The Visiting Writer’s Program hosted Pulitzer Prize–winning author Hernan Diaz this week, with numerous events with students and faculty culminating in a lecture and book signing Nov. 18.
Diaz read from and discussed his novel “Trust,” which was released in 2022 and awarded the 2022 Kirkus Prize for Fiction and the 2023 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. The novel follows the rise of a 20th-century business tycoon from the perspectives of four different characters. Diaz said that he was interested in the idea of money because he didn’t know a lot about it.
“I think the advice ‘write about what you know’ is the most pernicious advice a young writer can receive,” Diaz said. “Literature is not here to confirm your experience but to widen your knowledge and bring you out into the world of the other.”
In an interview, Diaz said that he is not a spontaneous writer.
“I believe in control in the prose and in the process,” Diaz said. “The hard thing is to be in control of the prose, to be as lucid as possible, to explore the grammatical possibilities of language, to show restraint while also conveying depth of feeling. That’s the biggest challenge for me as a writer.”
Although technical control should never come at the expense of the emotional dimension of the text, there is also a difference between sentiment and sentimentality, Diaz said.
“I’m not interested in emotional pyrotechnics or gut punches,” Diaz said. “I’m not that kind of writer at all. I’m trying to access feelings that are more opaque in a transparent way, if that paradox makes any sense.”
In addition to inviting Diaz to campus, Associate Professor of English Dutton Kearney taught a class this semester on Diaz’s two novels.
“The hope was to create a groundswell of interest in Diaz’s work, and then to have a group of students who know his work and know it in a way that makes them want to participate in the events,” Kearney said. “I just want students to see that contemporary writers are very interested in the tradition that we’re studying, that there’s a lot in common with American novels written in the last 100 years and American novels that are written today, and to see that as a conversation.”
Senior Erika Kyba, who took the Diaz course this semester, said she recommends Diaz’s books.
“Sometimes Hillsdale students will shy away from authors who are more modern because they distrust the postmodern movement, and they especially distrust the claims that a lot of people make that we can’t arrive at truth,” she said.
Kyba said she appreciated that during his Monday lecture on “Trust,” Diaz expressed the pursuit of truth as asymptotic but not impossible.
“The splinter narrative isn’t breaking down reality,” Kyba said. It’s a way of getting us to look at reality differently and come to understand it more.”
“All of us should come to terms with the fact that so many of the stories that we both consume and produce inhabit a very indeterminate region,” Diaz said in an interview. “I think delving fully into the realm of fiction will perhaps help us understand where these evanescent and moving boundaries may lay.”
Better understanding the multi-storied nature of reality is one of the purposes of fiction, if indeed fiction has any purpose, Diaz said.
“Maybe we don’t need fiction. We live in a society where utility and instrumentalism are our rule, everything is commodified and serves an ulterior purpose. To have something that doesn’t do that is not necessarily a bad thing,” Diaz said. “I could leave it at that, but I know that I need fiction, and I suspect that all of us need it. Even if we don’t happen to be big readers, we’re telling stories all the time to make sense of reality and to make sense of ourselves.”
Associate Professor of Economics Charles Steele attended Diaz’s “Trust” reading and said he was interested in the comparison of fiction and money.
“He talked about money as a fiction, that it exists because people believe in it. That’s economic theory: money is a set of mutually reinforcing expectations,” Steele said, referencing Diaz’s statement during his lecture that “a genre is nothing more than a horizon of expectations.”
Kearney said he was intentional about inviting different departments to participate in Diaz’s visit.
“I love reaching across campus for these kinds of events,” Kearney said. “So we’ll have the business department because ‘Trust’ is all about the business world, and then also reach across the aisle to the Spanish department, because Diaz is from Argentina.”
Associate Professor of Spanish Victor Carreño attended Diaz’s lectures and said he enjoyed hearing about Diaz’s high modernist influences.
“It’s very interesting the way he talked about being influenced by Thomas Mann and Virginia Woolf,” Carreño said. “It’s a pleasure to find an author who is still interested in and being influenced by high modernism. He’s not imitating the avant garde but recreating it.”
Correño said he was grateful for the chance to eat lunch with Diaz on Tuesday along with three Spanish students and Associate Professor of Spanish and Department Chair Todd Mack.
“Dr. Arnn always says college is a partnership,” Kearney said. “So for the departments to be siloed off from one another, I think that would be appalling. We don’t see one another all the time, but here’s an event that can bring us all together.”
