinking then happen in the breaks in between or in moving back and forth between being absorbed by the text and what you call mind wandering, moments of absent mindedness, that remind us of meditation? Or how do you see this?
Karin Kukkonen
Yeah, well, I think fundamentally, reading literature is always something that allows us to have this commentary track in the head which can be more or less verbalised. A sense of... it's right that this is happening, or they really should have, or the author really should have paid more attention to that, to, oh, She is like my aunt. So there are multiple possible responses in which you yourself are the sounding board, you know, the resonance board of the text that you read. Uhm, so I think, actually, in order to be immersed you need to have that track running, and that is a metacognitive track where you sort of look at what does this remind me of? Also, of course if, when you're in the flow of reading, you often get a sense of, oh, I'm doing quite well, you know, especially when reading something like Ducks, Newburyport... after a while, when you get the hang of "the fact that", oh, you feel quite pleased with yourself. So I think there is a sense in which reading actually allows both for a very intense understanding of an experience — through what we've discussed with presence, that you get these multiple perspectives on an experience — but also on the level of how you relate this to yourself. There's always a loop where in order to open that counterfactual space, you supply that with your own arm, which is your own expectations, your own sense of what is likely to be the case.
Stijn Vervaet
You mentioned a kind of metacognitive track that you run in your head while reading, but sometimes we have also narrators who'll provide us with such a track — and is this then kind of disturbing our reading flow or our own reflections upon the novel or the story? How do you see this?
Karin Kukkonen
Yeah, I think readers respond quite differently to these narrators who tell you what it is they're doing right now, or who comment on what characters are up against or on about. I think there are obviously some readers who have more tolerance for that, and some readers will find it quite annoying. And of course there are then novels suited to both temperaments. I mean you can read Hemingway, or you can read Henry Fielding. So the choice is yours. But I do think, even if you read something that is written, as long as it's literature, in as simple a style as possible, it still opens up this metacognitive track while reading.
Stijn Vervaet
Yeah, then I would like to talk a bit about what you call literature as a form of extended cognition. Literature, you know, works as a lifeworld technology, so how should we understand claims that the literary text functions as an extension of cognitive processes happening in our brain? At the beginning of your book, you refer to a wonderful quote from the philosopher Merleau-Ponty, which I cannot resist citing here — I quote: "Without any explicit calculation a woman maintains a safe distance between the feather in her head and objects that might damage it. She senses where the feather is, just as we sense where our hand is." End quote. Where does Merleau-Ponty metaphor get us, when thinking of literature as extended cognition?
Karin Kukkonen
Yeah, the reason I chose that metaphor, is that in order to give in, or in order to come to an understanding of the feel of reading, I think it is quite apt to think of it as a feather which you sort of know is there, but you only barely sense. A much more famous part of that passage from Merleau-Ponty is the blind man with a cane, who's tapping about in order to orient himself, and there are people who have used that as a metaphor for what reading is like. But I think most of the time actually we're not tapping around. We have a pretty good sense of where we're going, what we're doing. So when I talk about exploring as a reader a text, usually that doesn't feel like so much work.
Stijn Vervaet
Yeah, a stepping in the dark.
Karin Kukkonen
Yeah, usually it is like, yeah, making sure your feather doesn't hit the door frame, because, yeah, you know it's there, you know the door frame is there, but you have a good enough mastery of the situation that you can do this with ease. I guess that is probably the word I would use — It's done with ease. It's done in a light way when you read.
Stijn Vervaet
But doing things with ease is also something that the text itself helps us with, right? Because you stress a lot the role of form of the form of a literary text, so you talk about the affordances of literary text, things literature can do for us... or literature can help us train cognitive capacities from memory to theory of mind, or – which is the ability to attribute mental states to others — all the way to training perhaps empathy. But in all these processes you argue the form of literary texts play a decisive role. So could you comment a bit upon this?
Karin Kukkonen
Yeah, I think that link that you made between the ease, with which you read, and the literary text, that is the thing that makes it possible. It is very important to remember that, I mean, in real life, I think we quite often have, yeah, like a meta commentary going on, but it's not anywhere near as focused as it can be in response to a literary text. It's not anywhere near as easy, I think, to get into a state of concentration. Like, when you're reading a book, when you're in the flow of reading, it's reasonably easy to be concentrated on that and your own back and forth as a reader with the text, for a good amount of time. I think in a real world context it would be impossible to maintain that degree of attention, concentration, redoubling of attention across multiple levels.
Stijn Vervaet
Is it because we turn down our external impulses that we can concentrate, or because the form of the text drives us into the text so that we do it automatically?
Karin Kukkonen
It's both, it's both. I think the very fact that we're reading something helps. The very fact that we're concentrating on low bandwidth input, that these are words printed on paper. Not very many letters going into it, at least not in Western languages, that we have something that is quite simple to work with, to generate this experience. So in that sense it's just a technology of reading and writing, that makes it fundamentally possible. But then, on top of that, I think, in order to have this doubleness of being immersed and reflecting on it at the same time... In order to go in and out of what's going on here and how this relates to you... In order to predict how the story is going to end, while yet at the same time feeling very strongly with the main character — For that you do need it to be written in a literary form. So in that sense, I think what literature does with probability designs, is it gives a shape or form to language which allows us to think in complex ways, in flexible ways, while yet being concentrated, that arguably no other cultural artefact allows us to achieve.
Stijn Vervaet
So are we back at the kind of upgrading the russian formalists' understanding of literariness here...?
Karin Kukkonen
Uhm yes, I guess. I will not deny the influence of the Russian formalists, and you will find a chapter on Gogol's overcoat in the book.
Stijn Vervaet
Exactly.
Karin Kukkonen
I think their insights on how literature, on the one hand, is very closely entwined with everyday life, with everyday language, so it is not an overly aestheticized, isn't detached... It's not detached from life. And I think their interest is exactly in how literature can reshape that experience to give us a new insight, to make something visible in ourselves, in our engagement with ourselves, that we couldn't see without getting a helping hand from the design of the literary text. So I think the idea is quite similar to what you find in Shklovsky, for example, but the theoretical framework of predictive processing, which allows you to link it very specifically to particular cognitive processes, allows us to be much more precise about how this actually works, to move beyond sort of anecdotes and observations into something that paints a bigger picture.
Stijn Vervaet
Thank you well to conclude I would like to ask you whether you have any reading recommendations for the listeners?
Karin Kukkonen
I do. I mean, beyond all the books that I discuss in probability designs, I'd like to recommend a book that came out, I think, last year, by Anne Weber, which is called Annette, ein Heldinnenepos. Anette, an epic, yeah, I think in English, I think there is an English translation now. She's a German author who lives in Paris and translates herself into French. And in that book she decides to write the life story of a woman called Annette, who exists, whom she's met, who fought in the resistance and also in the Algerian wars — she was involved in that. So a good part of French history in in the 20th century is something that this woman has lived and Anne Weber decided to write a book about it, but she chose not to write a novel or a biography, but an epic. And it's, I mean, it's... as far as epic goes, it's with a light touch, so it's written in free verse. It's quite readable and I think just this experiment of turning something which has a historicity, and which asks for an authentic treatment, into a genre like the epic is something that provides a very interesting probability design. I think it's something that it has a great drive when you're reading it.
Stijn Vervaet
OK, and also form that is very specific, I guess?
Karin Kukkonen
A form that is very specific and, of course, it draws on your mental library in most interesting ways. It ends with a reference to Camus and The myth of Sisyphus, and how basically that woman's story allows you to reinterpret one of the basic tenets of French existentialism. So yeah, I think it's a book that has everything.
Stijn Vervaet
OK, thank you for a very nice conversation.
Karin Kukkonen
Thank you.