The Creativity of Jhumpa Lahiri: A Look at Marginality and Motivation

When it comes to analyzing the creativity of modern writers, Jhumpa Lahiri is a fascinating person to study. Her works include written short story collections such as Interpreter of Maladies, as well as novels including The Namesake, The Lowland, and In Other Words. Her short fiction has been published in prominent literary magazines such as The New Yorker. Since Lahiri is only fifty right now and still very much an active writer, it will take time to tell whether she will be considered an eminent creative in literature. However, she certainly has tremendous talent. She was launched to almost instant success with the publication of Interpreter of Maladies, which won the Pulitzer Prize and several other awards, as well as much national attention because it was her first published work.

Looking at Lahiri’s literary career is an excellent way to explore Gardner’s concept of marginality as an influence on creativity. Marginality is a defining trait of Lahiri’s writing, which is often focused on the immigrant experience. Lahiri’s parents are Indian, but she was born in England and brought up in Rhode Island. Although she spent the majority of her formative years in America, she says she’s “always felt the conflict of the Indian and the American in varying proportion.” Like many of her characters, Lahiri finds it complicated to define her own identity, since she has never felt fully a part of one identity over the other. In a 2003 interview, she discussed how her perspective has been shaped both by this sense of not fully fitting in and by the stronger “sense of exile” her parents experienced, living away from their native country. Many of her works and characters draw on the experiences of her parents or other people they knew when she was growing up, and their struggles to adapt to a foreign land. The creativity in Lahiri’s work lies in the masterful way that she draws readers into this outside perspective. Like Lahiri herself, her characters have a unique and insightful take on both American and Indian culture because they have been immersed in both without feeling completely a part of either.

At the most general level, Lahiri is nearly a textbook example of the theory that creativity is intrinsically motivated. In the same 2003 interview, she emphasized that she cannot write unless the inspiration comes from within–she said that to focus on external expectations such as her first novel meeting the high bar set by The Interpreter of Maladies would paralyze her. She said that one of her biggest messages for young writers is that writing cannot by fueled by the hope of success or fame, or even “the desire to be read by anybody.” Rather, “you have to work for the love of it.” It’s interesting to dissect this idea in light of what Lahiri has to say about her own writing process. If her love of writing comes from within, what exactly motivates that love? 

Lahiri’s first response would probably be that she can’t dissect her love for writing–it’s just a natural process. In the interview, she explained that she began writing when she learned to read, and since then writing always “felt as instinctive and as pleasurable as reading–if someone asks me why do you write, it’s almost like asking me why do you read, or why do you breathe?” In a 2013 interview with The New Yorker, she described writing a story as “a very mysterious process .... I mean, I know it takes time, I know it takes effort, I know it takes lots and lots of drafts and hours, but I still really don’t understand the internal mechanism of how it really happens.” For her, the mystery and exhilaration of the process comes back to the idea of internal motivation. “All writing, all art, it’s just a wild leap off a cliff,” she says. “There’s nothing to support you–you’re creating something out of nothing, really–no one’s telling you to do it, it comes from within.”

However, while this mysterious leap is central to Lahiri’s description of what it’s like to feel motivated to write something, it is clear that this intrinsic motivation doesn’t mean that her entire creative process is an unregulated, free-fall type of activity. The wild leap of inspiration is followed by a great deal of trial and error until she is finally able to create a successful draft. Her discussion of toying with point of view, allowing years for ideas to gestate, revising over and over reminds strongly of the psychological concept of divergent thinking. However, if part of Lahiri’s creativity lies in her ability to play with and generate ideas, it also shows that she possesses one of the paradoxical traits of creative that Csikszentmihalyi discusses–the pairing of playfulness with discipline. Lahiri pairs her divergent thinking with a sharply analytical eye. When it comes to her writing process, she says that it’s analyzing the flaws of each draft and building from there that carries her forward through rounds and rounds of revision version to version, and ultimately allows her to create a finished work.

Ultimately, the most interesting thing I noticed in hearing Lahiri speak about her creative process is that while she finds writing to be a natural, comfortable state, this doesn’t mean it’s necessarily the only reason she finds it rewarding. Her internal motivation also seems to stem from the sense of marginality that is so central to her work. Writing seems to be her way of processing feelings of isolation. In her 2013 interview, she said, “I feel that I’m not quite in the world if I’m not trying to write about it.” In her later New Yorker interview, a similar theme emerged when she described her writing as “a very private form of consolation.” Even after publishing Interpreter of Maladies, she said she felt that "the writing of the stories came out of a place of deep isolation for me. But then to have the book published and to realize, there’s a way that almost anyone can connect on some level to something one puts out into the world. It was very consoling and gratifying in that sense because I felt that my experience of loneliness as a child, my experience of feeling so estranged and being convinced that nobody else lived in this particular way, wasn’t the case.”  

Perhaps, then, marginality itself can be the impetus of intrinsic creative motivation. The reward for the creative is not external praise in and of itself, but a feeling of connection to the outside world. The idea is admittedly somewhat paradoxical since this still means the creative work must be accepted and appreciated by the outside world for this connection to truly happen. However in Lahiri’s words, “that’s the enormous power of literature–that you can write out of such a specific place, and yet it’s really about entering into other people’s consciousness." She believes a work can speak to universal experiences despite its specific context, and show that "we’re less divided that we think we are." For her, at least, the ultimate reward of creativity–the ultimate intrinsic motivator–seems to simply be the knowledge that she's contributing to this universal understanding of the human experience each time she creates a new work. 

 Additional Sources:

https://www.chipublib.org/jhumpa-lahiri-biography/

http://www.pifmagazine.com/1999/08/interview-with-jhumpa-lahiri/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KQkK8ThNsOY&t=2456s