A Fugue, INTERR-COM No. 0
Anti-interview
Fugue,
a disturbed state of consciousness in which the one affected seems to perform acts in full awareness but upon recovery cannot recollect the acts performed
a musical composition in which one or two themes are repeated or imitated by successively entering voices and contrapuntally developed in a continuous interweaving of the voice parts.
KEY:
Italicized text is from my fourth Dérive (essay).
Bold text is from me being interviewed by BarBar Literary Magazine.
Writers cannot seem to speak out loud without compromising themselves—even printed rather than recorded interviews are suspect. (To pick up a pen and write something down takes a minimum of seriousness, even if all you are doing is recording a joke you heard. Corollary: There is something discordant about a person who laughs while writing [to say nothing about the writing].)
BarBar: What is a writer, to you?
Zane Perdue: To me, a writer (to paraphrase Walter Benjamin in his radio piece on Cagliostro) is someone whose powers of observation have ascendancy over the mere firmness or correctness of their point of view.
(You close the window to see the people outside more clearly, their bodies, dress, expressions, and movements, beautiful and endearing in both their unselfconsciousness or their self-consciousness, conveying those open secrets that speech vies to occlude.)
The greatest orators are mediocre writers, and when the writer starts telling a story to a handful of listeners, even if these are sympathetic friends, he goes along as if over a narrow, exposed bridge crossing a flowing moat of everything in him that is insufferable. (Kirilov in Demons: “He seemed rather thoughtful and absent-minded, spoke jerkily and ungrammatically, transposing words in rather a strange way, and getting muddled if he attempted a sentence of any length.”1)
Writers should be, above all, observers and listeners, which is why hearing them speak—especially of their own work—is often repellent. During a reading, e.g., someone other than the author should read the work at hand. (Doesn’t seeing a painter at their own opening skew things in a weird direction disgust you?)
BB: What is the most detrimental to your writing progress? (E.g., Is it distractions? Plotting? Revisions? The blank page? The finishing? The size of your audience?)
ZP: The most detrimental thing to the process of writing in general, in my opinion, is the notion of inspiration. Of course, we no longer see inspiration as something that is put in us from without, e.g., by God. Instead, inspiration has become so psychologized that it is even more difficult to get away from than when God was striking it into the hearts of geniuses. I am convinced that inspiration is the ultimate spook.
I can already hear what a critic of this position would say. (And that is my point.)
We do not know how to speak with the economy of the hand: the voice is necessarily overwhelming.
(When Korah and the Levites are swallowed by the earth in Numbers, this is just the other side of the voice of God, which has come to the point where speaking is no longer sufficient).
BB: We all have strengths and weaknesses in our writing, what are yours?
ZP: The weak point in my writing (and I do not think I am alone in this) is that I often seem to want to say the last word first. Any strengths I might have derive from the degree to which I am able to remember this weakness.
In the political realm, the common sentiment of “enough talk already!” should be taken not in the anti-intellectual sense in which it is usually employed, based on the false antagonism between theory and practice (the two are inextricably entangled, as if at the quantum level), but very literally: Suppress all this talk to the dual benefit of both writing (thought) and action (also thought).
Wittgenstein: “My difficulty is only an—enormous—difficulty of expression.”
Žižek: Whereof one cannot speak one must be silent because one always says too much.2
BB: Tell us about the projects you are working on now and what’s next.
ZP: I am currently working on a manuscript of essayistic prose.
[Laugh now]
The best interview with a writer that I have ever read was with Dag Solstad, the Norwegian novelist.3 It is no coincidence that I had never yet read a word of his actual writing. He was still not yet a writer for me—I was able to suspend my (dis)belief while reading the interview.
(So, does this mean that the problem only lies with me? That is always possible, but that would not nullify or solve the problem nor answer its echoes outside of me.)
It might be interesting for a writer to make the interview their unit of composition and to forswear actually writing anything down themselves (not the same as dictation: Montaigne, Dostoevsky). The real greats have pulled this off: Goethe and Samuel Johnson with Eckermann and Boswell.
What is so annoying about reading a book that is “not written the way people talk,” to quote another common, thoughtless criticism, is not that it is really written differently than day-to-day speech—these can never be the same; they displace each other—but that books which make you say this make it seem as though the author talks the way they write.
What our common critic really means is: “This is written in a way that approximates the writer’s speech; it is written too much the way they speak.”
BB: What written work by another author lives rent-free in your head?
ZP: One chapter in particular from Henry Miller’s book on D.H. Lawrence (The World of Lawrence) has been very significant to me recently: “The Universe of Death,” a long meditation on language and the life of the artist via the work of Marcel Proust and James Joyce (favoring, seemingly, the former over the latter). Robert Walser has also meant a lot to me lately.
(And so the italics I am so fond of are a useful concession to the “bad style” of talking.)
How many books are born of the inability to say even a single correct word? (The failure of speech opens the door to writing.) A book (like a child) appears out of an incomprehensible strife and confusion, out of a ferment of happy failures and accidents (the domain of speech)—failures of the past and the constitutive failures of the present, which we carry within ourselves like the undetermined, partial x of genetic material, flowering eventually into offspring.
If we cannot say the right word that will quiet our minds from the beginning, then we progress in spite of ourselves, and, before we know what we are doing, end up with an entire volume of false starts.
Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Possessed, trans. Constance Garnett (Project Gutenberg).
Ludwig Wittgenstein, Notebooks, 1914-1916, trans. G.E.M. Anscombe (Harper Torchbooks, 1961), 40e.
Žižek: paraphrased from somewhere toward the middle of Less Than Nothing (Verso Books, 2012).
Dag Solstad, "The Art of Fiction, No. 230.”, The Paris Review.