Literature has never been a particularly good way to make money, and in recent years a lot of traditional revenue models have been challenged. I now derive almost all of my income from this site, which frees me from certain pressures, but which also requires me to promote myself more aggressively than previous generations of literary taste-makers. To drive traffic, I often tweet excerpts from an interview before publishing it. (This practice is not uncommon and is not inherently problematic, though obviously in this case it was inadvisable.) And so when Sarang agreed to a phone interview while touring in support of his latest effort, The Tricolour, I knew that I had to make the most of my opportunity. That's why on Monday I started tweeting a few of the most interesting parts of the interview.
Among them was this now infamous tweet:
Of course, "#provocative" was putting it mildly. Sarang has always enjoyed a very strong following all over Ireland, and his readers outside the capital city were shocked and dismayed. Dublin is the largest city in Ireland, but it was first a Viking city and then the seat of British rule, and a large majority of Irish people do not live in Dublin... so claiming that the soul of Ireland resides there came across as, at best, a tendentious and simplistic way to understand Irishness.Sarang: "Dublin is the soul of Ireland and has been for a very long time..." #CallousLiterature #books #novels #provocative— James (@15c3PO) August 21, 2017
This was all the more troubling because The Tricolour is set in Ireland (both the Republic and Northern Ireland), and Sarang's publisher is relying heavily on the book's success to make up for the commercial disappointment of his previous novel, Lady Chatterjee's Lover. I will post a full review later, but suffice it to say that The Tricolour is a nuanced exploration of Irish identity and, as it happens, is set almost entirely outside of Dublin.
I posted the tweet on Monday, but it got almost no attention (including, apparently, from Sarang, who is not among my 113 Twitter followers) until it was retweeted yesterday by Colm Tóibín with the pithy comment, "My god..." By then, Sarang was on a jet to New York, blissfully unaware of the firestorm that my tweet had ignited. #HasSarangLandedYet quickly shot to the top of Twitter's trending topics, and everyone from Colson Whitehead to Alec Baldwin weighed in with biting commentary.
Worse, once he arrived in the U.S., Sarang was whisked straight from JFK to Charlie Rose's studio, so he was blindsided when Rose read him the tweet out loud and asked him if it was accurate. Sarang confirmed that it was and expressed surprise that anyone might disagree. Many of his ardent fans had stuck by him this far, assuming I had misquoted him, and so his calm reaffirmation of the statement sparked a new wave of shock and revulsion across the globe. (The interview has not aired yet, but leaked footage of this back-and-forth spread quickly on social media.)
My only defense is that conversation with Sarang is never easy, and it is all the more difficult when carried out on cell phones across the Atlantic. Here is my initial transcription of my recording of that portion of the interview (we had been discussing the extent to which different countries are dominated by a single preeminent city):
J: England is sort of in between.
S: Perhaps. London is obviously the most important city, but you've also got Manchester, Liverpool, Birmingham... but for my purposes what is more important is that Dublin is the soul of Ireland and has been for a very long time.Sarang now claims that he meant that Dublin is the Seoul of Ireland. I hope you will agree that my interpretation was reasonable, but I take Sarang's word for it that he was comparing Ireland's largest city to South Korea's.
And so I wholeheartedly apologize for my tweet and for the anguish that it has caused Sarang and his readers. I hope that we can move past this painful episode. I also hope that Sarang's publisher will take my sincere apology into account when considering its legal options.
[UPDATE: Sarang has asked me to post a more complete excerpt from my transcript, which I have done below.
S: Of course, the U.S. has any number of cities preeminent in their sector. New York for finance, San Francisco and Seattle for tech, Washington for politics, Los Angeles for God knows what... all the filmmaking energy is in Frankfurt now... [Editorial note: Sarang has taken advantage of extremely generous German tax subsidies to move his independent film studio to Frankfurt.]
J: But not France.
S: No, not France, everything is in Paris. And more to the point, not South Korea. Seoul is the epicenter of everything in the country, there isn't a major sector it doesn't dominate.
J: England is sort of in between.
S: Perhaps. London is obviously the most important city, but you've also got Manchester, Liverpool, Birmingham... but for my purposes what is more important is that Dublin is the soul of Ireland and has been for a very long time. I mean in some ways it is a hypercharged soul, it is more soul than soul. I don't even know what Irish city would be comparable to Busan, which is clearly South Korea's "second city." Belfast, if you count that. Otherwise I suppose it would be Cork?I hope this clears everything up and we can move on.]
