by We Are Champion
It's rare anymore you get excited simply hearing a premise for a new book. Everything's been done before and other defeatist maxims. But on occasion you hear snatches of just what a book is about and you get that flop sweat, synapse snapping nether and neural joy. My friend, Blake Butler, attended a reading by Ben Marcus, Tao Lin, and Nicholson Baker at the Brooklyn Book Festival, and afterward gave me a rough sketch of what Marcus' new book was about. Language. Kids. Words as weapons. The words Flame Alphabet.
I'll leave the details for you to find out further down in the interview, but let me say I walked around for days screaming at strangers. Widening the mouth seemed the best reaction.
CHAMPION
As tightly packed as your prose is, and the forms as sharply cut, some of the ways in which your language works takes, and expects from the reader, some real dissociative leaps. Are these conscious expectations or are you simply putting down the language as you best hear it?
MARCUS
I don’t get much from obsessing over what a reader has to do—other than go through what I’ve written word by word—to read me. When these worries become conscious, at least for me, then something is wrong. I’m the first reader of what I write—I read it hundreds of times before I show it to anyone else—and I want the usual things: to be immersed, mystified, engaged, fascinated, emotionally implicated, held in suspense, threatened, psychologically incriminated, entertained, delighted; I need to feel that what I’m working on is worthwhile and able to pay back extensive attention. The usual stuff. If it bores me, pains me, or seems too contrived or obvious or just bad, I try to fix it. It’s a four-thousand point checklist, as with any writer, I imagine, and I keep combing through what I’ve written until I’m done. I do this for myself, for my own standards, because I don’t know how to do it for anyone else. I’m the only reader whose thoughts I have deep access to. It would all be guesswork to do this for someone else, to address someone else’s standards. In putting in this kind of labor, I guess there’s an implicit hope that I am not some super freakishly unusual reader. I’m hoping there are other readers just a little bit similar to me, and that maybe they’ll find something they enjoy. But with the exception of interviews, I really never think about this. I don’t nurse this hope explicitly, because it’s just not that actionable. To me the composition process is, after the initial drafts, anyway, about answering every misgiving, about the most fastidious attention to every detail. But first and last there has to be huge enjoyment, in the biggest sense of the word.
CHAMPION
So, since you pay such extensive attention to your own work before you send it on, who are your second readers? Specific names aren't necessary, rather are they former teachers? Former workshop members? Do you read your wife's work and vise-versa? I know at one question-and-answer she talked about how you wrote dissimilarly from each other in that she word vomited while you eked stuff out. If in fact you do read each other's work how does process relate to the editing/commenting side?
MARCUS
I don’t have a steady stable of second readers. Often it’s the editor I happen to be working with, or sometimes my agent, just to see if a piece is worth sending out. It’s never a former teacher or workshop member, but maybe that’s because I’ve been out of school for nearly twenty years. Heidi and I do read each other’s stuff, though not always. Sometimes deadlines intervene, and we are pretty sensitive about each other’s time. And yeah, usually we’d not show each other anything until we’d gone as far with it as we could. I just have trouble showing anyone anything if there are still outstanding problems I know about, and I think she’s the same way. When I show something to her, it’s usually not about finding out where the comma goes or whether something needs to be cut, but just whether or not a piece is, on the whole, fucking hopeless, just completely doomed. It guess it’s the very conception of it that I sometimes want feedback on, since execution is usually just about labor, and I feel like that’s my own responsibility.
CHAMPION
There's the intro in Notable American Women written by Michael Marcus and your work with Matthew Ritchie is called The Father Costume. Has your father actually read much of your work and what is his response to it?
MARCUS
He’s read my books and he’s very supportive. He’s a mathematician with one of those legendary liberal arts educations, back when a deep grounding in the history of literature was seen as unquestionably valuable, no matter your profession. He reads more fiction than most writers I know. When I was first writing stories, in early college, he made a few comments that indicated he felt I was drawing on him whenever I wrote a father character, no matter how fantastical the material. This was interesting to me, and funny—it’s a kind of bind that says autobiography is inevitable, deal with it (imagine Calvino’s father saying this to him about Cosmicomics)—so instead of trying to escape the inevitable, I decided to make it even more true. I took the accusation and literalized it. I wouldn’t just write about him, I’d have him write about himself, through me, making him the ‘author’ of some of my work. But that was all quite a while ago, and I’m pretty sure that neither of us believe that my fiction is a psychological battleground for me to exorcise my feelings about him.
CHAMPION
There seems to be a fixation in your work on the mouth the same way Gary Lutz seems to be overly concerned with arms. Obviously the mouth is a stem for language, but can you describe why the mouth holds so much meaning for you?
MARCUS
You sort of just answered the question. A stem for language is a good way to put it. And this doesn’t even get at breathing or eating. You could almost just ask why people themselves hold meaning for a writer. Gary’s done a lot with arms, which seems harder, but I wouldn’t say he’s ‘overly concerned.’ Can you be overly concerned? Lutz’s level of concern seems just right to me. A perfect level.
CHAMPION
Can you talk about your own workshop experiences, as conspirator not authority figure? It's been well documented that you went to Brown and learned under Robert Coover, and while Brown is known for being, for lack of a better term, more "experimental," your style is so singular and the workshop model works by community, so I wonder how well your stories went over.
MARCUS
My stories did okay. I found a lot of support at Brown. But with a few exceptions I was writing the usual dismal stuff back then, fiction destined for compost. People with real human bodies failing to get something they thought they wanted. I lacked compositional authority and those forms never released any language from me that I could care about. It wasn’t really work that was native to me. I didn’t start the pieces that went into The Age of Wire and String until my last semester, when I didn’t have a workshop. This was when I worked with Robert Coover, in a fantastic course he taught called Ancient Fictions. Mostly we read very early fiction: Gilgamesh, Genesis, etc. This was the best class I had at Brown, and it was good to work with Coover outside of a workshop setting. He was also my thesis advisor, so I showed him work for one-on-one tutorials, and he was a careful, challenging reader, but he didn’t create an insane currency out of his approval. No drama, no guru theatrics, just hard work. Before Coover I had three workshop instructors at Brown: Meredith Steinbach, Michael Ondaatje, and Edmund White. They had distinctly different approaches—each were sensitive to writing in different ways that I really appreciated—but the program was so small that it was always the same ten students in class, even as your teacher changed. You can become fairly familiar with a classmate’s response to your work, particularly after three semesters. Students generally aren’t aware when they repeat the same critique no matter whose story is under discussion. Students and teachers alike can sometimes air out a single complaint, an unwavering literary diagnosis, that simply gets refined over the years, and this can be boring to listen to. One of the things we do at Columbia is mix up the student rosters each semester, so the students get not only a new teacher, but a whole new set of peers. In other words, their critical circle has just been completely refreshed, and they will be read by a whole new set of people, exposed to different readers who will naturally care about problems that might be new to the writer. And in my experience as a teacher, workshops don’t work by community at all, at least if by community you mean consensus. I just never found that to be true. I know that’s the stereotype, but I haven’t seen it. A good workshop provides, and sustains, conflicting opinion, and the writer gets used to navigating a spectrum of responses, often contradictory. This reflects how one is read outside of school.
CHAMPION
When you talk about "lacking compositional authority" how did the turn happen for you in gaining that sense of authority? It must've happened in school, correct? Since you mentioned writing the stories that ended up being The Age of Wire and String in your last semester.
MARCUS
I actually don’t think it’s happened yet, at least in some permanent sense. It happens for little moments, then ceases to happen. Sometimes a sentence comes together in terms of pressure and acoustics, and a form of knowing or thinking becomes available, which seems to liberate things from me that I did not know I felt or thought. But I sort of hate explanations like that. They’re so abstract. Authority, to me, is about finding access to language that unlocks a shitload of sensation and cognition, an upsetting amount of it, and then form is the discipline one applies to this material, form suppresses it until the tension grows. But look, that’s really abstract too. In the end, so much of what one sits down to write is flat, contrived, received, dispiriting, willed, fake, just overtly fake. And occasionally little minutes of respite come when those terrible traits are not immediately in evidence, and off one must go trying to bring something to life before the inertia and wall of failure hit.
CHAMPION
You've talked previously about how in The Age of Wire and String you set out to tinker with sounds and sentences while in Notable American Women you tried not to write solely for the sake of language. How has your approach changed or not changed in the new novel? In the new stories?
MARCUS
My new novel, The Flame Alphabet, has a single narrator, a man telling a story about a world in which language has become toxic, an epidemic that has led to the loss of his family, and pretty much everything else. In this book it has made sense to have much more functional language, like “I went in the room and fell down the hole.” I’m not interested here in trying to reinvent the sentence every time I write it, and the narrative calls for modest, transparent language sometimes, locutions that hide in plain sight. I love the simplest language, and I love complex, syntax-bending sentences, but I don’t really care for either for their own sake. Each book is different, and I lose interest pretty quickly in things I’ve done before. To me, the conceptual things I’m attempting in this book are harder and stranger, more demanding, than in my other books. But here a simpler delivery system has seemed to be the more interesting choice. We’ll see. As to my recent stories, they vary. My next story collection has fictional essays, fictional interviews, stories with more transparent language, stories that are denser, stranger. It’s a pretty wide range.
CHAMPION
Since you say this particular novel needs a simple delivery system, how far into the process do you decide on this? Does the system come in before the micro work of the sentences? Or do the sentences create the system?
MARCUS
I’ve been thinking about this novel for a long time, but only seriously writing it for a year. I sometimes work off of the misgivings I have for my last project, among other impulses and disgusts. After Notable American Women was published I wanted to do something much different, and part of that meant a single narrator recounting a story that unfolded over a set period of time (rather than multiple narrators contributing to an episodic, prismatic work, which is a much more conceptual approach). Knowing these kinds of things, of course, does not really help. There is still the matter of voice, execution, tone, calibration of feeling, etc. Whatever I decide in the armchair might be interesting to me personally, but it’s essentially meaningless when it comes to the actual book. So there’s a lot of back and forth. The day to day writing is probably all that matters, as much as I sometimes like a chalk talk. In any case, I really did think in terms of specific limitations for this book, under the belief that useful freedom arises out of restriction.
CHAMPION
Your website has been updated with a lot of new content. You've got some really incredible drawings for The Flame Alphabet. Did you do them yourself? And if so, how do the drawings supplement your written work? Did you do drawings for your other novels? Stories?
MARCUS
I did the drawings. I haven't done any drawings for previous books, but I have done some drawing for one or two art projects. I'm still not sure how I'll incorporate these drawings into the book, but for now I've put a few of them on the site, and we'll see.
CHAMPION
Your new novel mentions kids wielding language in unruly ways. As a father, especially since both you and your wife are writers, do you think there's a different emphasis on the systems that are set-up for your kids in regards to language acculturation?
MARCUS
We don’t really experiment on our kids. It’s too tiring, and the legal boundaries rear up, don’t they? But it’s amazing to hang out with kids when they’re flexing their language muscle. Kids are so inventive and imaginative, and their subversive instinct is just naturally high, so you can roll around on the rug and make up new languages with them, which is a lot harder to do with adults.
