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"What are refinement and the intellect compared to a sublime fuck?" asks Adam, the protagonist in Hanif Kureishi’s fifth novel, The Body (Scribner, $20). Like his fictional offspring, Kureishi relishes a probing question. In his latest work, the author continues to explore issues of commitment, identity and desire that have fueled his screenplays and novels, from The Buddha of Suburbia to Intimacy. The Body finds Adam, a successful married writer of sixty-four, faced with the opportunity of two lifetimes: to have his brain transferred into the body of a recently deceased twenty-five-year-old. Naturally curious, Adam plans a six-month hiatus from his old body, and an experiment that began in the spirit of Lewis and Clark devolves into a European frolic worthy of Masters and Johnson. But when he meets a stranger with bad intentions, his lark takes some serious turns.
Was there a specific event that prompted you to imagine having a new body? I watch late-night TV — trash TV — and there are lots of programs about people having bits cut out of their bodies or other bits added and so on. I thought, why go to all the trouble to have a bit done here and there? Why not just get a whole new body? I became interested in what people thought having a new body would do for them. And I was really interested in the philosophical questions about identity: Who would you be? What makes you who you are? Did turning fifty this year have anything to do with the topic? Well, yes. Also, if you start writing when you're young, and you're still writing when you're older, you get interested in time and age and duration and memory, in how people deteriorate and whether older people have anything to teach the young. Or, as in The Body, whether younger people have anything to teach the old. Exactly. I teach writing, and one of the things that I'm now very clear about is that I don't want to teach people who are all twenty-five. I want to have people in the group who are seventy, people who are twenty-five, thirty-five, forty-five, etc, so you're not living in a segregated world. Do you think it's possible to separate identity and character from our physical appearance and how desirable we imagine ourselves to be? If you think of your identity, your face, your body — it's a map of your experience. I don't think any of us really believe in the idea of the soul anymore, of there being a part of our human frame that is our essence. A human being is composed entirely of memory, physical appearance, and what one believes others will make of one's physical appearance. If you're a black person, or an Indian, like me, and you walk into a room full of white people, being black leads. When you're fifty, you've got lots of identity, lots of life and lots of connections, so to begin again is almost to become a Nobody. Do you find yourself watching interactions between the young and old differently now? Absolutely. You may have fantasies about being young, but you don't have fantasies about being ignored, about being patronized, about people thinking you're stupid, that you know nothing. [Adam] had high status before, and suddenly people ignore him, or they have contempt for him, or they have all sorts of fantasies about him that he's not prepared for. Do you want everyone to fall in love with you? Well, you might say that you would want that, but in fact, that's actually quite wrong. There are particular people at particular times that you want to fall in love with you. It's like being a rock star — millions of people love you, but actually it's completely empty. How do you think getting a new body might have been different for a woman his age? I wouldn't know. I don't understand anything about women whatsoever. Some of your contemporaries [Houellebecq] paint a dismal picture of the romantic and sexual prospects for the baby-boomer, sexual-revolution generation in their middle age . . . I don't accept that. I don't believe that what's desirable in real people is the same as what might be desirable in a twenty-five-year-old model. What you find attractive in other people is not normally their most classical, obvious feature, to be honest. There's something endearing about a lack of symmetry or a physical imperfection . . . . . . or something someone does, or the way they move, or the way they show you their body that can be incredibly exciting and isn't the same as a twenty-five-year-old's body. There's a difference between real sexuality and pornography, and I think we're in danger of getting them muddled up. Real sexual relationships are full of terror and fear and shame and anxiety. There's another real person there, who's also suffering from fear and anxiety and shame and normal human weaknesses, and that's what makes relationships terrible and beautiful. They're not objects like cars or pornographic models or whatever. They may do or say something totally unpredictable because the other person has a mind, which is quite independent of you, and that seems to me to be what's interesting about real relationships. Adam isn't fulfilled by "browsing" or "grazing" in his new body. Can our desires ever be satisfied? Or is the idea of fulfillment ridiculous? I think a lot of people fantasize about having a fully satisfying relationship, like having a meal that's going to make you never want to eat again. Unfortunately, and what's wonderful, is that appetite keeps returning. Is it possible to rediscover the innocence of our younger selves? There's something about discovering sexuality when it's completely devastating and new that you can never go back to. What you have to learn is to find something new, to find happinesses where you can, to dig them out. They're harder won as you get older, no doubt about that, but if you're smart, you can find good substitutes: art, culture, work, love, and different kinds of identification with other groups of people, [especially] with your children. Your own ego dissolves, to a certain extent, into them. It's their pleasure that gives you pleasure. If everyone could live indefinitely, what would be society's greatest loss? I think you'd lose any element of risk, which is the fact that you live with your own death. Life would have no meaning whatsoever. The only pleasures that are possible are, as you get older, the pleasures that are under the aegis of death. I think there's something unbearable about that as well. n°
©2004 Nerve.com.
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