[Interview conducted in October, 2012]
1 V. S. Naipaul has declared there are
not any important writers anymore, Philip Roth has predicted the
novel will become a cult activity, Peter Stothard has asked if
fiction writing simply used to be better, Cullen Murphy, David
Shields, Lee Seigel, and Geoff Dyer have all stated that non-fiction
is superior to fiction. The list of people of letters who apparently
have lost faith in literary fiction goes on an on; it is clear that
an elementary questioning of the novel is not a passing cultural
phase. Furthermore, the short story seems to be under siege as well:
many agents and multinational publishers do not handle/publish story
collections, small magazines seem perpetually underfunded, and a
YouTube-ification of text and image seems to be taking short
narrative in new directions.
What is your opinion? Do the novel and
shortstory have a future?
There’s two affective things going on
here. One is the imposition of the marketplace over all cultural and
educational activities, which has transformed most fiction writing
into arid exercises in conventional behavior—trying to please
novel-reading little old ladies who want to escape their lives with
Robert McKee-grade mechanical nonsense. The other is a “natural”
degradation of the importance of written literature in the face of
more technology-driven forms of narrative—television series drama
(which is approaching a golden age), motion pictures, the Internet,
and really, the nightly news, which has writers making up arbitrary
narratives about how human reality is unfolding, and at a
minute-by-minute speed that authenticates it as fact to the unwary.
All the evidence suggests that what we
thought of as literature—the novel and the short story—will end
up as a minor heritage activity with little or no cultural impact.
I’m probably closest to the position David Shields has, which is
that both fiction AND non-fiction are epistemological absurdities,
and that the boundary between them was always a cultural illusion.
I think there IS a way of writing that
does have cultural relevance: it’s that tiny edge of postmodernism
that never got far beyond the experimental and the precious, but
which I still think holds allpostmodernism’s valuable mineral core,
where writers seek a paratactic depth and transparency at the same
time that allows readers to move as quickly as the human mind now
naturally moves while being completely candid about where the
materials are coming from and how they’re being deployed. I’ve
probably written about 15-20 passages across my various books that
succeed at this. It’s really hard work, but its also a huge amount
of fun. The Spanish writer, Javier Cercas, is probably the most
successful writer who regularly achieves this, most recently with
Anatomy of a Moment.
If so, what kind? And will e-technology
alter the very forms of them? If so, how?
I think I answered the first question.
The second question really isn’t very interesting. E-technology is
here. It works, sort of, and will get better, maybe, and will end up
with 50-70 percent of the book trade. The danger lies in Google and
the text mash-up crowd, who are going to, if they get what they want,
undermine the evidential/referential systems upon which Western
civilization is based. So what’s at risk here is the rule of law
and the judicial systems. What happens to individual authorship is a
crucial element in this, even if literature isn’t. How e-books will
change conventional novels is relatively speaking, not very
important. Literature might be, because it remains the most effective
device for long-form thinking that exists outside research
collectives. And long-form thinking is what got human beings most of
the good things civilization has created.
2 Are the very significant structural
changes taking place in the publishing industry having an effect on
novel or short story writing? If so, how?
Of course changes are occurring. It’s
winnowing out everyone who isn’t terminally conventional or
independently wealthy. And it’s contributing to the general dumbing
down of readers.
3. Is the cutting back of mid-lists and
a general cautiousness about taking risks on new or relatively
unknown writers affecting the caliber of writing that does manage to
get into print?
Probably. But there are lots of nuances
here. It’s been a big boon to young writers coming out of the
creative writing factories, because they’ve been taught how to
market themselves, and how to be acceptably conventional. Publishers
are looking for “new, fresh writers” because that’s a prime
marketing category. And really, if, as a writer, you’re just trying
to get laid by the market, why not go do real estate, where there’s
real money to be made?
4 Do you have an author's website? Does
it help you sell books?
No, and no. It’s sort of like having
a Visa card. If you don’t have one, you lose elements of full
citizenship. The test of this is simple: can you find an author’s
website that isn’t so crudded with bullshit and self-congratulation
that you feel like barfing after 20 seconds?
5 How do you feel about running an
author's website? Do you feel its a labour of love or an annoying
imposition? Or something else altogether?
I don’t have one, so I can’t say.
But I’d think it would be an ongoing humiliation for any writer who
isn’t completely stupid or fixated on the market (which is more or
less the same thing.
6 Is the selection system for novel and
short story manuscripts fair? Should it be made blind?
No, and No. On the first question, no,
because it can’t ever be fair, because human beings are social, and
thus gossip and sleep with one another and talk and think and do
elementary detective work. No to the second question because the last
thing we should do with literature is put it in the hands of
bureaucrats and their systems. I’ve been on a jury in a blind
manuscript selection procedure. The reality was that all the jurors
knew who 2/3rds of the writers were, because good writers write
distinct sentences. I went out of my way to point that out, along
with who most of the writers in the competition were. That got me
permanently blacklisted from literary jury duty, but it did get the
best manuscripts on the table.
Rick Salutin once remarked that there
are only about 900 people in Canada, and they all know one another—or
should. He was talking about Canada as a cultural entity. You can
froth at the mouth about how shocking and appalling this is, but it
won’t change it, and if you erect a bureaucracy aimed at preventing
it, you’ll end up in Stalin’s lap with a bunch of tight-assed
dickheads telling you what to do.
7 According to media reports, e-book
sales now represent a significant percentage of overall sales.
They’re lying about this, but it’s
coming.
But small bookstores see them as more a
threat to their survival than anything else, and a lot of book people
remain printpeople.
The independents are going to be wiped
out by it. And print people are going to get old. There’s no
pleasant future to any of this.
8. Are you enthusiastic about e-books?
No. But not for the reasons you might
guess.What worries me about the e-book industry is that it will put
an end to the editing of books. And that would be an intellectual
catastrophe, because most e-books right now are really just blogs,
which is to say, they’re mostly unedited. You can see the effect of
this already in the U.S. where publishers—even the major ones—are
demanding that books arrive already edited.
9. Do they hold the potential for a
renaissance in literary publishing?
Only if you believe in the old Kerouac
“Firstthoughtbestthought universe, which I think may have been the
greatest disaster to have befallen intellectual life in the 20th
century. I happen to love being edited, for the simple reason that
two minds are always better than one.
10. Or are they over-rated and too susceptible to piracy?
I don’t care about rating or piracy.
I care about the demise of editing. That’s a cultural catastrophe.
11. What do you think of literary prizes?
As Jason Cowley has commented, they reduce our culture's ability to
think in a critically complex fashion? Do they suggest, “this book
is worth reading and all these others aren't?”
That isn’t the problem with prize
culture. The problem with it is that prizes always reward
conventional behavior. And that has led to a situation where books
being published are run through the prize mill, and if they don’t
get nominations or wins, the publishers abandon them, and the morons
who run the chain bookstores, people who have expertise in marketing,
don’t order them. Meanwhile, the books that win prizes nearly all
disappear within a few years, because they’re mediocre. This is, by
the way, more true in Canada than in any country in the
English-speaking world, and it’s utterly toxic. We need to worry
less about prizes and more about the stupidization of the public
realm that this is part of.
12. Philip Marchand once stated, “Not
even the most fervent partisans ofCanadian literature will say that
Canadians have done fundamentally new things with the novel form, or
changed the way we read in the manner, say, of a Joyce, a Kafka, a
Nabokov, or a Garcia Marquez. Marchand is correct as far as
*perceptions* go; Canadian writing is not considered formally or
stylistically groundbreaking. However, is this in fact the case when
one regards our de facto production? What examples can you think of
(including your own work) which would suggest otherwise?
I’m guessing you never saw Gender
Wars: A Novel & Some Conversation about Sex and Gender: 1994,
Somerville House. If you want radical with the novel form, that has
it, in both content and graphic representation. It may not succeed as
prize “fiction”, but it’s as crazy as it gets and travels at 4
times the speed. I also thought that Ondaatje’s “Coming Through
Slaughter, George Bowering’s Burning Water, and Barbara Gowdy’s
We So Seldom Look on Love were ground-breaking by any International
standards. Phil’s beef is with the Jane Urquhart/later Ondaatje
universe, along with every nominee/winner of the Giller since it
began, of which his description is accurate. What he doesn’t say
(even though he knows the truth) is that conventionality is what
literary prize culture begets.
12. What are you working on now that
you're excited about?
The Epic of Gilgamesh According to
Enkidu, where the issue is whether or not I’ll ever know enough to
finish it. The truth is that I do know how to finish it, but I'm just
not a temple priest, and they’re the ones who wrote all the other
versions.
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