To shoot +ex
tempore+, with unknown models, in unforeseen places of the right kind
for keeping me in a tense state of alert.
*
Model. Reduce
to the minimum the share his consciousness has. Tighten the meshing
within which he cannot any longer not be him and where he can now do
nothing that is not +useful.+
*
Model. Two mobile
eyes in a mobile head, itself on a mobile body.
*
Models. Mechanized
outwardly. Intact, virgin within.
Robert
Bresson
Robert Glück:
I have a theory that we pretty much become the writers we wanted to be
in the first place. When you first began to write, what was your idea
of the writing life, yourself in it? Who were your models? What were the
attractions? How did you see yourself in 20 or 30 years? Did your writing
itself take you in a different direction from that, or are you now pretty
much what you imagined you would be?
Dennis Cooper: Well, my idea of the writing life was
very impractical and romantic. But then I was fifteen, so I guess that
makes sense. My first model was -- and, in a weird way, still is -- Rimbaud.
Finding his work is what made me decide to devote my life to writing.
At that point in my life, I was extremely interested in the effects of
psychedelic drugs and related rock music, and I think Rimbaud's notion
that language could be fashioned into a spell that summoned ulterior or
poetic knowledge represented a practical way to pursue this interest.
My other model at that point was Sade, but in that case it was a matter
of his work waking me up to my own pre-existing fascinations and legitimizing
them as a subject for writing. As a person, he didn't appeal to me at
all. My third important model was and is Robert Bresson, but I didn't
find his work until I was in my early twenties. His films made my work
start to fall into place.
I think the attraction of writing was its secrecy, and that I could do
it
with absolute independence and in complete privacy. My personal life was
both externally and internally very chaotic at that point, so these qualities
really appealed to me. I didn't have to think about whether what I was
thinking and writing was insane or sick because no one knew what I was
doing. In fact, I didn't show my "real" work to anyone for many
years. Even when I was first publishing my poetry, I never considered
that to be my real work. The poetry and my early prose poems were ways
for me develop my chops and test the waters. In secret, I was developing
what ended up being my cycle of novels. I don't know that I could have
worked that way in any form other than writing.
I must have imagined who I would be in 20 or 30 years, but I don't really
remember. It's a pretty safe guess to say that I saw myself being like
Rimbaud, Sade, and Bresson, which I suppose means an artist who was known
and respected, and whose work was very important to some people but not
necessarily known to or loved by all.
Well, I guess I did become the writer I imagined I'd be, didn't I? My
work seems to mean a lot to a certain kind of young person, and I get
a lot of really moving emails and letters from young writers who say my
work inspired them to write. So I guess your theory makes sense. Of course
I never imagined the whole publishing world nonsense and the difficulty
of cracking the literary establishment and the lack of financial reward
for being this kind of writer. But, yeah, when I'm discouraged by the
insurmountable problems that my work creates for itself and for me, realizing
that I've achieved what I dreamed of achieving keeps me on track. So,
Bob, can I assume that you became to writer you imagined too? I'd really
like to know, if you don't mind making this interview somewhat of a conversation.
RG: Well, okay, briefly. Though I never believed in god,
I wanted to be a saint and for divinity to pour through me, so I may have
missed the mark? I lived in almost total isolation; I wanted contact and
a kind of absolute. It made me ambitious for literature itself and suspicious
of personal ambition. I think Rimbaud is the summit of that kind of writer.
He opposes his culture,expresses its instability, and he wants words to
actually move mountains,start revolutions. But my very first love was
for John Keats, a surface smooth as enamel, and underneath a heart breaking
against an absolute. There is some way he wills things into words, almost
three-dimensionally, like the drops of blood on a Flemish crucifixion.
If I had known the term, I would have said cult writer, recognized by
few. I imagined my perfect reader to be someone digging through a bin
of used books, attracted by a deeply strange volume which alters his life
in some way.....
DC: That's beautiful, and pretty close to my dreams.
I wonder if Keats is the distinguishing factor.
RG: Rimbaud certainly was a poet to lead you into the
present. I love your poems--don't disparage them! I am curious if there
are some passages from Rimbaud that are still in your head, and what you
think about them.
And I'd really like to know more about the inner and outer chaos you
mention.
You often talk about Bresson. Could you tell me a particular film that
was important, and go into it a ways?
DC: Rimbaud is a writer I've reread at least once a year,
so I don't really have a sterling, isolated memory of the particulars
that first hooked me on him. I know it was a combination of A
Season in Hell and his letters -- the external and the internal,
as it were. My fondness is generalized, and has to do with the superior
translations of his work which are now out of print, especially Enid Peschel's
versions of A Season in Hell and “The Drunken Boat.”
I think it's sad and vaguely criminal that the only in-print, widely available
translations of Rimbaud in English are Paul Schmidt's, because his Illuminations
and Season in Hell don't begin to cut it.
Fifteen was a really important age for me. I decided to become a writer.
I met George Miles, who would become my muse and the most important and
influential person I would know in my life. I started using drugs as an
investigative tool. I had sex for the first time and realized I was gay.
I found a group of similarly artsy, intelligent friends and was suddenly
cool. All these things helped me start to get away from a life that had
been very confusing and unstable. Before then I was a profoundly unpopular
kid who was harassed and beaten up at school, and spent most of my time
in my bedroom obsessing over rock music and television shows, drawing
pictures and writing naive poems and stories. Not to mention that I was
tormented by the thrills I'd felt when three boys my age were found raped
and murdered in the mountains near my house two years before. My parents
were in the middle of really ugly and protracted divorce proceedings.
My mother, whom I lived with, began drinking very heavily and her behavior
was unpredictable and very chaotic throughout my early teens. I'm the
oldest of four kids, which made me feel responsible for my siblings, whom
I couldn't protect. It was all really terrifying, so having that revelation
at fifteen about who I was made a huge difference. It helped me separate
myself from all that to some extent. I could escape into writing or drugs.
I could crash at my friends' houses whenever I wanted. I could focus my
thwarted wish to cure my mom or protect my siblings on George, who was
deeply troubled, but, at the same time, someone not unlike myself, and
who seemed to really flourish within my love and support for a long time.
My favorite Bresson film is The Devil, Probably (Le
Diable Problement), mainly because its concerns are so close
to my own. The first Bresson film I saw, and the one that changed my life,
was Lancelot du Lac. It's an astonishing work, though I think if I'd seen
any of his other films first, it would have had the same effect. His work
is so powerful and meaningful to me that I find it almost impossible to
talk about. It's like his influence dawned on me rather than being something
I studied into being. It's something to with his work's concision in relationship
to the ephemeral and chaotic nature of his subject matter. And that it's
nothing but style and form on the one hand, and completely transparent
and pure on the other. It's only concerned with emotional truth, and,
at the same time, it works so hard to exclude all superficial signs of
emotion. It's bleakness incarnate and yet it's almost obsessively sympathetic
to the deepest human feelings in a way that can only read as hopeful.
It's religious art and, yet, despite Bresson's avowed Catholicism, it
seems not to depend on any religious system for answers or comfort. The
fact that Bresson only used non-actors inspired me to create characters
in my work who were non-characters in a sense -- that is characters who
seem both unworthy of the attentions of art and incapable of collaborating
with art in the traditional sense. That relationship between Bresson and
his 'actors' was very key to me, and if you read his book Notes
on Cinematography, it's all there. I could go on and on, but
that's a general explanation, I guess.
RG: I would have suggested that same aspect of Bresson’s
work and yours—in a sense you both use untrained actors as characters.
I suppose I want to do something like that by using people from my life,
allowing them to “portray” themselves. Though I do see them
as trained, not trained by me but by themselves and their lives. I can
also see that urge to express impossible amounts of complexity with a
simplicity that language itself resists.
In your description of your teenage years, there is so much matter that
looks forward to your mature work. There’s the lyricism of dying
young and sexualized, there’s the waif, there’s nurturing
as a way to have access to feelings and romantic love, there’s the
dichotomy of desire that protects and desire that murders, there’s
the little family that random teenagers make for themselves, there’s
the general absence of mothers. In fact, the only mother I can think of
in your work has throat cancer, so she is silenced. But more than thematically,
you have built aesthetics on the depiction of teen years, especially on
their complexity combined with their inarticulateness. Could you talk
about that? — And perhaps touch on Tenderness of the Wolves?
DC: It's true that my teenaged experiences resemble my
novels' subject matter, though I've never consciously written about my
past, apart from the honest but not entirely truthful autobiographical
passages in My Mark and Guide. Even
the George Miles in my work is not the real George Miles, apart from looking
the same and sharing a similar emotional make up. I think my past functions
more as a set of research materials that hopefully allows me to do the
subject of teenagers justice. I've always been horrified by how teenagers
are either read as quasi-children or quasi-adults, as though they're merely
some kind of problematic transitional species with confused emotions and
intellects. They're expected to have two effects on adults — inspire
sentimental feeling and/or hold an erotic charge. If they challenge these
expectations, they're considered dangerous. I think this disrespect is
absolutely pervasive in American culture and is played out in a huge number
of ways. As I grew up and felt myself becoming susceptible to the same
convenient misperceptions that had done my peers and me such an injustice
when I was young, I think I started writing about the relationship between
teenagers and adults as a way to hold on to the truths I'd believed and
study them in relationship to these new truths in hopes of finding an
objective truth.
My aesthetics developed the way they have because I conducted so many
different mental and physical experiments on such a specific area of interest,
I guess. I mean in my fantasy life, in my life itself, and on the page.
My goal was to find a language that was native to the world of teenagers
and therefore paid them unremitting and unwavering respect yet was simultaneously
involved in a sophisticated, erotically charged investigation of them,
so that the work seemed to mediate between the two worlds in an evenhanded
way. It seemed to me that if I could define the exact point where these
conflicting worlds were done equal justice, the truth would then be exposed
somehow, and I used my own archetypes and obsessions as touchstones as
a way to keep the work absolutely honest and to keep my own interest in
the project fixated and evolving. As far as I'm concerned, I didn't find
my real voice until I wrote Closer and knew I was as ready as I'd ever
be to start the project I'd always wanted to write.
My book The Tenderness of the Wolves was the first time
I attempted to write in serious way. Idols was basically
a compilation of poems I'd written over about ten years, a number of them
when I was a teenager. The poems and prose pieces in ToW
were written specifically to be together in a book and to function as
much collectively as individually. I was very much influenced by punk
rock at the time, and also by the poets I was into then — James
Schuyler, John Wieners, James Wright, and others. I was in a period of
my life when I rejected the idea of romantic love as a weakness and a
lie. I was extremely interested in serial murderers like John Gacy, Dean
Corill, William Bonin, and others, and was investigating them very intently.
I was obsessed with one of Gacy's victims, Robert Piest, who looked remarkably
like George Miles — the title poem is about Piest; I referenced
him again years later in Period; and the cover of ToW
was a photograph of me standing in my bedroom next to framed pictures
of my muses and heroes at that time: Piest, Bresson, and Rimbaud. The
book's title is taken from the title of a film by Kurt Raab about a German
boy murderer. The work in that book was also the first I did after discovering
Bresson, whose influence introduced the kind of final big ingredient I
needed to find my voice. (I've often said my work arose from the intersection
of Rimbaud, Sade, and Bresson.) At the time, ToW kind
of threw people. The Crossing Press, who, based on Idols,
had invited me to publish a book with them, didn't really like it, and
only agreed to put it out after Edmund White kindly offered to write the
introduction, even though I don't think Ed liked the book that much either,
and basically was just doing me a personal favor. I’ve always had
a problem of people being confused by my latest book, then coming around
to it later on. It surprises me, because I see the steps as very logical.
But people develop expectations of my work because of their own preconceptions
about sex and violence, and they don't like it when I undercut what I've
determined in the name of progress. So people who liked the achy romanticism
and eroticism of the poems in Idols didn't like it when
I started exploring the consequences of unfulfilled longing in ToW.
Anyway, as much as I'm not interested in the approach I took in ToW,
I think it was the beginning of my mature work, especially the title poem,
which kind of presaged the structural investigations I ended up using
in my novels. I feel more connected to that poem sequence than I do to
the long prose piece “A Herd,” which was my first real work
of fiction that wasn't complete crap. There are passages in “A Herd”
that I like, but I still had too much faith in (and inexperience with)
narrative at that point, and the emotions in “A Herd” are
too qualified by sentimentality, which I think is a sign that I wasn't
brave enough to confront my true feelings yet.
RG: You ended your response with the words "true
feelings." Long ago, I started calling you a horror writer, because
I wanted to show how both religion and horror explore the region between
life and death. Horror and religion both bring tremendous awareness--though
not always the awareness of the dying—to the instant of death. Related
to that, I think there is a performance aspect to your writing, that there
are true feelings to get to and display, and that the authenticity of
your work is related to how far you will go, how much you will say. There
is an impossible complexity of feelings in one direction, an impossible
cultural complexity in another direction, and a sort of below-language
brute fact (of death, of matter) in a third direction, and in all directions
there is the problem of articulation, which is married to your amazing
powers of articulation. Oh, I recall of a lovely sentence fromGuide.
"Chris's shock was so dense and complex that it collided with the
world's very different complexity, sort of like what happens when a very
strong light hits a very big jewel." So, to tease out a difficult
question from all this: What do you see as the ground of authority in
your work?--which you were discovering in Tenderness of the Wolves?
DC: ‘Ground of authority’ is an interesting
way to try to think about what I do. My work is such a weird combination
of things that are beyond my control, things that control me, and things
that are excessively controlled by me in attempt to keep my work coherent
and pragmatic. What I write about has such an intense hold on me, and
seems so inappropriate to the world I live in, that it's left me deeply
confused and split. My life and my work has been about trying to negotiate
between my internal world and my external world. The pull toward horror,
for lack of a better term, is very intense for me. It attacks me on so
many fronts. It terrifies me, it holds an overwhelming erotic charge,
it fascinates me intellectually like a puzzle or problem, and it makes
me feel insane and deeply emotional. If have any authority, it derives
from my kind of obsessive focus on building a craft that will get me as
close as humanly possible to these things that would destroy me if I didn't
have language to protect me. It's sort of like each novel is a new attempt
to build something that will get me closer to the source, give me more
room to move within that area, and leave me less protected but safe enough
to survive. In Tenderness of the Wolves I found a kind
of cold, pragmatic voice that I sensed would be flexible enough to allow
me to approach my personal horror. I felt like it could potentially convey
deep emotion, logic, the pornographic, the horrific, the analytical, the
personal, the impersonal, objectivity, subjectivity, etc., all within
the same voice. I wasn't able to do all that much with it at that point,
but I sensed that if I experimented with it, I might eventually develop
the chops I would need to make a serious effort at writing about the things
that preoccupied me so ferociously. For me, the next years were purely
about developing my writing. Sometimes an experiment seemed to work, like,
say, “My Mark,” which is still one of my favorite things I've
written, but I feel like between The Tenderness of the Wolves
and Closer was an awkward phase for me where I was reading,
absorbing, and trying to incorporate a lot of fiction whose style and
structural notions weren't necessarily right for what I wanted to do.
I don't know if that answers your question. I just felt like the work
I'd done before ToW was too personal, too self-indulgent,
and not critical enough of my relationship to what I was writing about.
I think with ToW I realized that the best way for me
to be the writer I wanted to be was to use myself with all my flaws and
strengths as an opportunity to understand my subject matter, rather than
use my subject matter as an opportunity to understand me.
RG: I see what you mean, the true feeling, which comes
to equal proximity to horror, gets framed by a deadpan along with a lot
of other kinds of matter--for example, a mournful isolated lyricism, and
a lot of comedy too. In fact, I'd say you were one of the best parodists
I can think of, that your aim is dead on. What is the relation between
comedy and violence/horror in your writing?
DC: Thanks for that, Bob. Well, I think I learned a lot
from the horror
movie, which is a form where those things are almost always fused, and
of course from Sade who practically invented that combo. I think of my
prose as being made up of a bunch of different systems that are distinct
but simultaneous and interdependent. Or I should say that when I'm doing
all the laborious rewriting and editing that I need to do to get my work
right, I divide the various things going on in the prose into individual
systems and attend to each one so that it functions correctly on its own
and also services and is serviced by its fellow systems. Comedy is one
of the systems, and an important one, because comedy is such a talented
tone, yet it has no gravity in and of itself, so it can be used to popularize
other systems that are signaling more subjective, meaningful things. It
can subvert the visceral effect of represented violence without decentering
the actual punch. It can distract readers long enough to ease information
into them that would be too confrontational for them to absorb otherwise.
It can both deflect the reader's attention away from the emotional meaning
of a violent act and indicate that emotion by causing the reader to wonder
why that deflection is occurring. It can signal the reader to relax, then
betray his or her trust, thereby creating a particular kind of tension
that can be really useful. If it's used in a novel or section of a novel
where authorial intent is as important as the fiction, comedy can function
as superficial entertainment while at the same time indicating a shift
or tweak in the fiction's subconscious. Comedy can do a lot, and I try
to use it very carefully. That might all sound like gobbledygook, but
it's the way I think about comedy. It's interesting that you bring that
up, because my first post-cycle novel My Loose Thread
is completely devoid of comedy, and one of the projects I have in mind
is a novel that would nothing but comedy a la Jacques Tati's great films.
I think that would be a really curious challenge.
RG: What conception did you first have for the kind of
novel you might want to write?
DC: I was reading a huge amount of novels back then,
almost all European, the majority of them French. I wanted my fiction
to be really direct and complicated at the same time, and I had an idea
that I wanted to write a sequence of novels that would combine to form
one work, and I had a vague idea at that point that I wanted the structure
of that sequence to involve a novel gradually dismembering itself, or
being dismembered. So I knew I had to write a first novel that had enough
material within it and a strong enough life force to sustain a series
of surgeries and attacks, because I wanted to begin by having a pretty
strict area to work within. I tried out a lot of different things that
didn't quite work. A lot of the pieces collected in Wrong
were attempts to begin a novel. I didn't figure it out until I moved to
Amsterdam, and then Closer finally came together because
of certain factors in my life combined with the books I read (and music
I was listening to) while I was there. I think my experiences and literature
and, to a certain extent, music were equally important at that point.
On the life front, I’d moved there to be with someone I loved, but
our relationship started falling apart almost the day I moved there, and,
except for a couple of trips to visit friends in the States, I ended up
living alone and basically friendless for over two years. What that did
was allow me to live in an experimental and adventurous, sometimes dangerous
way that I would never have done if there'd been people around who cared
enough to stop me. I did huge amounts of this strong, very cheap Dutch
speed called Pep that induced this kind of psychotic state where the erotic
overpowered everything yet I felt extremely objective. That in and of
itself hugely influenced my prose, and was a revelation, as well as giving
me the need and energy to experience real life equivalents of my most
profound and scariest fantasies first hand, then write about them both
while I was in that state and when I was sober and myself. It helped me
understand the difference between the fantasy of something and its actual
nuts and bolts, and having the most extreme experiences available to me
helped me understand who I was in relationship to them. My experiment
escalated over the course of about eight months until I found myself in
one situation where things went so out of control that I was forced to
make the most important decision of my life, and I made the right one,
as well as scaring myself so badly that I stopped the experiment. At the
same time that all of that was going on, I'd discovered the Nouveau Roman.
There was a used American bookstore in Amsterdam where someone had unloaded
about thirty Nouveau Roman novels by Robbe-Grillet, Robert Pinget, Claude
Simon, Nathalie Saurraute, Marguerite Duras, and Michel Butor, and I bought
and read all of them. For some reason, in terms of literary influences,
they were the kind of final piece of the puzzle, and Closer
came together with their help. The books I remember as being particularly
helpful were Robbe-Grillet's For A New Novel, Topography of a
Phantom City, and The Voyeur; Pinget's The
Inquisatory, Mahu or the Material, and Fable;
and Simon's Tryptich. Something about those writers'
interest in an objective voice and the way their experiments with narrative
were terse and kind of voluptuous at the same time excited me. I should
also say that Closer was just as heavily influenced by
the styles of two rock records: Psychocandy by the Jesus
and Mary Chain, and Joy Division's Closer (hence, the
title). Also, almost as soon as I stopped doing drugs, I got very ill.
I literally couldn't get out of bed for about two months. I was illegally
in Holland, and, like I said, had no one around to help me go to a doctor
or anything. I thought I was dying, though it turned out that I had a
severe case of German measles. That kind of drove me to finish Closer
too, because I was horrified that I might die without having written what
I believed I could.
RG: Can you describe what that most scary experience
was? Perhaps it's too much for you to do, but being me, I have to ask.
DC: I can't really isolate that one experience because
it was the result of months and months of related, accumulating experiences,
and I don't have the space or language to explain what happened. That
whole period of experiences was undertaken on behalf of my writing, and
my work represents it more accurately than I could do in a situation like
this. Basically, I stumbled on the entrance to a kind of secret, utterly
amoral little world that existed in the nooks and crannies of Amsterdam
where very extreme things went on and were made available to me. I tested
myself, and I passed the test. I don't mean to be coy. You have to understand
that's just not possible to talk about those things for many reasons.
What's important about that time is that I was able to inhabit a morality
and state of mind that were contrary to my own, and this allowed me to
write about certain things with a more evenhanded understanding and an
authentic force than I would have had available to me otherwise. It was
sort of my own weird living out of Rimbaud's incredibly attractive notion
that one could access a kind of transcendent knowledge through a derangement
of the senses and all that, only narrowed in this case to knowledge having
specifically to do with the erotic. Long story short, what I'd gone through
as a kid raised a lot of questions, and what I did in Amsterdam answered
a number of them well enough to give me the clarity to write about those
questions with a certain confidence.
RG: In our conversation, the way you are framing the
violence and horror in your writing, you are describing the working out
of inner demons. It is generous of you to do that so candidly. Now I’d
like to ask, Are those demons individual or global? Do you also believe
horror is at the heart of the human condition, as, say, Sade or Baudelaire
might have? Is that a naive question? In your books, I sort of climb my
way through your voice toward you and your vision — it’s a
realization that comes to me through my growing friendship with your voice
and feeling life as I read a particular book. I wonder if it may be your
own version of self-preservation that you locate this matter inside the
self — your self — so firmly. Perhaps you sort of soften the
blow, or offer us an escape clause, or even try to protect us, by giving
us the option of saying, Oh, that’s just Dennis and his ‘problems’,
rather than, Now I see the darkness of my own life.
DC: I think my inclinations, proclivities, and experiences
provided me with an example that I could use in my work with a certain
authority. That's how I think about it anyway.
I think my work is one of a million individualized attempts to understand
the human condition. I.e., I'm like any other fiction writer out there.
My work becomes very personalized at times, but the only thing remarkable
therein is that the ideas and emotions I cop to within that strategy are
those which are the most confusing and disturbing to me. I have particular
gifts and interests and concerns, and they set my course as a writer,
but my pursuit is everyone's pursuit: self-understanding in relationship
to global understanding. To break it down, I think the inspiration behind
my work is entirely mine. The content of my work is a reconciliation of
what's mine to that which is familiar and of essential interest to others.
My work's style and form are the result of my attempts to find the perfect
balance between the pure product of my mind and a careful if necessarily
limited understanding of what it takes to communicate clearly and entertainingly.
Honestly, I think my work's inability to communicate with a lot of people
has more to do with its politics than with its contents. I don't mean
that my work is making a political statement. I just mean that my writing
is guided by my world view, which I define as anarchist. When my anarchist
principles meet the material I'm interested in exploring, the result is
a kind of neutral, pragmatic tone with a lot of internal turmoil. I think
that tone is the source a lot of confusion, specifically because it doesn't
guard its readers in a traditional way. Anarchism is often confused with
amorality when in fact morality is at the very core of anarchist thought.
My work assumes a basic goodness in its readers, and, within that assumption,
there's a secondary assumption that this projection will create trust
and good will. Obviously, this is a flawed strategy on my part, since
it seems to lead to a lot of misunderstanding of what I do, but I don't
have a choice. I just don't believe in the idea that there is a system
already in place that is capable of locating the truth. I think the minute
you to start to prioritize one system over another you start deluding
yourself. I think if I were able to believe in God or socialism or the
narrative or whatever, my work might have a better relationship with the
average person who likes to read novels. But if I eliminated the contrariness
and confusion in my work, I might write like Clive Barker or Stephen King,
and, as much as I enjoy horror as entertainment, I'd rather go for the
global, the hard, maybe even wrong way.
Sade's work identifies its enemies and uses the construction of these
enemies' principles and rhetoric in the construction of its own narratives
and philosophy. My work doesn't see itself as having enemies. I would
never ever put myself in a class with Sade as a writer or as a thinker,
God knows. But I don't think my work is any less global than his work.
I think self-preservation is a motive for me, but I don't think it's the
overriding reason why I locate my work inside my own archetypes and tastes
and emotional touchstones and so on. I think that decision is more about
keeping the work honest, controlled, and full of energy.
RG: I find in your work an intense contradiction that
is obviously extraordinarily generative. On one hand, isolation, horror,
lyrical stasis, an idealism that is almost a gnostic anger at the material
world, on the other, a meditation on community and friendship through
youth culture (where a young person seeks recognition so urgently) and
the tribes of young friends you often depict.
As you say, there's no reason why these two sides — or anything
else — should be resolved in fiction when they can't be resolved
in the world. That's being honest as a writer, though it may confuse readers
who expect to find resolution in a novel. The two sides (and much else!)
are not resolved, but held together in a kind of performance, where I
am watching how far Dennis will go, formally and content-wise. I was wanting
to get at how you view the self — your own self — in your
work.
I am reminded of a passage by Nabokov, where he says, somewhere in some
parenthesis, “In a first-rate work of fiction the real clash is
not between the characters but between the author and the world.”
Would you talk more about anarchism? — I'd love to hear how you
think about it, what you take from it for your work. (You know I spent
many years in an affinity group — going to jail and whatnot.)
DC: I'd investigated anarchism a little in my mid-teens,
but it hadn't really connected with me. Like everyone I knew back then,
I was totally swept up in the radical leftist politics of the late 60s
and early 70s, but was pretty naive about the details. But I did the whole
protest march, sit-in, et cetera circuit. When I was 15, I went to Washington
DC for most of a summer and worked for the Eugene McCarthy for President
campaign as a volunteer. When radical politics lost steam I kind of lost
faith in the whole system, again like just about everyone back then. I
rediscovered anarchism through my love of punk rock. It was referenced
a lot by punk artists and by people writing about punk, so I read a number
of books about it. It just made absolute sense to me, especially as articulated
by Emma Goldman. The impracticality of revising society into an ideal
anarchist state was obvious, so it appealed to me more as a philosophy,
although if there's ever a viable revolution I'll definitely join the
front lines, and anarchist action groups have my heart. But I do think
that all structures created to impose order of any kind are inherently
corrupt and that the quest for personal power within the context of America's
notion of democracy is at the root of every extant problem here. Obviously,
my thinking is a lot more highly detailed than that, but I don't know
that it's so useful to this situation to go into all of that at sufficient
length. I think to live a life informed by anarchist principles in the
United States is a reasonably doable if inherently compromised thing that
can be boiled way down to a basic rule: As soon as you get power, disperse
it. For me, that simple idea reverberates out through instinct into a
way of thinking about everything. I think my novels are entirely informed
by anarchism on the levels of form, style, approach, and philosophy. They
enunciate what happens when one anarchist point of view is applied to
situations in which the principles behind that form of anarchism are the
most severely tested. My characters, however configurative in some cases,
act on their own devices, and I think in some way their culture is responsible
for the problems that their minds conceive and their actions create. That's
why the blame in my work seems so generalized and why its morality seems
to lack clear foundations. Anarchy's problem in terms of public perception
is that it divests itself of the kinds of signifiers that more politically
correct belief systems have no problem utilizing to their advantage. I
think my work shares this dilemma. In sort of the same way that an anarchist
who acts on his or her principles and attempts to recreate society by
the means available to a revolutionary becomes a radical leftist by default,
I think the particular nature of my work and the means available to me
to make it as public as possible causes it to become an experimental novel
by default. That's the huge and insurmountable flaw in the kind of work
I've tried to do, and I just try to face the music with an open mind and
as much pragmatism as I can muster up, I guess.
RG: Thank you, Dennis. Maybe a question to throw in--like
those The Paris Review interviews — is: Do you
have any special writing routines, how do you go about writing a novel?
DC: I don't really have a general routine. Writing is
kind of a nervous habit for me. I write every chance I get, and there's
almost never a 24 hour period where I don't do at least a little writing
on my fiction. I've never had a real 9 to 5 type job. I've done whatever
was required to get around that, which means I've been borderline broke
for most of my life, which is pretty stressful. But I've always prioritized
writing over everything else, and never really had to find a time to fit
it into my life. Starting a novel is always a frustrating process for
me because I generally have to write a huge amount of crap and do a lot
of failed experiments to find a form and approach that'll contain my interests
and keep me interested enough to concentrate on the novel's construction
for a long period. When I was writing the cycle, the process was very
particular because each novel had to arise out of its predecessor, and
usually by the time I finished one, the next novel would already be in
the planning stages. Also, I always used a discarded piece of the finished
novel as the starting point for the next one, so that the novels would
have a kind of connective physical tissue or stylistic echoing. Now that
I'm finished with the cycle, the process is different, and much more difficult
and strange to me so far. On a kind of basic front, I write by hand. I
even write my journalism by hand. I only use the computer (or typewriter,
since I didn't work on a computer until Guide) for editing.
I tend to write in the morning until mid-afternoon because my inspiration
tends to fade around then, although when I was doing drugs I wrote all
the time. I can rewrite and edit at any time of the day or night for some
reason. So that's my routine.
RG: Even though some of your books take place elsewhere,
you have a deep literary association with LA. In fact, I think I'd have
to go back to Raymond Chandler to find such a deep connection. Would you
like to talk about that? — what LA means to you, how it operates
in your writing and perhaps also in your life?
DC: The choice to set my novels in Los Angeles was a
choice for familiarity, I guess. I needed a base of operations so comfortable
that if I made things go haywire, the groundwork would remain stable in
my head. In that way, the choice wasn't so different from my choice to
base characters on people from my life and give them my tastes in music
and art and sex. But I think Los Angeles completely influenced the way
the novels are structured. I think the way they're extremely organized
but give the impression of being casual, wandering, and disorganized is
a direct result of the narrative drift that comes with trying to represent
daily life in LA. LA is so huge and intricate that you can live your whole
life here and only know a fraction of it, and its physical mysteriousness
is palpable. David Lynch is a great example of an artist who explores
this quality in his work, and I think in my own way I mine that particular
kind of landscape-based eeriness too. Because LA life is about cars, the
route between, say, your home and your work place is fluid and always
changing to avoid traffic or relieve boredom or whatever, and driving
in LA is a really unique experience, at once requiring close attention
to where you are at any given moment and, because of the isolated nature
of being in a car, conducive to daydreaming and fantasy, with the nonchalant
cityscape as your material and a radio station as your musical score.
I think my narratives work kind of like that, simultaneously almost game
like in their dutifulness, but with a really loose attention span.
There's a lot of circumstantial stuff about LA that definitely affected
me when I was growing up. Like if LA hadn't been the capitol of serial
murder in the late 60s and early 70s when I was a teenager, I'm not sure
I would have used 'the serial murderer' a model in my work. There were
a number of years where dead teenaged boys were being found around LA
on an almost weekly basis, and people here were constantly assaulted with
news about that. During that time I was dating a boy named Julian who
worked as a street prostitute in Hollywood. In those days there was this
very active hustler scene around Selma Avenue and Las Palmas Street, and
I spent a lot of time hanging out with Julian and his prostitute friends
around there, so I learned a lot about what that was like, which surely
lead to the prevalence of “boy prostitutes” in my work. I
think growing up in proximity of Disneyland and the movie industry made
a difference. My parents used to take my siblings and me to Disneyland
at least twice a year, and on tours of movie studios frequently as well.
I was incredibly excited by Disneyland's idea of the small town as the
secret container of adventurous, hallucinatory rides, and by movie studios'
sets and back lots full of fake towns and lakes and historical locations.
I think that really influenced my interest in unreal realities and false
fronts. Obvious examples of that are the paranormal rural town in Period,
the windmill and Twilight Zone set in Frisk,
the Disneyland motif that runs through Closer, the fairytale/kiddieporn
mesh in Guide, just to name a few.
In a different way, I think I was really affected by the absence of a
real literary community here. Apart a time in the early 80s when I ran
the programming at the Beyond Baroque Literary Center, and had a tight
group of other young writer friends like Amy Gerstler, David Trinidad,
Bob Flanagan, and Benjamin Weissman, I haven't had a lot of literary comrades
and friends here. Most of the time I like the isolation that creates,
though I do envy the strong literary community that you guys have in San
Francisco. Sort of by necessity, most of my friends here are artists or
filmmakers or musicians, and having the bulk of my serious conversations
about the nature of making art with people whose process is not based
in language definitely affected the way I think about constructing a novel.
Even though LA has a really rich literary history, it still feels like
a cultural frontier for some reason. There's no obvious tradition to LA
writing, and I think that might have freed me up to do whatever I wanted
with no real fear that it wouldn't be appropriate. True or not, it's always
felt like people in Los Angeles don't give a shit about literature and
writers, and that includes a lot of the local writers as well. When I
do book tours in the States and in Europe, I get reminded that what I
do matters to people, but when I'm here it often feels like no one, even
most of friends, care about my work. For me that's been really fruitful,
although I think that unsupportiveness kills off more writers than it
nurtures, which may be why LA's literary history is more sparsely populated
than the respective histories of, say, New York and San Francisco.
RG: You put amazing pressure on language and make a distinctive
sentence, recognizably yours when it's baroque and when it's truncated
and blunt. What is language to you as a medium, how do you think of sentence?
— how has that thinking changed over the years?
DC: My sentences are the result of my inability to spontaneously
construct a decent sentence. It's bizarre that I'm a writer at all, because,
as a person, I have a very clumsy and nervous relationship to language,
and I feel deeply unconfident as a speaker. When I was in school, I was
never good at English. When I was a kid, my parents made me take a test
to determine what sort of profession I would suited to, and 'writer' was
near the bottom of the list. Even answering your questions with these
prosaic, explanatory sentences, I have go back and rewrite them numerous
times before they seem at all adequate. In my fiction, the amount of rewriting
and correcting and fixing I do get my prose right is insane. I had to
develop this intensive process of tinkering and polishing to get my writing
to work, and I think maybe coming at writing from such an askew angle
is the reason my prose is the thing it is. The conventional, felicitous,
elegant sentence is very foreign to me, and I don't feel deferential to
it at all. I'm not a trained fiction writer. I've never been in a fiction
writing workshop. I went straight from reading adolescent garbage fiction
— novelizations of TV shows like The Man From UNCLE
and I Spy, The Hardy Boys, etc. -- to
reading nothing but poetry and avant-garde fiction. My skills as a writer
are very rudimentary, but my interest in style is very high minded for
lack of a
better term. So in my work you have this very simple kind of prose that's
been toyed with until it hopefully conveys a more complex relationship
to what it's describing than it has the right and/or ability to contain.
I think that's the stress you mention. My sentences tend to be very plain
and clear and, at the same time, kind of compacted with this weird aspiration
to fulfill the requirements placed upon them by emotions and ideas that
they're incapable of transmitting.
My relationship to the sentence changes all the time, or I feel like it
does. Early on, say in SAFE, I was interested in overloading
my sentences with internal rhymes and rhythms and extensions and shortcuts
so that flow of the narrative would feel labored and unnatural, and the
work's artfulness would come off like a meaningful burden. I wanted the
work to be about the cruel, self-defeating nature of aestheticism itself,
and how art could only short-circuit in relationship to experiences that
were too deep or frightening or complex to be represented by language.
I felt, and still feel, that when language tries to encompass those kinds
of experiences, it becomes overly infected with the consciousness of the
artist who tries to represent them and, as a result, it flatters the artist
and lies to the audience. It's kind of heretical to say, but I think that's
a problem in the work of Genet, for instance. In hindsight, I think the
approach I took in SAFE and other works from that period
was kind of at odds with my particular talents. In the cycle of five novels,
I pared the prose down while paying the same obsessive attention to the
construction of each sentence and the physical relationship between the
sentences and I think found the right balance. Even so, the cycle ends
on a note of surrender — form and style reduced to performing a
magic trick that tries and fails to make the content disappear. But at
least I think I was able to fully explore and represent the problem in
those five novels, and I feel satisfied that I achieved my goals as best
I can. Now, post-cycle, I'm interested in making the art in the sentences
more invisible, more subterranean, and weighting the work more towards
a realistic or documentary-style take on whatever characters and situations
I decide to write about. On that level, my new novel My Loose
Thread is maybe the beginning of the work I want to do. We'll
see. |