About Writing: Seven Essays, Four Letters, & Five Interviews

A Para•doxa Interview: Experimental Writing/Texts & Questions

209 A฀Para•doxa฀Interview Experimental Writing/ Texts & Questions Questions฀by฀Lance฀Olsen samuel฀ r.฀ delany: I’d like to use your questions as an opportunity to talk about some ideas—and some texts. The texts come from among the alternative, or experimental, pieces I’ve read and reread over the last forty years that have given me much readerly pleasure. I don’t put them forward as any sort of history. They come from different genres; and freely I admit I’ve had some sort of personal relation with most of the writers, in some cases as fleeting as attending the birthday dinner of my friend Bruce Benderson, where I met Ursule Molinaro, whose birthday it also was; and in others, warm relationships of long standing, as with Richard Kostelanetz—we went to the same summer camp as boys, though we didn’t become friends till twenty-five years later. I might mention too that, in at least half the cases (Disch, Keene, Abish . . . ), I knew the writing before I knew the writer. With a couple of these, I’d been impressed enough with the writing to seek the writer out after reading him or her. The ideas have to do with writing and its renovations, its innovations, and its fundamental graphic energies—about how those energies shake the body itself and how, through some astonishing butterfly effects, those rumblings eventually work to erect the very structures of culture. With that as prologue, let’s look at your first question. lance฀olsen: Why฀do฀you฀write,฀and,฀more฀interestingly,฀why฀do฀ you฀choose฀to฀write฀alternative฀(that฀is,฀experimental)฀fiction? 210 Part฀III:฀Five฀Interviews delany: Once we get beyond the rich and intricate Bloomian answer to your question’s first half (artists create in rebellion against the failure to create), we’re faced with a more limited field in which to look for answers, a limitation already suggested by your question’s second half—really a form of “Why do you create what you do in the way that you do?” As I worked through them, some of my science fiction novels presented problems I thought might be solved by appropriating techniques from across various genre boundaries over in the literary and experimental precincts. Only two of my novels started out, however, as experimental per฀se. The first was The฀Tale฀of฀ Plagues฀and฀Carnivals, which began as a response to the AIDS situation, back in 19. That is, it grew out of a sense of crisis. The second was my short novel, Atlantis:฀Model฀1924฀(1995). We’ll return to that one. Paradoxically, when I was a kid, I associated certain sorts of writerly experiments with heightened readability . As a fourteen-year-old, when I first read Alfred Bester’s The฀Stars฀My฀Destination (1956) over the summer issues of Galaxy ฀Magazine in which it was first serialized, I soon knew I was reading something very different—and clearly it was far more readable than anything else in the magazine. As a seventeenyear -old immersed in Faulkner, I found The฀ Sound฀ and฀ the฀ Fury (1929) certainly an easier and—for me—more intense read than the more ponderous (and traditional) Light฀ in฀ August (192), both extraordinary novels. When, as a thirty-three-yearold , I read Joanna Russ’s The฀Female฀Man (1975), I realized that I was reading a novel conceived in an entirely different way from most. It went down far faster and more energetically than most novels—not to mention that it made its points with greater intensity. When, in the midst of her strange and unusual rhetorical ploys, straining so hard—and so frequently managing—to say things I’d never heard before about a world I’d certainly known and lived in and looked at, Russ wrote: This book is written in blood. Is it written entirely in blood? No, some of it is written in tears. Are the blood and the tears all mine? Para•doxa:฀Experimental฀Writing 211 Yes, they have been in the past. But the future is a different matter. As the bear swore in Pogo after having endured a pot shoved on her head, being turned upside down while still in the pot, a discussion about her edibility , the lawnmowering of her behind, and a fistful of ground pepper in the snoot, she then swore a mighty oath on the...