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ELIMAE: While my understanding of you is limited mainly to your fiction, I understand from various author biographies that you have been involved in the theater as a playwright for a number of years, and it would appear that your entrance into the world of writing began there. How, if my assumption is correct, has the drama of the theater affected your approach to the somewhat less socially interactive dynamic of the writer and the page in relation to the reader and his response to it? To what extent has what you learned from theater informed your pursuit of fiction? In what ways has it hindered you, if that has been the case? Has there been anything, more specifically, you've had to unlearn?
LOCK: I wrote for the theater from 1981 until the mid-1990's. During this period, which was certainly an exciting one, I wrote, to begin with, stage plays and ended my career as a dramatist, if it can be said to have ended, writing one-hour radio plays for WDR, Germany. The story of how my stage work came to be known and performed in Germany and of my subsequent recruitment as a radio dramatist there is interesting, but beside the point of our present discussion. I also enjoyed, at that time, some success in the American theater, especially in Los Angeles, and was pleased to have a play called by a member of the Edinburgh press "the best play of the [1996 Theatre] Festival." But having said that (at the insistence of my vanity), let me leave it.
 Perhaps I should mention that I was a performance artist, in Philadelphia, from 1974-7 -- one of a troupe of avant-garde composers and poets. I constructed theatrical environments assembled from props, physical routines, and collages of pre-recorded sound (excerpts from Super Man comic books, chemical formulae, axioms, fragments of narrative, piano noise). If there was a piano, I would play it with my forearms. I'd also juggle while a young woman turned somersaults down the aisle. As a finale, I might shoot bright-colored panties and confetti into the audience from an empty Quaker Oats cylinder, propelled by a squirrel-cage blower, to an accompaniment of The 1812 Overture. It was all very picturesque and provocative -- an idiosyncratic revival of Dada spectacle. There were manifestos, of course. To be doctrinaire can be fun. It would amuse me to write a book of manifestos for vanished artistic movements -- a nice Borgesian joke!
I did not commence my writing life (a more fitting designation of what has absorbed me for thirty-three years) -- I did not begin it as a playwright, but as a poet. My earliest literary attempts took that form; and, indeed, I concentrated as a graduate student at Syracuse University (1972-3) very nearly entirely on poetry. I read other things; but poetry felt to me then to be most strongly at work inside me. It influenced the way in which I saw and heard the world around me then and -- it must be said -- now.
My Master's thesis was a book-length collection of linked poems -- a predilection that continues, to the good of my work and, perhaps, to its detriment to this day. I am speaking of my habit of composing sequences, usually extended ones, of interrelated texts. This is the case in the long prose work that occupied me from 1995 until 2001 (and may be said to occupy me still as I examine and re-examine the parts of that ambitious whole), which is called A History of the Imagination -- several fictions from which you have done me the honor of publishing in elimae. So, too, those pairings of "continuous texts," Émigrés and Joseph Cornell's Operas, which you have kindly made for me into a book; so, too, the short texts I am now composing -- Grim Tales. I said that this habit of making writings that become, in time, self-referential and "enclosed" is good and bad: good in that once I have discovered my subject and warmed to it, it reveals itself to me increasingly, giving up its secrets and becoming a territory to be entered, searched, mapped, and (this is the bad thing) escaped; for the universe of sentences that I do ultimately compose out of the materials of that place becomes a rich imprisonment. What I mean by that is I go on perhaps longer than I ought, enlarging the fictional world -- perhaps, who knows, to the exclusion of others more useful to me, or to a reader.
But maybe not. Maybe the worlds that I have made for myself, from myself, in spite of myself are all that I could have done.
I wanted, of course, to be a novelist. When I first took to reading as a boy, inspired by the example of my mother, who is a continuous reader, I read novels. Our Philadelphia house was always filled with novels, and she was always reading them. I did not imagine, at age thirteen or fourteen, that there was anything else in the world of reading to be read except them. There were short stories, but they seemed to me to be an inferior product, or what one might write who failed at writing novels. This prejudice against the story lasted in me for some time. Poetry appeared to me then as something embalmed, in school books -- a thing without freshness, a dead form. I could not imagine a living poet. As for drama, we were awash in it -- loving television stories and going to the movies. But it never occurred to me, would not for years occur to me, that they began with a script. I was ingenuous. I was, in that working-class Philadelphia neighborhood in the 1950's and 60's, without culture -- except for my mother's novels and for another thing -- the Aesop's Fables she read to me when I was a very young boy and the fairy tales I read to myself from a big orange-bound book that came with the set of encyclopedias my father bought one day -- persuaded of their durability by the salesman who spread them on the floor of our living room and walked from one to the other as if they were paving stones.
I will talk later about parables and fairy tales. But for now, let it suffice to say that they were, for a long time, disdained by me. In the classrooms in which I came of age, they were a despised form of sub-literature, at best an artifact of childhood or an unsophisticated, pre-industrial age -- a lower rung on the evolutionary ladder that led, finally and triumphantly, to realism and especially its epitome -- the psychological novel. In the late 1960's and 70's, this was, for those who wanted to do something with words, the only game. At least, this is the view I had of the situation, informed by an admittedly narrow experience. I had read one piece by Edson and another by Anderson Imbert, but could fit neither into any category of literature I knew of, except fantasy. The genre of fantasy meant to us then those garish paperback productions whose covers were illustrated with Hobbits or sorcerers or alien landscapes. We would confess to reading pornography but never fantasy. I don't know whether this exclusionary devotion to high seriousness had to do with the general Anglophilism that seemed to hold sway over the universities then or with the radicalized consciousness of the young. I was under the influence of both. I read Stein, and I read Steinbeck and much preferred the latter. As an undergraduate at the University of Pennsylvania, I was a sociology major and participated in campus unrest. It was only as a junior that I changed my major to English Literature and began to entertain the ideas of Modernism that, admittedly, haunt me still.
How could it be otherwise?
One might be tempted then to ascribe this early social and political interest to my decision to write for the theater a decade later. But I entered the theater by happenstance -- which is not to say that I did not attempt to give my dramatic writing a social or political underpinning; or, more precisely, to look closely at what I had written to see whether or not I could discover there a subtext to salve my social and political conscience, which was and remains acute. But the plays were products always -- almost always -- of some anarchic, absurd, or comic impulse. They elaborated an intensely theatrical, often fantastic, conceit. When they failed, it was from a tampering with theatricality wanting nothing more than to work out, extravagantly, its own imaginative premises. I think, Deron, you will discern in that statement the pattern of that prose fiction of mine you have come to know. That delight in artifice I will address later in our discussion.
I said that I had entered the theater by happenstance. My entire practice as a playwright began by accident and was furthered at random. When I wrote my first script, I knew nothing about plays -- their writing or production -- or about the equally important business of the theater, a much larger enterprise, certainly, than that of publishing a literary review. The stakes for the participants are high because of the large sums of money needed to mount even the most modest production. (I got a scent of that money and was, in turn, influenced by it. But I'd rather not talk about that.) Having no practical experience as a playwright or of the contemporary theater, I was persuaded to write by the examples of those playwrights I had read at Penn: Pinter, Albee, and Beckett, primarily. I would be under their influence for years. How could I not be? Later, after I had written my first two or three plays, I fell randomly under the influence of those playwrights whose works were to be found on the library shelves (especially, marvelously Ionesco!) and on those of the Universal Bookstore, in the Philadelphia neighborhood where I lived.
The Universal Bookstore may be the single most significant influence on my reading and writing life. A small old-fashioned shop, it was run by the Shlahtos, a German-speaking couple, who had settled in what was, until the 1980's, a predominantly German Philadelphia neighborhood. They loved literature and had a German (and later a Latin American) section in their shop. There, I discovered Dürrenmatt and Frisch and Handke. For me, their theaters was theater -- the one that dominated my imagination; for remember, Deron, I had not seen or read much contemporary theater. But what I learned -- a painful and difficult lesson -- was that this was not the theater as it was practiced or enjoyed in 1980's America. This is not the theater that makes money. When I told my agent of my wish to do something like Beckett, like Dürrenmatt or Frisch, she informed me that nobody outside of the university theater was interested in these writers. What I mean by all this, Deron, is that I fell in love with a theater of image, of artifice -- of theatricality -- because of the harum-scarum way I went about instructing myself in the art. My work became -- according to many in the business -- too intellectual, too "gorgeous," too concerned with images -- too much about language. It was also anti-naturalistic like the theater of my idols; and anti-naturalism, like satire, is the kiss of death for an audience. Besides, the Theater of the Absurd is obsolete, isn't it? Well, if the world continues in its absurdity, why should the theater not continue to show it? Apart from the madness of history and current events (and who knows? the madness of the universe itself), there are bizarre mental illnesses whose symptoms might have been conceived by Ionesco in collaboration with Dr. Seuss. I'm thinking of Oliver Sacks' book The Man Who Thought His Wife Was a Hat.
So I renounced the dramatic form and began, again, to write short fiction where image, language, and my growing interest in metaphysical ideas could be indulged without compromise. Also my new interest in the narrator and in breaking the dramatic unity of place, which radio plays encourage. I say "began again" because I had spent two or three years writing stories after writing poetry and before writing plays. With one exception, which won the 1979 Aga Kahn Prize given by The Paris Review (again, I tell you this for my vanity's sake), the stories I wrote in the late 70's weren't much good. One story, however (a divertissement) was published in the men's magazine Oui. It was a piece with a decidedly dramatic structure. And one day I just began to make a play of it. My first play -- Water Music. And in spite of a huge cast (Shakespeare's casts of characters were large, weren't they?), it was produced Off-Off-Broadway at the Perry Street Theatre in the Village. And that is how I accidentally came to write plays.
To finish with this, Deron, yes -- dramatic structure does influence the form of my short fictions, even the briefest of them such as Émigrés, Grim Tales, and the operas. (I have written novels but have had no success in publishing them. They may be barred from commercial consideration on the same grounds as my later plays.) I like the single, theatrical idea -- the conceit -- the stage picture. I like to think that my stage and radio plays are engines that generate ideas through the theatrical elaboration of a theme. I like my stories to do likewise. (I think here of the fabulous Calvino -- his charming and ingenious reifications of scientific concepts.) What's more, the apparatus of theater intrigues me. I have always been in love with stage props, the papier-mâché and trompe l'oeil world that becomes evident when one is permitted to examine the props up close. A History of the Imagination is filled with these props, this furniture. Some of the later "histories" are set in theaters -- emblems for me of the marvelous and the magical. They are -- these highly "artificial" stories -- theaters in which consciousness can have its say and also the unconscious. I like to think that in my best fictions, I dramatize the conflict of unconscious impulses. I meant, in the histories, to create a mise en scéne that is, becomes, manifests, materializes the unconscious. Is a Theater of the Unconscious. And, of course, Joseph Cornell's Operas is nothing if not a homage to theater -- the one that still survives, shining, in my mind (although it may not be found on "real" stages outside of the university).
If my fiction is worthy of notice, it is made so by poetry and by theater. And one can still discern in it, the pricking conscience. I may have been given permission to disregard the wider world of men in my writing, but the working-class Philadelphia boy who grew up in the 1960's can still make himself felt. I learned in some long-ago classroom that the best writing exhibits tension between two antithetical impulses. Perhaps that writing of mine that is good is good because of it. In any event, to finish my response to your question, I have, happily, not had to unlearn anything in coming to write short fiction. The precise language and erudition I first admired in Eliot and Joyce, the anti-naturalism I adored in Beckett and Ionesco, Arrabal and Dürrenmatt thrill and encourage me still, together with a host of other influences. I do not disavow my influences: I am their sum. My writing career and life are the result of endless accretion.
ELIMAE: You said you were given permission to . . . depart from naturalism?
ELIMAE: By Ionesco, Beckett, Arrabal, Mrozek, Havel, Stoppard, Orton, Vian -- by the examples of those, predominantly, mid-twentieth-century European playwrights. As well as Americans like Kopit and Durang, who were also making Absurdist plays Off-Broadway and, later when I came to it, Off-Off-Broadway. And I had always in my mind Klee's paintings and Miró's and also Mondrian's and Calder's pieces -- the work of any number of those who were making abstractions or non-figurative art. More than any other art, I love painting and sculpture. The influence of men and women making paintings and sculpture has been paramount for me. Not only looking at their work but reading about it, for I do like to read art history -- modern and contemporary art history. Invariably, I seem to find in it something I can apply to my own projects. A theory or an idea that I may have misunderstood -- who knows? -- or taken out of context. But you see, I adore ideas of this sort and am always thinking about them, even, as I say, when I have not understood them correctly or fully.
I'll give you two examples -- taken from literature -- of ideas I have read and that have affected me strongly, in ways their authors may not have intended. Somewhere in Kora in Hell, William Carlos Williams talks about the dangers of figurative language -- of metaphor -- in that it shifts the reader's attention away from the object, the thing itself. You can see this happening when you think about a simile: this thing is like that thing. Suddenly, you have moved away from "this" to "that." You are no longer considering "this" by itself and on its own terms. It's an easy point to understand, once Williams makes it for you. It explains for me why his poetry is the way it is and why he condemned Eliot's and Steven's work. Along the same line as Williams' adjuration against metaphor is Robbe-Grillet's against analogy, which, I suppose, is the same thing as metaphor; as the simile. Robbe-Grillet condemned the habit of analogy -- not only in art and literature -- but in thinking. Analogy is a "connection" that leads the reader, the viewer, the thinker outside himself to "nature." For Robbe-Grillet, this is a dangerous transference: it anthropomorphizes objects in nature and fosters in men and women a tragic outlook. As I understand him, we look for a sympathetic human response in things -- in nature or God; and when this response is not forthcoming, we feel a tragic absence and abandonment. We pray to God -- he says -- and when God does not answer, we feel His abandonment, His absence. It is better not to believe in Him and in a connection to nature. This is the way to freedom -- in the sense that Camus means when he wrote, in The Myth of Sisyphus, of the absurdity of existence and of hope.
What all this thinking does for me, as muddled as it may be in me, is to expose language as -- I don't know what . . . a set of signs? Is that right? Let's say that language is something exterior, adventitious to the universe. That there is, between language and its referents, always the possibility of distance and dislocation. What I take all this to mean is that language is not the world -- not the real world or any part of it. Language exists independent of reality -- at least the one we choose to agree on at any one time and in any one place. Magritte plays with this notion in some of his paintings; Ionesco in a play like The Bald Soprano does as much. Then there are the elegant subversions of Marcel Duchamp. If this is true -- that language does slip -- then we cannot choose but to take the view that the marks on the page compose a world of their own ("the universe of signs"?). One can be appalled by the inadequacy of language and give up writing as futile and solipsistic, or one can make the inadequacy a theme of the writing. One might also relax and come to be fascinated by the world one makes on the page, or on the canvas. We have, I suppose, since Whistler's Nocturnes, accepted the idea that the canvas is not life and is under no obligation to signify anything but itself. But language and its products seem to us to be genuine reflections of the real. Maybe this has to do with the power of narrative to seduce us into acceptance (to suspend our disbelief); or maybe it is simply that, while we may not paint or sculpt, we all use language and claim it as a truth about the world. The debate over the degree of removal of language from reality begins in antiquity, does it not? With Plato and Aristotle. Perhaps what is new in our time is the license it gives some artists to create independently of an alleged reality. If I have understood the issue correctly.
For me, the rejection of mimesis -- say, instead, the view that language is a forgery of life -- is not always easy to maintain. I come from working-class people -- a blue-collar family. I wanted -- remember -- to be a sociologist. As a young man, I wished, above all, I might have been the author of The Grapes of Wrath and believed -- still believe because I have heard it confirmed -- that that novel as well as a book like Let Us Now Praise Famous Men and the photographs of Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, and Jacob Riis did contribute to social amelioration. The idea that I may be betraying a social obligation is to this day disturbing. You can see it clearly in one of Joseph Cornell's Operas:
. . . we wish to see, we wish to take joy in these operas, however unreal to some -- but not to us! we shouted antagonistically, for there were many outside who vilified us for living so long in the opera house in the marvelous shadows beyond the footlights, they stood outside in coats left over from the war, hands in their pockets clutching stones, now we were on our way to being lost because of the strength of Svengali's hypnotic influence, his terrible somnolence, sleep! he whispered, just then Fred Astaire arrived with a suitcase full of dance-step diagrams . . . .
Yes, this is a problem for me, Deron; and now that I have brought the dilemma into sharp focus, I feel conscience stricken again.
Look -- I am not an intellectual. My reading, my study have been too unsystematic. And you can't be an intellectual when you have read more précis than originals. My God, I don't speak French or Italian or German. I read Spanish, in College; little is left to me now of that. And the critical work that informs our century, I have not read it, or very little of it. I have not read a single page of Roland Barthes or Wittgenstein. I haven't read Auerbach's Mimesis, though I have been glib with the problems it so rigorously confronts. I have not even read Finnegans Wake! I know them all in the same way I know sub-atomic particles and String Theory: imperfectly and by reputation. They are important documents of the twentieth century, and I am pained not to have read them. But there has been no time, and already I am fifty two and my memory is weakening. Much of what I read I forget.
Maybe my position comes down to this one assertion, finally, contained in a letter from Gordon Lish: "Norman, all utterance, all perception, is it not all of it a fiction?" That may well have done more to determine me on my present course than any other. And who knows whether or not I have understood you correctly, Gordon?
ELIMAE: Are there any writers of fiction you can point to as having given you permission to separate yourself from the attempt to mirror reality -- whatever that may mean?
LOCK: Donald Barthelme -- he was, is, bewitching. It was while reading about him in the 70's that I came upon the useful critical notion of "foregrounding" -- emphasizing language and structure over subject and the obligation to engage the world in recognizable terms. I suppose my first experience of foregrounding was in reading Gertrude Stein. I have been reading her, on and off, since I was nineteen -- the portraits and Tender Buttons especially. I have read her lectures in which she explains herself, but I admit to frustration. I know, I think I know, what she is up to; but her radical disassociation of object and language is -- well, frustrating. I attempt to listen to her texts as music and see them as paintings; but the words, insomuch as they do assemble themselves into sentences, beg to be interpreted. By me they do.
Other twentieth-century century writers I have used to grant my divorce from naturalism (and I mean "realism") are Calvino, Cortázar, Edson, Agnon, Kenneth Koch, Landolfi, Hildesheimer, Meckel, Danill Kharms, Anderson Imbert, Bruno Schultz.
And before them, Gogol and Jarry.
ELIMAE: And Gordon Lish, since you have cited him . . .?
LOCK: I did not come to know his books until I read Peru, accidentally, in my town's library in the mid-1990's. I was stunned. I was also scared by it. I had read some back issues of his Quarterly before it, but I wasn't aware that he wrote fiction. A couple years later, he published two brief fictions of mine in The Quarterly -- in what would be the last number. He also -- and I owe him this debt -- was the first editor to want to publish the histories, saw in them something that merited publication. During the two, three years that followed, he took twenty histories for publication in Q but was unable to put out an issue. I regret that I was never to publish one in his magazine. So, no, Gordon did not influence my writing -- he came too late, which may be a good thing because his voice is so strong and I am a facile -- and not always willing -- mimic. Nevertheless, he has influenced me profoundly. His manner of seeing, the elegant music of his sentences -- their periphrasis, how he crosses like a tightrope walker the abyss on his stringy sentences -- his determination to make important art with significant social and psychological content in spite of its structural non-conformity -- his kindness to me. Without him, I would have no connection to the life of writing as it is lived in New York. Because of him, I feel much less isolated. And because of editors like you, Deron, I am connected to the writing life of American literature as it is being made now everywhere. Gordon's large presence seems inescapable for writers a little younger than I, if the number of books I have seen dedicated to him is an indication. You may have a similar fate.
ELIMAE: In my conversations with you, you have confessed to a love of artifice, of the subterfuge, if I am understanding you correctly, of the relationship between the author and the text and the reader's understanding of the author and his assumptions concerning that relationship. Do you care to expand on my assessments? Perhaps addressing the facets of artifice that appear so satisfying to you?
LOCK: By artifice, in the context of my work, I mean a fiction that makes no pretense of realism; one that, in fact, is shameless in its determination to present itself as a text, a thing made, a rich surface. It does not eschew decoration, artificiality, or extravagance and will use, if it suits the occasion, fantastic or improbable actions. If the occasion demands that a character levitate or read another's mind or enter Ohio by submarine, I will allow it. If the fictional end may be furthered by stopping an airliner in midair while the captain tells his dreams to the sleeping passengers, there is nothing to prevent my stopping it. Certainly the laws of physics or mechanics will not disallow, for me, such interventions in the world -- the world I am making up from one moment to the next. If, as Gordon says, all utterance is a fiction, well then why not let a character float up in his theater seat if he happens to be asleep there and dreaming of sex? (Gordon may have meant by utterance something different.) I can always claim the Singularities predicted by Einstein in justification for the anomalies that delight me. If I wished. But I feel myself under no compulsion to justify the ways of the writer to his readers and would commit such anarchic acts even without benefit of Singularities. (The reader is always, for his part, free to seek other worlds and viewpoints than mine.)
None of this is original with me, of course. There were flying carpets in the world long before Einstein. And if I can point to a single work that determined me on my career as a playwright, it was Ionesco's A Stroll in the Air. If M. Bérenger can levitate, why not a character of my invention? I used to believe that the imagination was limitless and vaster by far than what is called the real world. But now I know that the universe -- the actual one -- is unimaginable, at least by men and women. So whatever it is I can imagine probably obtains somewhere in the universe already. In this, I am, ironically, a realist.
To return to artifice: I like design, I like structure -- especially a dramatic one. I like -- talking of theater -- props and painted backdrops and stage machinery, as I have already confessed. The more artificial -- the more obviously bearing evidence of the maker -- the better I like it. I love the obvious, creaking machinery by which the moon is hauled across the darkened cyclorama on invisible wires. In this regard, a Goldoni play I saw fifteen years ago may have given my imagination the fillip that moved it, decisively, from a regard for realism (however tenuous it may have sometimes appeared) to the disregard of it. In that wonderful example of commedia dell'arte The Servant of Two Masters, I remember the moon's shimmering entrance . . . the gondola that was also drawn onto the stage by some mechanism . . . and the sea, which was an undulating sheet of cobalt Mylar. (I remember nothing else of that evening in the theater!) Of course, Joseph Cornell's boxes (miniature theater sets in themselves) are an obvious and important influence on me. Goldoni and Cornell used artifice to create their fictional universes; used trompe l'oeil effects, props, and a proscenium arch to frame the mysterious actions inside their intensely theatrical spaces in order to stop time, to re-create space, and to make -- in Klee's words -- the invisible visible. In as much as they beguile, or trick, the viewer into engaging them on their own terms, they are artifices. The viewer is seduced into their worlds, not in the way of realism (which erases the difference between the work's and the viewer's worlds), but in the way of magic (which astonishes by italicizing the difference). Stage or box -- the viewer is asked to consider, from his remove, the elements of the design. Neither Cornell nor Klee nor Ionesco (certainly not Goldoni) abandoned the viewer's world (and viewpoint) entirely; none produced hermetic works of art. There is always an evocation of life -- real, imagined, or dreamed: the life of the viewer (a viewer) and the artist. (I think in this regard of Robert Wilson's theater of tableaux. Although I have not been able to see for myself Einstein on the Beach or another of his artifices in which we are deceived into experiencing time itself in a new way, I have read much about him and his work.) So, too, those artifices of mine: they refer not only to other parts in the sequence but also to things outside of the text and off the page. I am not interested in making poesia visiva or concrete poetry, though at times I will deploy certain concrete effects in my stories. We can call them stories, can't we? They are stories insofar as they are narrations of things that happen to characters, despite my unconcern with psychology. (Which is not to say that my characters -- even those that levitate like figures in a Chagall picture -- do not behave in a psychologically credible manner.)
So, yes -- artifice is attractive to me. It enables me to work -- to tool -- the surfaces of my fiction to a degree many may condemn as rococo. I admit to liking Faberge eggs and paintings by Fragonard, but I also like Constructivist jewelry and Mondrian's painting. The latter I consider artifices, too, in that they would deceive us into a belief that the Neo-Plastic universe is somehow related to the actual one. And perhaps it is.
I remember at this moment, wandering by accident into a gallery of photographs by Josef Sudek. Magical images! Lamps in the trees, strange, strange and beautiful things! The ghostly interpenetration of exterior and interior views. His photographs irradiate the ordinary world, in Baudrillard's phrase. Man Ray's photograms do as much.
Does this answer the question, Deron?
ELIMAE: Most of your fiction I have encountered contains historical aspects, whether they pertain to specific characters (Joseph Cornell as the emblematic cohesion in Joseph Cornell's Operas, and the vast array of political, artistic and social personae you concoct around his evocation) or the references to the genre of the fairy tale in your Hundred Grim Tales, or the obvious and delightful interaction of Freud and Lenin and Houdini as they cavort in your fictionalized version of Africa (very much bringing to mind an idealization of a history that in some senses only exists in our memory of it). To what extent does this pseudo-historicality (if you will allow the term) intersect with your notions of artifice and to what extent does it supply a redi-formed set of assumptions which then you are free to manipulate?
LOCK: My appropriations from twentieth-century cultural, artistic, and scientific history allow me -- as you observed in your question -- a readymade subject matter and set of attitudes toward it. (Attitudes that can be subverted.) I use "readymades" in this context, in recognition of Duchamp's appropriations from the world of objects. I was thinking about Duchamp, Cage, Rauschenberg -- and Daniel Spoerri's "snares" of the chance accumulations of things on his table -- at the time I began to compose the first histories. I wondered if I might not practice a similar method of composition -- one of chance operations on a randomly selected subject matter. This is a different thing, I believe, from Burroughs' cutups, Cage's scoring, or Marowitz's radical reformulations of plays taken from the classical repertoire.
I have on my shelf a book, African Game Trails -- a natural history and travelogue written in 1910 by Theodore Roosevelt. It belonged to my great-grandfather. I had written a short piece about a man on safari dying of gangrene, and I wanted to indicate the background -- the geography, flora and fauna of Africa. The fiction's style and tone were inspired by the Hemingway I was reading -- especially the interludes that separate the stories in In Our Time; for me, his best work. So I dipped into African Game Trails for this data -- at random. I then made some attempts to construct stories almost entirely with bits cribbed from Roosevelt's book. Although the results of these experiments (or games) were indifferent, they did point to a landscape I might borrow for a sequence of stories, set, like Roosevelt's original, in the first decade of the last century, in Africa. During the writing of one of these stories, I introduced John L. Sullivan into the landscape; I had "chanced" on the heavyweight champion of the world, in the original. Other "real" characters discovered in Roosevelt's book joined the dramatis personae. I had, by this time, renounced the hope I could build up stories from randomly seized pieces. (I called it with deliberate irony "colonizing the original.") The method was impossibly unwieldy; and rather than liberating me, enslaved me to the original text. I returned Roosevelt to the shelf.
Then George Méliès appeared, by chance -- on the outskirts of a story. I was reading about his fantastic cinema (one of wonderful artifice, with the wires visible and the machinery fairly clanking!), and his appearance was inevitable -- especially as he and T. R. were coeval. Méliès licensed for me my use of historical characters. I call them characters because they are departures from and distortions of their originals. They bear them resemblance; but they have been manipulated by me to further the stories' ends: which became, increasingly, the examination of aesthetic and metaphysical themes. Méliès was succeeded by a bewildering number of cultural icons, including Freud, Sousa, Einstein, Edison, Eiffel, Kafka, Klee, Darwin, Dewey (of the decimal system), Gregg (of the shorthand), Colette, Caruso, Proust, Lenin, Picasso, Matisse, Muybridge, Gertrude Stein, King Kong, Sarah Bernhardt, Scott Joplin, Stravinsky, Woolworth, Wells, the Invisible Man, Conan Doyle, Cole Porter, Houdini, Ziegfeld, Pavlova, Madame Tussaud, the Wright brothers, Apollinare, together with Teddy Roosevelt, himself -- all arriving in Mombasa in 1910 at the time of Halley's Comet.
I should tell you that A History of the Imagination has some fragile connection in my mind to Raymond Roussel's Impressions of Africa, which I read twenty years ago and did not understand. But it proved to be a powerful experience of language. Roussel also takes a turn in one of the histories.
Exploiting characters from twentieth-century history certainly relieved me of the burden of inventing characters of my own and a landscape in which to put them. The more I wrote of them, the more they interacted, thereby suggesting additional complications and plots. I ended by writing some fifty of these "African" stories in the five years I spent on A History of the Imagination. I could have gone on; but I knew that, finally, I needed to end what had become an almost overmastering obsession. After six months of not writing, I found that I was not yet through with them, could not separate myself from them; and I took them up again in Joseph Cornell's Operas. Now I am through with them.
I suppose I ought to speak to the idea of history as I entertain it. I must admit to you that my knowledge of history is shallow: wide, perhaps, but not very deep. I have not read much history (with the exception of art and theater history), took no history that I can recall in college. And yet I adore it, especially that of art and science. But my experience of history is that acquired from public television (especially the series The American Experience and in Ken Burns' documentaries), in encyclopediae entries, and in my cursory researches in the library. I have never sat down and read a history book or publication through (again, with the exception of those devoted to art and theater). But I do think about history -- what shapes it, what it means to be in it, to record it, to be forgotten or ignored by it. And I suppose that my insistence in the stories on the imaginative alternatives to received historical accounts has something to do with all that. At the moment, I can't think what. Perhaps the simplest explanation for what I have done with and to actual history is to say that I have imagined for it an Absurdist alternative -- an imbecile or strange or miraculous mirror image of history. I have certainly made a game of it. Whether or not I have in any way contributed to the serious discussion of history is anybody's guess. I might have said that my contribution remains to be judged by history, except that I would be wildly surprised if anything I have written will long survive me.
There is, of course, always the hope that I will yet write something that will.
I would be remiss if I did not mention two additional influences on my use of historical characters: the first is Doctorow's novel Ragtime. The second is Arsenic and Old Lace, the movie and the Kesselring play from which it derives. In it, a lunatic who thinks he is Teddy Roosevelt assists his daffy homicidal aunts in burying their "yellow fever" victims by digging in the basement of their Brooklyn home what he believes to be locks for the Panama Canal.
I love it still!
ELIMAE: And your Grim Tales and their relationship, in your mind, to history or the historic past of literature?
LOCK: I said already that for a long time I scorned fairy tales, parables, and fables as children's or folk literature; as a less evolved narrative form. I was taught this attitude. If not instructed in it, at least I came away from college with this prejudice. Who knows who or what put it there -- this was more than 30 years ago. But eventually, in my forties, I came to appreciate them. They are no longer, for me, less evolved forms but alternative ones. I have enjoyed reading them always, but I was embarrassed by the pleasure and felt I ought to be reading serious literature -- Finnegans Wake! I now think of fairy tales, parables, and fables as serious, although their language may sometimes be rudimentary. We are reading, after all, translations from long lost originals.
What excites me about fairy tales especially is the intimations in the text of forgotten attitudes toward the world -- its dangers and forbidden pleasures. The terrors and anxieties. I have the feeling when I read one that something is concealed -- some wicked or terrible knowledge. All this blood and pricked fingers and secret nocturnal dancing. And being lost, abandoned in the forest. Reading a fairy tale now, I seem to see faintly what the Medieval forest was -- meant -- and the thickets that grow up around unconscious women. All these transmutations and sublimations! I feel I understand little of what is really happening inside a fairy tale. (I feel the same thing sometimes when I read Borges or try to read Eliot's Four Quartets.) I admit that I did not discover this subtext on my own. I read -- I don't remember where -- psychoanalytical interpretations of some fairy tales; I am always keen on applying what I know of Freud's interpretations and Jung's archetypes to literature -- the latter, from an essay by Robert Bly. I do believe in the unconscious, believe that it enters the text during its composition -- is influential on the composition -- and that we can, using psychoanalytical technique, penetrate to the subtext. And should we get it wrong, there is no patient on the couch to suffer for our misguided enthusiasm!
It was in a book by Michel Butor, Inventory -- that's where I discovered it.
Parables and fables are different from fairy tales. They seem often to be depictions of the world as we know it, or at least know it in dreams. (I'm thinking here of S. Y. Agnon). But their symbolic content narrows until we are left with a single signification, or meaning. The moral. When the moral is not explicit, the entire text becomes a metaphor -- one of situation. That's my view of it. I like to feel that I can go through the metaphor and find something beneath. This wanting to understand is human; and art can provide us with what can be understood, through the cunning creation of a pattern, and what, finally, may not be understood. The pattern can be too highly figured, too labyrinthine. I take the difference between parable and fairy tale to be in the degree of dislocation. The fairy tale is the world at its most out of joint. And the difference between realism and fantasy to be in the degree of interiority. In fantasy, the world is skewed either to the idyllic or the grotesque -- one an expression of desire, the other of fear. For me, the difference between realism and fantasy -- intelligent fantasy -- is that between a photograph and an X-ray: both are representations of reality. But which is the "realer"? The photo or the X-ray? (The answer to this question has disturbing implications for Realism.)
Intelligent fantasy extends the possibilities of depiction. Using it, we can illustrate the unconscious. We can pursue questions other than those posed in the social or psychological laboratory of realistic fiction, with its emphasis on observable behavior. Fantasy's means are, of necessity, artificial in the same way that a theater production is artificial, even in the case of a naturalistic play. Art is resemblance. When the resemblance is powerful, when the artifice is successful, something happens between stage and audience, page and reader. A pact is formed. A realm of discourse, established. A "reality" is negotiated. For me, intelligent fantasy is reality with its pockets turned inside-out. Finally, it comes down to inclination: whether one prefers to write about the inside or the outside. Obviously, I prefer the former. But I do not exclude the latter. Together, they assemble for us a world. One which may or may not be real. Certainly, the result is real enough for most purposes.
When I think of cosmology, Deron -- the extent of the universe, anti-matter, black holes, dwarf stars, dark matter -- I think then that nature is the greatest fantasist of them all.
After the histories and the operas, I wanted to write very brief texts -- a few sentences, although most of the one hundred and twenty I have written so far tend to paragraph length. In them, I express my feeling for the strangeness and mystery, the inscrutability and grotesquerie of the world. The little texts began to be written, and they seemed, in their compressed plots, sketched characters, and in their balefulness to be like fairy tales. And they were all so grim, really -- so I called them Grim Tales, which, of course, alludes to the great collector of German tales himself. Here is one:
Each morning when he woke, he found that his papers had been worked on during the night. His affairs were being put in order -- no matter how he tried to resist it, this "settling of accounts." No matter that, in desperation one night, he burnt the papers, including his last will and testament, which was now being written in a hand he did not recognize, leaving everything to his estranged wife, a woman whom he despised. Last night, having resigned himself, he took an overdose of sleeping pills, sufficient to stop his heart.
There are twentieth-century influences I ought to credit as well: Randall Jarrell, Christian Morgenstern, Henri Michaux, Russell Edson -- master of this peculiar, gothic genre. And Cortázar's Cronopios y famas! And before them, Kafka. Kafka has been important to me. Kafka from the beginning. And always, for me, there are Klee, Chagall, Miró, whose work, more than the Surrealists', has been an invitation to joy, freedom, and mystery. In their charm and sweetness, they are a powerful antidote to the forebodings of Kafka, the pessimism of Beckett, and my own habitual gloom. There is nothing wrong with charm and sweetness, is there? Not so long as you do not let yourself be fooled by them. I like film noir, and I like Fred Astaire and Busby Berkeley movies. Pasta and antipasto. Those black-and-white movies are well on the way toward abstraction -- aren't they? I think so, and in a much more engaging form than Duchamp and Man Ray's Anemic Cinema.
ELIMAE: I am delighted by the associations I see in your writing that remind me of some of the work of Borges or Marquez or even Davenport in terms of its historicality, playfulness and artistry; do you mind elaborating on the possibility of any of these associations (or the lack of them) and, perhaps, expand upon the notion by describing writers whose writing you take pleasure in for the variety of reasons you might do so?
LOCK: I have answered this question sufficiently. But let me say "yes" to Marquez and to Borges, whose productions fill me with awe. Yes, to the pleasure I take in both, although I am not conscious of having been influenced by them. Who knows? I love Borges' high intelligence, his conundrums, the image of the maze, the sense I have when I read him that there is something to be attained at the center of the maze -- a secret, hieratic knowledge. I like how he plays with ideas. And Marquez, too -- the stories, especially those I first read in the mid-1970's: The Incredible and Sad Tale of Innocent Eréndira and Her Heartless Grandmother. I discovered that -- and so Marquez -- at a significant time. I don't see their influence on my writing, but who knows in what secret ways my way of looking and my imagination may have been shaped. As for Guy Davenport's work, I did not know it until a review of his recent book (read at elimae) prompted me to buy The Jules Verne Steam Balloon. I admire it; but he has not been an influence, obviously, although there are affinities between our writing, which you have pointed out to me. I don't know how it is that his name and work escaped my attention until recently.
Do you believe, Deron, in the possibility of the truth of the expression that "ideas are in the air"? I do.
ELIMAE: You have described yourself as a writer's writer -- if I am remembering correctly -- what did you mean by that? More specifically, what are your goals for your books? How would you hope that they would be perceived? What sort of audience do you wish for them?
LOCK: At the end of the time I was writing for the stage, my plays were being read and championed but not performed. Directors, especially those who had seen The House of Correction in Los Angeles or New York, wanted to put on something of mine and lobbied theatres and producers for a couple of years. Young directors recently graduated from theater schools; veteran ones, too, like Charles Marowitz. That's when I began to write for German radio -- a venue more open to experimentation. It was the publisher of The House of Correction (my one "hit), who called me "a writers' writer."
At the time, I was displeased by the epithet -- felt it to be too limiting. But lately I have come to see in it a privilege: to be read by those whose judgments one most values is a privilege. I do not delude myself into thinking that my fiction has universal appeal, or even wide appeal. It is a minority art and is written for those, like me, with an interest in language, structure, and metaphysics. I'm not interested in having my books read by people on the train or on the beach. I am an elitist.
My experience with the book you made for me has helped to clarify my idea of an audience: to know that it has been read by Guy Davenport, Diane Williams, Dawn Raffel, Cooper Renner, Brian Evenson, and Gordon is a pleasure. I thank you for it.
ELIMAE: How do you perceive the state of the art around you? Are there contemporary writers you look to in order to gauge your effectiveness? Are there historical writers you look to for the same? Who, in this environment, other than yourself, can you look to for solace, inspiration, guidance? Does the work of anyone currently writing stun you?
LOCK: I am not well read in the work of my contemporaries, especially the most recent of them. I apologize to them, to you who are one of them; we owe each other our support. My taste is eccentric; my reading habits impulsive. And increasingly there is, for me, less time to read. If I am to write and work and do the other things required of a person with a family. I have a wife, a son and daughter. I work fulltime in an advertising agency and, at night, in a federal prison. I have taught literature and creative writing there since 1990.
Of those I have read, I point to Diane Williams, Brian Evenson, Gary Lutz, Susan Daitch, Jeanette Winterson -- authors who have written work that has struck me, in some way, as marvelous. And a little before them -- Gordon's books, Kenneth Koch's poetry, Christopher Meckel's stories, Mrozek's fantasies -- and Jamaica Kinkaid's At the Bottom of the River.
I have already shared with you those non-contemporary writers who give me solace. I will add Emily Dickinson and James Joyce, especially Dubliners. "The Dead" and Stephen Crane's "The Open Boat" -- they seem to me to be key explorations into the century's -- the last century's -- central preoccupations: absence, the emptiness of the universe. In light of this, solace may be the wrong word. But I return to them often as I do to Beckett, especially the late prose -- Ohio Impromptu, Ill Seen, Ill Said, Company. Maybe there is a degree of comfort in finding others who feel what one feels. To be less alone with oneself inside that absence.
When I'm terrified, I read in Leaves of Grass or watch Annie Hall or look at Matisse. I do not care to confront always the harsh facts of existence.
ELIMAE: The other facet of your non-writing life that I am aware of is your employment in an advertising firm. Can you tell me to what extent this experience has shaped your approach to writing, your aesthetics? Whether this form of employment has been a benefit or a hindrance, or something simply to pay the bills?
LOCK: My commercial writing has contributed nothing to my essential writing -- except, as you point out, a salary on which to live and to pay the considerable expenses of raising two children. This is no small contribution, and I am grateful to be employed. And I could not have done any of this, if it were not for my wife; she has my gratitude. My life in advertising also furnished the subject matter of The House of Correction, for this, too, I am grateful. (If anyone would like to read this play, it can be ordered from www.broadwayplaypubl.com.)
Although I am accounted a very fine copywriter, I place no importance in it. I bring technique to my assignments and little else -- techniques learned in the business and in the writing that belongs to me. When they want "classy" copy or "poetic" copy they look to me. And I give it to them. Here is an example, written to advertise a 118' yacht:
THE COLORS OF EVENING
We have known a sapphire evening in the Aegean that almost made us forget all that came before. And a night once off Ibiza that changed us forever. Java nights are plum and rose. Those in the Maldives inlaid with old ivory. Let us conceive for you a Millennium Super Yacht to the exact dimensions and colors of your imagination. The rarest of experiences are shared by only a very few.
That's good ad copy. But it is all technique and affect. It was written to sell -- not to open a new viewpoint or enlarge our experience of the world. There is poetry in it, but it is not hieratic or transcendent. You might insert the line "Java nights are plum and rose" into a poem and have something; but as it is, I cannot forget the line's ultimate intent: to sell a product. I might lay myself open to a charge of inconsistency: I claim that writing is only, at best, a distortion of what is and is, therefore, under no obligation to be other than a text -- an object apart from reality. If this is so, then is not advertising copy just such an object in that it pays no homage to reality? If it acknowledges the world at all, it is only that part where money changes hands. The ad copy, above, is about desire (my most constant subject); but it is an insidious attempt to foist the desire of my client onto the reader: the desire to have his $8 million dollars.
It is hard to be consistent when you are talking about the relationship of language and life. Language cries out to be "about life." To be taken as real. It would be easier not to be bothered by all these metafictional questions (if this is what they are), to just go ahead and tell a story. But the questions are fascinating, even if I have misunderstood everything! And if what you wish to do is tell stories, you may be better off making movies.
When I was young, I used to like to paint watercolors. I made little wiggles of red and orange paint on the water underneath the setting sun. It was pretty. The copy I write is equally empty in terms of subject -- like using a Fauré theme to sell wine or one by Aaron Copeland to sell life insurance. In the business, we call ourselves, good-naturedly, whores; and this is true (no disrespect intended to whores). I have spent twenty-six years in advertising. I wish I had done something else. I came to it by accident, was happy at the time to do it, and stayed in it too long.
One day when I can afford to give it up, I hope to teach.
ELIMAE: I remember framing a supposition of mine concerning the fruits of the Renaissance being funded largely by religious and political entities employing artisans to their intentions; to what extent, in your judgment, can this perspective be applied to the current state of advertising? Are there similarities between the two that are worth mentioning? Do you perceive any artistry in the wake of the efforts of your employment?
LOCK: If I were putting my words at the service of God or a Renaissance prince, I might be making works that transcend the immediate requirements of commerce. So far, my clients have been neither.
ELIMAE: What five books, written in your lifetime, do you most wish to have been the author of?
LOCK: I have a library of some fifteen-hundred books; I regret so large a number when it comes time to dust them. I keep thirty or so books on a shelf in another room. These have been culled from the "main stacks." They are there, ready, in case I should have to flee my creditors. They can be thrown into a suitcase and taken with me, when I go into hiding. These are the books that are most important to me. They are changing, always. I tell you this so that you will know that the five books written in the last fifty years that I most wish to have authored are provisional. My taste in literature has not changed in fifteen years, but my habit of making chance discoveries of new books can send a title back to the stacks. And it is only fair to remind you, Deron, that my experience of contemporary literature is narrow.
For what it is worth, here are my nominations: Aharon Appelfeld's Badenheim 1939, Alan Lightman's Einstein's Dreams, Bernard Pomerance's The Elephant Man, Andrzej Zaniewski's Rat, Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. And if you will allow me five more: Kenneth Koch's The Art of Love, Emmanuel Carrère's The Moustache, Gordon Lish's Zimzum, Alessandro Barico's Silk, and Boris Vian's The Empire Builders.
It is worth saying that there are books that figure prominently in our memory and in our esteem for reasons apart from their merit. They are significant because of when we read them, where we read them, or with whom we read them. Barthelme's Unspeakable Practices, Unnatural Acts, which I found, at eighteen, during one of my first visits to the university bookstore, is such a book. So is Kenneth Koch's Thank You and Other Poems. Anti-Story: an Anthology of Experimental Fiction, given to me by a friend during my freshman year, has stayed close to me. In it I read for the first time examples of narrative that were like nothing I had ever encountered. They thrilled and shocked me. It contains texts by Anderson Imbert, Edson, Landolfi, Lettau, which I could not, until a decade ago, admit to the canon of literature, although I wanted, secretly, to write things like them. I have lately been able to purchase the original texts from which these pieces were abstracted (through www.abebooks.com), and they are now core books -- works of continuing and profound influence on me.
Of equal influence and importance are paintings and sculpture.
ELIMAE: Final thoughts?
LOCK: I have dropped a lot of names, and this has only a little to do with ostentation. Much more than this is my desire to be thought of as part of a tradition. In this way, I can overcome a little my isolation. I also refer to the work of so many others to acknowledge their influence on my conscious and unconscious mind. My descent from them will never, outside of this interview, be known: I am too minor a figure. But for the record, this is the way I have come to be what I am.
I am struck by the fact that my life -- that part of it I have spent in reading -- has been lived almost entirely by accident. The things that I have read (and seen) have shaped my consciousness and unconsciousness -- have directed my own effort to make something with words. I am certain that, had I read other books and seen other art than what I have read and seen, I would have written differently -- perhaps lived a different life. I am not sure if this is a profound observation or a simple-mindedly obvious one.
I have written a good deal in thirty-four years: stories, novels, poems (including concrete), plays, film scripts -- scripts for installations and performance pieces. I have thrown most of it away. There is some work, however, that I am pleased to acknowledge. I believe it is good enough to point to at the end of my life and say to whoever may be there to listen: "I did that."
All in all, I would rather have been a painter.
(If it is fitting to dedicate a thing like this -- an outpouring, I dedicate it to my mother, my wife, to Gordon Lish, and to your own good self.)
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