Lance Olsen:
LITERATI: To kick off I want to begin with something I picked up on fairly quickly in reading your work and a comment you made during an interview: You mention in your novel Girl Imagined by Chance that you employ “a mode that hovers between fiction and fact; a mode that in my mind is somehow profoundly concerned with the very nature of authenticity and, by implication, of reproduction.” That notion of “hovering” makes me think of the voyeuristic element of pop and contemporary culture and how in 10:01 we hover in front of neighbors, strangers, partners, television, film, between life and death, expectations and disappointments, truth and lies etc. You extend the metaphor into the most intimate realm of all: what I call the vanishing point of rms (reality&memory&self): the instantaneous moment of flux when rms dissolves into imagination and back again, by setting the reader/voyeur context against the instantaneity of “reproduced reality” of the pending but never seen cinematic piece. In 10:01 you delve into the desperation of that voyeuristic need on one hand and on the other play the game we all play when we wonder about other people’s lives and minds … and nothing is what it seems and nothing remains what it is. LANCE: I’m a movie addict, plain and simple, I should say right off, and one of those who still believe the most powerful, most resonant experience of film is to be had in the theater. In large part that’s because the scale of such imagined spaces allows you to fall completely into the spectacle, to become, in a sense, the show. But in large part that’s also because at some deep-structure level the experience of watching a film (as opposed to, say, the experience of reading a novel) is a communal act, a social celebration of what feels like, when you’re in the midst of a potent celluloid reality, transcendent timelessness. What fascinates me about the communal event is how when you’re in it you’re always surrounded by an ocean of other people, an ocean of secret histories. And I have always suspected those secret histories are much more emotionally and intellectually engaging than what’s going on on the screen. That suspicion led me to write the print version of 10:01, which is set in an AMC theater on the fourth floor of the Mall of America in Bloomington, Minnesota, one December Sunday—that is, smack in the heart of the American Dream. The narrative drifts in and out of the minds of forty-some-odd moviegoers, one mouse, and one cat during the ten minutes and one second before the feature begins, nestling into various narriticules behind what appears to be The Narrative (i.e., the about-to-begin movie) but isn’t. Novels can mine psychology in a way that films can’t. Films are all about surface and speed. Novels are all about depth and taking one’s time. What other art form allows you to live inside another person’s mind—a theater of other people’s minds—for days or even weeks on end? So part of the fun for me in writing 10:01 was also using one genre (novel) to explore the limits of another (film). About halfway through writing the print version, I got the idea for creating a complementary hypermedia one—a version that isn’t simply a digital adaptation, mind you, but a rethinking that through its hypertextual form opens onto questions about how we read, why we read, what the difference is between reading on page and screen, between reading and watching, about which text (the one made of atoms or the one made of bytes) is the more “authentic” one, and so forth. Tim Guthrie, an amazing artist and web designer, had approached me earlier with the suggestion we collaborate on a project someday, and 10:01 seemed like the perfect opportunity to do so. For me, then, to return to our original metaphor, a third text emerges in that hovering between the paper and electronic iterations of 10:01. And that’s the text whose possibilities engage me most. LITERATI: Extending this idea into the aesthetics of uncertainty: you refer to the ubiquitous popularity of the memoir and the apparent consumer need for its authenticity as serialised fiction of an absent past into a wholly present story. In 10:01, you seem to undo this and reverse the process by creating a certain degree of predictability and a textual comfort zone up front. Yet the deeper into the text one moves the more you challenge aspects about language and experience we take for granted. LANCE: Let me start by trying to clarify my position on memoir by enlisting a helpful distinction John Barth, I believe, once made between Boring Writing and Boring Writing. The first adjective refers to writing that is unselfconscious, predictable, tiresome, dull, and formulaic. The second refers to writing that bores—as in burrows, perturbs, troubles. Needless to say, he prefers the second kind of Boring Writing, and I do as well. My problem with much if not most memoir is that for me it falls into the first camp. This is the case for several reasons. First, many of its narcissistic narratives seem drearily formulaic—essentially going something like this: I grew up impoverished or a victim or an impoverished victim in Lockjaw, Wyoming, or O'Yawny, Ireland, but triumphed (provisionally, of course) over life’s adversities and will explain how in my sequel. I know I’m oversimplifying … and yet, and yet … I wonder how that fairytale, in its bare-bones form, is essentially different from the one all of us learned to tell in grammar school about what we did over our summer vacations—dressed up, needless to say, in the robes of literary, or, worse, oracular pretensions. Second, much memoir pretends to be something it isn’t: truthful, accurate, insightful, even (god forbid) spiritually enlightened. What I tried to do in Girl Imagined by Chance was to investigate the truth-claims of photography, memory, and memoir, and I found them all, at the end of the day, subcategories of fiction—special-case subcategories, of course, but subcategories nonetheless—that seem to demand for themselves a privileged status with regard to fact and history, a demand reminiscent of those made in such eighteenth-century novels as Robinson Crusoe that masquerade as “factual” journalism but are precisely the opposite. Third, and perhaps most important, authors of memoir are frequently oblivious of the theoretical implications and complications extant in the very genre in which they are composing. They seem to me a weirdly unselfconscious, unthoughtful, naïve bunch. That said, the memoirs I cherish are not surprisingly those that display a certain critifictional intelligence, are profoundly aware and troubled by their own processes. I’m thinking, for instance, of David Shields’s absolutely terrific one, Remote, which rethinks memoir into a fiction of cultural critique, or those by W. G. Sebald, whose explorations of consciousness like Rings of Saturn self-awarely fuse and confuse fiction with fact in ways that force the reader into a position of instability with respect to the truth-value of the text. I’d also include Shelley Jackson’s absorbing hypertext, My Body: an Autobiography and Lies and Ronald Sukenick’s Mosaic Man, one of the best transgressive avant-memoirs of the last twenty years, although most people talk about it as a Jewish novel. Again, to return to your question, it’s only in those instants of readerly instability and uncertainty that things get existentially, politically, and aesthetically interesting for me, because it’s only in those instants that we are reminded that the text of the text, the text of the world, and the text of our lives can always be other than they are. In 10:01 I tried to push that sense of instability/uncertainty much farther than I had in Girl. LITERATI: What is the difference between “avant memoir” and “a Jewish novel”—that sort of categorization reminiscent of some of the reactions to the writings of Saul Bellow? LANCE: Well, I can’t think of a thing that’s “avant” about Bellow, but the point about Sukenick’s Mosaic Man I find interesting is that readers and reviewers have a hard time knowing quite what to make of it because it defies easy market-driven pigeonholes. Many engage with it as a novel, since the word novel appears on the cover. If the word memoir had appeared on the cover instead, however, they would have read it through a different lens entirely. In other words, and in a profound and illuminating way, Sukenick’s text is amphibious, complicating easy assumptions about how and why it should be read. I find that sort of backbroke contract between author and reader more alluring than a cleaner—if more bromidic—one. This leads us to the question of accessibility in innovative writing. I’m not at all sure what we really mean by that term, since “accessibility” is one of those highly subjective words that, as Nabokov claimed of “reality,” should always appear between quotation marks. Nor am I clear about to whom a work should be “accessible”—an M. F. A. student, a bus driver, an associate professor of biology, a politician, a waitress, a reviewer? Nor do I understand why many people seem to believe texts in general should be more than less “accessible.” But what I want to suggest is that, whatever we may think of when we use that word, texts in general should be just the opposite. They should be less accessible, not more. They should demand greater labor on the part of readers, even a good degree of uneasiness, rather than effortlessness and comfort. Why? Because I want to suggest that texts that make us work, make us think and feel in unusual ways, disrupt our quotidian habits, are more valuable epistemologically, ontologically, and sociopolitically than texts that make us feel warm, fuzzy, and forgetful. LITERATI: It was more the comparison to the “Jewish novel” than the “avant memoir” which brought Bellows to mind. Isn’t there a certain ironic (even tragic) implication that that “narcissistic narrative,” which demands that status of respect for its journalistic veneer, has become the very substance of contemporary visual storytelling, aka Reality TV, and suggests more and more that we, much like your characters, have become nothing more than our desires? How defining does this become in the business of publishing in evaluating a publishable book? LANCE: I’m not sure “ironic” or “tragic” are quite the right adjectives to describe the current situation. I might gravitate toward “pathetic.” LITERATI: I was trying to play ‘nicely’.. LANCE: In late-stage capitalist culture of the spectacle and conspicuous consumption, the human is defined almost solely by his or her desires, his or her ability to be thought of by others as a niche market. Consequently, if he or she wants the highly manipulated simulation of mimesis called Reality TV, well, that’s exactly what he or she is going to get—and in spades. A gas-guzzling behemoth of an SUV for two-minute jaunts to the local market? Ditto. All the oil beneath the Alaskan wilderness with which to fuel it? No problem. More offspring than you can shake a birth-control pill at? Planetary resources be damned. The same sort of mentality guides publishing, and has done in the States since the seventies. In the U.S. the three major publishers in New York are subsidiaries of huge entertainment corporations that use said companies as tax write-offs. Combine that unnerving fact with an emerging audience reading less and reading less to be challenged than comforted, and, um, welcome to the United States of Shopping. That’s why a rich palette of independent presses have been springing up across the country. They exist as antidote to the literary equivalent of Zoloft, functioning on much the same models as indie music companies and microbreweries. FC2, of which I am currently chair of the Board of Directors, is one of the longest-running not-for-profit publishers of artistically adventurous, non-traditional fiction here. Last year we celebrated our thirtieth anniversary. Granted: every week is an economic nightmare for us. But, then again, no independent press would have it any other way. LITERATI: Back to the question of authenticity. Does it have a form and function in fiction? LANCE: At first the obvious answer appears to be yes. Yet the more I think about what we may mean when we use that word, especially when we use it with respect to fiction, I feel things quickly turning complicated. That isn’t to suggest, of course, that some sorts of writing (journalism, say, or history) aren’t based on facts. But it is to suggest that there’s always an author behind those facts shaping them to reflect his or her own sense of “authenticity,” no matter how hard he or she tries to be “objective” (another troubled word). One need only compare a report of a suicide bombing in Iraq broadcast on Fox News with one broadcast on Al Jazeera to see what I’m getting at. So in a sense I suppose I want to say that authenticity’s function in fiction is to announce the absence of authenticity. LITERATI: You talk of pushing reader instability/uncertainty farther in 10:01 than you had in Girl. Is this because you raise that third text of hovering between the paper and electronic iterations of 10:01, and do you think readers will automatically sense this between the two readings? LANCE: I enjoy the idea of a third virtual text hovering between a very concrete paper version and a less-concrete digital one. The paper version, by its very nature of existing between covers, presents itself as a text that moves from a beginning to an end, from one cover to the other. It implies both by its structure and its physical presence a chronology, a story arrow, a method of reading. The electronic version, on the other hand, presents itself as a very different narratological beast. Open it, and you find an image of the interior of a theater filled with silhouettes representing audience members. Your instinct, I’m guessing, given that in a very real way there is no beginning here, no clear place announced as the start of your journey, is to click randomly on one of the silhouettes to reveal his or her secret history. In other words, the paper version asks you to take a linear, Cartesian approach to the text, asks to be read completely from alpha to omega, while the electronic asks you to take a nonlinear, Derridean approach to the text, asks to be read in as small and as aleatoric bits as the reader (or, better, reader/viewer) sees fit. There’s another major distinction between the two texts as well. The paper version presents itself as a written text, “only” a written text, while the electronic one presents itself as a more open space comprised of written blocks, but written blocks that find their existence amid a sea of video, static images, music, sound effects, and more. One could argue, in fact, that the actual writing segments no longer maintain an advantaged position in the encounter between reader/viewer and authors (remember, too, that the electronic version is a collaborative, not a solitary, enterprise—not unlike film is a collaborative enterprise, as opposed to fiction writing, which one usually does alone). That is, the latter presents itself as a multimedia performance, and so I suspect that those who come to it will experience it in very different ways than those who come to the paper version. Perhaps each version will actually attract quite different sorts of readers with quite different sorts of interests. Finally, the closer you read the two iterations, the more textual dissimilarities you will uncover between them. Some characters appear in one, for example, but not the other. Some details of their lives don’t harmonize between versions. Some of the text blocks have more or less information in one form than the other. And so on. I’m not sure what readers will automatically sense when exploring the two versions side-by-side, or even one after the other, but I’m very interested to find out. Perhaps it will tell us something more about how we read and why. LITERATI: To appreciate the full scope of this journey, then, are you saying the reader is obliged to read both the print and electronic versions? LANCE: Yes. Absolutely yes. No. And maybe. Additional links: 10:01 : www.cafezeitgeist.com/1001.html Return to Reading Room |
