Natassa Sideri was born in Athens in 1981. She is a playwright, writer and translator. Her plays and short stories have been published and produced internationally, winning multiple distinctions and awards. As a translator, she has translated, edited or adapted for the theatre texts by Κeiran Goddard, Henri Lefebvre, Miranda July, Caroline de Mulder, Volker Ludwig, Matei Visniec, Isabella Hamad, Ferdia Lennon, etc.
Your latest writing venture Το μόνο ζώο [The Only Animal] was recently published by Gennitria. Tell us a few things about the book.
The Only Animal is a collection of short stories which explores a key formula in Western culture: “Man is the only animal that…” As man is the only animal that has this eternal need to define himself through what he considers his opposite, the idea behind this book is to test the ground on which these definitions of the animal have been proposed. Each short story in the collection begins with an epigraph. These are various iterations of the aforementioned phrase, coined by thinkers as varied as Aristotle, Friedrich Dürrenmatt, and George Orwell, among others. I find this paradoxical formula fascinating. Why do we humans have this need to both declare that we are animals and, by the same token, insist on the fact that we are not really the same as animals, as we are the only ones to possess X, a certain shifting quality that changes throughout the centuries?
The book, of course, is a literary project and not a philosophical treatise, so it is the stories that give the answers, or rather ask the questions by placing their characters in situations where the seams holding together these temporary constructions become apparent. These stories portray women and men – more women but also some men – who are forced to look at themselves in mirrors held up by animals, gods, or machines, whether real or imagined. For example, a cow being milked in a farm during a group visit urges a childless theatre director to challenge her previous certainties, an egg donor in a waiting room contemplates the future of humanity, a civil engineer decides to reintroduce wolves in his father’s village to help men restore the masculine role model they are gravely missing – plus other episodes from the life and works of the only animal that blushes, the only animal that keeps a secret, the only animal that prays before committing murder, the only animal that…
The short stories navigate the fragile threshold between human and animal, moving between stark realism and allegorical resonance. Which were the main themes you set out to explore in the book?
To tell you the truth, it wasn’t so much in terms of themes that I approached the subject. I thought a lot about dichotomies. The working title of the book was “Man and”. And even though this title was eventually dropped, traces of it can still be discerned in the structure of the collection. There are stories dealing with the relation between man and animal, four of them in total, but also stories treating man’s relation to God and the machine. “Infinite monkeys”, for instance, started out as a mock retake of a Cartesian meditation, and ended up as a stream of consciousness of a woman participating in an increasingly industrialized reproductive process, which nonetheless doesn’t stop her from celebrating the fact that she has the choice to participate in this process of her own free will. “To Keros”, also, the concluding story of the collection, assumes the guise of a biblical narration to offer a speculative explanation of the fascinating enigma of Keros – a tiny island on the Cyclades where a vast number of statuettes, presumably used in worship, have been unearthed. The findings, however, date back to the Early Bronze Age, so can we even be sure what religion meant to these people, if they even had any gods at all and what role, what function they assigned to them? That’s the question the story sets out to explore, with Mark Twain’s quip “Man is the Religious Animal. He is the only Religious Animal. He is the only animal that has the True Religion—several of them” serving as the epigraph.
Τhe book constitutes a literary incision at the point where biology, ethics, and society collide. Do you see writing as inherently political? Or do you think literature is more powerful when it works subtly, through suggestion rather than statement?
I believe literature is at its most political precisely when it works through suggestion. Literature, or at least what I consider good literature, is not a pedestal to preach from, not a space to ruminate preformed opinions but rather a place of discovery where both the writer and the reader can find themselves shifting sides before passing (or permanently refraining from passing) judgement. None of this is new, Aristotle already said as much in his Poetics. In the agon the two sides must carry roughly the same weight or else the struggle will not be convincing, the reader/spectator will not be moved, will not be frightened and in the end there will be a yawn instead of catharsis.
Writers, of course, are at the same time citizens, often engaged ones publicly expressing political views and taking action. But it is not this function that readers are looking to engage with when they open the book. There are many professionals whose job is it to offer statement and opinion, but this is not the case with writers. Literature offers story, plot even in the absence of plot and this complex game of identification that bears a very peculiar relationship to truth and statement. This is what we ask of writers, not to get the facts straight but to give us an untrue story that, through its untruth, can reveal to us something about our experience that we probably knew already but hadn’t managed to isolate in the everyday flow of things.
Language seems central to your style, with your prose being interspersed with poetic elements. What role does language play in your writings?
You know, although I do understand where you’re coming from, the funny thing is I don’t really think of myself as a writer that cares too much about language. Yes, things like rhythm, economy, and convincing character voice (especially in theatre) are important to me, and I do work obsessively until I get them right, but once everything is said and done I like to think that the story and the language that is used to tell it are part of the same process of deciphering. It’s like a scale, really, if the thing leans too much on the language side the prose will sound pompous and laboured, the reader will start hearing the author’s voice rather than the character’s; whereas if you don’t work on language at least enough to develop a frame for your story and your character to live in, then the reader will most likely fail to read the story as literature, and will instead approach it as a news item or some kind of disguised memoir, and will be searching to find the shadow of real people behind the silhouette of the character.
But when literature does things right, we don’t find ourselves wondering if it’s language, the character or the story that came first. Take, for example, Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury. Could we ever imagine having access to Benjy’s story independently from his narrative voice? And how about Malone or practically every character from a Kraznahorkai novel? Obviously, Faulkner, Beckett and Kraznahorkai are great stylists that did marvellous things through, with and to language, but from a reader’s perspective, I vividly remember both admiring their prose when I first opened their books and quickly forgetting my admiration the more I got into the story – as if this was the only possible way to have this story told by that person, the most natural thing in the world.
Where does literature meet the theatre in your work? Does the dramaturgical form—with its emphasis on voice, presence, and immediacy—leave traces in your prose? Or do you find that fiction allows for a different kind of interiority, a quieter unfolding of truth?
I’d say the latter. When I see something on the street that is story material, it’s usually very clear to me what I should do with it. When I write theatre, the process starts and normally also ends with a question, specifically a question I don’t have an answer to, whether on or off stage. This question is then first delivered to the polyphony of the theatre, then to the actors and the director, and finally handed over to the public as a take-home gift. This is how theatre has worked since antiquity: as a place for asking difficult questions that could be neither raised nor answered anywhere else in the polis without creating havoc. Short stories, on the other hand, at least for me, provide this space of interiority that allows the reader to follow the character’s journey in a more intimate setting than the theatre, where the world that the work creates is invited to enter the room through the reader’s filtering of it rather than the actors’ boisterous voices and ever-present bodies. So yes, it’s a quieter unfolding of truth, I really like how you put it. Rules, of course, are made to be broken, with the last story in the book being one such example.
*Interview by Athina Rossoglou
TAGS: LITERATURE & BOOKS | READING GREECE
