Unofficial Mexico
An Interview
with author Ilan Stavans

Q...About your introduction and the issue, in general: How does the study of the Mexican essay enliven or change our study of the American essay?

Stavans...The Mexican essay is a unique window into the soul of the country. It shows the power of words as tools to dig into history and psychology. It indulges in its own subjectivity and succeeds by being interdisciplinary. But it isn't personal in the way the American essays is. In fact, it is allergic to flashy confessions. Instead, it predicates the idea that life is impossible to understand and so the best one can do is to have fun coming up with subterfuges.

Q...You emphasize the Mexican preference of style over, or perhaps style as substance. It seems that you may even suggest that such an approach is intuitive to Mexican writers. On the other hand, it could be said that there is a more narrative, less experimental, intuition in American nonfiction. So, to modify the last question, how does the study of the Mexican essay modify the way we write nonfiction? What lessons can American writers learn?

Stavans...An essay is at its best when it recognizes that truth is at once partial and subjective. Mexicans have learned this much from history: nothing is as it seems. They have also learned that words aren't only a conduit for arguments to be made but that the order those words take is in itself an argument. There are in American literature a handful of essayists endorsing a similar approach. But for the most part, essayists north of the Rio Grande are far more presumptuous: they are convinced that they are the center of the world.

Q...Creative nonfiction is always a hard concept to define or even describe. How does the existence of genre-hopping, definition resistant Mexican nonfiction inform your conception of "creative nonfiction?" Does it render the act of definition obsolete? Reductive?

Stavans..."Creative Nonfiction" is an utterly redundant category, synonymous with "Fictional Nonfiction." It encapsulates everything and nothing--and so, it is meaningless.

Q...You liken the Mexican obsession with the essay to obsession with a sport. Could you speak more about that analogy.

Stavans...Mexicans like their essays to be adrenaline-driven. They are impatient with long-winded explorations. For them the best essay is succinct and muscular yet humble and entertaining. It should not hope to revamp reality, for that is the domain of fiction. It should also not try to explain it, for reality is unexplainable. What should it do then? Among other things, have fun pondering the absurdity of its own mission.

Q...As you say, Mexican nonfiction is driven by a search for national identity. Many would say that American nonfiction, if not American literature in general, is fueled by the very same search. How do you reconcile such different approaches to the same quest?

Stavans...For American the whole of Western Civilization is their stage. Mexicans are more nearsighted--or perhaps more modest.

Q...About your essay "On Becoming a Book at 40": How did your essay develop, both in your initial thinking about it and in the revision process? What happened in the writing that you didn't expect would happen?

Stavans...My inspiration was a reflection by Edmund Wilson on being "bibliographed" at an advanced age in his artistic career. I wanted to respond to the question: how does a memoir define the author not only for his audience but also for himself. The first line of "On Becoming a Book at 40" came to me while I was waking up one morning. An hour later, I sat down and the piece dictated itself to me.

Q...How does your experience writing creative nonfiction depend upon or depart from your work in other genres?

Stavans...Again, everything I do might be described as "creative nonfiction." This is because I come from a literary tradition in which the genres (novels, stories, drama, poetry, etc.) often erase their differences, or at least exist in a promiscuous state. Is an autobiography less fictional than a novel?

Q...What advice do you offer new writers?

Stavans...Read, read, read--then imitate the masters as closely as possible. Once you've digested their style, rebel against it in order to find your own voice.

Q...Your essay seems to be in line with a more traditional, narrative approach to nonfiction. How does your piece fit in with the other pieces in this issue? Do you see it as a bookend of sorts, a relatively straightforward meditation on the place where cultural literatures meet?

Stavans...It is a bookend, indeed. Whereas other pieces in the issue take a more experimental approach, mine is a conventional meditation on the manipulations of the self in literature. In my forthcoming small book, Dictionary Days (Graywolf, 2005), I take this approach upside down: I juxtapose dictionary definitions, anecdotes, dreams, and fiction in the hope of understanding the role words play in my life.