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Speeds & Shapes of Consciousness

Evan Lavender-Smith interviewed by David Winters.

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On the strength of two short books – each slim enough to be read in a single sitting — Evan Lavender-Smith has established himself as one of America’s leading literary artists: a writer whose work reconfigures the relations between fact and fiction, form and content, writing and reading. Not only this, but Lavender-Smith speaks as much to philosophers as to lovers of literature. His books have been copiously praised by some of the most pioneering voices in contemporary fiction (Gary Lutz, Brian Evenson, Michael Martone) and by prominent scholars of continental thought and critical theory (Clare Colebrook, John Mullarkey, and Ian Buchanan, among others). Lavender-Smith’s first book, From Old Notebooks (BlazeVox, 2010; Dzanc, 2012) presents a constellation of self-reflexive fragments — scattered thoughts on writing, thinking, and the comic chaos of family life — that combine to create a vivid, living literary meditation, reminiscent of Montaigne and David Markson. His second book, Avatar (Six Gallery Press, 2011) treads strikingly different territory: recalling Bernhard and the late works of Beckett, this grief-crazed monologue gives us a glimpse of life at its limit, stranded in space, left only with tears, stray strands of hair, and degraded memories for company. Taken together, these two texts testify to a level of intellectual and aesthetic adventurousness rarely seen in recent literature. Evan and I corresponded by email throughout September 2013, in a conversation that ranged from the legacy of modernism to the vital importance of style and form for both literary and philosophical writing.

David Winters: Forgive me for beginning with some fairly broad brushstrokes. Reading both of your books together, my first instinct is to try to make comparisons between the two. This may be a mistake on my part (I’m not sure why two texts’ shared authorship should automatically make them candidates for comparison) but perhaps there are commonalities. For instance, both books present what we could call the “rhythm of thought”. But each book is driven by a different rhythm—most rudimentarily, that of the fragment on the one hand, and the unbroken monologue on the other. So, to start with, I’m interested in how you conceive of the relationship between these two modes, and the capacity of each to reflect (or rather, produce?) “thought”…

Evan Lavender-Smith: It seems that my own thought often proceeds in one of those two ways, either in the mode of the concise fragment (e.g. “Need eggs”) or in the mode of the excessive interior monologue (e.g. “Eggs eggs Walmart today tomorrow eggs must buy them don’t forget the eggs …”). I’ve spent a lot of time trying to really think about the way I think, but I’m still not sure that I have a very good handle on it. I listen to myself think; invariably I forget what I’ve heard, so I return to the most basic questions. Do I think in words? If so, what type of syntax is involved? These are the simple, first-order questions; it gets trickier when the relationship between thought and writing is introduced. How is (or isn’t) language/writing commensurable to thought? What might a formalist representation of thought look like, in contrast to a realist representation of thought? That last question has particularly interested me, the possibility of non-realist literary forms reflecting the hidden or forgotten rhythms and syntaxes of thought. As to your point about the literary mode producing rather than merely reflecting thought, yes, of course, at a certain point it’s six of one, half a dozen of the other: I perceive my words and sentences feeding off other words and sentences in the same way I perceive my thoughts feeding off other thoughts; I intuit a certain immanence about content, as determined by form, just as I perceive a certain immanence about thought, as determined by the body. I don’t know that the language’s self-generative ability is any more marked in the fragmentary mode as it is in the monologic mode; it seems to be a fundamental feature of both modes, or of any mode in which I write, including the rambling mode of the answer to the interview question.

Variations on a theme

Adam Thirlwell interviewed by Susan Tomaselli.

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In the British literary establishment (and let’s face it, named Granta Best Young Novelist not once but twice is ‘establishment’), Adam Thirlwell is something of a Trojan horse: ‘Good novelists (or, maybe more honestly, the novelists I like) are often not just avant-garde in terms of technique; they are morally avant-garde as well.’ His novels – Politics (2003), The Escape (2009) – use Milan Kundera and Philip Roth as templates, and feature digressions on Osip Mandelstam, the Bauhaus and Saul Bellow, to name but a few. With their narratorial interventions and other unconventional stylistic quirks, they flaunt the rules of sexual comedies. But Thirlwell is a master of turning ideas upside down and inside out, no more so than in his novella Kapow! (2012), a response to the Arab Spring that uses typography, fold-out pages and wordplay to mimic the noisy confusion of events as they emerged on Twitter and YouTube. It is the missing link between Tristram Shandy and the Lissitzky designed For the Voice. Thirlwell has always been interested in the international and the experimental, and his Miss Herbert (2007), named for an English governess who may or may not have been Flaubert’s mistress, and may or may not have helped him translate Madame Bovary, is his understanding of the possibilities of translation through a miniature history of the novel (or, an ‘anti-novel, with novelists as characters,’ as he puts it). It’s a theme he continues to explore in Multiples (2013), a ‘project for multiplying novels in any language,’ inspired, partly, by Augusto Monterroso.

The Short Fiction of Flann O’Brien

By Adam Rivett.

Flann O’Brien didn’t have much respect for the traditional novel as we’ve come to know and scarcely tolerate it. At-Swim-Two-Birds, his first, can barely get started before it’s wandering down the winding track of digression and self-conscious hyperbole, all tongue-in-cheek mythology and undergraduate linguistic bluster. His second (and arguably greatest) novel, The Third Policeman, trades in the virtuoso style of the debut for a plainer prose, but, indisputably, a bleaker world view. Play becomes despair, and youthful drunken rhetorical games grow surreal and morbid. There was, from the outset of O’Brien’s work, a fundamental impatience with received forms. The ‘ideal’ novel that is so often rewarded these days – realist, tightly plotted, tastefully ‘well written,’ and above all consistent – is not O’Brien’s. Yet Birds is one of the 20th Century’s great debuts. Its voice – sardonic, harshly original, comfortable in numerous registers – seems formed and confident from the start. Reading the small amount of pre-Birds material in the new collection The Short Fiction of Flann O’Brien, then, gives us, among other things, the only clue we have as to how the man otherwise known as Brian O’Nolan got it so right so fast.

Paradises

By Paula McGrath.

If in recent times the ‘literary’ novel has polarised into two distinct types — the expansive, all-encompassing Jonathan Franzen kind, and the other, more modest variety, slim volumes of spare, detatched prose, like Ben Lerner‘s Leaving The Atocha Station — Paradises belongs firmly to the latter. It follows an episodic structure, and this, combined with the uncomplicated sentence structure of its first person, present tense prose, makes it deceptive in its apparent simplicity.

Paradises opens a few years after Iosi Havilio‘s earlier novel Open Door ends, and follows its unnamed, recently widowed protagonist as she moves with her four year old son, Simón, from rural Open Door to Buenos Aires. Chapter by chapter, she finds accommodation, employment, meets an array of misfits, parties, sometimes takes care of, sometimes neglects Simon, considers participating in a robbery, and other somewhat random situations.

On the Absence of Light

By Hugh Fulham-McQuillan.

1. When the world first began to turn from the sun, pulling that new light until it broke against a fallen leaf, or the cap of a mountain, which, from the perspective of the sun must have looked like a pebble, it created infintesimally small absences of light. The world turned and the absences grew, spearing and then cloaking desserts, forests, fresh oceans, and the world pulled the darkness around it.

2. Amerighi da Caravaggio painted his studio black. Pinholes in the ceiling let the light peer through. He is there, face emerging from the shadows, holding a lantern obscured by the helmet of the soldiers arresting Christ. He watches us through the tired eyes inside Goliath’s severed head; he emerges from the vast darkness to witness the murder of St. Matthew. Bellori, his first biographer, believed “Caravaggio’s stylistic habits corresponded to his physiognomy and appearance. He had a dark complexion and dark eyes, black hair and eyebrows, and this naturally, was reflected in his paintings.”

3. Remember we could not speak the language, and the bus stopped, and the driver motioned for us to get off on that rutted road that smelled of roasted manure. After a while, a town shimmered up from the horizon, slowly creating itself in readiness of us travellers. We measured the earth’s imperceptible turning by the length of our shadows drawn before us as we walked. And now those same shadows reach across the clutter of my desk. I turn on the lamp and my own vague image jumps, darkly, against the wall behind me.