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This content downloaded from 132.203.227.61 on Tue, 24 Nov 2015 13:56:11 UTC
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Thomas LeClair
Thomas LeClair: Could you say a bit about your working habits?
TLeC: You seem at ease handling scientific materials. Can you say
why and why so many novelists are not?
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itself in The Four-Gated City and with Peter Matthiessen in Far
Tortuga. But it also seems to me that many writers don't let them
selves take science and technology seriously because they see these
areas conflicting with the human imagination. They see science as
anti-human. I don't. Science and technology offer forms by which
we can see some things clearly; their experimental and measuring
methods, their patterns larger than life or smaller than sight, beckon
us out of ourselves. If you assume your assumptions are only one of
many possible views, maybe one day you find a way to drop, say,
the reassuring habit of scale models and conceive distorted models,
a model you can visualize only in fragments that the mind must leap
to unite.
TLeC: Could you reconstruct some of the reasons why you decided
quite early that you did not want to write what you have called the
"sensitive American novel"?
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TLeC: After your four realistic novels, Plus could be read as a sport,
but it seems to me to be a kind of coda to your work.
TLeC: Did you have to research brain anatomy for the writing of
Plus?
JMcE: I did do some reading but Iwas more interested in some kind
of transcendent anatomy which never claims that the anatomy you
can find in books is not true but moves beyond that physical
anatomy to some of the possibilities which are associated with our
word "mind." If mind emerges from brain, it certainly is also true
that mind changes brain. Mind can actually change the physical
thing that we call brain. I also feel that there is something not
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individual?more collaborative?called "will" which arises from the
anatomy of our zoological self but which transcends it, and I was
trying to find a dramatic image of some life force in Plus that to me
would be more important than any amount of dissective neuro
anatomy that could be done on the brain. What I had in mind was a
more transcendent, visionary, even simple book. While the book
arises out of materials that are scientifically observable, it is more
inclined toward the visionary or the religious.
TLeC: Some of the earlier books, Hind's Kidnap for example, are
very tightly structured and seem to be researched. Has your method
of composition changed as you have gone along?
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I believe I do in Lookout Cartridge. I feel that Cartwright's informa
tion about cinematography and so forth can be acceptable to the
reader because Cartwright is not a professional. He has suddenly
found himself involved in a plot that has to do with film-making, and
he has had to acquire a lot of information fast. You add that to the
fact that his temperament is sometimes a rather excessive collector's
temperament, and you have the beginnings of my attempt to excuse
my need to acquire further information in order to elaborate and
work out my fundamental conceit in the book.
TLeC: You knew you wanted to get the sense of between. You know
it is going to be a "mystery-thriller," as you have described it.What
is the next step in the elaboration of the conceit? How, for example,
did you choose Stonehenge as a setting?
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vation, what we might loosely call science, was inseparable from
religion. So increasingly Stonehenge seemed to me to be a natural
setting for some crisis event to occur in my story.
TLeC: How does this notion of network affect the relation of cause
and effect that moves most fiction forward?
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struction of cause and effect assumptions entrancing, though he
knows it's only theoretical. It supports a fiction writer's just showing
events and not ascribing causes. A Smuggler's Bible has a temporal
sequence and many histories through it, but formally it is to be seen
also as a m?ndala or some other spatial form in which the eight
chapters have a kind of equality outside of time. In Ancient History
the narrator is increasingly overcome by thinking in twos?in
dichotomies?and he wants to get beyond this, not by moving
through some dialectic to a synthesis, but to some stasis which I
associate with a physical field in which everything is at rest. Differ
ent entities in a field would have hierarchical relations because they
would be at different distances which could be measured, but they
would also be distributed in such a way that they are all equal.
My Cartwright finds himself in such a position at the end of
Lookout Cartridge. He is alone at a center which is one of many
centers. He has moved through his story knowing things which have
to be partly why he moves and acts, but the more important causes
are not behind but ahead of him, pulling him on, the action con
stantly reinventing, restating its track, which makes him seem more
free at the same time that his power is that he knows better than
anyone else in the book how much he's a mere part of a necessity
partly seen. He's in the open, at the end, wonderfully free within the
opening field. Sounds dumb, eh?
TLeC: You have spoken about fiction in spatial terms. Have you
been influenced by visual art or by film?
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JMcE: Not in any ways that would interest you. I toy with trying to
see a view two-dimensionally as if my eyes couldn't distinguish
distances. I'm attracted to navigators' maneuvering board plots of
relative motion and to wind-vector diagrams?time or force seen in a
spatial model. Painting is madly sexy. Visual arts? Blow-up color
photos of marine life, what's going on on a coral reef, orange zoan
thids, animals like plants. Film? I'm encircled by a wall of film; I'm
audience and projector.
TLeC: You once wrote about the "wonder and awe" the Apollo
spacemen experienced. Would those two reactions be an appro
priate aesthetic aim?
TLeC: Who are some writers working now whom you have affinities
with or admire?
JMcE: During the 1960s itwas Nabokov more than any other who I
felt was on the right track, and then increasingly I felt that he
shouldn't be any different from what he was?generous of me?but I
should be different from him. Now I have gone back to reading Doris
Lessing, whom I was unable to read when I tried in the '60s, and I
feel that she has a tremendous amount to say in spite of a style that I
used to find an impediment. Names at random: Calvino, Invisible
Cities (story beyond story into meditative plane); t zero, science
without jokey undercutting; Butor, Passing Time, and Degrees,
which I've said too much about in "Neural Neighborhoods";
Harold Brodkey in his search for an absolutely right and natural
language; Cormac McCarthy, who published a book called The Or
chard Keeper in 1966 which I thought a very powerful work of
American landscape, menace, and love. He is a writer I still look for
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great things from. I haven't read too much of Walter Abish, but his
way of playing with the given energies of language so that language
seems to be playing with the writer's mind has a gaiety and an
independence; his is certainly one direction that I think literary art
can take.
I read a lot of poetry. I admire Ammons for his beautiful recon
noitering into the structure and form of natural things. I love Kin
nell's Nightmares, Levertov's touch where nature and person meet,
Snyder's domestic poems, Ashbery's rhetoric as a unique image of
the mind living its changes. While I try to keep up with writers like
Updike or Iris Murdoch, the reading that matters most to me is in
nonfiction and often philosophy, Eugene Marais's books on baboons
and termites. He was an amazing, versatile, tragic man. I've been
writing a play, quite an extravaganza, about him for three years.
Philosophy I read because I am looking for visions and statements
that have an unusual clarity, a clarity perhaps not so swarming with
business and dread as Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow, which I ad
mire, or Gaddis's The Recognitions, an older, less well-written book
I admire much more. I have gone back to read Schopenhauer and
Hume whom I admire immensely. Hume would be on my list of six
dead dinner guests. (That sounds like a poisoning.) I read and re
read Nietzsche, and since my present book, Women and Men, turns
upon economics in various forms I've re-read Marx, Keynes,
Schumacher's beautiful book, and Thorstein Veblen, who seems to
me to have more to say about the relations between women and men
than a lot of women have. In a different way the Buddhists and
Ruskin tell me more about goods and services than all the rest of the
economists put together. What about Keynes as a difficult fiction
writer? Much as I admire the stories of all kinds of people from
Eudora Welty back to Hemingway, from Isaac Babel to Flannery
O'Connor, there is something about the crystallized definition in the
work of many philosophers that appeals to me. Even when the
philosophers' hypothetical visions of truth are shaky and subjective
and open to criticism, heavy criticism as in the case of Nietzsche and
our moral, mystic, magic tourist Casta?eda, I often find more inspi
ration from them than big books like my old love U.S.A.; Gaddis's
J.R.; a better big book, Mark Smith's The Death of the Detective; or
a smaller, finer, but safer fantasy, Cheever's Bullet Park.
I also want to mention William Wilson, who has published a
collection of stories entitled Why I Don't Write Like Franz Kafka.
This is a man whose knowledge of philosophy and whose insight into
science and the visual arts are enormous and whose mind is bewil
deringly brilliant. Of all the people I have known over the last ten
years, I would have to single him out first as an influence. He felt
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there was some distinctive strain in my notion of correspondences
and phenomenal forms making up a network which was a field, and
he encouraged me to have confidence in the rather haphazard intu
itions that I had.
TLeC: How do you get away with the abstractions you use in your
fiction?
JMcE: I like books that try to push the reader into a strange state of
mind in which everything has to be relearned. I like William Gold
ing's The Inheritors for that reason. The language of Plus, especially
at the beginning, is that of a consciousness that is discovering the
world all over again. I set out to take everything away from a person
and write a drama in which that person would begin with some
essence which could not be taken away and rediscover the world
and reconstruct the self. I do not like to speak of novels as being
about language or even in a sense made of language because it seems
to me language always has to somehow refer to a shared world. That
is why I can admire the work of Dreiser and of Doris Lessing. Still,
Plus is an exploration or experiment in language, where I am moving
more toward Beckett than toward Joyce, trying to establish a mini
mal language upon which one might build.
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TLeC: As you say, a great deal is taken away inPlus. But it seems to
me that the more common tendency in your work is overload, giving
the reader more than he can possibly process . . .
TLeC: Does your giving the reader more than he wants remind him
of how little he knows or can know?
JMcE: That question hurts, but I think the answer is yes. I hoped to
create ambiguities from excess?the need to know yet to have at
hand too much?in order to have at least a chance of finding the key
to it all. I knew that Iwas asking too much of the reader sometimes,
but I persisted in doing it. If I had it to do over again, I would ease
some of the identifications inHind's Kidnap. Although I think that
Updike hasn't been as adventurous as a person of his enormous gifts
should have been, his notion of a compact with the reader is fair
enough. I think he goes too far; I think I don't go far enough in that
direction; I hope that I am writing for readers who would be willing
to commit themselves to a strenuous, adventurous fiction, but I
don't write fiction of deliberate difficulty. What I believe I am doing
is being, possibly in some new way I'm not sure about, a realist. In
the collaboration between the syntax of my sentences and the ob
servation of phenomena that is contained in my sentences, I think
that I am being faithful as much as I can be to the world that I find
with my senses and feel in the forms that are my mind. I have a
choice between going on as I have been or leavening and loosening
and to some extent dissolving the surface obstacles that a reader
finds reading me. I am trying to write easier prose because I don't
think people have time for long books and I am not even sure the
human race has a great deal of time. So I want to write easier prose,
but what comes out continues to be a sentence which is packed and
convoluted.
I'd also like to think the overload of information is partly an act
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of giving and the obsessive attention which the writer seems to pay
to the world is not paranoid or defensive primarily but appetitive, an
attempt to say here it is to be loved and to be received. When I first
started writing, I saw myself being divided between a cornball and
an iceberg. I think now I am much more of a cornball than I am an
iceberg, so I am dismayed by people calling my books cold. I grant
there is a cerebral, analytic, even sometimes manipulative strain in
my work, but I see this as subordinate to the emotional, the impul
sive and up-rushing. I see the books as emotional, almost too much
so. I thought Plus almost got out of control. I see Plus also as a step
beyond the despair and overload in Lookout Cartridge. And Women
and Men, which is number six, is my re-entry; my coming back to
the world and attempting to understand relations between men and
women, women and men, in a way that will answer more honestly
and fully questions which I only groped at before.
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