Columbia professor Anelise Chen explores existentialism at Raymond Carver Reading Series
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Addressing the crowd in front of her Wednesday, Anelise Chen criticized a culture of self-doubt, stress, anxiety and unfair comparison. Though striving for perfection is common, Chen said people need to put less pressure on themselves.
Chen, a creative writing professor at Columbia University, visited Syracuse University as part of the Raymond Carver Reading series, a SU series featuring prominent writers. Before reading and discussing her novel, “So Many Olympic Exertions,” she held a Q&A session with attending students.
The novel, which Chen called experimental, attempts to answer one question: “Why to live?”
Exploring success, failure and loss with a semi-autobiographical lens, the novel follows Athena, its protagonist, as she grapples with the suicide of a friend from college.
Throughout the week, students taking ENG 107: Living Writers studied the novel and came to the event with a plethora of questions. Max Delsohn, an MFA student in the English department who introduced Chen to the audience, said that, utilizing sports, Chen is able to craft a depressing, yet effective, narrative.
“In referring to the point of living, and all apparent pointlessness, what could be more pointless than playing sports?” Delsohn said.
Sarah Harwell, the associate director of creative writing at SU, shared a similar perspective. Harwell doesn’t typically enjoy sports but found the book “fascinating” because it was about both sports and failure.
“I went to the sports section (of a bookstore) and most books were autobiographies of famous athletes and didn’t treat sports as the site of this philosophical inquiry,” Chen said.
When asked by a student how the relationship between her body and mind informed her work, Chen discussed how she rediscovered her body after quitting swimming by going outdoors and taking up cycling.
“We shouldn’t forget our bodies, because I think with our phones, our bodies aren’t doing what they traditionally have been doing, which is being active in the world. I think now, more than ever, we need to keep our bodies in our minds,” Chen said.
The novel’s narrative centers on self-talk; Athena doubts herself amid the loss of her friend and eventually has trouble with her Ph.D. dissertation. But Chen urges readers to break out of that way of thought, seeing it as detrimental to mental wellness.
“Self-talk is about winning, losing — it’s very self-critical. You are always comparing yourself to others. That way of thinking has translated into other parts of life … I found it to be quite toxic,” Chen said during the Q&A.
Chen’s upcoming work, “Clam Down,” continues to cover themes of self-perception, mental health and identity, but with a radically different perspective.
“It’s from the perspective of a clam, which is the ultimate distancing,” Chen said. “It’s not even a human perspective.”
It has its roots in a column Chen wrote for the Paris Review where she was a “mollusk correspondent.” Despite the absurdity, the decision to write from a clam’s perspective was deliberate, Chen said.
It comes from a texting typo that the character in the Paris Review receives from her mother. Instead of “calm down,” the text says, “clam down.” The mistake inspired Chen, who thought about what that implied.
“It actually seemed surprisingly fitting, because when we’re hurting or going through something, we shut down. That’s what I was doing: clamming down,” Chen said.
Chen was influenced by Franz Kafka’s “The Metamorphosis,” as well as Yoko Tawada’s “Memoirs of a Polar Bear,” while writing “Clam Down,” which hits the shelves later this year. But Chen was equally influenced by personal experiences in writing “So Many Olympic Exertions,” drawing heavily from her personal life.
“The novel isn’t a diary, but I wanted it to have that feel. I love reading journals … they’re so intimate,” Chen said. “That was what my friends and I were going through.”
