Interviews

A Form of Surrender to a Hallucinatory World

An interview with Lee Rourke by Liam Jones.

Lee Rourke’s work is difficult to summarise, because to summarise it would be to misrepresent it. By exposing the fissure in reality Rourke demonstrates the fallibility of language. Language in Rourke’s novels always seems like an effacement of reality. Despite this his work articulates with clarity a certain loss of meaning in contemporary neoliberal culture. His debut novel, The Canal, deals with boredom and the affect it produces. His latest, Vulgar Things, plays out like a mystery as the protagonist searches for coherency in the life of a relative. It is through this lens we glimpse at the futility of a search for meaning. Influenced as much by theory as he is by fiction, Rourke forces us to question the limits of human understanding and productivity through his narratives. This interview took place via email, between July 2014 and July 2015, with Rourke responding to a list of questions I sent to him.

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Liam Jones: Repetition seems to play a key role in Vulgar Things. It can be seen most obviously through Uncle Rey’s character but also in Jon, how he also goes into the shed to look at Saturn or listens to the same Dr Feelgood records. When writing did you see repetition as a key way to move the plot and characterisation forwards?

Lee Rourke: Repetition is essentially humour played out through drama (drama in the original Greek sense/meaning of the word: ‘to do,’ ‘an act,’ ‘the thing done’—or, as I like to think of it: a goal): the more we repeat something, the funnier it gets. The aim is to reach that point of comedy. I think it was Hegel who said this (or it might have been Bergson). If we take this into account pretty much anything can be funny—I’m thinking (as I always do) of Beckett’s ‘nothing is funnier than unhappiness’ here. We essentially reach a point where all of this stuff—no matter how miserable, or mundane—becomes funny. It is this exact point, through the repetition of all our petty dramas, we are striving to reach: a point of glorious, maddening humour that helps us to defeat all of the bad stuff. Kafka was all over this premise.

The Novel Without Qualities

An Interview with Luis Chitarroni by Andrew Gallix.

Luis Chitarroni is a prominent Argentine critic, editor, and novelist, whose staggering erudition is only matched by his warmth, humour, and kindness. Over several months—as I edited the following interview—he patiently responded to all my queries. Here is an extract from a message he sent me yesterday, which gives a good idea of the number of references he can cram, quite naturally, into a short paragraph:

The Distant Star is an allusion, almost a reference, to Roberto Bolaño’s title (Estrella distante). The man from Madrid is Javier Marías (an autor [sic] who declared ‘War’ to Jorge Herralde, his previous editor and publisher). The final sentence pretends to enhance Giordano Bruno’s observation on explosions and shakespeare title’s play [sic].

In the end, I cut some passages that remained too obscure to me. There are other instances when I chose to leave in some rather cryptic sentences, due to their hypnotic rhythm or sheer beauty. After all, as Roland Barthes declared, ‘For writing to be manifest in its truth (and not in its instrumentality) it must be illegible.’ Tidying up Chitarroni’s answers felt, at times, like translating from English into English, which is slightly disquieting, but also ironic. Indeed, Susana Medina—a London-based Spanish novelist—had kindly translated my convoluted questions into her mother tongue, as I wanted Chitarroni to be able to express himself as freely as possible. When the answers came in, however, they were in English. So the questions were in Spanish, the answers in English, and the interview is the gap between the two. Whenever Chitarroni opens his mouth or puts pen to paper, it is the entire history of Western literature that seems to speak, and yet the voice is always unmistakably his. Whatever the language.

A Literary Atlas for a Dispersed Form

John Holten interviewed by Rob Doyle.

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The Readymades, John Holten‘s 2011 debut novel, was a marvel. A Bolañoesque, avant-garde page-turner, it trained a breezily pan-European sensibility on the story of a shadowy Serbian art collective at large in Paris, Vienna and Berlin. Alongside the book’s heady inventiveness, there were ample doses of sex, drugs and alcohol, and exhilarating, wistful evocations of being young, broke and brilliant in post-Cold War Europe. Beautifully published by Broken Dimanche, the press Holten himself co-established in Berlin, where he now lives, The Readymades was largely ignored by the literary mainstream. One of the most remarkable novels of recent years, it has been read by relatively few people. 
Earlier this year, Broken Dimanche Press published Holten’s second novel, Oslo, Norway. Slimmer than its predecessor, it is no less abundant in flair, formal daring, 
and breadth of vision. There are metafictional tricks and turns, effervescent sexuality, apocalyptic visions, ruined love, Nordic alienation, and a Cortazarian invitation to read the novel in any number of ways.
 
Holten is as much of a wandering spirit as the bright young things without borders who populate his fiction. I tracked him down between various art exhibitions and projects he’s been involved in, to talk about books, art, influence, travel, the future of fiction, and why it’s fun to write about threesomes and drug binges.

Bringing Out the Dead

Alan Moore interviewed by Pádraig Ó Méalóid.

Pádraig Ó Méalóid: We’ve been spending a fair bit of time in London, Deirdre and myself. We were over in the British Library last week. I’m doing research into Flann O’Brien, and The Cardinal and the Corpse, all of that.

Alan Moore: Aw, that sounds great. Yeah, I’ll tell you what, I would – this probably wouldn’t help you with your research but, have you read The Whispering Swarm? By Mike Moorcock? Yet?

At Home in the Unheimlich

Deborah Levy interviewed by Andrew Gallix.

Andrew Gallix: I wonder if the discovery of your ‘own voice’ isn’t also due to the adoption of a less theatrical style. Were you more influenced, in the early days, by your playwriting? Many people who discovered you when Swimming Home was shortlisted for the Man Booker, in 2012, had no idea that you had been a successful playwright for many years: did this give you the feeling that you were starting over again as a fiction writer?

Deborah Levy: Yes, I trained as a playwright. Oddly, my two favourite plays written in the 1990s, The B File (an erotic interrogation of five female personas that has been performed all over the world) and Honey Baby: 13 Studies in Exile (performed at La Mama Theatre in Melbourne) are not theatrical at all. Read those plays (Deborah Levy: Plays 1, Methuen) and you will see I’m starting to slip into prose. I can’t begin to convey how hard it was to be a female playwright in the mid-1980s, writing in the way that I did — yes, the whole gender thing — but mostly because I wasn’t writing social realism which was very much in vogue, nor was I writing didactic feminist theatre which was also having a moment at that time. I was much more influenced by Pina Bausch and Heiner Müller than anyone else, though Pinter and Beckett were influences too. Writing for the theatre taught me to embody ideas.