Rumpus: Yeah, cool. I can never even tell if it’s meant to be negative or if it’s meant to be congratulatory. Just what kind of comment it is. So, in another instance, it didn’t hit me until I saw a number of reviews that something like the tiger is actually this trope of magic realism.

Lethem: Well, the tiger is a lot of things for me, and I can’t really clear it up, or… Magic realism, you heard me sort of sigh, I’ve never identified very readily with that phrase. It describes a very particular South American movement. And the word magic, even if you just separate that bit, doesn’t seem to me like what I’m doing. I do like to put dreamlike, non-interpretable, allegorical elements into my work, to draw it into a charged, strange relationship to reality. But I don’t think of it as either magic or realism. I just don’t think that name fits. You know. The tiger connects to me to a number of things, and is also William Blake’s tiger, and Kafka has a parable about leopards breaking into a temple, and then I borrowed it, as I mention in the book, very directly from a writer named Charles Finney. He wrote a book called The Unholy City, and other places it came from may not even be completely conscious. It struck me afterwards that I was maybe teasing a little bit about Life of Pi, which is another book with a borrowed tiger. But I don’t put things in in a programmatic way. I don’t have like a—‘Oh, I’ve got this book and now I’ll put this tiger in and it will be such and such a thing.’

Rumpus: Very exotic!

Lethem: It was native to the book. It arrived when this version of New York City arrived. So I don’t have the best tools for picking it apart afterwards.

Rumpus: What’s Obstinate Dust all about? Why did you include it, and include it the way you did?

Lethem: Well, uh. There’s a gesture in this book and in my work in general. I have a tremendous interest in the impossible artworks. And you have Obstinate Dust in this book, but also the fjord, Noteless’s sculptures. And in Fortress of Solitude Abraham’s film is another one of these. And I really am drawn to endlessness and unapproachability in art in general. I guess I haven’t really committed anything that risks making that kind of total statement, but I like to watch thirteen-hour movies and read books that don’t have endings and so on. And so I’m thinking about that as a kind of gesture, in this sleepwalker’s world of Chronic City—obviously that book, along with Noteless’s sculptures, are attempts to startle people into awakeness, to do something that would actually break through. Then it’s also a joke about the way unread books can become cultural tokens, or objects of fascination and energy, and I’m thinking about obviously David Foster Wallace there. But also Samuel Delaney’s Dhalgren is sort of enfolded in that, and The Man Without Qualities is another one. But the reference to Wallace became strange, because he died while I was finishing this book. I’d already put the reference in and then it felt disturbing to me, but it didn’t seem right to take it out. It was as though I’d be erasing him in some way. So what I ended up doing was strengthening that reference. I put it in again at the end of the book to make it mean a little more, and then I felt that it would be okay. I hope it is okay.

Rumpus: I think it is. Has anybody said anything bad about it to you?

Lethem: No. But people—as much as you might imagine from the violence of Internet conversation that people will say the bad things they’re thinking—people in person never do. They might hide them on some blog, but in person they never confront you. So I don’t know.

It seems possible to think I’m dishonoring Infinite Jest, but I don’t have that in mind at all. My characters are often caustic about a lot of things, the city itself for instance, and one another, and all sorts of cultural objects; for instance just to give a silly example, the way that Chase is very harsh about Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid, the Steve Martin movie. But if anything gets into my books at all, as an overt reference or slightly disguised the way that David Foster Wallace is slightly disguised, it’s almost invariably because the thing has meaning to me, tremendous value and interest. I don’t really bother putting in anything that I dislike. So people are often thinking I’m attacking stuff that I’m actually terrifically interested in. It’s just that in conversation they sometimes get some scuff marks on them. That’s where the pleasure of handling things is. You can’t help but scuff them up a little bit.

***

Rumpus original art by André Eamiello

Pages: 1 2 3 4 5

Read the whole article on one page

Tweet

Related Posts

• Elegy and Affirmation
• Eli Horowitz Interview
• The Ecstasy of Influence
• They All Stand Up and Sing
• Chloe Caldwell, The Last City I Loved #1: New York, NY