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Pif Magazine
Pif Magazine |
RM: Some stuff is almost impossible to qualify, and "Drawer" is a good example. All I can say about it is that Esquire was running stories that had to be less than 650 words, and they asked me to do one, so I did one that was exactly 650 words, including title (although I think I messed up the number slightly when it was in galleys for the book). It was all about just taking a word and performing a sort of archeology on it, which is an exercise very central to The Black Veil, my next book. Taking words and figuring out how we use them and what they mean when we do. This tactic is consistent with the opening of Purple America, in rhythm and music. But The Black Veil, which is mostly finished, is all about the word "veil," what it means, how it gets used, why it turns up so frequently in English language prose. Like a lot of writers, I'm fascinated by trying to take words and restore them to their initial glory as really beautiful names of things. "Veil" is particularly good since it's about disclosing and concealing at the same time. I did the same thing with an essay on "cool" a couple of years back. Really dug in under the surface to see what was behind this overused word of youth culture. I don't see how this is like hypertext, especially since I was just reading one of the classics of the form, Patchwork Girl, by Shelley Jackson. I don't see any resemblance at all. Although I find the idea of hypertext very fascinating, and although I really love Shelley's work, I still don't find the actual thing that compelling. CR: Is this your first hypertext? What was your experience with this very different approach to authorial control? RM: This was the first CD-ROM hypertext novel I've read. Shelley Jackson also has a very interesting piece on the Web, and I have read other Web-based hypertexts, although some of them were multi-media. I frankly think the medium favors multi-media. But my argument has always been that for fiction, hypertext is redundant, because fiction is already reader-controlled. That's what interpretation is. So, while it appears to be a different kind of authorial control (a more vast, attenuated kind of control), it ends up, in my view, being the symbolic made actual, and not in a terribly interesting kind of way. Maybe it will improve in the future, as people work more with it. But I doubt it. There's something about old-fashioned storytelling that makes it simple, flexible, and attractive, in whichever medium. Hypertext clutters up this narrative impulse needlessly. CR: Do you think the heightened influence of technology on our lives is shaping literature in any significant way? RM: I can give some concrete examples in my own case. My tendency to italicize, which is considered one of my very individual tropes, derives from the moment I first got a word processor. I was always drawn to italics, but it was a lot harder to do on typewriters. It required extra movements (holding down the shift key while you typed, etc.) on the Selectric II, which was my pre-word-processor tool. So I suppose you could say that the flexibility of MS-Word is responsible for that, ditto that story of mine "Primary Sources," the annotated bibliography. It was made much easier to manage with the advent of word processing software. I had a discussion with friends about the cut-and-paste functions in MS-Word, with others arguing that it makes changes too easy. But I think you just have to build in reflective time between drafts to account for this. Probably the human and the technological have been married since writing was first carved into rock. The first impulse is human, and will always be, but there are tools that are required, and they are reflected in the work. Tell us what you think. Email talkback@pifmagazine.com Camille Renshaw is the Editor-in-Chief for Pif Magazine.
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