Ocean Vuong: The Emperor of Gladness

Inklings Book Club

Host Jack Edwards sits down with acclaimed author Ocean Vuong for a live conversation in London regarding his new novel, The Emperor of Gladnes

Key takeaways

• Ocean Vuong uses the metaphor of 'rafts' to describe books, suggesting writers should avoid being trapped by their own published works.
• Vuong expresses existential concern that AI threatens to evacuate humanity from art by removing the historical and personal struggle inherent in human creation.

Main topics

• Democratization of literature via BookTok
• AI and the loss of human consciousness in art

Notable quotes

The technology of the sentence, the wonder of it, is that it becomes a vehicle to test human consciousness.

Conclusion

An intellectually stimulating deep dive into the soul of modern litera

Transcript preview

Speaker 2 (0:04) Hello everyone and welcome back to the Inklings Book Club podcast. I'm your host Jack Edwards and for this month we chose the Emperor of Gladness as the Inklings Book of the Month. And so, you know what that means. I actually can't believe this is real, but we are joined today by the inimitable Ocean. Vong. I'm overwhelmed by this because Ocean is one of my favourite writers. His debut novel on Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous won the American Book Award, the Mark Twain Award, and the New England Book Award. It has sold over 2 million copies and marked the arrival of an incredible talent onto the literary scene. He is also the recipient of a MacArthur Genius Award and his books of poems include Time as a Mother, which was a finalist for the Griffin Prize, and Night Sky with Exit Wounds, which was the winner of the T.S. Eliot Prize, the Whiting Award, and the Tom... Gunn Award. It does not get much bigger than this. This is a literary rock star. Today he joins us on the Inklings Book Club podcast to talk about his newest novel, The Emperor of Gladness, which as I said is our Inklings Book of the Month. We recorded this conversation live in London at the Emanuel Centre, so please welcome to the Inklings Book Club, Ocean Vong. Speaker 1 (1:27) Hello Speaker 2 (1:27) everyone, thank you so much for joining us on the hottest day ever recorded in May in the UK. Normally I would say, please could you give a warm welcome to my guest, but today I think we'll do a cool welcome to one of the coolest people writing today, someone who I feel so grateful to be reading at the same time as they are writing. Please welcome Ocean Vong. Ocean, how is London treating you? Speaker 1 (1:52) Well, thank you so, so much. for having me. It's a deep honor to share the space with you. I think especially what you've done to democratize literature and reading for so many people across the world and in a way to me spearheading Speaker 1 (2:14) the book talk as a new mode of influence in taste-making and i think for the first time in our species we have never had until now Speaker 1 (2:28) tastemaking in literature, truly in the hands of people. And I think there's a lot to be said about influencers. I think newspapers have always been influencers. Throughout literary history, governments, authoritarian regimes have been influencers. And for the first time, somebody anywhere with access to a phone and Wi-Fi could speak their mind. with an intellect, a curiosity, and a charm that could share the written word. And it's really exciting to see where it takes us. And I just thank you for being a part of it. I think it breaks down really important class barriers for what is legible and what is possible to be read with dignity and a new kind of reification. So it means a lot for me as someone... who comes outside of so many institutions growing up to see what is possible now with literary culture, with folks like yourself and many people like you across the world doing this work. Speaker 2 (3:36) I appreciate that. I did not expect an Ocean Vuong in defense of BookTok to start the day, but I'm very grateful for it. It's funny because I suppose with On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous, that book predates. BookTok and yet you might now see it in a bookshop under a sign that says as seen on BookTok or categorized as a BookTok book. So does that label kind of mean anything to you or do you just celebrate it? Speaker 1 (4:03) I'm not on TikTok, so I don't know what it means. It's a compliment, I promise. Speaker 2 (4:12) I'm very happily ignorant of it all. Speaker 1 (4:16) I understand it as a concept and I think... I'm very laissez-faire about my work. I think I was asked a couple nights ago, how would you like to be remembered? And I think as a Buddhist, I don't think about legacy at all. You know, the very useful metaphor for Buddhists is that our life is like a hotel room. you eventually have to leave it, and you try your best not to leave it in a mess. The work that you do, the books that you make, will be placed neatly on the desk, and maybe the maid comes and sweeps it right into the bin as soon as you walk down the hall, as soon as your soul floats down the hall. So I think while you have a body, you do what you can with it, but it's important to see the book as a kind of... technology you put on a raft and then the technology of the book and publication floats the raft down river and the writer has to stay on the shore you don't want to be trapped on your own book because you can't make a new book if you're trapped on it so to me i've just sent four rafts down the river and i have to stay here and i think it's an important exercise in the ego and the lack of attachment to the self, that's more important to me, that practice, than being a writer, whatever that may mean. I don't see being a writer as an ontological truth. It's more like a performance. I have written, but right now I don't see myself as a writer. I'm not writing anything. I don't have anything going. And if that four books is all there is, that's a really good run. That's a really lucky run. So I don't know what a book talk or any talk means. You know what? Keep it that way. But I'm happy it's there because I see the excitement young people have. My only regret, I must tell you, my only regret is that it's coinciding with AI. And I would have wished for this democratization of tastemaking to have had a little longer run before it hits this interception of AI. I would have liked to see a few more decades, even half a millennia, of what would happen if literature was in the hands of folks as it is now. But I think AI has put us in quite a foible. Speaker 2 (7:00) As a literature professor, the one thing I suppose we all fear is AI becoming unidentifiable. Do you think that your students and also people within the profession are able to recognize signs of AI or that it's almost like a badge of honor now to have had no contribution from a computer? Speaker 1 (7:20) I don't think it's about recognition. The technology will change. It will eventually get indiscernible. It also depends on who. I've seen people run programs of Dickinson's work because there's such a robust body of it Speaker 2 (7:34) in Speaker 1 (7:35) the open market, out of copyright. And it does Dickinson really well because there's a lot of it to study from. Speaker 1 (7:46) I don't think it's about recognition or catching it. It's really, to me, a philosophical and spiritual question of, is that valuable? Because to me, the technology of the sentence, the wonder of it, is that it becomes a vehicle to test human consciousness. And if you offload that to a machine, you offload a major portion of humanity from which we have owed our very civilizations. So the question is an existential one. Do we want to give that away? Because I think there's a lot to be said about... publishing and being an author. And some authors might say, oh, let me do it easier. Let me go for fame and whatever easier. Finish the work, get an ISBN, make a deal. Sure, there are plenty of mercantile reasons already in human history for taking the easier way out. But to me, the greatest reward of being a writer is draft one. Because You have a thought, you have a desire, and then you enact it using this organic system called syntax that we have collectively agreed upon to a certain extent. And then you watch your consciousness manifest through this idiosyncratic mechanism. So when you're writing a sentence, you're kind of writing the thumbprint. of your selfhood manifested linguistically. But unlike the thumbprint, it's inexhaustible. The wonder of that consciousness made felt and then shareable. Why would you give that away? Why would you deny yourself that? And so I think, you know, if you want to use the technology to offload yourself, to take yourself out of the equation, then you've missed the point. of dreaming and thinking in the first place. So the greatest loss is the quote-unquote author who's using this. And I think what becomes really felt is not so much the work, but the fact that a human being made the work. This became really true when a few years ago, ChatGPT appropriated Hayao Miyazaki's aesthetics. We saw all those memes, right? You can generate Studio Ghibli cartoons of yourself within seconds. But why did it suddenly feel so cold? Why didn't it last? It's already such a moment that went away. Speaker 2 (10:38) But Speaker 1 (10:39) why do we still keep watching Miyazaki's films? Because Hayao Miyazaki was a human being. who was historically contingent to his times, who was coming out of a failed Japanese fascist empire after the wake of two nuclear bombs dropped on his people. And he was attempting to solve a kind of monolithic problem. How do I tackle narratively the darkest pages of Japanese history? with themes of ecological decline consumerism existential loss humiliation ethics and the frailty of national morality and make it accessible to the next generation of japanese children Speaker 1 (11:32) Ah, I will make a charming, soft, sort of whimsical aesthetic to talk about war, blood, death, and the monstrous acts of humanity using magic as a fulcrum. So you see that a human being named Miyazaki solved a human problem, and that cannot be replicated by the machine. And this became more true when I visited... a high school recently and the kids were showing me this program called suno you can ask it to make music and you can say something like oh dude early 2000s hip-hop but with country lyrics or what have you and it comes off it takes like 30 seconds and it shoots it out and it's brilliant it sounds good they're all bobbing right and they started to like make up a rapper, right? They're all theater kids. So they invented a persona of a rapper. I think it was called Lil Eazy or something, right? And Speaker 2 (12:40) they Speaker 1 (12:40) said, Speaker 2 (12:40) oh, Speaker 1 (12:40) he's like a theater kid who realizes he's actually a rapper. So they wrote all these, it's like beautiful. They were generating this persona and they played it and they're all cheering for Lil Eazy. This is like 45 minutes in and we're like building Lil Eazy's. album, quite frankly. And I'm sitting there and suddenly I felt this supreme vacuous sadness. And I'm listening to this and I said, oh, but Little Easy is not here. He'll never be here. we are manifesting the artist without the artist at all. And suddenly I had this moment of severe grief. Like, oh gosh, the music is so good. I wish all this was true. I wish he was here to have manifested it and it wasn't just the result of technocrats harvesting and destroying the planet with water coolers. Speaker 1 (13:51) suddenly I was immediately bored of it. And when I brought it up to them, they kind of deflated as well. And so the awe of it suddenly went away. And it was just like, oh, it's neat, but we don't have a historic human being solving human problems, even if it's creative ones. And it suddenly felt as empty as a tin can, which is what it was. And similarly, you know, now they're having robots who can dunk. in a basketball court. And I think the only interesting thing about it happens conceptually. Oh, human beings created a robot who can dunk. Beyond that, it's quite boring. When LeBron James dunks from the free throw line, you're stunned because it's a human being who grew up in Akron, Ohio, raised by a single mom, who manifested through hard work. this tradition of a basketball to elevate one's life in a capitalistic country founded on slavery. That historical contingency is incredible and it's endlessly thrilling. And the fact that he's still doing it at age 41, et cetera, et cetera. But again, if you have a machine do it, it's instantly dead because it was never alive. And so I think it's less about recognizing what's real and what's not, but having a real existential question as readers, as consumers. Do I want this? Do I want something that has evacuated humanity as a human being? Speaker 2 (15:27) This is a room full of... readers who adore your stories. You spoke about the four rafts you've put out down the river. They have made it down the River Thames as well. So I wanted to