Originally appeared in the Boston Book Review. Date
Approximate.
Her body slowly adjusted to the fact of the Archbuilder, its
walking and speaking, scuffling in the dust, seemingly made of scraps, stage
props, but alive, cocking its head curiously like an attentive dog, moving
around the truck now beside the unconcerned men. She stared, perfectly still,
fighting the urge to run. In one sense the Archbuilder was nothing, a joke, a
tatter, too absurd to glance at twice. It seemed pathetic that they'd honored
this thing with their endless talk, back in Brooklyn. That Caitlin had wasted
her breath. At the same time, the Archbuilder burned a hole in the world,
changed it utterly.
"Girl in Landscape"
HB: There's a bit in "Gun With Occasional Music"
in which you have Freudians going door to door:
A neatly dressed woman in her late twenties or early
thirties stood in the doorway, and behind her a young guy in a suit and tie was
walking up the steps. "Hello," she said.
. . . "Thanks no. I'm not a believer myself."
HB: It's a wonderful set piece, Freudians peddling
"Civilization and Its Discontents" as if they were Jehovah's
Witnesses. But you don't follow up on it.
JL: I don't. It's a comic jaunt; I don't have any real agenda there except to continue creating the picture of a world where communication has been boxed into margins. I'm making fun of Freudians but also saying it's a world where human contact can only take place in a fetishized way.
In "Gun With Occasional Music", and even the first
draft of "As She Climbed Across the Table", I may be prone to using
every funny notion. I learned in "As She Climbed Across the Table"
that could backfire. Early versions of that book were too antic and I ended up
pruning it. I took about seventy pages of material out.
HB: Funny out-takes.
JL: Funny and irrelevant, B plus jokes crowding out A jokes.
"Gun With Occasional Music" has that quality, too, and I had to do a
similar revision, pulling out one-liners and giving the remaining material more
room to breath.
HB: In "As She Climbed Across the Table" you
write: "After an additional ten hours weekly, the rate changes to six
additional inches per additional square hour." Guess that joke made the
cut.
JL: It's the Italian physicist. I'm always looking for
excuses for word play, and usually authorize one character or set of characters
to be my official hplayer -- the babyheads in "Gun With Occasional Music",
the Italian physicist and the blind man in "As She Climbed Across the
Table", the Archbuilders in "Girl in Landscape".
In the book I'm working on now, I attempt to let the
gibberish element come front and center. Instead of having a minor character or
set of characters authorized to talk crazy, the narrator's going to be the one.
HB: The Archbuilders are language fetishists from the start,
what with the crazy names they assume -- Lonely Dumptruck, Hiding Kneel, and
Gelatinous Stand. You write: "English words seem, to an Archbuilder,
garishly overloaded with meaning. One Archbuilder describes speaking English as
'stringing poems into sentences,' another compares it to 'speaking
hieroglyphics.'"
JL: The Archbuilders are like writers. The human characters
face issues subliminally that the Archbuilders think about explicitly.
Complications about defining adulthood and childhood are reflected in the
Archbuilder's language. They've got different boundaries than we do, and that
kind of difference is linguistic as well as conceptual and psychological.
HB: You often leave connections and identities unclear. Who,
really, are the household deer in "As She Climbed Across the Table"?
And what is their relationship to the Archbuilders? Who, for that matter, are
the Archbuilders? At the end you talk about the humans preparing to meeting
them as if they hadn't already, all throughout the book.
And in "Amnesia Moon", the "break," as
you call it, is never specified; it's a vague distortion of reality, something
in the editing process, a "jump cut in a movie." You write,
"Everyone is missing something."
There's a fuzziness around the edges; you don't try to
settle everything.
JL: I'll take that as praise. My main difference from
traditional science fiction is that I abandon the explanations. I try to leave
as much of that out as possible. I transform the world in the way that
fantastic literature does but omit the sometimes pedantic architecture of
explanation.
The secret of "Girl in Landscape" is that I'm not
terribly interested in the Archbuilders.
HB: You make them sound like living junk heaps.
JL: Duckbilled platypuses. But what interests me is the
effect of their presence on the human characters and on human culture,
especially on the little girl.
The Archbuilders are the Indians in John Ford Westerns, and
the India Indians in E.M. Forster's "Passage to India", which is the
hidden influence on "Girl in Landscape". They're the archetype of a
defeated and mysterious race. They're also indebted to the Martians in Ray
Bradbury's "The Martian Chronicles," who are also never really
visible, but are projections of the human characters, who see, at the end of
the book, that they are the new Martians, and they'll never know who went
before.
HB: I don't really think of you as a writer of science
fiction. I'd say you write fables.
JL: I prefer that.
HB: And that sometimes you use science fiction to that end.
Your writing is very hard to classify.
JL: Intentionally. I try to be naive about literary boundary
in the writing process. I'm more eager to generate those confusions than to
resolve them. As I was growing up, I was always excited by work that hovered at
genre boundaries.
HB: It feels like your work is beyond the issue of genre;
you just don't care.
JL: At some level that's true.
HB: You inherited the meltdown.
JL: Exactly. I have the privilege of working in the new
landscape that results from the existence of writers like Patricia Highsmith,
Phillip K. Dick, J. G. Ballard, Italo Calvino, and Kobo Abe.
HB: And Kafka?
JL: He's hugely influential on my work, and a writer who is
impossible to think about in terms of any category or definition whatsoever.
And Stanislav Lem, and Cortazar.
You're very right to say I inherited that meltdown. It's a
privilege to work in a landscape in which those issues not only don't have to
mean anything any more but I think rather definitively can't mean anything any
more. The sections remain in bookstores; the publishers are still hidebound by
the tracks they put books on. But in a literary sense, these distinctions don't
mean anything.
I'm free to write. That's all.
Before me, there were people who were struggling consciously
with those problems, like Phillip Dick, and people who were breaking down the
boundaries with absolute obliviousness to questions of genre, like Donald
Barthelme. Almost all the American writers who interest me stumble across genre
and category distinctions. The other influence comes from the international
writers who never had to think about these things for a second.
HB: They weren't self-conscious innovators?
JL: I don't think when Cortazar or Garcia Marquez or Kobo
Abe put a fantastic occurrence into their books they had to think about it the
way an American writer in 1955 or 1965 or even 1975 had to. If the instinct for
self-preservation was awake, the American writer would be reminded how
enormously disreputable it was to be writing science fiction. And that was true
at the same time that some of the motifs of science fiction were becoming
crucial to literature at large. Both the fantastic impulse, and the interest in
technology that people like Don DeLillo were going to write about, were
prefigured, however clumsily, by science fiction's attempts to grapple with our
increasingly technological society. The effect of technology was crying to be
written about and the only attempt was in the genre.
HB: So there was a fear of contamination by science fiction,
a recoil if you got too close.
JL: There had been something like a quarantine.
HB: One theme that's been mainstreamed is that of the
cyborg, and of artificial intelligence, which engages all sorts of novelists,
including Richard Powers in "Galatea 2.2".
JL: Right. And Joseph McElroy, who twenty years ago wrote a
brilliant novel called "Plus," about artificial life, a very special
book, a sort of Beckett book, written from the viewpoint of the machine.
HB: You're unlike other science fiction writers in that you
don't give much indication of being interested in technology. You don't seem to
give a damn about computers or the Internet.
JL: Right. I could easily mention a dozen writers more
mainstream than I am who are more interested in technology than I've ever been.
In American writing it's the fantastic impulse, rather than the interest in
technology, that is threatened with quarantine. But historically fiction has
been more fabulous than realistic. Ancient novels are all fabulous. The notion
that the literary equals the realistic is only very recent.
HB: There's a strong element of satire in your work. In
"Amnesia Moon" you invent drugs called Regrettol and Believol, not to
mention "the ingredient all had in common: addictol."
JL: My initial impulse tends to be satiric but then I get
impatient and want to flesh it out and make it somehow richer and more
novelistic. So there are satiric points of entry that I try to deepen into
psychological realism. Sometimes the results are problematical. There's a story
called "Hardened Criminals," for example.
HB: A great story. What stays with me is the image of people
who've been fossilized into the elements out of which a prison is built; they
go on living, sort of, and talking in an increasingly deracinated way. That
image sticks.
JL: Thank you. Of course, it's a very Kafkaesque image and
the story is terribly indebted to Kafka.
HB: There's something similar in the story called "The
Happy Man," where you create individual hells that people check into
occasionally, negative vacations from daily life. The customized hells are
powerful but your attempt to ground them in the characters' psychology -- in
child abuse, for example -- seems contrived.
JL: I think in "Girl in Landscape" I found a way
to bridge those elements. That's my pride in the new book, that I can negotiate
it in a way that feels more serious.
HB: The writing in "Girl in Landscape" is more
spare, more economical. "Girl in Landscape" parodies the ways we
speak the lingo of science -- of neurology, of physics.
JL: In that it's indebted to DeLillo who analyzed, through
his dialogue, the ways in which we incorporate psychological and scientific
jargon, and the jargon of advertising and the media, into our self-perceptions.
And In "As She Climbed Across the Table" the human
problems are worked out in line with the scientific metaphors. The physics in that
book provides the solution to human problems. That's not true anywhere else in
my work. "Girl in Landscape" has some fantastic window dressing, but
it's my most human book; everything takes place according to the emotions and
relationships. To my mind that book is secretly a Western. Or not so secretly a
Western.
I was thinking very much about John Ford when I was writing
"Girl in Landscape", about "The Searchers" and to a lesser
extent "The Man who Shot Liberty Valence". Efram is very much a John Wayne
character, Pella's father very much a Jimmy Stewart character, an Easterner
going to the frontier where his idealism is rebuffed by its violent ways. For
that matter, the figure of the tomboy is kind of a "True Grit" motif.
That little girl perspective on the John Wayne character isn't something I
completely invented myself. I was also thinking, as I said, about Forster, and
Henry James; there's a bit of "What Maisie Knew" in that book.
HB: I doubt anyone brings all of this reference to bear on
the book, except you.
JL: I hope not. It would be overwhelming. Of course, I think
most everyone's books have these kinds of echoes in them. I'm not so sure I'm a
more influenced writer than others but maybe more consciously influenced.
HB: I recently watched some Betty Boop cartoons with the
sound off. They're brilliant. The transformation of things from once scene to
the next obeys some wonderful logic. Then reading something you said, it hit me
-- the logic of Betty Boop has to do with literalizing the image. You said you
like to "exaggerate into literalness the metaphoric or thematic subliminal
elements." That works for Betty Boop, as well.
JL: I concretize metaphor, I take what would be a fluid
image in anther writer's realistic portrayal, and see what happens if I harden
it into reality. In "Sleeping People," the people are literally
sleeping their way through their lives. In "Hardened Criminals, the
criminals are literally hardened. At its worst, it's a punning method. At its
richest, it's the door into everything I do.
Another example: the entire structure of "As She
Climbed Across the Table" is indebted to an early John Barth novel called
"The End of the Road." In "The End of the Road" the
narrator is a human cipher, withut emotions or attachments. He can do or say
anything he likes because he's the human being as empty set. He intrudes on a
very passionate married couple. Because of his weird fluid emptiness, he
fascinates the woman and woos her away .
In "As She Climbed Across the Table" I literalized
the metaphor, turning the human zero into a literal zero, a thing of physics, a
laboratory black hole, that is irresistible.
HB: You did that consciously?
JL: I was very aware.
HB: How do you avoid being crushed by influence?
JL: The way not to be crushed by an influence is to have
some other really dominant counter-influence at work. "Girl in
Landscape" is John Ford's "The Searchers" told from the point of
view of a Shirley Jackson or Carson McCullers tormented adolescent, the classic
tomboy resisting womanhood.
HB: In "Girl in Landscape" you give your own
secret away when you write: "Breach, gap, gulf, hub -- the lack was
obviously an explosion of metaphor into a literal world."
JL: It's really at the heart of literature, this tension
between the metaphorical and the literal. As the Archbuilders point out, every
word is already a metaphor, in a sense, and even the plainest description is
embedded in the structures of unconsciousness.
My curse is to be born in interesting times. I inherit a
fertile confusion about high-low boundaries. You've mentioned cartoons. My work
is enormously influenced by Warner Brothers cartoons. It's a big influence if
you open yourself to it.
Another influence on "Girl in Landscape" is Crazy
Kat. The little creatures running around spying on one another and tumbling
around in the dust under these giant towers is very much a Krazy Kat image.
HB: The household deer never seem to eat or excrete.
JL: No more than Bugs Bunny.
HB: Who do you read?
JL: I read a lot more old writers than new ones. New writers
are, of course, interesting to me but are too recent for to be influences. Mark
Leyner is much smarter and funnier than I'll ever be but I invariably find
myself wanting to see him stop being so clever and start writing some fiction.
Other writers who profit from the opportunities you and I have been talking
about include David Bowman, Jonathan Franzen, and Kirstin Bakis, who wrote
"Lives of the Monster Dogs". There's a ton of interesting writing
going on.
HB: A generation or so ago, a novelist could have
considerable impact on the culture, just as fifty or sixty years before a poet
like T.S. Eliot could seem central. I'm wondering if a novelists can occupy
that position now, or if any particular art form can claim it.
JL: The tendency to bemoan the death of the novel just seems
unnecessary. There was one brief period, with Dickens, when it was a really a
mass medium. But before that and mostly after that, it's had its specialty
audience. That's OK, that's not a bad thing. If you think Roth and Mailer and
Bellow defined American culture, I don't think that's such a great thing. They
were interesting writers but there's no reason to prefer having three or four
literary giants looming over us to the current situation where there's enormous
vitality in an extremely disunified way. That doesn't seem like a problem to
me.
I know a lot of people who can't wait for the latest book;
it's just by a bunch of different writers. I'm not sure the energy is so
different. When you get older -- I'm sure this will happen to me -- young
people look superficial to you. Salman Rushdie had this piece in the New Yorker
where he had suddenly crossed that threshold and it was his turn to be
crotchety; he said there's this terrible proliferation of first novels and it's
such a horrible thing because we don't know what's good and what's bad.
What's wrong with that, for god's sake? Let a million bad
novels be published. It means the activity is vital enough; people want to try
and the good stuff will always sort itself out. The lasting stuff will always
find its place.
HB: What about short stories?
JL: I miss writing short stories. I'd like to write more of
them again. But there's a competition for your writing time, which is very
finite. The stories tend to flit away into corners of the publishing culture.
HB: Like household deer.
JL: Right, like household deer, whereas novels become
central things. You're nudged in a million subtle ways to favor novel writing
over short story writing. And I think I'm a better novelist than a short story
writer. I don't think there will be some great loss if I only write twenty more
short stories for the rest of my life. That's OK. I'd like it to be more than
that but I've got novels in me that I'm very excited about writing, that I'm
very eager to get to. The pressure of those novels wanting to be written
dictates the main shape of my writing time.
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