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An Interview with Diane Williams |
elimae: When I read your stories I am reminded of the poems of Emily Dickinson in terms of a quality of obscureness, a rigidity or terseness of cadence, and a sensitivity to or intuition of the pulse of your subject: a sort of sense of your writing as an exoskeleton through which glimpses of the life or flesh of the animal that lives beneath it may be viewed. Are there writers to whom you look for solidarity in terms of style and substance? Diane Williams: I look for consolation, for thrill, for a text to deliver intimacy in that instant, and then in the next instant. Nightwork by Christine Schutt, just out, can do this. elimae: Do you find it difficult, or have you had occasion to have had to, justify the differences (if they exist) between the internal, writerly Diane Williams and the external socially accountable Diane Williams? Is there a gap that must be bridged or a bridge that must be concealed between a writer's external and internal circumstances? Diane Williams: I am desperate to justify why it is I am not virtuous and triumphant. There is no great enough gap to comfort me between external and internal circumstance which is why my life is fairly impossible to live. After a reading one night, several years ago, a man and a woman approached me, I thought to praise me. I thought to praise me. I hoped so. Perhaps, they looked angry. The man said angrily, "We didn't think you looked like the kind of person who would say that!" elimae: The novella, "The Stupefaction," which is the title piece of your latest collection, is the longest fiction you've published in book form. Could you discuss the process of its writing? Diane Williams: When I wrote The Stupefaction I was giddy. The labor may have been the cause of my giddiness. Nothing at that time seemed to me beside the point. elimae: When you write a story, generally, do you draw on incidents which have actual social contexts or do you begin with an impulse or thought and supply it with one? Are the first drafts of your stories as enigmatic as the final versions, or do you heighten the ambiguity as you rewrite and revise? Are terms such as ambiguity and enigma fair to use in relation to your work? Diane Williams: My methods change. I hope they do, because unprecedented methods produce unprecedented effects. Also it's true I may only think I know how I do what I do. Everything I write has a social context because inescapably I have one. Certain dramas insinuate themselves whether or not this would have been my preference. Ambiguity and enigma are unfair terms but are the intractable terms. Yes, these terms could refer to my work. elimae: There are moments in "The Stupefaction" (the novella), as there are in many examples of your writing, in which a semblance of realism gives way to the fanciful (the presence of the golden creature as symbol and character in the protagonists' lives) or moments in which the opposite occurs: well crafted semblances of the surreal give way to fragments of realism (the female protagonist steps behind a tree and urinates on her shoe). Are you as surprised by these epiphanies as a reader without benefit of knowing their creator's intentions might be? Diane Williams: Yes, I am surprised or unnerved, and then I can be grateful. elimae: The authorial information listed on the jackets of your books is very slim. The most minimal being "Diane Williams co-edits StoryQuarterly," and the most verbose adding to that statement the names of your first two books and your place of residence. How relevant to you is a sense of who the writer is biographically to the reader's understanding of the written work? Should biography in this sense be important? To what extent is the lack of information revealed about you on the jackets of your books due, simply, to a feeling of irrelevance on your part for that sort of information? Diane Williams: My ideal text would stun as the moon still stuns me, so that any one of us, of any era, of any culture, having no access to coy or to auxillary comments about it, might be overcome. elimae: The following is a list of questions you may respond to, select from, or ignore: How long have you been writing? Have you always written in the style to which we have become accustomed? If not, how did the change occur? Was it sudden or did it happen over a period of time? Do you consider your fiction to be an act of concealment or of exhibitionism? If either, would you describe how? Diane Williams: I have thought--Hey! This is exhibitionism! I feel shame, so that I wish, of course, so often, this thought would not occur to me. Texts of mine which cause me to swoon or to recoil may cause this sensation in others. I cannot predict this. elimae: "The Stupefaction" (the novella) seems to leave itself open to interpretation along a sort of weird confluence of Freudian and fairy-tale-ish lines. Does psychology influence the content of your writing? Are you ever afraid of or concerned about what people might read into what you have written? Do you have a clear sense of what a piece of your writing has achieved once you've completed it? Do you have a sense of who your audience might be? Diane Williams: Yes, I am alarmed by what people might think of me, but I have no business at all to let this interfere with my intentions. If I am not alarmed, this is more alarming.
elimae: I think of segments of the writings of writers such as Shakespeare and of Joyce as able to create a state in which the language achieves an almost religious significance, a palpability, not unlike the idea of language as sublime, in the romantic sense, possessing the power to overwhelm with its multiplicity of implications. Is it your aim, as much as you may be able to describe your aim, to allow the language of your fictions to achieve some semblance beyond which you intended, to become, in the manner of smoke and clouds, substances amplified beyond and abstracted from the particles of which they are composed? Diane Williams: Yes, yes, yes, yes, this is my aim! If you have guessed this is my aim, then your question has brought me the sort of happiness I have not had in the longest time! |
1996 © 2004 |
--From an introduction to Marianne Moore