An interview with an Italian journalist. (Grammar uncorrected.)
You have done many jobs before becoming a full time writer, from groundsman in Texas to guitarist in a country western band. How these jobs influenced your writing, if they did, both in terms of self discipline and in terms of experiences to be told?
They gave me the confidence to exaggerate about my culture. If you wanted to paint an hallucenogenic, bloated portrait of, say, the ocean, it would be good to have spent some time at the bottom of it.
The stories in your first collection were all written while you were working as an engineer. Could you tell better how it happened and if switching at any time from your job to your writing has changed anything in the way you wrote?
I just stole whatever time I could. We had to bill every minute of our day, and so I would hit any particularly fat projects. I also wrote on the bus, late at night etc etc. This approach had the effect of eradicating any pretensions about having to write in a particular place or at a particular time of day, since a succession of suspicious co-workers were constantly racing into my office, trying to bust me writing anything but "Soils Sampling Results for Northeastern Air Force Base With Regard to Possible Cyanide in Soil Due to Inadvertant Cyanide Spillage During War Games." Actually, I guess there is one area of residual influence-- I find it really helpful if, when I am writing, someone periodically races into my room screaming, "Saunders, you piker, what the hell are you smiling for, are you writing another one of your so-called literary products, you skilless liberal whiner!" That really gets me going.
I read you were a student at a creative-writing program at Syracuse University. How was your relationship with Tobias Wolff, which is definitely a very realistic writer?
It was (and is) a great relationship. Toby has a great mind and a big heart, and was completely able to read my stuff and see what it could be, and counsel me accordingly. And also his work can be pretty strange, for example, "Hunters in the Snow."
You said in an interview that for a long time after you came out of Syracuse you went on trying to write realistic stuff. When you decided to move to this unseizable kind of--how may I call it?--corporate grotesque? What made you make the step?
Desperation. We'd had our second daughter and that realistic style was starting to feel like a pair of tight pants. My first book felt to me something like when you have tried and tried not to speak the truth, and then it suddenly bursts out of you.
After becoming a teacher at Syracuse, changing so strongly writing habits has in any way changed the way you write?
Not really-- I still write in short bursts.
Your style loves to play with dialogue and with euphemisms and with common verbal tics, like "like". How did you come about to this strange style, which is not something borrowed from anyone, as far as I can recognize? Why are you interested in common language defaults?
To me it seems like poetry. If we're talking that way, it must mean something. I don't know what it means, but it's not empty of meaning. And so poetry is just the purification of that verbal tendency. For example, if I mean to say: "The cat is sitting on your plate," but instead I say "It would appear, to an outside observer, that a small animal, possibly feline, has taken up residency in the vicinity of your temporary food storage receptacle, with its rear end...." -- there is a reason for that. That verbal messiness is actually an indicator of character.
A lot of your characters seem to be stuck in some kind of awful jobs. Why?
That would be the autobiographical aspect. Also that sort of life represents the end-condition of capitalism-- one extreme of capitalist existence. So I think it's worth looking at.
Why there are so many theme parks in your stories? What fascinates you in that?
Mostly I think it's because when I set something in a theme park 1) the language gets more interesting and 2) I am protected from an innate tendency to get lofty and grandiose, a la Hemingawy on Quaaludes. Once you have put a story in a theme park, you can no longer write, with a straight face, sentences like "Nick felt it pleasant to feel pleasant in the bright clear day."
The real truth is: I don't know, I just enjoy it.
A lot of your stories take inspiration from pop culture, and seem to respond to the television patterns, and devices, of narration. Am I wrong? Is that conscious?
No, that's true. I was a child who had basically no limits on TV-watching and I'm sure that narrative style comes from that. I watched literally thousands of hours, in a sort of stupor, and it probably rotted my brain.
Is the novella Pastoralia a (beautiful) failed attempt to write a novel? Why do you feel so at ease with the short story form?
I would certainly not have wept if it had been a novel, but it just wasn't. I think stories have a sort of genetic encoding, in their style, that pre-determines their length. And my approach is extreme compression, a sort of Catholic doubting-of-my-abilities that is always pushing me to eliminate the slow parts, cut to the chase, etc. The story form lends itself well to my neuroses, in other words. I am constantly being edited by an Inner Nun, who doesn't like this whole fiction business, finds it frivolous, and would like me to stop it at once and get back to doing the Stations of the Cross.
I have heard you are Buddhist. If that is true, does that have any influence on your writing?
I think I was a Buddhist before I knew anything about Buddhism, and the first place I practiced this pre-Buddhism was while writing. Writing teaches us to be open to the moment, not to assume anything or have a lot of conceptual ideas about what we're writing, it teaches us to look more deeply, be more compassionate, etc. Now that I am really practicing Buddhism, I think my writing is progressing towards openness more quickly. I recognize my sticking points more quickly, maybe?
It seems you're very appreciated among the noglobal people, and this is also true in Italy. What do you think about that? What's your position in relation to the Seattle movement?
Well, my feeling is that one first needs to work on seeing the situation in all its complexity. I don't like simple good guys and bad guys. Our corporations, our international structures of government and so on, wouldn't exist if we hadn't made them. They need to be seen, first and foremost, as externalizations of internal (mental) structures. Our corporations could not exist if they did not respond to some internal and, I would argue, universal desire for the things that corporations provide. Our current set-up is just one more attempt by human beings to be happy. This does not mean that corporations are good or inevitable, but rather that we should try to avoid objectifying "big corporations" or "money-grubbing international whores of the World Bank," because then our understandings stop short, and any solutions we come up with are inherently flawed. The more compassionate and effect thing to do is to think, like Pogo: "We have met the enemy, and he is us." With this attitude, we can begin to really understand how the world came to be in the shape that it's in, and start to change it.
Having said that, I have come to believe (to paraphrase Fitzgerald) that the mark of a writer is the ability to passionately inhabit contradictory positions -- and so I would add that I find the emerging corporate international city state to be pretty darned scary. The problem with globalization, of course, is that it privileges those who've already got their stuff, and silences everybody else, and imposes a dopey status-quo-preserving boilerplate on a world that is naturally (and beautifully) unruly and luminous. But - and this is the interesting part, to me -- that boilerplate can also be imposed by a too-easy resistance position. In other words, if, in opposing Evil #3, we become rigid and hateful and non-humorous and pedantic, we then embody Evil #4.
Above all, I'd say we should be guided by the idea that every life is precious, every being deserving of respect and integrity, and let our politics flow from there.
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