Email Dialogue/Interview with Pamela Lu and Catalina Cariaga

Pamela Lu, Pamela: A Novel (Berkeley, Calif.: Atelos Press, 1998); and Catalina Cariaga, Cultural Evidence (Honolulu: subpress books, 1999). These works are cited parenthetically.

As has been noted in small-press circles, Pamela Lu took the ambiguous “we” of autobiographical narration and deformed it further in the pellucid contortions of Pamela: A Novel, which some underground critics have acclaimed as the “last masterpiece of the twentieth century.” Singular, wry, aloof yet collective in struggle, Pamela offers up a varied, virtualized, and vicarious world of subjectivity-in-formation (autobiography) for “Pamela Lu,” a narrative falling off and feigning forward that is virtually Proustian in its preternaturally eloquent shifts of time, scene, and fashions of selfhood.

In ninety-eight well-wrought pages of poetically torqued prose, Pamela proffers a world of self-reflective and tenderly estranged representation and the fatal fall into the language of postmodernity that is, at all places and contexts of daily utterance, discontinuous, wry, twisted, yet drenched in the shifting fashions, creative-destructive dynamics, and cultural codes of the 1980s and 1990s. While not quite Barthes on Barthes , Pamela offers a world of similar discursive and epistemological pleasures in exactitude and discursive reframing of self-as-sign: “The very fact of our existence, amidst the flux of circular debates about the state of our very existence,” Lu writes in suspension, “felt like a parody of these debates themselves; hence we could only be real, really real, when we mimicked the representations of ourselves as they appeared in theory, commercials, and general conversation, which in turn seemed to suggest that we had just missed being real by about fifty years or so” (19).

By way of some basic data, Lu grew up in what she herself calls a “provincial region of Southern California,” received a degree in math at the University of California, Berkeley, moved to San Francisco, where she coedits Idiom (www.idiomart.com), the “occasionally productive” on-line journal and chapbook press, works as a technical writer in Silicon Valley, and has joined the board of Small Press Traffic. Her work has appeared in such journals as Explosive, Prosodia, Chain, Chicago Review, and Poetics Journal, and she is working on a new blend of poetry, history, determination, and we-ness, “The Accused.” As an ebullient Web blurb (which I wish I wrote) puts it, “Lu’s writing weaves in and out between poetry and fiction, mixing the theoretical wit and spark of Barthes or Avital Ronell with a bewildered confusion and terror—like some Berkeley-born mutant blend of Gayatri Spivak, Shirley Jackson, and Kurt Cobain.”

Pamela: A Novel in effect disconnects the “I” voice of self-fashioning and estranges “Pamela Lu” from any substantial or material sense of isolation; while all may be too perilously close to posture, pose, coded selving, the “I” is shown to be a dense nexus or contrarian bundle of relationships (in the Bay Area surround) that extend and void the self of interior belonging. Pamela is and is not “Pamela Lu” in any unmasked or unmarked sense. Instead of straightforward pastoral epiphany or lyric cry, the sentences are virtually Augustan in their decorums of suspended utterance, periodic surrounding of material, and delays of timing, troping, torquing, and closure. “I acquired the consequent habit of initiating conversations that could only be finished five to ten years later and developed deep personal attachments to recent eras such as the 70s and 80s, with their inarticulate liberties and reckless loyalties to the moment” (86).

These codes of selfhood are distanced via a heightened Bay Area critical reflexivity and self-consciousness that may be closer to Peter Handke than to memory-haunted Proust or the disappearing acts of John Ashbery in their hard-edged alienation. The stream of attention and signing of consciousness (not so much “stream” as “virtuality” of space and memory) are mingled with flights of erotic tenderness, as the self—blocked...