BlazeVOX 2k4 an online journal of voice

Jeffrey DeShell is the author of two novels published with FC2, In Heaven Everything is Fine and S&M. He is also the author of a study on Poe, The Peculiarity of Literature, and has co-edited two collections of contemporary short-fiction by women, Chick-Lit and Chick-Lit 2. He is an Assistant Professor at University of Colorado, Boulder, and has taught as well in Turkish Cyprus and in Hungary on a Fulbright Fellowship. His third novel, Peter: An (A)Historical Romance, will be published by Starcherone Books in 2005.

Ted Pelton is the author of a collection of short fiction, Endorsed by Jack Chapeau, published by the small fiction press he founded, Starcherone Books, of which he is now Executive Director. Recipient of an NEA Fellowship in Fiction, he is Associate Professor and Chair of Humanites at Medaille College. Recently, BlazeVox Books published his novella, Bhang. He has a novel in progress, Malcolm and Jack (and Other Famous American Criminals).

Pelton: Your new novel (read in manuscript), Peter: An (A)Historical Romance, is very engaged with world political situations. A highly materialistic American is wrenched out of his Pierre-like child's romantic fantasy world and spends a good deal of the novel negotiating one of the world's most difficult political environments, Israel and Palestine. That was funny to me, on a personal level. I remember in the old days, when we were in grad school, you were a very apolitical writer, that this was very much your aesthetic. I remember you coming into my office once and seeing a book my office-mate had on his desk called, Marxism and Art, and you saying, "Must be a small book." Now, I know you were in Turkish Cyprus for a few years. Was that responsible for your change? Has there been a change in what you hold to be the purpose of art or the novel?

DeShell: I'm interested in a number of things with this novel, some more overtly political, some less so. I hint at one of the themes of the book with the epigraphs: "Love will surely not weary of image forming. Happy is this folk to revere its God so." Aaron, from Moses and Aaron, Arnold Schoenberg. Moses and Aaron is a fascinating story in this context, for it depicts the battle of imagery and materialism (Aaron) with an abstract, non-imagistic ideal, a religiosity that is incidentally Abrahamic or Semetic (Moses). It's a war between those who believe in things and images and those who do not. I want to maintain a strict ambivalence in the novel, and ambivalence is often a difficult thing to digest for readers who desire (immediate) political fiction. Peter is definitely materialistic, but some alternatives to materialism can be extremely frightening.

I also find the whole question of political art often misunderstood. Marxism, like deconstruction, historicity, feminism etc., all those things we learned in graduate school, are narratives of debunking or disenchantment, as opposed to fiction, which is necessarily enchanting. Criticism, at least from the 60's on, is a series of narratives that aim to expose our always already involvement in and reliance on constructed ideologies. Fiction, on the other hand, aims to create that magical world where everything has meaning. What gets really interesting, however, is when we see criticism turn into fiction, and fiction turn critical. I again go back to our grad school days and remember the real pleasure one got from the enchanting deconstruction we would do, over and over again. And nowadays, because I do mostly fiction, I see narrative as one of the most important and efficacious ways of debunking myth.

Also, and this is an answer I owe somewhat to conversations with Ann Lauterbach and Lynne Tillman, both of whom are more overtly politically committed than I am. And more hopeful, because I think you have to be hopeful to get out there in the world and try to change it. Anyway, the hope here is because all creative projects, all aesthetics, is a series or pattern of decision-making. And readers will hopefully see or understand, appreciate, on some level, the care put into this aesthetic decision-making and then learn to take that care with the decisions they make in their everyday, political lives. One sees a beautiful or sublime or effective artistic project and then transfers those aesthetic choices into political choices. I guess this is similar to Wilde's idea that art shouldn't become more public, the public should become more artistic.

On the other hand, Yes, I've enlarged my canvas with this novel. My other books where mostly interior, personal, claustrophobic novels, and as you've noticed, this is much more engaged with the external world. Not that Peter, the American, understands any of it. Okay, my turn. What about you? In Malcolm and Jack, you are quite interested in the marginalized, in different subcultures of the 50's and 60's. How do you American history in relation to these subcultures? Is there such a thing as American history anyway? And are you interested in mythologizing or debunking? (You can change the term of these questions any time you wish). How does the combination of the different discourses-fiction, history, personal anecdote, song lyrics-critique (or create) the myth of America (given that myth is often created by a combination of discourses)?

Pelton: It’s funny, the activity of writing about history. Because as everything in the world seems to get faster, one of the things that certainly does not get faster is publication of the traditional print sort. Like, I was worried about my book Endorsed by Jack Chapeau when it came out, that it started with a piece about the Gulf War that I had originally written in something like 1992, and I was only publishing the book in early 2000, before the election. I thought, who’s going to care or even remember being upset about Bush and his misguided war in Iraq!

So I think it’s an illusion to think we are living in post-history. History is uncomfortable to the capital-controlled environment, it gets in the way of “consumer confidence” and the like if there are really actual wars and all they entail. You get your war on, get it off, is the way they’d like so-called post-history to be structured, and let’s all get back to our leisure-spending habits as soon as possible.That said, and it’s admittedly glib, what exactly constitutes history is where your question aims, and what exactly does fiction hope to do in such times and conditions?

I’ve always been drawn to the novel and fiction generally as that place where all discourses can be included and accommodated, where the form itself is open to inclusion and counter-tensions of various discourses being at play. There’s the Bahktinian sense of this, that every time we speak we already speak in various voices, and there’s the sense of this that comes out of Chomsky and others that we’re in a sense taken up by discourses larger than ourselves, controlled by people whose wish to determine our behavior is simultaneously to render us powerless against their neverending profit seeking. But Chomsky also allows for the old-time power of the people, and I guess its in this vein that I try to jump around and in and out of different mythic discourses, to try to constantly register inside and outside so as to ultimately be aware of so-called knowledge AS discourse, to be constantly wary and critical.

I think history does exist. I think that consumer capitalism does its best to assure us that it doesn’t, but that people will be around 100 years from now to pick up the threads to which we’re too close to see for ourselves. But the Bush father and son are doing their best to reinvigorate historical consciousness, I’d say, even if their attempt is the opposite.

What is hard is that time is not on our side, “us” being literary workers. David Markson, a novelist I very much admire, claims that his novel Wittgenstein’s Mistress was rejected 56 times. Such an impressive record of failure cannot be acquired overnight, and some version of this is run-of-the-mill for any fiction writer who doesn’t write the formula novel, isn’t already known as a bankable commodity. Books take time to write, more to publish, and then as well to digest once they’re written. Emerson supposedly said that no book should be read until it’s a year old; seeing as he also said each generation must write it’s own books (i.e., he was not a cultural conservative), we have a problem in how literature is produced in the US. It’s produced like our wars – get them on the shelf, get them off: “Next!” A sad state of affairs that small presses can only hope to mitigate. But it’s obviously much larger than what can be done by Starcherone and its ilk in the world – all we can do, I suppose, is wail and mourn, and try to do it loud enough. I just read a quote in a novel by Michel Houellebecq this morning: “We have created a system in which it has simply become impossible to live, and what’s more, we continue to export it.”

This is long and yet seems to evade what you were asking particularly about Malcolm and Jack. But I’m interested to see what it evokes from you. The Crisis in Publishing, that is to say, in Everything .... Nonetheless, looking back at terms you set up (Lauterbach, Tillman), I would have to say I'm in line with the hopefulness of creativity you describe.

DeShell: I don't share your belief in the possibility of history, or the possibility of consciousness of history. I'm not sure we are post-historical; I would argue that we've never been historical. I thought 9/11 would place us smack dab into history whether we liked it or not, but I can see no consciousness of why or even how 9/11 occurred. The rights that were taken away have been mostly from others (foreigners and other usual suspects), the airport lines are almost back to normal, and for those of us who don't live in New York, were there ever any deep scars to heal? I’m not so sure. We had a couple of wars on TV, but the capture of Sadaam in his rat hole was probably the climax of that story, at least until another major attack comes along. When we lived in Cyprus we met a lot of Turks and Greeks: now they have a history! Same when I lived in Hungary: everyone still talked about the Treaty of Trianon (the Treaty that shrunk Hungary by almost 2/3) that was signed in 1920. That's history. We can't even imagine that. The US government threw a party once in Northern Cyprus (which it doesn't officially recognize) and the American ambassador was there, and he gave a little speech about how if only these Greeks and Turks, two similar peoples, would realize how prosperous they would become if they would just cooperate, the troubles would be over in five years. We have no clue. Our history is marked by Super Bowls and World Series. And by the songs we heard in high school.

I like the fact that small publishing industry is slow. I think serious novels are always out of synch, and yet they come to be more permanent, more symbolic, than other forms of discourse: they never are contemporary, and yet, after time passes, they are often seen as the expression of an age, as a snapshot in time. That's why I'm not that interested in internet publishing: for one thing, it's too immediate. For another thing, I can't read complex material on screen. Maybe I'm showing my age, but I read quickly on screen, scanning and grephing, like I'm reading a newspaper: anything that requires concentration or thought I have to print out. I ask my students, and most of them are the same way.

I do think you've hit on something important though, and that is DIY publishing. If you don't like what's out there, do it yourself. I think it's luxurious for writers to be separated from the mechanics of editing, publishing, publicizing, all the dirty work of getting books to readers. It's another job, true, but I think it's an important one that writers shouldn't shy away from (We might have to come up with another name for "small press" though. How about "handcrafted fiction" or "boutique press" or "single barrel books"?). Part of the job a being a writer these days is audience-building, and by that I don't mean establishing a readership only for one's own books, but trying, through publishing, teaching and other activities, to create and expand audiences for unknown or lesser-known writers whom we feel simpatico. While I believe the idea of a writers' community is a contradiction in terms, I also believe we can't be selfish. In times of crisis (and I've never known a prosperous time for the literature that's important to me), we have to be generous. This is sounding pompous and pedagogical. Let's move on.

Pelton: Regarding history, what I think we definitely do have are historical texts. And I’ll even come out and say “we” as American citizens. You are very right when you say that the slowness of books is an asset, I stand corrected. Would it be wrong even to think of them forming much like boulders, over (seeming) eons, and then lasting eons? Well, that’s a bit over the top – but not completely untrue either. Luckily we don’t live in Orality but fundamentally, I think we both would want to insist (or hope?), in Literacy. I give my character Malcolm X, a kind of visionary monologue in roughly the middle of Malcolm and Jack. It was one of those weird experiences in writing where it feels like you’re channeling voices from somewhere else, like channeling dead people, shamanic. I tend to trust those voices. At this point he’s still a lost punk, but now he starts thinking to himself in a kind of oracular voice. And he gets to this point where he is insisting on history for his people, the people he runs into in his neighborhood, the downtrodden -- and he seizes on the importance of reading. This was something Malcolm understood and talks about in his Autobiography – that books have power, and that he loves reading, even as he’s living large on the world stage in the months before being shot. Malcolm X himself was someone who as a young man existed outside history but then moved into history: he understood and seized upon his historical moment, against all odds becoming a historical actor.

Before the various 1960s Civil Rights movement moments, American black people lived without history. Oppressors want us to live outside history, forget the past, or within their mythic construction of history – mythic in Barthes’ sense of being received, not us writing. Another thing that can happen is that people live in the illusion that history is irrelevant. But we don’t yet know the meaning of what happened in Iraq – nor am I predicting what it will be – but one day, in some context, we’ll be visited by the survivors and ancestors of what we’ve as a nation only now just done, or by some altered version of ourselves that causes us to witness again what we’ve done from a previously unseen perspective. Like the old blues tune – You’re gonna reap just what you sew / That old saying is true / Further on up the road. This is how history exists, as far as I’m concerned. Maybe it’s just some warped Puritan vengeance myth in my psyche, but I believe you get visited back. History will yet redeem the present moment, which shall have consequence. And Americans do not escape history. The racism that attempted to bury slavery in this country was an attempt to escape history, and it didn’t work, and the lost histories are returning.

Yes, historical consciousness is severely marred in the US. But then again I hear intelligent people calling in to The Connection on public radio, I see things like Moveon.org gaining real power – and I see lots of little presses and people who write and come to readings. Even if they’re goofy, it’s better than being on the other side, and it’s a testament that the real world is something other than we’re told it is on TV. I got it. I should market to these people. Starcherone should print up baseball caps with the letter H on them and market them as “History caps.” Still believe in History? Then wear History Caps.

There is a point, I agree, where this all gets overly serious and pompous. The fact is, I like making books. I am more or less in awe of every stage of the process. Copyrighting, getting cataloging data from the Library of Congress, placing ads, getting quotations from printers, numbering tables of contents, playing with layout and design, wrestling with the author over various questions (they don’t always like this, but I can’t help myself), trying also to bring people’s visions to life in ways they find satisfying. They Romantic myth of authorship is one that not just me but I think most people, even most Americans, still indulge (even if they don’t read anymore!). I guess I too am a cultural conservative of a certain definition, involving myself in the book at this moment of its history, or demise. Not that I’m a net illiterate. But I similarly can’t imagine reading an entire novel on a computer screen. I’m not against it. That environment just seems to have different conditions. I think in a sense that’s why poetry has taken off in recent years in a way I don’t think fiction has – it can fit on a screen. It can be slammed. Fiction’s enchantment – I like your word – requires more room, breath, space, time. Slowness. I lot of these themes, and I bring this name up to get your goat, are seen in Milan Kundera. He, of course, has become an almost Andy Rooney-like grouch, and he has always been a cultural conservative. Yet his sermons about postmodern cultures of forgetting, his honoring of text and art, I seem to return to them again and again. Have I gotten your goat? “Is that my goat?” Or to quote a recent novel by Soft Skull: “You sure know your porno.” But we made a rule, didn’t we? No sniping.

DeShell: I can't disagree with your observations, but I guess I'm a little more pessimistic about the relationship between literature and history, or, and I guess this has always been what we've been talking about in a way, the efficacy of literature in the "real," political world. History is narrative, not a narrative: there are many forms of narrative available, some with closure, and some without. I don't mean this only in the sense of it's the winners who get to narrate, because I don't think that's necessarily true anymore. Your belief in history seems based on a sort of karmic return – what goes around comes around – and that's a narrative I can't completely buy into. I think a lot of bad deeds and a lot of bad humans continue to go unpunished. And as far as what happened in Iraq, I'm guessing we'll never know, we're perhaps incapable of knowing. And I don't believe racism's "lost histories" are returning. Returning to whom? While it's true that we as a culture are somewhat more aware of the evils of slavery and the general distastefulness of racism, how close is that awareness to the center of our consciousness, to that part of our consciousness that wants to change things? I don't think we even talk a good game when it comes to racism and sexism any more. You look at mainstream culture and literature, from "Bridget Jones" to "Sex and the City" to "Cold Mountain": I don't see many new stories coming back to effectively haunt the oppressor.

The novel, if not literature in general, is always lagging behind the times. You're right to see that as part of its strength. Novels can never be contemporary; their very mode of production precludes that. The lag time between a book getting accepted, proofread, printed, distributed, sold and finally read is for most of us longer than a year. Not to mention the time (years) it takes to write the damn thing. Years where the person who starts writing the novel is very different from the person who finishes it. So novels are always more or less out of synch. Novel writing is not a terribly politically responsive activity, it doesn't work well in the immediate world. Unlike poetry say, which can immediately respond (the collections of 9/11 verse is one example), novels can't keep up. A novel's historical veracity, a 'capture of the zeitgeist' is always something given after the fact. I think because of this temporal mediation, the novel form has to be somewhat indifferent to the outside world., indifferent, or at least ambivalent, to history. Let me give an example. The full title of my recent novel is Peter: An (A)Historical Romance. First of all, it's a rewriting of Melville's Pierre: or the Ambiguities, and I wanted to refer to that previous text. I also wanted to play with the genre of historical romances. Those are perhaps too obvious. But I finished it and started to send it out in August of 2001, about a week before 9/11. And because it's about a young white rich American's journey from the restaurants of Bel Air to the refugee camps Palestine and back, topical, political stuff, I thought, damn, everything has changed. I'm going to have to really rethink and rewrite it, because everything's changed.

But nothing, finally, had or has changed. After Afghanistan, Iraq, shock and awe etc. etc., the rich are still living large, the poor are still being killed, and Americans are still in the dark. And it finally wouldn't have made sense to change the novel in response to the change of the world, because our world, our immediate world, hadn't changed.

But the key, and the hope, happens when we look beyond the immediate world. I said that history has many narrative forms, and like interesting literature, the most immediate is often the least interesting. I think we all believe that eventually we can shift something in the world. I think we all hope, by the example of our thoughtful aesthetic decisions, we can inspire others to try to make equally thoughtful decisions. But I'm starting to repeat myself.

So maybe, finally, I'm agreeing with you after all. Our immediate lives are not historical: we continue to mix events, media, genres, high and low cultures into the soup of laughter and forgetting. Our novels are not immediately historical either (partially due to their bricolage as well?). But in the long run, perhaps novels, in the very denial (or indifference to) immediate history, can let us glimpse the mediated narratives of the world that do link us to a past, that are, in a real but nonlinear, atemporal sense, historical. I think of Benjamin's angel here. The more novels are indifferent to history, the more they can perhaps help us see how historical we truly are. Anyway, that's the hope.