Sukeint1

JF: It also comes across as tongue in cheek.

RS: Right. But fiction’s always tongue in cheek.

JF: But you actually expected people to do that.

RS: I didn’t expect people to do it as they were
reading that page, that’s what’s tongue in cheek. But I did hope
the ACLU would benefit in some way, sooner or later, by somebody
writing a check. [Laughing] That’s a crude example,
though. I can do an interventive pornographic piece in which I
try to get people to behave sexually, for example.
[Laughing] Interventive also has to do with interactive,
because once you’re trying to do something interventive, you’re
interacting with the reader. I guess that’s why I thought of
that, because my porn piece [“the burial of count orgasm” in
Doggy Bag] is interactive.

JF: I suppose most writers would say they want to move
the reader, make him/her laugh or cry, or get angry. What I’m
listening for is how you expect interventive fiction might go
beyond that.

RS: A writer like E.L. Doctorow would, I think, use
fiction like an editorial opinion piece to influence people to
think a certain way. I have nothing against that, except I think
there’s a difference between what writers like Doctorow do and
what I do, inasmuch as the contract with the reader is quite
different. The whole grounds for reader-text interaction are
different. What I’m really trying to do is re-engage from the
position of the voluntary suspension of disbelief, which is at
the base of our Western fictive tradition. It’s the heart of the
conventional tradition in Anglo-American fiction. (Even though
it’s a poet’s phrase, the Preface to Lyrical Ballads,
Wordsworth/Coleridge.) I don’t put down Doctorow’s writing, he
writes well. But he’s still using that suspension-of-disbelief
kind of approach. My point is that you can’t really come to
grips with the reader on a platform of suspension of disbelief,
because that’s like a fairy story, or a children’s
story.
     
What I do is breach the conventional contract with the reader. I
cancel that contract and make another kind of contract. I put
fiction on the same level as any other discipline of knowledge,
and throw out the suspension of disbelief, and move in the
direction of the rival rhetorical tradition, which goes back to
the Sophists. Which is a tradition of argumentation, and
presents itself as a legitimate means of making valid statements
and discovering information and imparting knowledge on the same
level as other disciplines. For that matter, the old tradition
of rhetoric was indistinguishable from psychology. Actually I
think all of the humanities may have branched out from rhetoric
in a kind of false and disastrous splitting up in multiphrenia of
the way we research knowledge. In any case, my feeling is that
whole notion of fiction in the Anglo-American tradition is on a
very shaky basis, if not a totally false one. Or to put it
another way, there’s a much more fruitful way of going about it,
and that is to just consider the whole thing narrative, and
forget about the fictive
quality.
     
What I’m looking for is direct interaction. I mean if it’s
something like “Go-down-to-the-Post-Office-and-mail-a-letter”
kind of thing, or “STOP AND WRITE A CHECK TO THE ACLU.” Anything
that will make the reality of the reading situation and the
writing situation manifest as opposed to hidden. It’s part of my
Reader’s Liberation Movement.

JF: Do you consider that what you have written fails
if the reader doesn’t do that?

RS: No, because it changes the basis of the contract
between reader and writer. So that other things become possible,
at another time.

JF: So that even if the reader doesn’t write the check
to the ACLU, you have succeeded in making him or her react in a
way they’re not used to reacting when they read.

RS: It’s not a question of reacting, it’s a question
of changing the way people understand writing. And once that
happens, much more is possible. You then take writing more
seriously, like you take history seriously in a certain way, or
philosophy, or physics. Because you have faith that these things
are directly about experience. Whereas the way you take fiction,
now, it’s at several removes, it’s make-believe. So you don’t
take it seriously.

JF: I can’t speak for E.L. Doctorow, but I will play
ventriloquist for somebody else. Tom Wolfe, writing The
Bonfire of the Vanities. Did you happen to see that essay he
wrote a couple years afterwards, “The Billion-Footed Beast?”
Where he’s telling writers, “Drop out. Go down, become a
reporter. Learn society from the bottom up.”

RS: Yeah, I seem to be his bete noir. He
always likes to quote, with outrage, this writer Sukenick who
claims he writes without any clothes on. [Laughter] He
must have read Up. In Up there’s a passage where I
wrote, “You know what I’m doing? I could be writing without any
clothes on. I always write my erotic scenes without any clothes
on.” Something like that. So I think that got Wolfe’s goat. He
takes that as the benchmark of, quote, “experimental writing.”

JF: Wolfe sees himself in Bonfire of the
Vanities as resurrecting the 19th Century novel, the one you
say and many have said is dead. He would say that he is not just
telling about bond traders but he’s going from the top to the
bottom of society; and that he’s telling us things, not only
about the judicial system, but that the U.S. is becoming a Third
World country, etc., etc. So he would say, “I’m bringing the
news about real life today, I’m doing exactly what the novel is
supposed to do.”

RS: The trouble is he’s doing it in this castrated or
self-castrating form. The novel loses its power as a mode of
knowledge because, again, you read Wolfe’s novel and you know
it’s only a novel. It’s specifically not reality. If he
wants to do that, why doesn’t he do it as the kind of reportage
he’s always done, which he does well. I like his non-fiction,
not all of it but I like a lot of his non-fiction books. He’s
very good at it, and I think that’s very important. It’s much
more direct and has much more credibility, instead of this kind
of cardboard construct, which is barely even up to the standard
of journalistic writing, much less artful writing. I read part
of that book; it’s horrible, Bonfire of the Vanities.
It’s certainly not up to his own standards as a good writer.
It’s curious how much his style suffers from using that form. I
mean here’s a good writer who’s suddenly writing pure crap.

JF: But it’s what he’s always wanted to write.

RS: I know. Tangerine Baby, or whatever it was
called, Snowflake–.

JF: The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline
Baby.

RS: Yeah, that’s a really well-written book. By the
way, I thought it was a great irony that when Down and In
was reviewed by the New York Times Book Review on page
three — that is, the second most important page — Bonfire of
the Vanities was reviewed on page one, and I was writing like
Wolfe and he was writing like me! [Laughing] Maybe with
his non-fiction he wanted to write badly, but he couldn’t quite
do it. That’s his own fault. So I guess now he’s a fulfilled
person.
[Laughter]

JF: Maybe Wolfe, in self-defense, would say your own
books at times sound like conventional fiction. In 98.6,
for instance, you set scenes, you have characters come on,
there’s dialogue, there’s description. There is also some
occasional editorial comment on the characters, but from the
sense that this is Ron the character speaking, the one who
brought everybody together to the commune, and is writing a book
about them. If “interventive” means changing the contract with
the reader, how does the argumentative dimension you’re just
describing apply to 98.6?

RS: First of all, language is referential. Sometimes
I’ve been criticized for saying I don’t want to write
representational fiction, which is true, because you can’t avoid
that in language, which is also true. The point is the basis of
representation. Language is referential and can hardly avoid
being representational in some sense. The question is really
whether there’s the make-believe of conventional fiction, or
whether you can maintain a non-factitious relation with the
reader, by admitting precisely what the reading and writing
situations really are. This has been called self-conscious
fiction, or self-reflexive fiction; I would call it, simply,
conscious fiction. I always do something to point to the textual
quality of the book, to the fact that it is a written artifact.
I try to make the reader conscious of what the hell is going
on.
     
In 98.6 one of the textual, consciousness-rendering ploys
I use is having myself as a character in the book, writing the
book. Another is the gradual destruction of the fable quality,
the fictive quality of the book. In other words, as the book
progresses, the fiction becomes more and more absurd, till
there’s no way you can really believe in it as fiction.

JF: Especially in the last section.

RS: Especially in the last section. The first section
is quasi-documentary. The second section moves into something
like conventional fiction, although it’s broken up in a lot of
ways. The scenes in California are impossible in California,
because they bring things together that couldn’t exist together,
like the snowy mountains and the ocean. There are also
inventions of things that are slipped in, something like the way
Borges slips in bits of fabulous reality into his Library of
Babel. I slip in things like a vegetable I made up called squam,
that the people grow. But then the third section becomes nakedly
imaginary. That serves to point to the textual quality of what’s
going on. But also paradoxically it points to the imagination as
a way of solving dilemmas, the saving power of the imagination.
Because in the last section Bobby Kennedy is still alive, and the
Arabs and Jews love one another in Palestine. Maybe a little
prophetic there? The book is resolved in the
imagination.
     
So put fiction, poetry, the arts in general on the same standing
as other ways of gaining knowledge. If fiction or painting or
any of the arts don’t give you some access to knowledge, some
increased understanding, some expansion of your comprehension of
experience, then it’s a useless game. I’m not interested. But
this is what we expect of all the other disciplines. That’s the
test we apply, that ultimate test of usefulness to the culture.
That’s what we apply to philosophy. When a philosopher is
grappling with epistemology, it’s a serious pursuit, because it
has to do with the way we can understand our experience. I think
we need to put the same requirements, and give the same test, to
the arts. On that basis, if you apply that standard, almost all
of what is now known as “Quality Lit” — contemporary I mean, not
the Canon — “Quality Fiction” especially, just crumbles to dust.
There’s nothing there.

JF: You concede language is referential and
representational. You also speak of language as politics. In
“Politics of Language,” one of the essays in IN FORM:
Digressions on the Act of Fiction, you speak of language as
codes of authority, on the one hand, and, on the other, as
subversive thrusts against those codes, trying to break them up.

RS: Well, I think it’s really a question of
introducing a mode of thought that’s more independent. Reader
Liberation, as I say. Teaching the reader to read in ways that
are not dictated, but which in fact are calculated to release the
reader’s own thought processes and make the reader think for him-
or herself.
     
You know, this is directly related to what [William S.] Burroughs
talks about when he says, “Cut the word lines.” Cut the lines of
authority that are implicit in most of what gets published. And
it is an authority, it’s written by stooges of the Establishment,
enforced by money and distribution, and promotion. It’s absurd
to think that the kind of writing that’s pumped out of the
conglomerate international publishing industry would not have an
intellectual — or I should say non-intellectual — orientation,
basically a political orientation. But it’s a political
orientation that surrounds us so much — i.e. free market,
capitalism — that it’s invisible. It’s so omnipresent it’s like
the force of gravity. And publishing is also, for writers,
invisible as an influence in their writing, but is also like the
force of gravity. Everything is pulled toward money, at bottom.
And the only way to pull against that is by cutting those lines
of authority that are plugged into the money machine. One of the
ways of doing it is to write in different ways so that readers
can get out of the molds that are prepared for
them.
     
I mean I think that the control of the media in this country is –
– not only in this country, what am I saying! the Western world,
worldwide — is one of the major forces for the move toward the
Right now. It’s no accident that, all of a sudden, all the
publishing companies, the newspapers, the magazines are owned by
three or four different conglomerates. And you can even get it
down to people in some cases: Si Newhouse, Rupert Murdoch, and
what’s that guy, “Good to the Last Drop?”

JF: Maxwell?

RS: Maxwell. Before he jumped off the boat, was
another one. The English Pearson Company, which owns Viking
Penguin and ten million other things. A few German companies,
which own American companies as well. How can anybody say this
is not a major, major influence on politics at the moment? These
people are totally invulnerable from the point of view of direct
confrontation. There’s just no countervailing power. The only
thing you can think of at that level is there might be a
technological revolution that will shake them. We have this
hope, for a while, for the Internet. That’s still up for grabs.
So it may well have some kind of modifying and mitigating
influence. Anyway, from the point of view of a writer, from
my point of view, I see one of the ways of undermining
that is to break the molds that are set by money.

JF: You break them for yourself as self-expression.
As communication, if there are no readers — of course, some
people read. But let’s say it’s just a handful of people, like
the motto of Black Ice magazine is “Not For Everyone.”
But if a writer writes, and even gets published, say by FC2, but
nobody reads him, how does that cut the word lines?

RS: Well, you always start with small groups of
people. And it’s better, I think, to have a real effect like
that on three people than have a hypnotic kind of masturbatory
effect, which, basically, nullifies and numbs the intelligence of
any number of readers. It doesn’t make any difference in that
case. Suppose I had a best-seller, so what? If I had a best-
seller on my own terms, which is unimaginable, in my lifetime,
that would be significant. Remember the Henry James story about
this writer, who’s a terrific writer, and every book he thinks,
“This one is going to be the best-seller,” and it always turns
out to be a poor seller but a great book? I have a lot of
friends like that. [Laughing] My friend Steve Katz
always says, “I’m specifically writing a best-seller. This is
going to be my best-seller.” But he can’t do it because he’s not
that kind of writer. Of course, you never can tell, and he may
prove me wrong. I hope so.
     
Anyway, let’s suppose there are some writers who probably could
do that, and some writers who have done it. Take my friend Mark
Leyner, for example, who was started off by the Fiction
Collective. (We don’t call it Fiction Collective any more.
Everybody gets mad at me when I say Fiction Collective, it’s FC2-
Black Ice Books.) Anyway, he was started off by FC2 — since
Collective sounds so dated is the problem — and he actually ran
the Collective, he was one of the directors for about six years.
He gradually accommodated himself, when he was picked up by Crown
Books. The first thing they said was, “Will you punctuate?” His
second book, which was his first one with Crown–.

JF: My Cousin, My Gastroenterologist? [New
York: Crown/Harmony Books, 1990.]

RS: Yeah. It was going to be a Fiction Collective
book, and we let it go when Crown picked it up. Our version, I
think, had no punctuation. According to Mark, Crown said, “Will
you punctuate?” He said, “O.K., I’ll punctuate.” That really
struck a note for me, because I remember, and I’m not trying to
oppose myself to Leyner, he’s a friend of mine, it’s just that
there are different kinds of writers and different kinds of
careers. I was in the first issue of a fiction magazine
published by an editor named Solotaroff.

JF: Ted Solotaroff, New American Review? A
piece from Up.

RS: Yeah, New American Review, a piece from
Up. Solotaroff is a good editor, right? he’s not a
sleaze-bag editor. But I went to talk to him, he said, “I want
to talk to you about the story.” And he wanted me to change the
punctuation. [Laughs] And we argued and talked and he
was a very reasonable guy, and the reason he gave me was, which
made me feel sorry for him, he said: “Look, this is the first
issue of this magazine, I’m trying to get it off the ground. If
I don’t have the correct punctuation, people will think I’m
stupid.” So I said, “O.K., change the punctuation.” Then I had
a sleepless night, and I called him up in the morning, I said,
“Look, I changed my mind, I can’t change the punctuation.”
[Laughing] So he didn’t change the punctuation, but he
never would touch me again as a writer.
[Laughter]
     
Leyner changed the punctuation. But that was just the beginning.
Then he came to me and he said, “They’re pushing me as a cult
writer, Ron. I don’t have a cult. But now that they’re saying I
have a cult, I’m getting a cult.”
[Laughter]
     
And then the next thing was, “Well, yeah, I’m trying to be more
comic. I’m trying to, specifically, be funny because people like
it better.” And then not long ago he said, “Well, you know, I’m
not trying to be a great writer any more, I just want to
do what’s amusing.” And he can do that, but the writing is
already different from what it was in the beginning. It’s good,
but it’s a different kind of thing. He’s become what you would
call, instead of a novelist, a humorist, I think. Which is
fine.
     
But the point is, once you accommodate to that market, you have a
completely different effect. You help support the market. At
this point it’s hard to imagine somebody who could be a real
seller, who’s also undercutting the market. But anything is
possible, so some genius will probably come up with
that.
     
The next writer who’s going to come up from the ranks, I think,
is Steve Dixon. It’s always puzzled me — Steve Dixon’s a
terrific writer, and we’ve pushed him a lot in American Book
Review because of that, and because he’s been totally
ignored. Steve Dixon publishes about fifty stories a year, and
three novels a year, something like that. Very prolific. He
gets published all over the place, but in tiny, tiny places.
Habitually he was getting published in presses much smaller than
FC2, if you can believe. And I was always wondering, you know,
this guy is not so far from mainstream writing, it’s just that
the pace is a little different. It’s very good, it’s much better
than mainstream writing. And I think that with Dixon, there’s
really something there.
     
Basically, I think, the publishing industry does not like writing
where there’s something there. They like vacuums better because
vacuums are easier to sell, you can put any kind of label on
them. So I think probably the fact that he was a substantial
writer held him back a little bit. Now he’s, I think, been
recommended for a second National Book Award, I predict his
writing’s going to take off, even commercially. But he was
always fairly close to that, with a twist. I mean the guy is
probably 55 now, so he’s had this long career of shadowing the
commercial.
     
Another example is Burroughs. Burroughs is now published by,
what? Random House or Knopf or some big publisher, I think it’s
Viking. Anyway he’s got a big contract; he might make enough
money to support him. Although his friends tell me he’s stopped
writing because he discovered he can make more money as a
painter. What he does, he smears paint on canvas, then he shoots
it. [Laughter] He says, “I can sell one painting for
much more money than I ever made on a book!” So they say he’s
painting and not writing. Anyway he does have this contract
which I presume he’ll fulfill.

JF: And he does Nike commercials.

RS: And he does Nike commercials. You know, I think
writers should be able to make money, but, what the hell, it’s a
matter of personal taste. But the fact is that Burroughs himself
has become an icon. It’s not Burroughs writing any more, it’s
Burroughs the Character. He had a bit part in some movie I saw
the other day.

JF: Drugstore Cowboy.

RS: Yeah. And it was foolish. I mean he
wasn’t foolish, he was good, he was playing Burroughs. But it
was foolish to have him in the movie, I thought. It was just a
kind of shtick.
     
But Burroughs’ influential books were the first three or four
books. They had enormous impact. They had a lot of impact on
me. Since then his writing has been getting progressively tamer.
The Cities of the Red Night, I think, is a very mediocre
kind of book. I know there are people who would disagree with
me. But it’s much more conventional than his earlier books. So
— Burroughs is now around 80, so maybe when I’m 80,
people will be saying the same thing about me, I hope so.
[Laughing] “That guy’s making lots of money!” Good luck.
I should live so long.

JF: One last question about language. In 98.6,
especially, but also in Doggy Bag, you have the Ron
character, or his surrogates, looking for a “Secret Language” —
in 98.6 called “BJORSQ” — which he finds more and more
clues to but never quite finds the Rossetta Stone. What are you
driving at?

RS: Well, they’ve discovered the Secret Language.
It’s the genetic code, which is called Gnomic. Apparently
they’re applying textual analysis to the genetic code. I don’t
know with what success. I mention it in Handwriting on the
Wall.
Another interventive, interactive bit, I say “Check out the
New York Times!” [New York Times, July 9, 1991,
page C1.] But I find it fascinating and the techniques they
discovered the genetic code uses are really much like Joyce’s
techniques in Finnegans Wake. Like puns. My whole thing
about the Secret Language is a language that will connect body
and mind, or body and spirit. And that seems to be the key.

JF: Speaking of body and spirit, let’s jump right into
sado-masochism.

RS: Splash! Into the mud!

JF: From 98.6 until even the story you’ve given
us, “life/art”–.

RS: Let me say something about sado-masochism. This
is something that I’ve been hit with ever since I started
publishing, and especially with 98.6. I’ll tell you a
little anecdote. First of all, you have to realize I have a bad
reputation. From the beginning, from my first books. We were
talking about this before. When I published the Wallace Stevens
book, I was the darling of the New York Review of Books.
Then when Up came out and The Death of the Novel,
everything turned over. I was really surprised, and somewhat
flattered, at the violence of the reaction — on the basis of
form — to those books. It wasn’t the politics, because my
politics of that time were approximately the same as the New
York Review of Books, which was much more radical, “How to
Build a Bomb,” that kind of stuff. But I was accused by the
incipient neocons of trying to dismantle the whole tradition of
Western Humanism. I mean I was really very flattered, I hadn’t
thought I was doing that. I probably got a big head from that.
But the thing is — I didn’t understand until much later what was
going on. It’s like the E.D. Hirsch, the Great Books tradition,
that whole debate, the “Something of the American Mind,” what is
that?

Carlo P.: The Closing of the American Mind.

RS: The Closing of the American Mind.

Carlo P.: Like, when was it ever open?

RS: Right, yeah. But these people have got a huge
stake attached to the forms of grammar, the forms of fiction, the
forms of this and that, because it’s identified with the Anglo-
American tradition. Not even the Euro-, not even the
Western, but the Anglo-American tradition. When
you screw around with these, especially if you change the look of
the page, God forbid, they go crazy. They don’t care what the
look of the page is, I mean, not really, because they can’t read.
If they were able to read, they wouldn’t have this kind of
reaction. But what they see is somebody’s fiddling with the
Canon, you know. This was a debate that didn’t really come out
into the open until about ten years
ago.
     
That’s point number one about sado-masochism. There are people
who can’t read. What especially they can’t do, they can’tseparate what is represented from what the author might happen to
think. They miss the whole sense of dramatic irony that’s part
of any kind of fiction that’s worth anything. You always find
some kind of irony at some level, I think. (I don’t want to go
back to the New Criticism, because I don’t like that kind of
irony. I don’t want to get into that discussion right now.) But
the point is, they confused certain things, especially in
98.6, with my particular point of view. Whereas
98.6 was specifically an investigation into what’s going
on with sado-masochism in American culture. My theory was, I
identify it with the displacement of power.

JF: Just to be clear: when you say sado-masochism, you
mean, essentially, one dominates, the other submits, then they
change roles?

RS: Yeah, that’s what it is. And people find it very
sexy.
     
The anecdote I was going to tell was that I met this guy at a
cocktail party that I crashed, because it was a literary cocktail
party, and I don’t usually get invited to those, except when I’m
an official member of something or other. And I met this guy,
who started talking to me and asking me searching questions about
98.6 and sado-masochism and so on. And at the end of a
half-hour he looked really illuminated and enlightened. And I
said, “Why are you asking all these questions?” He said, “Well,
I just wrote this book about the American novel. I just wrote
this long piece about you, criticizing you for sado-masochism.
And if I had known then what I know now, my whole tack would have
changed.” So I said, “Why don’t you go change it?” He said, “I
can’t. It’s already in proofs.” [Laughter] That was
Frederick Karl, who wrote this big history of American fiction
since World War II.
     
So that’s the story with
sado-masochism.
     
In a certain way I think I was ahead of the game, because there’s
a lot of that in Death of the Novel. But certainly by the
early ’70’s, mid-’70’s I was doing this kind of analysis. And it
was really pre-Punk. I mean, it wasn’t, maybe, quite pre-Susan
Sontag — and how come Susan Sontag is never criticized for the
strange sexual implications of her work? Is it because she’s the
darling of the Establishment and I’m not?
[Laughter]
     
I have nothing against Susan Sontag, I think she’s a good writer,
a good critic, better critic than fiction writer maybe, a good
movie maker. But it was the Punks who caught this theme and
began re-enacting it in their own experience. I don’t think it
came out of thin air. It came because they picked up this tone
from the culture and embodied
it.
     
So you get the costumes. The Punks in England, who are reputedly
the most ferocious, I meet some of these kids, they come to my
house. And first of all they do a double-take, they know my
books, especially they know Doggy Bag, with the picture
[of a wolf-dog baring its fangs, from which hangs a green bag
bearing a skull-and-crossbones]. So they do a double-take,
because they think I’m 25 like them, or younger.
[Laughing] And once they get over that, then I do a
double-take, because I see behind the chains and the whips and
the handcuffs and the pierced eyelids, that these are really
sweet, clean-cut kids. Very clean. I remember an interesting
debate from the ’60’s. Gregory Corso and Allen Ginsberg are on
stage in front of a hostile audience, and somebody makes a remark
about “dirty beatniks” in the audience. And Allen says, “When
was the last time you took a shower. I bet I took a shower more
recently than you took a shower!” [Laughs] I thought
that was really brilliant. Anyway, so these are really clean-
cut, nice, nice kids.
     
I remember one of them invited me to a rave, and I said “O.K.,
I’ll go as long as I don’t have to use any drugs. Because I
don’t have time and I don’t like drugs.” And the kid says,
“Well, you know, frankly, I don’t take them either, because I
don’t have time.” [Laughs] So there’s something
theatrical about this. There is a re-enactment, an embodiment of
currents in the culture. You have to ask where it comes from. I
think it comes from the misuse of power. When power becomes
pervasive and filters through all levels of life, and it’s the
only value, then it’s going to affect erotic life, because
everything gets re-enacted in erotic life also.

JF: I think you’ve already answered the next question
I was going to ask, which is: do you see this more as a symptom
of what’s wrong with the dominant society? Or is it more a
rebellious reaction against, or is it both things, going back and
forth?

RS: I think it’s both things. It’s an embodiment.

JF: You’ve said that as a writer you’d rather be a
medium than a creator, “a (shaman-like) intermediary between the
spiritual world, that is, the world of collective consciousness,
and the world of the living.” Andre Breton and his fellow
Surrealists developed disciplines for inducing the dreamy state
between waking and sleeping, which is where they wrote. In part
I’m thinking of what you say in Doggy Bag about tuning in
to the white noise, to what you ordinarily screen out when you
focus on something. The flow of imagery and free association you
display in a number of things, but especially in the “Fourteen”
and “5 & 10” sections of The Endless Short Story — when
you’re writing, in the old days at the typewriter or in front of
the computer screen now, is there anything you do to attain that
sort of negative capability to let the flow come through, and you
behave more as a medium?

RS: I think negative capability is a key. I don’t
dislike all parts of Western Romantic tradition, and negative
capability, Keats, was also picked up by the Beats, especially
Kerouac. It’s a very aggressive culture, so the aggression
filters out a lot of stuff that you can retrieve by relaxing,
being passive, and letting it
come.
     
However, as far as my own writing goes, I don’t do anything
particularly ritualistic. But I think I do go into something
like a trance when I write. The first thing I learned is I can’t
will things when I’m writing. I remember when I was
writing Up, a decisive moment in my stylistic development,
I was typing along, I typed something, then I went back to cross
it out, because I heard a little voice in my head, I literally
heard this, that said, “You can’t do that!” Because all my life
people were telling me, especially with writing, “You can’t do
that! You can’t do that!” So this voice in my head was saying,
“You can’t do that!” and I go back without thinking about it and
I rewrite, and suddenly, for the first time, I thought: “Why
can’t I do that?” And I put it back in. And I think it was
partly because I was reading Henry Miller, and Henry Miller is
the guy who puts in the things that everybody else leaves out,
and gets a lot of energy out of that. So, in a way, Miller was a
decisive influence for me.
     
So I’ve learned I can’t really will things. I really just try to
relax, and try to write, and I know that the way I feel has
nothing to do with what’s going to come out. I sit down at my
desk, and I know from experience I feel I can’t write shit today,
I feel terrible, I’m creatively constipated, and I don’t have
enough time to do anything. And some of my best writing will
come out of that, there’s no telling ahead of time. And
sometimes when you sit down, feeling really rarin’ to go, nothing
will come. I know that when I’m deep into my writing, the
telephone rings, I can jump up and hit the ceiling.

JF: Let’s talk about FC2. You were one of the
founding members of the Fiction Collective in 1974, and you
became a permanent director when it reorganized in 1988 as FC2.
You had three books published by the Collective before you became
a director [98.6, Long Talking Bad Conditions Blues, The
Endless Short Story], and one since [Doggy Bag]. How
does FC2 differ from commercial publishers? What reasons have
commercial publishers given for rejecting any of your books?

RS: Because they supposedly don’t make money, which is
not exactly the case. You never know till you try. But I think
the only function of the publishing industry, according to its
own proclamations, is not simply to make money; it’s supposed to
be a culture industry. So they should pay a little bit of
attention to that. In any case, I guess they don’t think I make
enough money. I don’t think I’ve had a fair market test,
however. [Laughing]
     
At FC2, on the contrary, we publish anything we think is good,
that’s also in that rival tradition. It’s really broader than
that. It’s really what’s beyond the spectrum of the publishing
industry. What’s beyond the spectrum of the publishing industry
is very surprising. For example, we publish a writer, and she’s
a director also, called Cris Mazza. She can’t get published by
the commercial publishers. Why is mysterious. Like Steve Dixon,
she’s very close to being a conventional writer, only a little
better and a little different. I think her books would really
have a wide audience. But apparently it’s just a little too far
beyond the spectrum.
     
And also there’s a kind of ideological narrowness. I remember I
tried to get her latched onto my then-agent. She didn’t have an
agent. She sent in her manuscript, the agent said she wouldn’t
take her on because she didn’t like the way Cris portrayed women.
She said the women always seemed to be too oppressed. I won’t
mention names, but my agent had strong feminist tendencies. So
Cris comes back to me very confused, she says, “Look, I mean,
women are somewhat oppressed! What’s she got against
this?” [Laughing] A kind of narrowness intellectually
there, I guess, that accrues to people who spend all their time
making money. But we need those people, because we’re not too
good at it ourselves, so I don’t put them down. But it’s just
that the whole center of gravity is money. That’s basically what
it is.

JF: You’ve mentioned some writers here, but what other
writers do you find exploring language and experience as you do?

RS: The way I do? Nobody. [Laughing] I’m not
a good person to ask about other writers.

JF: What other writers do you read, what writers feed
you?

RS: Well I was about to say, for the last ten years
I’ve been reading almost nothing but manuscripts. Actually
that’s not quite true, because for the three years ending this
year, happily, I was on the National Book Critics Circle Board,
which reads huge numbers of books. It’s supposed to read
everything that comes out that’s worth reading. In fiction I
found that there wasn’t very much there, and everybody said that.
In fact last year I led a mini-rebellion, the point of which was
to get them to not award a prize for fiction, all the
books were so terrible. And the spectrum’s getting narrower and
narrower. They finally awarded a prize to a pseudo-Victorian
novel, which wasn’t even American Victorian, it was English
Victorian, written by a Canadian writer who had one foot in the
United States as far as official citizenship goes. I forget her
name, and I think everybody will in about six
months.
     
But there are some good writers. One, who gets published by
tiny, tiny, tiny presses, is a guy named Stephen Paul Martin.
Nobody’s heard of him, but he’s very good. Another is Carol
Maso, who just got appointed head of the Brown Creative Writing
Program. Another is Rikki Ducornet, who last year won a Lannan,
and was a nominee two years ago in the National Book Critics
Circle Awards. She’s a really good writer. These are all
younger generation. As is Mark Amerika, my co-conspirator. In
my generation, Steve Katz, Raymond Federman, [Robert] Coover of
course. I can’t say that I’m influenced by anybody any more,
because I’m already so off on my own
track.
     
But you know who I’m most influenced by? I find most interesting
to me as a writer, that I get ideas from, is surprisingly the
young writers whose manuscripts come into Black Ice Magazine.
Some of them are very strong. I don’t know if they can continue
their careers, sometimes they’re flashes in the pan. But they
have very interesting takes on things, and very interesting
formal ideas. There are some of those in McCaffery’s anthology
[After Yesterday’s Crash], a lot in the FC2 Avant-Pop
anthology [Avant-Pop: Fiction for a Daydream Nation]. So
it’s those younger writers that are, personally, very stimulating
to me.

JF: Are you getting tired?

RS: I got tired an hour ago. [Laughs] It’s
all right, keep going. I’d like to have a beer to drink.

JF: Did you meet any writer in China this past summer
who has done with Chinese written characters what you have done
with words?

RS: I don’t know what the contemporary writers do; I
don’t think so. I met some of them. It was too much like being
at work and I was on vacation. But I got very interested in
traditional Chinese calligraphy because it specifically takes
advantage of the graphic side of text. I bought some while I was
over there.
     
This reminds me to tell you what static stories are. Static
stories [like “life/art”] are
stories that specifically use the
graphics of the text rather than the narrative progression as
their base. I got started when somebody was having a photography
show. She asked me if I would write some material for the
photographs, and stick it on the wall, sort of like captions, I
guess. But what happened was I started writing all over the
wall! I got these brushes, and different colored paints, and
magic markers, and I did this incredible thing all over this
large gallery. I did some huge story, up and down and around the
photos; and this woman got very sore, I think, because this story
was eclipsing her show. She would never give me pictures of it,
even though she was a photographer and she took lots of pictures.
So I have no record.
     
So that was writing that took advantage of the graphic side; it
was writing on the wall. I did another one in some college in
Upstate New York, I think it was last year. This is the first
time I tried to do it on the page; and the reason I did it was
because I figured I should exploit the computer screen, which is
not yet paper and which offers a lot of fluidity as to how you
can compose. The result is I use a lot of things that I would
use in a different way in a narrative. I let the look of the
graphics take over a lot of the communication.

JF: Have you written a number of these things?

RS: This is the third one. But now I’m getting fond
of it and I’m thinking of doing a series of them, like The
Endless Short Story, for a volume. Some combination of that
and the leaving things out bit, the interactive stuff. [As in
parts of The Endless Short Story and “the burial of count
orgasm” in Doggy Bag.] They really seem to go together,
because of the spacing.

JF: I’ll wrap up with one last question. This one is
more specifically about hypertext and computers. You call the
Doggy Bag stories hyperfictions. StorySpace is the
software, manufactured by EastGate Systems, that Michael Joyce,
Stuart Moulthrop, Carolyn Guyer and other hypertext fiction
writers play around with. Have you ever played around with it?

RS: No, I’ve never done real hypertext. Hyperfiction
is another thing. I think the coinage is Coover’s. I don’t use
it for that, for computer work.

JF: Have you read Joyce’s Afternoon, or
Moulthrop’s Victory Garden, or any of those things?

RS: No. I’d like to. Right now I have on disk an
English magazine that publishes that kind of thing. But you need
more powerful equipment than I have to get into that and open it
up. So I guess I have to get some new equipment before I start
doing that. I wouldn’t say that the medium is exaggerated in
importance, though; people may do very good things in it. But
it is another medium.
     
For example, in the story I gave you [“life/art”],
in the
square brackets I have notations, “Picture of This,” “Picture of
That.” This is directly from the influence of hypertext kind of
stuff, because they do include pictures. But when I get it on my
program, it comes through “Graphic Here,” something like that,
because my computer can’t pick up graphics, it’s not strong
enough. But I like it that way, because it’s still writing. In
other words, if I say “Picture of Something,” it’s still
addressing the imagination in — how can I put it? — in a non-
specific way. Whereas a picture is much more specific. It may
be worth ten thousand words, but it’s always the same ten
thousand words. Whereas if it stayed in your head like writing,
it can be any thousand words. It can be two thousand words, it
can be one word.
     
Now I’m all for integrating graphics; I think it’s an undervalued
dimension of writing. Just like Beatniks brought in the
tradition of the oral, that had been forgotten for a long time in
our tradition. I think the look of print on page is the defining
fact in our culture. That’s why, if you start tampering with it,
the neocons get so excited. Because the look of the page is very
important. If you question, as you do if you start playing
around with it, the look of the page, that’s bringing out a very
important side of writing that’s been suppressed, except in
poetry.
     
Poetry, in my opinion, in our tradition, is basically print on
page, but with a certain flexibility to it. It’s how the print
looks on the page, it’s not oral any more, despite the reading
circuit. I think you can see that in the whole Black Mountain
school, through [Charles] Olson and [William Carlos] Williams,
even though they thought they were doing something
else.
     
Anyway, you can play with print on page, and you should play with
print on page, but print on page is going to remain basic.
Always there are new media being added. Performance is the
latest. I have nothing against performance, I just don’t think
it replaces ordinary drama. It’s its own thing. And maybe
somebody will make a good thing out of skywriting, I don’t know.
They’re just different things.
     
But I’m convinced that writing is going to remain. We’re a
writing-oriented culture, period. I don’t think it’s going to
change, ever, unless the culture changes in ways that are really,
I think, improbable, unless we become some other culture
entirely. I can’t even begin to think of a culture in which the
electronic version is the authoritative version; I can’t quite
imagine what that would be like, or that it’s worth thinking
about.
     
Writing will retain the authority, in my opinion, no matter how
much electronics gets off the ground. Hard copy will be the
authoritative copy. We’ll always need a hard copy backing up the
electronic text. So the bookkeepers will still run the culture.
And I think that’s a good thing. I think writing allows more
freedom.