John S. Wilson III, better known as Jay, is studying philosophy at Princeton University, where he was recognized for outstanding work by a junior, by The Peter B. Lewis Summer Fund. Wilson grew up in Washington, D.C., after his family moved from Cambridge, MA., when he was six years old. The dislocation inspired him to write. Years later, after a teacher recommended he read One Hundred Years of Solitude, he fell in love with fiction for its focus on the real, the magical and the absurd. His winning story is titled “4, 6, 8.”
Q&A
What was it about One Hundred Years of Solitude that made you say: I want to be a writer?
The moment I finished One Hundred Years of Solitude, precisely as Gabriel García Márquez condemned the Buendía’s entire race, I became a zealot. Finishing One Hundred Years of Solitude induced in me an awed-determination, and so I began the work of deciphering Márquez’s trick. After repeated and close reading, I discovered inside and underneath the diction, the detail, and the rhythm of the prose, the temporal, philosophical, political and historical brilliance – the incisive and thorough truth – of the novel. Besides this, I discovered an emotional depth I did not know was there in the novel and in me.
Describe how that particular book inspired you.
Márquez’s magic never diminishes. With each reading, although the tricks of the text become less coded, the light on the page never fades. This biblically-sized tragedy – of colonialism and religion, prejudice and subjugation, and tyranny and genocide – spoke also about (as it seems to me) my history and my race. Even though while I read the novel I raced away from my own condemnation, these ironies remained: 1) besides whatever alchemy José Arcadio Buendía never accomplished, Márquez turned disgrace into art and made beauty out of many millions gone and 2) although Aureliano’s solipsism would eviscerate his legacy, my solipsism would be crushed by Márquez’s massive and unwieldy imagination. It was these re-readings, this deciphering, that to me made the project of fiction not only graspable but also realizable, writable.
What hopes do you have for your own writing and how it affects people?
I would like to create in my fiction something akin to what I perceive in One Hundred Years of Solitude. Though I do not have the talent or the time yet to unroll so many generations, so slowly, so personally, so powerfully and with so much magic, I hope the deep, dark, confused wandering of “4, 6, 8” encloses some of the same ironies, has something of the same trick. I hope as One Hundred Years of Solitude helps me face the already-annihilated past, my fiction helps others to do the same. Most of all I hope I accomplish these ironies, this magic, before nature reclaims me.
Interview conducted by Priscilla Lalisse-Jespersen, October 2016
“4, 6, 8”
John Silvanus Wilson III
– an excerpt
Four
In those years they lived in a house that looked across the river and the trees to the mountains and the house was there simply like the river and the trees. In the crowns of the trees there were nests for the squirrels hard with winter and brown with nuts. Gangs of them ran by the house and down the red trail, bruising the ground and tearing the leaves which fell early that year. They took to the trunks of the trees and up the trunks of the trees to their roosts in the crowns. Then the gangs tore down the trail and the leaves continued to fall. The house looked onto them as they moved on and afterward the trail lay bare and red except the leaves.
In his room, Bear lay straight palms stuck to his thighs. His nightlight blinked so so did his room. His floor, his dresser, his desk and his bookcase burped into and out of sight, leaving behind burnt reflections. Every time his nightlight blinked his feet shook and sweat beaded between his toes. His naked stomach complained against the elastic of his underwear. It was dark and behind the branches the moon glowed against Bear’s back. Bear’s heart gasped against his sternum. He took his arms from his ribs and put his face in them. His father said he would fix the light and how come he couldn’t remember? One squirrel found another and they skittered up the tree. Bear put his nails to the crown of his skull and he pressed. He was four.
The light from the nightlight diminished. The dark areas plowed softly into the light ones nearer and nearer to Bear. Bear thought if there was more time for the dark then there was more time for Them. He grabbed the headboard since he couldn’t any longer see the floor, but the dark was greedy and drank his sheets. It filled around him and put him nowhere. Breezes carried cold jokes through the leaves and the noise felt so near that he bristled. He found himself outside of himself and his own joy. The darkness around Bear began to slur into white and more white and then Bear found himself looking down onto his roof from (where he must have been) above it, the tiles dropping away from him gorgeously. He panicked. He was trying to throw himself back down but he was failing. Finally, losing his will, Bear looked down unflinchingly. He took his hands and he put them in his hair like he was lying down on the sky. He noted the roof’s beauty. Patches of grey grass stood to their tips and Bear thought the world was bristling. On this whole green earth he had never seen anything like it. He had come upon it naked and did not know to be quiet.
“Wowww!”
The scene wrapped itself back up. Bear frightened and felt heavy, falling and falling fast and colliding back with a back-breaking sound.