K.K.: And then there is the simple issue of narration, the self telling the self what is happening, which many of your characters do. I know this self-narration. I’m familiar with it, for myself, as a sometimes real, sometimes affected madness, since clearly there is no external story driving my life/actions. Your characters are extreme with it especially in the face of their own criminality/depravity: they are almost like children in some of the outrageous explanations they create for themselves when the rational answer is out of their depth, or when they want to reject the rational answer.
The thoughts are breathing just as anything else, all formed through the matrix of the word. I’m thinking what you are doing has a particular kind of authority. (Jesus, you are making me lose words…) The work lacks the pretense of the sort of contrivance most of us aim for (what we like to call verisimilitude), since every aspect of it – the characters, the ‘more than human world’ (ie. everything), the language used to deliver all this – is energetically living. The meaning resides there. Does this make sense? Am I getting anywhere here?
T.B.: There are two words, (handily alliterative) that I am always always mindful of…the first is phatic. The secret ambition of the book is to say hello to the reader. It tries many different configurations (frequencies? receptions?) in this project and it always fails because the goal is never within reach. The goal is that the reader hears the word hello and sees the writer who sees the reader nod or say hello back. There are no literary conventions that allow for this ambition, so – and here is the second word – the writer must go feral.
K.K.: The writer must go feral because the uncharted intention requires wildness? Meanwhile the central purpose is social? This accounts for the under-my-skin effect your work has. This primitive resonance – it isn’t like one reads Burgess and thinks, “Oh, the fellow can write.” It’s more, “Holy Bejesus. This is messing with my neurology.” You are in the head of the reader in a way I do not think I’ve seen before or not as consistently. It’s uncanny.
Earlier you write of ‘recording’ and this is the locus of my last question. What does that recording feel like to you, when that space is viscerally horrible, violent, and filled with pain as it often can be in your work. I guess I am asking something about the body as a vehicle within this idea of recording, because of the extent of your dare.
T.B.: As always I have to answer your questions by sliding some of the terms a bit. By recording I mean either taking an impression, or exploring how one thing registers on another…other things. (Have I mentioned R.Krauss on this…on mechanical reproduction? Her essays on this are great)…so the impossible is to try a make the imagined something also the recorded something. And the body will be a bit of a developing room. The goal is not to invent a new imagined but to change the imaginer.
The pain, horror is, I suppose, because the project really is to destroy the familiar, to unheal to the point of oblivion. And to do this with great joy.
Kathryn and Tony, that’s a marvelous interview!