At the start of the pandemic, Arundhati Roy, the author who introduced much of my country to the Booker Prize, declared that “historically, pandemics have forced humans to break with the past and imagine their world anew. This one is no different. It is a portal, a gateway between one world and the next.” After having lived four years inside this “next world” I wonder if we can say with certainty what kind of a portal 2020 was? Has whatever was supposed to have metamorphosed done so?

David Leo Rice’s latest novel, The Berlin Wall, begins in January of 2020 with the reshaping of Europe’s topology. The old mountains dissolve into the ocean and new ones rise, their vertical edges “warping over the top to form something like an origami box, sealing 500 million souls inside or threatening to, while granting access, through channels no one can map, to millions of others.”

As scientists, topographers and politicians dispute what’s really happening and which maps are definitive, air travel remains unrestricted. This image of existential uncertainty juxtaposed violently against a callous disregard for safety and truth brought back the familiar dread that Roy promised would serve as a gateway. Rice’s novel however is a revisionist history, an alternate retelling of the portal years without the pandemic. Inside Rice’s fictional world, the Berlin Wall has always been conscious. Once destroyed, its sentient fragments are scattered across Europe and yearn to reunite one day, to avenge their gruesome murder and take Germany back to its golden mythic era. Here, the Wall is the literal spine that held Germany together, and thus, as some people in the novel believe, it should never have been splintered.

Nothing in Rice’s world functions as a stand-in, or a representation of a greater or truer reality. The reality of the internet, or of games, is as authentic as the immediate reality of mountains and forests. In his world there are no hierarchies, where one level of reality negates or infuses meaning into another. Despite this flattening of levels, or perhaps because of it, there is an uncanny familiarity that makes his world and the experience of being in it feel authentic, more so than many essays that grapple with parallel issues in our ‘real’ world.

The Pakistani writer Saadat Hasan Manto once said, “I write with a white chalk on a black slate, so as to bring the blackness of the slate to prominence.” Rice’s work is that rare glimpse into the darkness of our times made possible by the clarifying power of his fiction. I had the opportunity of sitting with the author and exploring some of the ideas in his book. We spoke about portals, understanding the world through fiction, the role of truth and authenticity in our lives today, and the trickster as an alchemist of trash. 

You were born in 1986, the year of the Chernobyl disaster. This event can be viewed as a ripping open of a portal that changed world politics forever starting with the disintegration of the USSR, which Gorbachev attributed to, amongst other things, the mishandling of Chernobyl. You have written this novel living through similar portal years in the late 2010s and early 2020s, which have been an eerie combination of a mismanaged health crisis and the dissolution of another great Empire. How have portals shaped you as a person and as an artist?

Moments when the facade of normalcy falls away and the world seems to be in chaos are potentially very instructive because you can glimpse what’s behind it, or at least people feel that they can, and this reveals something about people–what they want, what they fear, what they imagine–which in turn reveals something about the human world. We hesitate at the entrance of the portal now, beyond the liberal, post-Wall era we all came out of, not certain if it even is a portal. We sense that to go through it would be to change so fundamentally that we wouldn’t know if we’d gone through, since we’d be so different on the other side we wouldn’t recognize or remember anything from before. And yet it’s also clear that we can’t refuse to go through, because that refusal–the increasingly desperate reenactment of the past–will itself lead to a bizarre new era, one smothered by denial about the fact that something major has changed.

In many of my stories, the characters are caught on thresholds like this, struggling to be born in the fullest sense. They exist physically–although even this, given that we’re talking about fictional constructs, is a stretch–but they feel stuck in a kind of pre-life purgatory, an on-deck situation from which they don’t know how to truly be deployed. This is the portal they approach without knowing if it really is a portal. Is there a realer life than this one? We sense there must be, yet perhaps this sense is simply part of the only life there is, the one we’re already living. Perhaps the feeling that the portal is just up ahead is simply how it feels to be alive.

In this way, I’m interested in cycles that degrade, in repetition that never quite repeats what happened before or succeeds in finding fresh terrain, but rather moves in a weird middle-ground where everything feels familiar but nothing quite is. This is the netherworld of the uncanny, and I think it’s definitive of the moment we’re living in now, where the past both promises and threatens to return, while the future always seems just out of reach, or else it seems like it’s already arrived and somehow we’ve missed it.

The strangeness of our times seems too slippery for news media or non-fiction to capture. When fact ceases to be a reliable tool, we turn to fiction to make sense of the world. You push this idea to the extreme as if to test the medium itself, to see if fiction, no matter how twisted and macabre, could still paradoxically manage to stay familiar and offer itself as a vessel or a mirror. What is it about fiction that uniquely equips it to deal with this strangeness? 

Fiction has a unique power in such a slippery time because it persists no matter what, at least as long as the mind remains conscious. It can’t be disproven. It is part of no regime or Empire, and thus can examine and even thrive in the dissolution of such powers. No matter how untrustworthy the grounding of our reality becomes, and no matter how battered and remade we become by going through portals or smashing ourselves against what appear to be portals but turn out to be walls, we go on telling stories. The power of fiction is that it can “solve for the unsolvable” in that it’s the only form of writing whose aim is to show uncertainty as such, rather than claiming to debunk that uncertainty. The only certainty in fiction is that it’s fiction, and thus the truth of this pursuit is based on its not needing to rely on external proof in the way that other statements do.

History feels both more and less present than anytime before, like it’s melting and spreading everywhere, obliterating the present even while it also obliterates itself. The straightforward way we learned history in the post-Wall era, the linear chain of cause and effect that we were told produced the present in a step-by-step manner, seems to have vaporized, and yet it hasn’t gone away. I feel more “enmeshed in history” today than I ever have before, even as I feel further than ever from being able to say what this means.

All the characters in The Berlin Wall are struggling to slip out of the grip of this kind of reanimated, zombified history while also struggling to find a stable place within it. The instability of being betwixt and between drives people crazy and makes them desperate to hold on to something, no matter what it is. But if history itself has vaporized, then there really is nothing to hold on to. I find fiction to be a sane-making practice because it’s all about this instability. The only stability involved comes from sitting in a chair and typing on a laptop, or sitting in a chair and reading a book. Everything else – all the content, all the ideas it leads to – can be maximally unstable without tipping me all the way into madness. I love this feeling of perching safely on the edge.

In this book, you’re writing a fictional history of Europe as an outsider. Although you’ve lived in Europe, you’ve spent more of your time outside it. In your previous books, while you write about America, your protagonist is a drifter drifting through towns that he’s an outsider in. As a writer, what does that perspective of an outsider allow you to explore?

In order to truly perceive anything, you need the right balance of distance and closeness. If you’re too far outside your subject, you know nothing about it and there’s not much you can say except pure speculation. But if you’re too much of an insider, it’s very hard to say anything other than what’s conventional, since your own thinking is part of the subject you’re trying to explore.

So the drifter or outsider perspective is the perspective of any writer. You have to be kind of alienated from your subject matter in order to say something about it, to play with it in a way that’s actually playful. If you give yourself fully to the alchemical act of writing, of fusing dreams and reality into symbols, then you can’t also participate in the events or places you’re writing about. The general can’t also be the war reporter.

This is my more external understanding. There’s also a much stranger internal understanding where you come to realize how much of an outsider you are to yourself. People who aren’t writers probably still feel strange about being themselves, but maybe they don’t dedicate that much time to exploring this strangeness. Whatever work they do in the outside world does not involve focusing on how strange the patterns of their own thoughts can be. Whereas to be a fiction writer you have to be a reporter on human nature where your main source is yourself. The more you can probe your own unknowability, the more interesting your work will become.

Therefore the writer stands on the boundary-line between inner and outer experience. That’s where figures of renewal, figures who can refresh thought, always stand. I recently read the book Trickster Makes This World by Lewis Hyde, and I’ve been thinking about the trickster figure ever since. The trickster stands on this boundary-line, patrolling the edge of town and trying to play tricks between the worlds of the humans and the gods, or the worlds of the urban and the rural people, or the worlds of the living and the dead. And the trickster is itself a borderline figure that is sort of godly but also human, and sort of clever but also gullible, and sort of joking but also dead serious, and sort of good but also evil, and sort of childish but also eternal. I think this spirit is where art comes from.

There’s also the perversion of the trickster that is omnipresent right now. The form of trickster that doesn’t really straddle two worlds, but pretends to, or that is not meant to straddle two worlds, but does. It’s the reason why our generation has lost all faith in our politicians, businessmen, and other systems of authority. And so, if nothing is as it seems, which is the general mood around media and information right now, then is the role of the writer as trickster redefined in some way?

We live in an age of tricksters pretending to be saviors, so maybe tricksters who admit they’re tricksters can actually do more good. As you say, there’s this huge doubt about anything that we’re presented with, any form of power or anyone seeking power. That’s another theme I deal with a lot in my work, the question of where power really comes from, and whether people can ever harness or embody it. My characters are always uncertain, even on the level of their own thoughts, about whether they have any free will. In a spooky sense, this is a doubt I share about my own role while I’m writing: am I making these characters up, or do they actually exist in some other realm where their fates have already been decided?

I think the role of the “true trickster” at this moment is not to put the pieces back together or to restore dignity or honor to our old ways of making meaning, but to revel and wallow in the degraded and rotting artifacts that history has left us with, and to find within these something that is still, or even newly, alive. Rather than promising a future utopia, the trickster finds something beautiful within the present, no matter how degenerate that present may seem.

In this regard, even though salesmen can be tricky, the trickster is the opposite of a salesman. Tricksters are not claiming the world is different than it is, or even claiming that it should be different, as every salesman does, but they are also not pessimistic in terms of saying that because we live in a trash heap, that means our lives are trash. Tricksters are heroic because they find within that trash heap something enlightening, something stirring to life inside a world that feels dead, just as a writer tries to do with the dead signs that constitute our human languages. It’s the opposite of alchemy, a degenerate process of finding within the trash something that’s already precious and thus overcoming the need to pretend we can turn trash into gold. This is the alchemy within fiction that I’m most excited to go on exploring as we head deeper into the 2020s.

Avinash Rajendran graduated from The New School with an MFA in Fiction. His work has appeared in Brooklyn Rail, Brooklyn Magazine, Vol1 Brooklyn and Heavy Feather. He is currently working on getting his novel, The Sins of Innocence published. Find him on Twitter @avinashrajendr.

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