Daisy Hildyard on Seeing Interconnectedness

In your story, “Revision,” an Oxford student named Gabriel is preparing for his final examinations, and is having especial difficulty with his paper on medieval literature; Gabriel’s rather aloof tutor, James Thornton, offers to give him additional help, and, through their ensuing sessions together, Gabriel begins to realize that he might have more in common with Thornton than he thought. How did you decide to write a campus story, and to choose this topic for Gabriel’s paper?

When I was Gabriel’s age, I would have found the idea of writing a campus story, and particularly one set in Oxford, mortifying and pathetic. There are already so many stories about the place, most of them bizarre fantasies of merrymaking élites. It’s a kind of novelty literature that never actually becomes new. Then I had this idea about a man who comes up with a plan to cheat a system that he feels stuck inside, and it interested me. I didn’t really think about the fact that it was happening in Oxford. (So it’s not that I’ve changed my mind about the mortifying and pathetic aspect of these stories—more that my personal sense of embarrassment just doesn’t matter very much.)

Using Middle and Old English writing made sense within the story, too, because it’s an inaccessible literature in some ways, but I also wanted its alien flavor: the odd spellynges and litel words. Reading that strange stuff, there can be a passing but intense moment of closeness with the author—whether he is writing about his favourite flower, or reflecting on how life is basically pointless—across distance.

In one session, Gabriel, who comes from a modest background in Manchester, tells Thornton that many of his peers “belong to English history, and it belongs to them,” whereas he feels removed from it. Thornton, in response, says that “everybody lives in history, of course.” In what ways do Gabriel’s encounters with Thornton expand or alter his understanding of history? Or in what ways do they not?

I think both men are trying to live on “the right side of history,” but they don’t know where it is. At the same time, they’re just trying to get through the day: to navigate the world they’ve inherited and the changes in it that are happening around them. They are, in different ways, not very good at it.

Part of the story also deals with class, which is probably inevitable for something set at Oxford, but the story also subverts our expectations; Gabriel discusses how many students feel underprivileged in one specific sense, even when, objectively, they are quite privileged in another. “Surely somebody was on the inside, holding power,” Gabriel reflects, “and yet everybody here felt iced out.” Were you trying to complicate the standard narrative of class divisions in a place like Oxford?

Yes, I think these complicated divisions are everywhere. The impulse came from something I’d been noticing in conversation: strong feelings about the positioning of other peoples’ identities, and a pressured or threatened situation of self in relation to that. I became aware of how I was often hearing third-person omniscient summaries of some distant acquaintance’s life experiences—not only from friends but also at work or on the news (politicians are always at it with one another). So you see this raw and peculiarly contemporary resistance to other people’s complexity or mystery. And I felt that this response was itself complex—to my mind, at least. But it was the strength of feeling that bothered me. I get it sometimes, too.

I see it as a sign that something good is happening—this is about being alive to what is unfair, and paying attention to how privilege perpetuates itself by manipulating the system, including those systems which are designed to rebalance it. I also think that experiences of privilege and privation are complete in themselves. One doesn’t delete the other. Writing the story felt like following all those feelings—trying to put my finger on them or play them out.

The outside world continuously intrudes onto this cloistered setting. Material realities seem unavoidable: the story is set in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, which directly affects Gabriel’s neighbor, Petra, and her family; Thornton comments on how many calves were required to produce a book in Chaucer’s time, and Gabriel muses on the immense chains of labor required to produce the cell phone in his hand or the gardens outside; and we get a glimpse of a statue of the notorious colonialist Cecil Rhodes. What was the process like of trying to integrate these larger systems into the genre of the campus story?

It doesn’t feel like integration to me; it seems more strenuous to hold those interconnected global, historical, and environmental materials outside a short fiction about a young English man. They are apparent in ordinary human life. People feel them, see them, talk about them, and we are all living inside them. They’re continuous with the privilege stories we discussed above—not distinct from them—but it isn’t always easy to see quite how.

When these scaled-up interconnections appear in contemporary fiction, it’s often within speculative realities, or else, in realist fiction, in the background, as a source of unease for the protagonist. I appreciate why and how this is expressible, but I have been looking for something else, too—something that feels to me more real and livelier.

Toward the end, the story begins to shift perspective, first from Gabriel to his friend June, then to Thornton, and finally to the animate natural world around them. Why did you decide to reorient the perspective there? Would you describe it as a sort of zooming out?

Yes, zooming out to an expanded view, and zooming around other scales, and zooming in to smaller worlds—the aphids on the roses have their mini narrative. I wanted to take a tour, exploring the story not only from Gabriel’s perspective but also through some of the other beings that were present, looking at how these same events might be experienced otherwise.

One thing I like in fiction, as a reader as well as a writer, is that it can take in big phenomena, but its particulars will do their own thing, often in a mischievous way—the cleverest explanations, or the best principles, get all bent out of shape by experience. Gabriel has to respond to that mess, and, personally, I respect what he does.

Without giving away too much of the ending, Gabriel sort of sabotages himself in the examination hall. Did you know that he was going to do that when you began writing the story? What do you think compels him to behave that way?

The story is concerned with the differences between these two men, Gabriel and Thornton, and how they form themselves within the narratives of their respective generations. I felt close to Thornton from the beginning, but I didn’t know what Gabriel would do at the end. What he does can be explained in different ways, I suppose. I think his choices called on either naïve stupidity or plain goodness. In a wider context, you could see him as a freak—what he does is unique—or you could see him as set up and sabotaged long before the story starts. ♦