Ahead of his Campbell Hall appearance on Wednesday, December 3, poet and novelist Ocean Vuong speaks with Air Time host Charles Donelan about his new novel The Emperor of Gladness and the fictions that help us see the truth.
In this wide-ranging conversation, Vuong reflects on imagination, compassion, and the power of storytelling — from Wallace Stevens’ idea of a “supreme fiction” to the silences that shape both poetry and life.
🎧 Listen to the episode above or read the full transcript below.
About the Author and Event
Ocean Vuong is the award-winning author of the novel On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous and the poetry collections Time Is a Mother and Night Sky with Exit Wounds, winner of the T.S. Eliot Prize. His work has been translated into more than thirty languages and recognized for its lyrical precision, compassion, and emotional depth.
Vuong appears at Campbell Hall on Wednesday, December 3, at 7:30 p.m., as part of UCSB Arts & Lectures’ Justice for All series. Tickets and information are available at artsandlectures.ucsb.edu.
Below is a transcript of the episode
Ocean Vuong
Hello.
Charles Donelan
Ocean Vuong, welcome.
Ocean Vuong
Thank you. Hello, Charles, glad to be here.
Charles Donelan
Wonderful to have you. Thank you so much for taking the time to speak with me.
Ocean Vuong
Oh, it’s a pleasure.
Charles Donelan
You’re going to be in Santa Barbara, come December — Wednesday, December 3, in fact — to speak to us here at the University of California, Santa Barbara, (thank you for accepting that invitation) and we’re very excited to have you as part of our Justice for All speaking series.
If it’s okay with you, I’m going to start us off in our conversation, talking in a very kind of open way about the idea of a supreme fiction. I’m a big fan of Wallace Stevens, and I have been reading his work for decades now, and I was delighted when I opened The Emperor of Gladness to find the epigraph confirming my suspicion that Gladness and Ice-Cream had something in common [“The Emperor of Ice Cream” is one of Wallace Stevens’ best-known poems–ed.]. You’ve said elsewhere that the belief that art can create its own kind of truth, and that imagination is an important ingredient in going beyond simply transcribing memory, is an important part of your process. Can you reflect on that right now for us, how imagination transforms memory and how that plays out in your work?
Ocean Vuong
Yeah, yeah. Well, thank you so much for that connection. Of course, Wallace Stevens, a fellow Hartfordian, his shadow looms large where I grew up in Hartford, as well as does Harriet Beecher Stowe and Mark Twain. But I think Stevens is such a fascinating writer/poet because, in an age where realism was supposed to dominate, the long shadow of Henry James, which says, you know, the greatest novels are almost indiscrepant from life, Stevens took the route of a deep interiority, strangeness, surrealism, you know, the palm tree at the end of the mind, right? And these, the orange rooms, the autumn leaves. It was just such an incredible and also how influenced he was by East Asian poets, you know, the “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird” can come right from Basho and Issa and so I think Stevens is a kind of quintessential mid-century writer coming out of this nexus where American letters started to move globally. And much of modernism, you know, does that from William Carlos Williams, Pound, Elliot, etc.
And so I think, to me, I take the term autobiography, perhaps literally, in the sense that it’s not so much about telling a diaristic rendition of a lived life, so much as the writing of a selfhood, the writing of personhood which includes interiority. You know, I narrate interior bewilderment and so even surrealist moments, I think, are autobiographical in that you are writing down an entire selfhood, including things that are not exactly known or not even, you know, labeled in the historical document. And I think, to me, this is the most valuable part of a supreme fiction. My understanding of Steven’s idea of supreme fiction is that it’s fiction that involves also the mystery of the self and the imagination.
Charles Donelan
Absolutely and what a beautiful answer. I’d like to connect the notion of a fiction and of a saving fiction, a necessary fiction, to some moments in The Emperor of Gladness, of course, probably the most striking one is Hai’s invention of Sergeant Pepper. And I hope this doesn’t qualify as a spoiler. Maybe you could talk a little bit about the way in which, and I’ll give you my other example, and I’ll just stop there, but that wonderful chapter where Hai and Maureen take the food to the other rival restaurant, and she confides in him about the lizards at the center of the earth.
You know, we live in a time when there are a lot of people who have bought into what seem to many of us rather fantastic… conspiracy theories is the standard term. But in your book, sometimes going along with people’s ideas and entering into their fantasies, or at least indulging them, I guess, is compassionate. Maybe you could reflect on that a little bit.
Ocean Vuong
Yeah, I think underneath, you know, the surface of polemics that we often engage in, I think at the root of conspiracy is the root of mythology. You know, it’s something our species has done from the very beginning. We looked at a mystery, we often out of deep vexation, right, out of confusion, pain, injustice, or what have you political, personal or communal. And then you make up a story to make it make sense. You look at the stars and say, I see a woman knitting, I see a hunter, and then there goes the beginning of narrative. And so to me, I think this is just who we are. I think, you know, on one hand you can say, you know, it’s both conspiracy in the modern sense, but also this impulse to fill in the unknown with the supernatural or the hyperbolic, right? And so I don’t think there’s any difference from people thinking the world is run by lizards to people thinking, you know, that the sun was a God who moved around the Earth every day and watched everybody, or that Poseidon, you know, ruled the seas, and that, you know, Zeus was a petty controlling, you know, multi-God, or what have you.
So, I think these are… so the book is actually deeply interested in the idea of the fictive, you know, what is a legitimate fiction and what is deception? And I think I’m deeply interested in that. And because, you know, our country is founded on a kind of mythic deception too, right? No politician would be successful criticizing George Washington, but there’s much to, you know, investigate and think about. As a child growing up in New England, I was told that Washington’s teeth, for example, were made of wood, you know, his dentures. And I later learned that that kind of whimsical, surreal anecdote was actually there to hide a much more sinister one, that, in fact, his dentures came from enslaved people’s teeth. And so there’s these myths that we actually contend with all the time, and they actually inform our politics. So in my eyes, you know, as much as I am, kind of, you know, for a kind of sobering truth, I deeply, I’m sympathetic with people who you know must come up with something outlandish in order to make sense of them, of their lives.
As a literary scholar, you know, you look at Gilgamesh, you look at Beowulf, and you’re like, Oh, the Icelandic sagas. And then you’re like, Oh, well, they’re doing exactly what our storytellers have done. Of course. You know, the repercussions here are quite gravid. You know, what is the question that I think I’m interested in this novel is, what is the cost, then, of making a myth? Does it get you further away from a viable, lived life, or does it get you closer? And for some characters, you know, both are true. For some it is closer. For some it is not. You know, the question that I’m interested in for Grazina, the character with dementia, is that, how demented is she? You know, because often we think of dementia as the loss of memory, and that is very true at the late stage of the disease, but as a caretaker myself, I’ve noticed that, in fact, it’s not actually correct to say they’re losing memory. Dementia is most often, memory without choice. And so Grazina has no choice of where she’s remembering something, it’s just not the present. And so Hai realizes that he has to follow her, because he can control his memories, but, you know, she can’t control hers. But what you start to realize is how much of this is she making up and for what for, right? She’s lonely, her children have abandoned her, and you realize that she’s opening a new portal back to 1945 for them to kind of bond and negotiate, and so she’s in a way, a novelist, as much as the author writing the novel.
Charles Donelan
Oh, very good. There’s so many directions that we could potentially go, and this suggests so many things to me. I’m going to share just the slightest bit of my story. I was raised in Central Massachusetts, in Worcester.
Ocean Vuong
Oh, yes, no, I know it well.
Charles Donelan
And so the setting of your books, and in particular, or of your novels, and in particular, the way in which you are so sensitive to not only class, but also to the gradual change over time, and the way in which traces of earlier times remain yet things evolve. Maybe you could talk a little bit about, why your Hartford is different from the Hartford of Mark Twain or Harriet Beecher Stowe or Wallace Stevens, but also about the attraction that you feel as a writer to depicting the particular world that you have chosen in these books. I know it chose you too, but go ahead.
Ocean Vuong
Oh, what a lovely question, and it’s a deep honor to hear someone from the region recognize, at least you know, the authenticity of what I’m trying to depict. I am a deep believer that place and region, regionality, is not only political and historical, but also is narrative, you know. So I think place is a narrative propulsion, but in writing workshops, we’re told that, you know, describing a place slows the story down, right? So there’s this kind of strange, arbitrary value that stories should always just move, but I believe that fiction and even the epic myths, they work because they work in tangent with acceleration and deceleration. And deceleration in fiction is a way to accrue value. You know, when you slow down, you have to describe something, you imbue it with more information and therefore more value, you refuse to move on from it. And so the towns and the cities that I grew up in are often… Hartford became a city wherein you literally passed by after World War Two. It had a beautiful, robust infrastructure, reminiscent of, you know, Cambridge, Massachusetts, believe it or not. And so that was Twain and Stevens’s Hartford.
By the time I got there, in 1990, it was pretty much a highway. It was the result, Hartford is a really architecturally and infrastructurally sad lesson in American greed. You know, contractors after World War Two just vied and, you know, sold and outbid each other to pave over the entire city. And that was to turn it into a hub of the insurance firms, which would then draw, you know, life into the suburbs. So it became just a kind of marketplace, all its art and beauty, kind of was literally bulldozed, save, for a few relics like the Bushnell Theater and what have you. And so it’s been trying to revitalize that ever since. There in a corrective, Hartford is in a corrective stage, and is trying to imbue itself back to a kind of place worth living, right? It became just a place that was purely utilitarian. It was that kind of American highway dream that came out of the mid-century of commerce, but it was now just a gray pavement, concrete-filled space, and so there’s kind of multiple Hartfords in one place, in the same way that all of that, even before Twain, was paved over, you know, indigenous Mohegan land. And so that was also a place. They had names for neighborhoods and rivers and inlets, and now that’s gone. So place is also tied to memory, and I thought, what a wonderful way to start a book is just to describe the many lifetimes a small space really had, even before we go into the many lifetimes that we will tell in the temporal reality of the novel.
Charles Donelan
You know, it spoke to me so much when the opening scene with Hai, you know, on the bridge there, and the bridge is revealed to be the King Phillips Bridge, because there was so much that, you know, we didn’t learn in my public school education in Massachusetts. They were so proud of Massachusetts that they never told half the truth of the land that we were on. I didn’t learn really about many of the things that happened in literally, the backyard of my home growing up until many, many decades later, especially that period, that initial genocide.
You’re going to be speaking and doing some reading, I assume, when you get here. Maybe you could talk a little bit about how I know a lot of people encounter your work, either through your performance or through the medium of the audio book. And also, as a poet, I know that you’re extremely sensitive to things like line breaks and pauses of various different kinds. I thought it might be fun to hear what you think about those. How do you use pausing and silence when you perform your work? Is that an element in your aesthetic?
Ocean Vuong
Absolutely. I think if you have a deep relationship with language,it is to have a relationship with prosody, you know, the understanding of rhythm and the breath. I mean, I think language is kind of like a score, it’s a score, it’s a musical score, it’s a score of the breath and silence. And then we learn this when we listen to music. You listen to, you know, Chopin, and the pauses in between, you listen to Etta James performances, right? Those lulls, those valleys, Whitney Houston, right. She starts the song in almost a whisper. And then, you know, you know what she’s capable of. And so the anticipation of a positivist result comes out of what Keats called negative capability, right? And I think to me, language is a kind of gallop, which then asks, is it a kind of trot? And then, is it a complete standstill? And those are actually the most powerful moments to me, and in Western narratology stand still is often frowned upon. It’s like, you know, in cinema, they call it dead time, dead air. In radio, they call it dead air, but in Eastern narratology, particularly in the films of Kurosawa and Miyazaki, there’s an element of Japanese narrative called “Ma,” “M – A” and Ma is a kind of pregnant, capacious silence. It is a lull in the rhythm, it is an absolute standstill. And in Miyazaki’s work, you can see this in works like My Neighbor Totoro, the bus stop scenes, and so I’m interested in bringing that. And so you see a lot of moments of Ma particularly in The Emperor of Gladness, where characters kind of completely stop and the story freezes, and you just see them. And the power of that is that you can feel the characters feeling what came before them, and that kind of moment of absolute empathy with the characters is something that I’m still trying to explore, but both in a sense of prosody, but in narrative, I’m interested in silences, for sure.
Charles Donelan
Excellent, and what an almost uncanny and wonderful way to head into our state of Ma as we conclude this fascinating conversation. Thank you, Ocean Vuong, so much for joining me on Air Time, the podcast of UCSB Arts and Lectures, and we look forward to seeing you on Wednesday, December 3, at UCSB Campbell Hall. Thank you again.
Ocean Vuong
Thank you so much, Charles. It’s an honor, and I look forward to being there with the community.
Ocean Vuong
Thank you. Take care.
Ocean Vuong
Thank you bye, bye.
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