"Anger is Not a Bad Energy": In Conversation with Olga Tokarczuk

Editor's Note: This interview took place in the fall of 2010 when Olga Tokarczuk was in the US on a book tour for Primeval and Other Times.

Olga Tokarczuk was a guest of the Brooklyn Public Library in 2018,  and was lauded this past December with the Nobel Prize in Literature. However before she came to Brooklyn Public Library, I had the chance to interview her in the autumn 2010, when Olga Tokarczuk's book Primeval and Other Times was translated into English by Antonia Lloyd Jones. Tokarczuk was then invited by the New Literature from Europe Festival and took a short promotional book tour in the US and Canada when this interview took place.

At the same time, her book Drive Your Plow Through the Bones of the Dead, appeared in Poland. This book was  later translated by Antonia Lloyd Jones and published in 2019 by Riverhead Books, earning nominations to 2019 Man Booker International Prize (short list) and Warwick Prize for Women in Translation (short list) and .

The short story is probably your favorite literary form, which you care for and pay a lot of attention to. You express this not only in your writing, but also in the promotion of this form– you played a significant role in the opening of the Wrocław Short Story Festival.

Yes, at one time, I wrote a lot of short stories. I’m still interested in this form and I collect ideas for stories on an ongoing basis, even though I’ve recently developed as a novelist. But my fascination with storytelling doesn’t end. I believe it is a highly sublime, very difficult literary form. Few writers can write a good short story. Sometimes I think it’s easier to write a novel than a short story with a good solid ending. I appreciate this form very much as a reader, too; I’ve loved collections, anthologies of stories since I was a child.

I’ve become involved in the community of people who support the short story, also because it’s a form that publishers don’t like to see. American publishing houses are much more likely to publish anthologies than Polish ones.

Coming back to the festival: I was once invited to a short story festival in Zagreb, in Croatia, where I met a few enthusiasts of this form, and when I came back, I started thinking about doing something like that here at home. In the end, we found people and more importantly, money. This year, the short story festival was held in Wrocław for the eighth time. The festival’s taken on a life of its own. The event is largely financed by the city; Wrocław is a city very focused on promotion through culture.

Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead is your latest novel. It’s a long title, borrowed from Blake. It’s ambiguous and long, unusual for a novel. Did the publisher protest it?

Of course they protested. Mainly because the promotion specialists, who think they know what will sell, have a big role in publishing today. They were the ones who claimed that such a long title wouldn’t encourage readers, that it would be difficult to remember, that it sounded bad.

But I insisted, and my publisher gives their authors a lot of freedom to decide on various matters. And so there was a discussion... I came up with the title thinking about the old Polish detective stories, like Joe Alex, where the titles were sometimes taken from a verse, or a poem, or a nursery rhyme. Agatha Christie did it, too. So I thought that it was a way for me to refer to the tradition of titling mysteries. Because this book is a mystery in a way, I really wanted it to stay that way. It turned out that the readers call the book Plow and they’re even buying it (laughs).

When I finished Flights, I wanted to write a simple book and just sink into the pleasure of constructing a traditional linear narrative. And that’s how I designed this book – it’s supposed to be a mystery, but not one that’s only limited to a “whodunit.” It seemed to me that writing a purely entertainment mystery was maybe a waste of paper – I have an atavistic belief that books are not there just to entertain the reader, but to give them a reason to reflect, to discover something, to be moved. Since I’m very interested in the issue of animals, hunting and vegetarianism, I wove the mystery between these topics.

In this book, there is knowledge about hunting customs, animal habits. Someone even called it an “ecological novel.” The protagonist, Janina Duszejko, is into astrology. Did you need to do special research on this subject, or are you, as I believe, well and long acquainted with the subject?

I put astrology into the book a bit out of spite and with full consideration. I wanted to create a character who would contest generally accepted customs with her whole person. I don’t know what it’s like here in the United States, but in Poland, astrology is a pseudoscience worthy of ridicule and contempt. The intellectual establishment neither values nor is interested in it. It’s considered to be the delusion of old women or hysterical girls; it’s part of the newspaper culture. Because I was creating a character who was supposed to be a bit rebellious, even as an older person, I gave her the astrology to annoy all those who treat astrology as something silly and frivolous. My personal attitude towards astrology? It’s a very old science, or rather art, that foreshadowed psychology, perhaps even some kind of sociological way or thinking. Astrology was the first to construct a typology of people, expressed in the signs of the Zodiac. It contributed to thinking in terms of personality categories or human temperament.  I think that every modern educated person should be familiar with the basic astrological vocabulary, and I think it’s good that people are familiar with the tropes that astrology uses. Of course, I don’t have a lot of respect for newspaper astrology or writing horoscopes based on the position of the Sun, but as an enormous field of knowledge, built over thousands of years, it’s something that impresses me. In astrology, we also have a kind of history of the pre-scientific approach to phenomena, something that existed before science.

Janina Duszejko doesn’t just dabble in astrology. She reads an English poet from the turn of the 18th and 19th centuries. There are probably very few elderly women, even those with an engineering background, who read Blake.

Oh, no, not at all. That’s what we think, because we don’t think at all about the elderly or what they’re like. These older people were recently creative people full of energy. They’re the same now, only they’re older. I really like eccentric personalities. There’s always someone like that in my books. There’s Walter Frommer, an occultist, who compiles his own death statistics. Or someone like Izydor from Primeval, looking for order in tetrasomies. I’m always attracted to characters like these, the freaks, and I wrote Janina Duszejo like that completely intentionally. There is a lot in her of my neighbor, a retired architect, who bought a house in the countryside, read a lot and got into all sorts of things. I think that civilization continues and develops thanks to eccentrics. The fate of every truth is first to be the object of derision and mockery, before it becomes something generally accepted.

The protagonist loves animals, wants to save them, believes they have souls, that they are our smaller brothers. She should therefore be the personification of goodness, warmth, gentleness, but in the meantime, we meet someone full of anger. Isn’t that a contradiction?

This book tells the story of a world which, according to the protagonist, is unjust, evil, and built on bad foundations. This is what reading Blake is all about for her, she draws on his philosophy, and it is rather a negative assessment of the world in which we live, the Ulro Earth. Duszejko, as a pure and innocent person, cannot abide in a world that is sinister, aggressive, terrible, cruel, and sometimes macabre. So the only emotion that is born in a holy person is anger. Anger is not a bad energy. In Polish, we have a phrase that translates to “divine anger,” “righteous anger.” When someone is righteously angry, we know that the situation has surpassed the tolerated limits, the human norms. This book describes a situation like that. The macabre of killing is a matter of course happening around us, so the only way to behave justly is the “divine anger” that inundates Janina Duszejko.

Two years ago, in a beautiful laudatory speech on the occasion of you receiving the Odra award, Kinga Dunin mentioned your interest in the animal world. What made you interested in this problem?

There was no breakthrough, I’ve always been like this – I’ve always been interested in animals, their rights, vegetarianism. I know there are many people like that around me. From the very beginning, there were animals in my books, especially in Primeval. There is a character very similar to Janina Duszejko there, Florentynka, an old lady who takes care of dogs and cats. I think it’s a broad subject to talk about, to write about. When I return to Poland, in December, I’m going to be writing a children’s book about animals. There’s a series coming out in Poland, The Little Book of... It’s a Swedish idea. There have been a few books already, for example there is The Little Book of Menstruation, feminism, democracy. I’m writing a book about animals to tell children that animals aren’t just the cute bears and rabbits, cats and dogs sitting in toy shops, but that animals are also intensely present in our civilization, language, in everyday life, and on their plates. Seems like an innocent subject at first, doesn’t it? But it’s actually very controversial and dangerous. I think there’s no reason to keep children ignorant of what the food sitting on their lovely plates is.

Is there a link between bullying, killing animals and bullying, killing people? If we prevent the killing of animals, will our human relationships change?

I think those are two different things. Nobody grows people for meat. It’s not about tormenting and harassing, it’s about treating animals like things...  There are very strong mechanisms that make it possible to torture animals and to be so-called “decent” people, good neighbors, to never hit anyone, but to abuse animals or be part of it by consuming meat produced through industrial breeding. Today we know that there is no reason for people to eat meat.

Are you a vegetarian?

I am, my child is a vegetarian, I was a vegetarian when I was pregnant. My son is a healthy, strong, tall man (laughs). There is a growing awareness that we do not need to eat meat and that it is worth investing in this process. Perhaps it’s worth including a reflection on such an important topic in a children’s book.