“What good is knowledge if it just floats in the air? It goes from computer to computer. It changes and grows every second of every day. But nobody actually knows anything.”
– Don DeLillo, “White Noise”
“The whole thing is a movie,” says Alan Moore. The comic-book visionary behind such epoch-changing works as “Watchmen,” “V for Vendetta” and “From Hell” is actually talking about the war in Iraq. But the statement could sum up his view of the ceaseless complexities of 21st century life, where reality TV and celebrity culture have usurped individuality, and the human body has become not much beyond more information needing to be assimilated.
Every once in a while we are horrified by a beheading (albeit one seen only on videotape) and human culture remembers that it is not much more than a vulnerable collection of flesh, bone and nerve endings. “This is what wars are; it’s not Hollywood,” Moore cautions. But ultimately we return to the womblike safety of our media universe with its push-button wars and Internet porn, where sex and death are hidden behind splashy corporate graphics.
The funny thing is that Alan Moore hates to talk about film and television, because, as he explains later in our interview, both “have a lot to answer for.” He’s not talking about how they’ve distilled his densely researched, intricate tales of socio-historical interrogation, like “From Hell” and “The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen,” into narrowcasted popcorn movies. Instead, he means the way they’ve had such an impact on human consciousness that many people were only able to articulate the horrific reality of 9/11 by comparing it to a disaster film.
Moore clearly believes that the same mechanism has foisted a deadly, unwanted and unnecessary war upon the world. “Television and movies have short-circuited reality,” he asserts. “I don’t think a lot of people are entirely clear on what is real and what is on the screen.”
Moore, now 50, has a peculiar perspective on this problem of “misrecognition” between fiction and reality — because so many of his works have seemingly anticipated or prefigured so much of what has come to pass. “V for Vendetta,” Moore’s dystopian early-1980s narrative about a future fascist Britain under siege by a notorious terrorist who was subjected to unbearable torture, echoes much of our current dilemma in the so-called war on terrorism, all the way down to the criminalization of homosexuality, the panoptic PATRIOT Act-like surveillance state and a homogeneous media that glosses over real news in favor of sensationalism.
Similarly, “Watchmen,” Moore’s groundbreaking serial that blew the comics genre wide open, unmasked our presumed comic-book heroes as nothing but a set of neuroses and psychoses in action, figures who look the other way (some in protest) as one of their own unleashes a devastating act of terror that kills half of New York’s population — ironically enough, in order to save the world from nuclear annihilation. It is the same kind of warped cost-benefit analysis that, some would argue, led to 9/11 and its resultant wars in Afghanistan, Iraq and who knows where else.
Then there is “From Hell,” a labyrinthine masterpiece of historical research, detective work and social commentary worthy of Thomas Pynchon’s “Gravity’s Rainbow” or William Burroughs’ “Naked Lunch.” Moore’s calculated tale of turn-of-the-century England — as seen through the eyes of its prostitutes, public servants and aristocrats — achieves its apotheosis in the birth of the serial killer, which Moore considers one of the 20th century’s key innovations.
There’s so much information to absorb in “From Hell” that it’s almost impossible to gather it in at one sitting. In one 38-page chapter alone, Moore’s Jack the Ripper takes his driver on a city-wide tour of London’s points of diabolical interest, connecting the bastions of secret societies, mythical and true lineages, transcendent architectures, phallic topographies and other landmarks into a pentagram shape. This allegorical voyage, which Moore says he made himself, relying on both recent and ancient maps of London, so terrifies Jack’s driver that he vomits, sick with the realization that he is connected to his culture, his history and his employer in ways he never could have conceived.
The lesson there, as Moore explains it, is that to understand the world one lives in, one has to give “coherence to … complexity, to say that it is possible to think about politics, history, mythology, architecture, murder and the rest of it all at the same time to see how it connects.” And Moore’s work is nothing if not complex. His explorations of the ways humanity deludes and condemns itself have done more to overcome the anti-comics prejudice of the American and European literary establishment than anything else in the comics genre. And he imparts a whole lot more information than Fox News or CNN.
In other words, Moore is not simply one of the finest writers in comic book history. He’s one of the world’s finest writers, period. He’s capable of illuminating postmodern culture’s disorienting information overload as well as any accepted literary genius, whether it’s Melville, Pynchon or Joyce.
When it comes to our current wars for democracy and struggles for identity, Moore has more than a few words to say about George W. Bush, Tony Blair, comics, Ronald Reagan, “Friends,” holy wars, quantum leaps and his own peculiar place in cultural history. I spoke to him by telephone from his home in England.
I find quite a few similarities between the fascist dystopia of your early work, “V for Vendetta,” and our current political situation.
Well, the one thing with writing stories about the rise of fascism is that if you wait long enough, you’ll almost certainly be proved right. Fascism is like a hydra — you can cut off its head in the Germany of the ’30s and ’40s, but it’ll still turn up on your back doorstep in a slightly altered guise. I’d agree that the current situation is particularly alarming. I tend to think that this momentum seems to have sprung up entirely from a group of largely discredited, extreme right-wingers who have been skulking in the shadows since the Ford administration and have suddenly come into the light of day surrounding George W. Bush. I think they’ve overreached themselves, at least I hope that.
And I really hope that people are not morally lazy or weak enough to elect this guy; I won’t say “again” because he wasn’t elected the first time. And it is true to say that across the world there is quite a lot of anti-America sentiment, which is different than anti-American sentiment. I think that even in the majority of Muslim countries that have been polled, nobody blames Americans — they blame George Bush and the people surrounding him. Mind you, we’ll see what happens this November, because you can have someone take over your country once and still have it be an accident. But twice? Well, that would be regrettable. [Laughs.]
When you look back at “V for Vendetta,” do you think the comparison sticks?
I heard someone recently talking to David Lloyd [the artist who illustrated "V for Vendetta"] about it, because there’s still occasional talk about a film. And he said, probably accurately, that the world is not quite ready for a terrorist hero at the moment. But yeah, “V for Vendetta” has had an annoying way of coming true ever since I wrote it in the early ’80s. Back then, I wanted something to communicate the idea of a police state quickly and efficiently, so I thought of the novel fascist idea of monitor cameras on every street corner. And the book was, of course, set in the future of 1997. But by that year — and I don’t know if Tony Blair and Jack Straw were big fans, but evidently they thought its design for future Britain was a really good one — we had cameras on every street corner along the length and breadth of the country. My general thought is that yes, it’s depressing, but not unexpected, when this stuff happens. And I do tend to think that, given the upsurge of the religious right over the last couple of decades, these are the last spasms of those dinosaur organisms.
Why do you think that?
Because they are standing in the way of history, trying to turn everything, politically and spiritually, back to a medieval vision of the world. Whereas they’re perfectly entitled to have whatever worldview they like, I would suggest that humanity is moving in a forward direction. And that any attempt to turn the clock back to a mythical, simpler, or better age would probably be about as effective as Britain’s ancient King Canute, who famously sat on his throne along the tide line and ordered the waves to go back. To be fair, he was only doing this to demonstrate the futility of expecting leaders and rulers to be able to command the forces of history and the world. But yeah, I tend to think that this conservative backlash that has been going on since the ’70s is the final spasms of a dying creature; history is not moving that way, and no matter how much people dig their heels in and assume this is the 1950s or the Middle Ages, that’s not the truth of the situation. No matter how powerful our political and religious leaders think they are, they are as dust before the immense and implacable forces of history and progress. I just hope that they don’t make too much of a mess or take too many more people down with them.
One of the other similarities between “V for Vendetta” and our current situation is that the populace is cowed by fear, to an extent, through the media, whether it’s television propaganda or electronic surveillance.
Of course. One of the reasons we singled out media in “V for Vendetta” was because it is one of the most useful tools of tyranny. We invite it into our own home every night; I’m sure that some of us think of it as a friend. That might be a horrifying notion but I’m sure there are people who think of television as perhaps one of their most intimate friends. And if the TV tells them that things in the world are a certain way, even if the evidence of their senses asserts it is not true, they’ll probably believe the television set in the end. It’s an alarming thought but we brought it upon ourselves. I mean, I think that television is one of the most diabolical — in the very best sense of the word — inventions of the past century. It has probably done more to degrade the mind and intelligence of its audience, even if they happen to be drug addicts or alcoholics; I would think that watching television has done more to limit their horizons in the long run. And it has also distorted our culture.
TV and politics have always made inevitable bedfellows, but the results have been disastrous. Look at the situation we have now. Let’s say that tomorrow someone who is a political genius were to emerge — and I’m not expecting this to happen, but say that it did. Say that a politician emerged who seemed, for once, basically competent, who seemed to be able to do their job as well as the average cab driver, comic writer or journalist. If they were the most intelligent, visionary, humane political thinker in the history of mankind, but were also fat, had some sort of blemish or something that made them less than telegenic, we would not be able to elect them. All we’re able to elect are these telegenic, photogenic crypto-Nazis. As long as they look good. I suppose it’s too early to go into my rant on Ronald Reagan? That would be tasteless.
Actually, I was going to mention him. Especially his recent sanctification by America’s television news media.
[Laughs.] Well then, OK. You’ve got Ronald Reagan — the much eulogized, recently deceased former president — who everyone seems to have forgotten was regarded as one of the most low and treacherous individuals by those in Hollywood that he sold out to the McCarthy hearings. This is someone whose response to the AIDS epidemic was probably responsible for hundreds of thousands of deaths worldwide. This is someone who created Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden, or at least set in motion the policies that would create these creatures. This was the architect of much of the world’s present misery. Why did we elect him? Because he had been in a lot of films that some quite liked. We thought him an honorable man because in his films he played a lot of honorable men. I believe there are some who believed he had an outstanding war record. Even Ronald Reagan himself talked with misty eyes about the time he liberated concentration camps, which he may have done in a movie. But Ronald Reagan was out of World War II, fortunately for him, because of ill health. So all of his memories of military service came from movies. I’ve got to say that there are probably better people to elect than film stars.
And now there’s Arnold.
What is it with California? They keep doing it! Who’s next? Is Robert Downey Jr. going to be the governor of California after Schwarzenegger? This is ridiculous. Television and movies have short-circuited reality. I don’t think a lot of people are entirely clear on what is real and what is on the screen. They will take what they perceive as qualities of fictional characters and attribute them to the actor called upon to play them, and then disastrously elect those actors to higher office. I think television and movies have a lot to answer for. It’s when they start to have an impact on our politics that we should become anxious about it. I used to joke a lot after Ronald Reagan was elected that the future probably promised a President Springsteen. Or a President T; you know, “I pity the fool!” Who knows? Unless we get our democratic system overhauled fairly urgently, there is really no telling what manner of monsters or buffoons we’ll have steering us into this still-young century.
It’s amazing how much power media can have if we let it, especially if we’re using it to supplant our political dialogue.
I guess we’ll just have to wait and see. At the start of this current conflict back in 2001 and 2002 when we were starting into Afghanistan, I said to my girlfriend — Melinda Gebbie, who’s Californian — that I believed there was a possibility George Bush could walk away from this with his political career intact. Because, and this may be a sweeping generalization, the American electorate has a somewhat shorter attention span than the English electorate. There’s a good chance that many people in the American electorate have already forgotten that Saddam Hussein had nothing to do with 9/11, that he was supposed to have weapons of mass destruction ready to deploy in 45 minutes. I think they’re going to forget that they were lied to; there’s a good chance that many of them will forget entirely who they were at war with. That may be doing a terrible injustice to the American electorate, and I hope that I am.
How about Tony Blair?
No, I don’t think so. I mean, I think that the recent savaging Labor was handed at the European Parliament election is purely attributable to Tony Blair having taken us into this war against our wishes. We despise him. He is an object of almost universal hatred. People who voted Labor feel that they’ve been misrepresented, that they’ve been made party to things that they would never in a million years have voted for if they had known that Tony Blair was going to suck up so shamelessly to the American presidency over this. No, I don’t think that we’ll be forgiving him anytime soon. I’d be very surprised if Labor wins the next election with Tony Blair at their head; the fallout from this is going to take several years, even decades; it’s going to take us a very long time to sort out the mess these clowns have made.
I was reading today that NORAD used to run simulations in the late ’90s in preparation for hijacked planes being flown into the World Trade Center. They would have been prepared; they could have sorted it all out. Except that the rules of engagement in such a situation were changed by the secretary of defense, Donald Rumsfeld. He changed them so that there suddenly wasn’t a way to cope with planes flying into the WTC. And then to basically use that terrible disaster to validate something they were going to do anyway? Rumsfeld had been talking for years about invading Iraq to safeguard U.S. oil supplies, and all of a sudden he had George Bush, a scion of the Bush dynasty and someone with unresolved issues about the way his dad had been humiliated and laughed at.
Emasculated.
Right, he wanted to show the world that you can’t laugh at a Bush. I was reading this excellent book called “American Dynasty,” that gives the whole lineage of the rotten bastards all the way back to Prescott Bush, who was dealing with the Third Reich up until 1942. I mean, it’s not that long ago! We shouldn’t forget these people, or their sons or grandsons. I tend to think that the whole tree is rotten, that’s the only conclusion I can draw. These are dynasties; they carry out the will of the family, which is old, avaricious, power-mad, arrogant. Generation after generation, they see that the family’s will is done. I’m surprised that the Bushes are doing so well over there. You people actually had a war of independence to free yourselves from a dynasty of blue-blooded Georges. I thought that was the whole idea! You were fed up with having a bunch of aristocrats named George ruling your country, but obviously it seems that you can’t get enough of it! [Laughs.]
We’re addicted to them. My chief problem is that he keeps bringing along a bunch of Bible-thumping fundamentalists who are stoking this global holy war we’ve got going on.
Well, that’s because of the alarming influence that Southern Baptists now have upon the American presidency. His language is very often cribbed from the Book of Revelation; it’s obviously very emotive for the religious fundamentalists that make up so much of his base. As far as I understand it, George W. Bush is the de facto leader of the Christian right in America. Pat Robertson kind of stood down, didn’t he? I mean, for the first time you’ve got an American president who’s also a major American religious leader. And it’s a funny kind of religion. I was noticing that Bush’s buddy Rev. Moon — in front of a number or Republican and Democratic senators he declared himself the messiah and savior of mankind.
We don’t have this terrible problem with the religious right that you have over there, and I truly have every sympathy for you. If there’s anything that makes America a laughingstock, it’s those people. America is a huge, surging, relentlessly modern country that will nevertheless send Oral Roberts millions when he tells them that if they don’t, the Lord will send him home. They’ll actually give credence to people who — in any other country of the world except perhaps some of the equally addled fundamentalist Muslim countries — would be laughed at. At the same time, since it’s a crusading religion, it’s difficult for them to accept that some might possibly reject their frankly retarded values. It’s certainly dangerous that you’ve got a president who’s playing pope to all these frightening, God-struck rednecks, which is probably a bit sweeping. But what the hell, I’m in the mood for it.
One thing I did want to mention to close out this subject is that there is no shortage of American moral outrage over the various beheadings going on in Iraq and Saudi Arabia. Such acts have enormous symbolic power, and your work, especially “Voice of the Fire,” is full of them.
Oh yeah, there are heads all the way through “Voice of the Fire.” They’re a kind of punctuation that runs through the entire book. Well, yeah, heads — they’re important. I mean, I was up visiting my youngest daughter, Amber, in college sometime last year and noticed a carved head at least above every third or fourth doorway. This is a surviving practice of the Celtic cult of the head, where you would place the real heads of your enemies above your doors as a way of usurping their power. After all, if you’ve got your enemy’s head above your door, all of their power is now yours. So I should imagine that it’s got a certain symbolic strength.
Do you find it curious that those of us in our part of the world are repelled by these visceral beheadings, but we can’t find the time to blink at the fact that we’ve already killed thousands by pushing buttons?
Yeah, because it’s remote, impersonal, and you don’t have to look your enemy in the eyes while you’re doing it. This is a thing that has come to typify much American warfare over the past 10 or 15 years, and can be explained by Sigourney Weaver’s strategy in the second “Alien” film: “Nuke ‘em from orbit.” It doesn’t matter if those black dots so far beneath you are enemy troops or a wedding party. Or your own troops, for that matter. You’re up there in the stratosphere and all you have to do is press a button, just like Super Mario. For people who have grown up on Pong and Space Invaders, it’s only a small step. And it does show that when you do finally get to the unfortunate physical aspects of warfare, like beheadings, they still have the power to shock. And the Americans do seem rather squeamish, especially with the blackout on the body bags or disabled soldiers coming home. I mean, most of the people we saw on television were gung-ho at the start of this war; surely they understand what happens in war. People do tend, for some reason, to get killed.
This is not a pillow fight.
No, it’s not. People tend to come home with bits missing, or sometimes they don’t come home at all. This is what wars are; it’s not Hollywood, not that ridiculous manipulation of Jessica Lynch, where they had soldiers shooting blanks into the air to make it look as if they were rescuing her under fire. It’s Jerry Bruckheimer warfare; they even had to dress it up to make it seem as if she was sodomized or raped by her captors. And there’s no evidence of this, she doesn’t remember it, and it seems that the people looking after her were trying to get her back to the Americans. The whole thing is a movie.
We always win our wars in the movies, and I think there are people raised on war movies who thought that was what real war was going to be like, that once the cameras stopped rolling, all the people who were killed would be able to get up and carry on with their lives. It’s a shame that we seem to need one of these things every generation just to teach a very simple lesson: War never accomplishes anything. It’s never going to look good in the history books. People are never going to look back and think, “He started a lot of wars; what a great leader he was!” That’s not the way it works. God knows how many more of these things we’re going to need before it starts to sink in.
It’s an eerie correlation to the devastating terrorist act visited upon New York in “Watchmen” — which is itself, along with other narratives, an eerie textual precedent for 9/11 — one that is ultimately preferable, for all the superheroes involved, to a full-blown nuclear war between America and the Soviet Union.
Oh yeah, I’ve heard some people who were apparently in New York during 9/11 say that it felt like the last episode of “Watchmen,” that they were expecting some giant alien jellyfish to turn up in the middle of it all. Because it all felt staged somehow.
It felt like a movie. That tended to be one of the more popular refrains about 9/11.
Yeah, that’s it. It felt like some sort of entertainment or spectacle.
Is there a kind of cultural disconnection between the image and fleshly reality? You interrogate the idea of the body in your work, especially in “Promethea,” “Watchmen” and “From Hell,” where Jack the Ripper’s dissection of prostitutes’ flesh gives him epiphanies as well as the power to transcend his own body, time and space.
Well, the body is one of our first sources of metaphor. One of the ways in which we create our language is to talk about things that are unfamiliar to us in terms of things that are familiar to us. Most of the metaphors that we use come from our own bodies. Of course, in magic, such as that I’m interested in, every part of the body has its own symbolic significance. We were talking earlier about the cult of the head. Various parts of the body, such as the sexual organs, have profound meanings in most systems and cultures. The eyes, the hands — these are all very rich in symbolism because they are so immediate to us. We all know our bodies intimately; it’s all we have and all we are. It tends to provide the easiest sort of metaphor. We talk about the face of a clock, or the foot of the stairs. The limbs of a corporation. In the case of Jack the Ripper, they tend to get our attention; same with the beheadings of those unfortunate hostages we talked about earlier. Although, with regard to those hostages — and I’ve got enormous sympathies for their families — but you don’t really hear the word “mercenaries” much these days, do you?
No, now they’re called contractors.
Oh, contractors, that’s right. I heard about these security contractors and wondered whether they’re the same guys with shaven heads and bandoliers and knives in their teeth that you’d sometimes see going around to the hot spots of the world. You know, to help out with the humanitarian effort.
To shift gears a little, my contention in this article is that it’s pretty much undisputed that you’re the heavyweight champion of comics, but that you should also be considered among the world’s literary greats, up there with Pynchon and DeLillo, because of what you do with language and narrative.
Well, thank you. That is praise indeed. I’m a huge Thomas Pynchon fan. But, I don’t know, it’s nothing that I’m really that bothered about. Over here, the literary establishment is still running, as back in the days of Jane Austen, on the novel of manners, which she more or less invented. And, of course, they’re about the social intricacies of the middle class, who were also the only people at the time who could read or afford to buy the books. They were also the people who made up the book critics. And I think that, around this time, critics were so delighted by this new form of literature mirroring their own social interactions that they decided that not only was this true literature, but this was the only thing really that could be considered true literature. So all genre fiction, anything that really wasn’t a novel of manners in one form or another, was excluded from that definition.
Do you still find that to be the case?
I recently saw a program about the history of the novel on TV over here — it was a short series and it was ridiculous. I predicted before the thing was actually shown that there would be nobody representing any form of genre fiction whatsoever — and I was, for the most part, right. They managed to get through the 18th and 19th centuries without a mention of, say, the gothic novel. Fair enough, perhaps the gothic novels weren’t as extraordinary as literature, but they also didn’t mention Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein,” which is an incredibly important book for all sorts of reasons. But I guess it has become what they would term genre fiction, so it is amongst the literary damned. My only mistake was that I said I didn’t think there would be a mention of H.G. Wells, but my girlfriend told me they did mention “The History of Mr. Polly,” which is one of the few works by Wells that I have not been able to get through. To completely ignore “The War of the Worlds,” “The Time Machine,” “The Invisible Man” and all his other work shows you the way that the literary critical establishment tends to regard even people in so-called lower literary genres. So if you are working in comics, which is considered a whole lower medium, well, let’s just say that I’m not anticipating being given the Booker Prize anytime soon — and I’m immensely glad of that.
You’re not too worried about mainstream appreciation.
No, I think that the real life in any culture happens on the margins. I’d agree with what the brilliant, divine, wonderful Angela Carter said about Booker Prize-winners; I believe she referred to them as shortlist victims, which I think pretty well sums it up. The most interesting writers are the ones that are seldom going to get anywhere within shouting distance of a literary prize because they are considered too vulgar. Take Michael Moorcock, for example, who wrote the wonderful “Mother London,” one of the most astonishing London novels ever written — and there have been a great many astonishing London novels. “Mother London” is a tour de force; it is the best thing he’s ever written, but there is no chance of Moorcock ever being given literary respectability because he has dabbled in ignored, disregarded and, some would argue, frankly juvenile comics or fantasy.
Are there other authors you feel are devalued because of the nature of their work?
Sure, people like Iain Sinclair, who is I think perhaps one of the best writers of the English language who is currently alive and working. His books are not an easy read. They’re very dense with a lot of information on a single page. Culture today predisposes us to receive our information predigested and prepackaged, and most, as a rule, tend to shy away from anything which hasn’t been simplified to the level where anyone could understand it. That is not the job of an artist or a creator, yet all too often in the mainstream you’ll find that is what people are doing in order to remain popular. They know their audience, and they know if they push the right buttons in the right order that they can create another bestseller or whatever. I’m very content with this kind of strange, underground ghetto that I’ve been shunted into. It’s a wonderful place and you meet a much nicer class of people.
Have you been thrown into that same ghetto in America? It seems that the American literary establishment is at least a bit more free-form and chaotic.
It’s a lot looser in America, although I’m sure you still have a literary establishment. It may be a lot less snooty than over here, although I bet you there are still a good portion of readers and critics who tend to think that American letters begins and ends with Henry James. There are probably strands of snobbishness that exist in American letters just the same as in their English equivalent. I’m kind of an anomaly, but I’m treated very nicely. That’s because there’s only one of me, so there’s no danger of me reproducing and ruining the neighborhood! [Laughs.] I don’t really fit into any category, so I am more or less left to my own devices, which is exactly how I want it. I don’t think there is a great deal of difference between the American and European response. They are probably both more vociferous than the British response. Not to say that I don’t get a fair amount of attention here in Britain, but perhaps the British see me as less exotic than the people across the water.
One of the things about your work that is so striking is that it is utterly dense with information, history, myth and legend. You pack more political and social history into one comic like “From Hell,” for example, than we’re likely to find in an actual history book.
I’m trying to produce work adequate to my times, and one of the things which makes our current times stand out is that we are saturated with information. Yes, there will be — especially in my longer works like “From Hell” — complex layering of levels of symbol, information and narrative. But that’s my experience of being an inhabitant of the late 20th and early 21st centuries. All of us have an astounding amount of information in our heads. Hence the rise of the trivia quiz, where we’ve actually got a brief opportunity to download some of this useless junk our craniums are crammed with! [Laughs.] If we look back a few generations to perhaps our great-grandparents, we’ve got a very different world in terms of its information content. You have a world where the people’s heads were more than likely filled with the details of their own lives. I know that sounds completely unlikely from our cultural standpoint, where our heads are filled with the doings of Joey, Chandler, Ross, Fabian, whoever the other ones are, I can’t remember.
Sacrilege!
How quickly we forget! [Laughs.] But, yeah, people’s heads are stuffed with a fantastic amount of information, and I think all too often they cannot assimilate, digest or connect up that incredible amount of data into a coherent worldview. And I like to think that if my work is complex, it’s because we live in a complex world. What I’m trying to do is give a bit of coherence to that complexity, to say that it is possible to think about politics, history, mythology, architecture, murder and the rest of it all at the same time to see how it connects.
With reference to my interest over the last 10 years in magic, one of the most useful formulas in alchemy, specifically, is “solve et coagula,” where “solve” is the act of dissolving something, where we take something apart and study how it works — what in our modern terms would be called analysis. In a scientific framework, it would be called reductionism. The other part of the formula is “coagula,” which is synthesis rather than analysis, holism rather than reductionism, the act of putting something back together in a hopefully improved form. Once you take the watch to pieces and see what was making it run slow, you put it back together and hopefully it works better.
I’d say that we’ve had an awful lot of “solve” in our culture, but far too little “coagula.” There are people who seem daunted by the complexity of our culture to the point that they’ll shy away from it rather than try to put those thousands of jigsaw pieces together into some sort of useful, coherent picture. Which is not to say that everybody is like that. You mentioned Thomas Pynchon earlier, and he would be one of my primary inspirations for that worldview. Reading “Gravity’s Rainbow” first alerted me to the fact that yes, you could work with this sort of complexity and richness. Pynchon was an authentic 20th century voice adequate to his time; the same with writers like James Joyce and Iain Sinclair.
Writers who have not shied away from the complexities of the world.
Right, and I’ve tried to do the same in my work. Connection is very useful; intelligence does not depend on the amount of neurons we have in our brains, it depends on the amount of connections they can make between them. So this suggests that having a multitude of information stored somewhere in your memory is not necessarily a great deal of use; you need to be able to connect this information into some sort of usable palette. I think my work tries to achieve that. It’s a reflection of the immense complexity of the times we’re living in. I think that complexity is one of the major issues of the 20th and 21st centuries. If you look at our environmental and political problems, what is underlying each is simply the increased complexity of our times. We have much more information, and therefore we are much more complex as individuals and as a society. And that complexity is mounting because our levels of information are mounting.
Information is the 21st century’s primary currency, it seems.
Information is funny stuff. In some of the science magazines I read, I’ve found it described as an actual substance that underlies the entirety of existence, as something that is more fundamental than the four fundamental physical forces: gravity, electromagnetism and the two nuclear forces. I think they’ve referred to it as a super-weird substance. Now, obviously, information shapes and determines our lives and the way we live them, yet it is completely invisible and undetectable. It has no actual form; you can only see its effects. Information is a kind of heat. I would suggest that as our society accumulates information, from its hunter-gatherer origins to the complexities of our present day, it raises the cultural temperature.
I feel that we may be approaching a cultural boiling point. I’m not saying this is a good thing or a bad thing; I really don’t know because I can’t imagine it, quite frankly. But I think we may be approaching the point at which the amount of information we are taking becomes exponential, and I’m not entirely certain what kind of human culture will exist beyond that point. Except it will happen sooner than we expect, and the difference between us and the kind of people that will exist after such an event will be vastly different than the difference between us and the hunter-gatherer society we’ve evolved from.
You’re saying we might not be able to recognize human beings of the future that well.
Yeah, it could be a quantum leap, a sudden, massive and unprecedented leap. Boiling point is a good analogy, because what you have before that stage is water. What you have after it is something that does not behave at all like water; it’s a completely different substance altogether. And that’s what I see looming for society — and it’s probably necessary, probably inevitable, probably scary. That’s my prognosis. I suppose, as an artist, one of the obligations upon my work is to try and prepare people for the more complex world, to try and make it more palatable and accessible to them and not quite so frightening. That would seem to be a worthy goal, illuminating reality.
That’s the “coagula” part of the formula. Synthesizing the future.
Yeah, that’s it. If you can find a new synthesis, as I try to do in my work, you can help people find new ways of seeing, thinking and dealing with the times in which they find themselves. That’s my intention. Whether or not I’ve succeeded is up to the readers.
Over three decades, Alison Bechdel’s comics have grown increasingly intimate. Her alt-weekly strip, “Dykes to Watch Out For,” was as emotionally true as it was funny and shrewd, but as with other great political cartoons of the era, like “Bloom County” and “Doonesbury,” the travails of its cast — a gay-community ensemble whose lives Bechdel chronicled from the Reagan era through the first anxious decade of a new century — only hinted at the life of the artist herself.
Her own personality burst out more explicitly in 2006 with the appearance of “Fun Home,” a masterful graphic memoir about her relationship with her clever, exacting and very closeted father, who taught school and ran a funeral home simultaneously, and whose death under mysterious circumstances raised the possibility of suicide. Critics justly heaped acclaim on “Fun Home,” praising its intricate narrative architecture and honest, despairing voice. In reconstructing her path from girlhood to womanhood, from nervous young diarist to nervous young artist, Bechdel overturned many of her family’s myths, and a host of broader cultural ones.
Her new book, “Are You My Mother?,” is even more personal, restless and reflective, a wry, self-interrogating look at her relationship with her mother, and the ways that relationship has fed — and obstructed — Bechdel’s own work. Like Roland Barthes’ “Mourning Diary,” it’s a gorgeous meditation on the lack of a mother’s love, one that keeps shuddering over a catastrophe that has already occurred; but whereas Barthes’ notes came into being in the months following his mother’s funeral, Bechdel wrote and is publishing her book while her mother is still alive. “The secret subversive goal of my work,” she has said, “is to show that women, not just lesbians, are regular human beings.” I spoke with the author by phone earlier this month about that project, and about her book and the fraught relationship it documents. The following is an edited transcript of our conversation.
The Barnes & Noble Review: You wrote ”Fun Home” looking back on your relationship with your dad, but you were constantly talking to your mom while you wrote this book. And she was a somewhat grudging subject. Was this one harder?
Alison Bechdel: Yes, as I learned during the research for ”Are You My Mother?,” and also instinctively from my experience being a human, mothers are just more difficult than fathers. It’s a much more fraught and complex relationship for everyone whether you’re male or female because this is someone who you’re physically a part of. And so it became very confounding for me, trying to sort that out. The psychoanalyst who I write a lot about in the book, Winnicott, wrote that the mother must be dismantled whereas the father can be murdered. And I feel like somehow I murdered my dad, and that was really a walk in the park. That was so much easier than dismantling my mother.
BNR: You were talking to her all the time, transcribing your conversations with her, and you had all these letters and diaries, and really precise memories, and then all of your reading, of Winnicott and Virginia Woolf and ”The Drama of the Gifted Child.” It must have been a lot to wrangle.
AB: It was, especially the Winnicott stuff. I kind of had to give myself a tutorial on psychoanalysis, which really took me a couple of years — you know, learning that language and getting a handle on it, just a slim grasp of the body of Winnicott’s ideas. That was a big project, but a kind of enjoyable procrastination too, because I couldn’t quite face what I was going to have to do.
BNR: But Winnicott ends up being, in a way, a character in the book.
AB: That was a real breakthrough for me, the moment that happened. When I began, I guess I realized it could be possible to introduce Winnicott as a character but I felt very firmly that I wasn’t going to do that, that somehow it was not in the scope of what I was doing. But then he somehow sort of insisted. That was soon after I ruled out the first name of the book and started over. Virginia Woolf and Donald Winnicott appeared in my mind crossing paths one day in London and that started me out in a new direction.
BNR: I love the way their experiences live alongside and reflect yours — your relationship with your mom, your romantic relationships, your psychoanalysis.
AB: I don’t know how this book is going to go over. I don’t know how many people are interested in psychoanalysis. I feel like most people are impatient with it.
BNR: Did you happen to see Maria Bustillos’ piece for “The Awl” about going to David Foster Wallace’s archives at the Ransom Center and looking through his self-help books?
AB: Oh God, no. I’m looking it up now. The first page I Googled has an image of ”The Drama of the Gifted Child” on it.
BNR: He wrote notes in it about his relationship with his mom, and that piece cycled around and around the Internet. ”The Drama of the Gifted Child” has a huge readership among people who are interested in literature and ideas.
AB: The interesting thing about that book is, it’s really intended for other analysts. It’s not meant for a lay audience, really. I mean it wasn’t directed toward that audience, though that’s the audience it found. But I just want to say, I’m relieved I didn’t see that. I feel like it would’ve distracted me from what I was doing.
BNR: One thing you highlight beautifully in ”Are You My Mother?” is that writers have the same problem analysts do: They compulsively analyze people. Would you say that your mom shares that tendency?
AB: Yeah, I would say she has a really keen kind of psychological insight into other people and their motivations.
BNR: Is it hard to talk about this, knowing that she might read the interviews?
AB: You know, I can’t even think about that. Whenever I do interviews I just have to assume that she’s not going to see them. She really is not interested to that extent, and I’m pretty sure she doesn’t seek stuff out online. So I think I’m just going to tell myself that she’s not going to see this interview.
BNR: OK, then, gloves off! One thing that makes her such a fascinating character is that you can’t tell — I can’t tell — whether she’s being intentionally undermining or just applying the same critical lens to your work that she uses to judge the rest of the world.
AB: I think it’s the latter, but I always have to deal with the former. You know, when she makes these comments about other writers or other cartoonists and seems to be comparing me to them, my first feeling is always that I’m coming up short and she’s criticizing me, trying to humiliate me. But I don’t think she’s really trying to do that.
BNR: That tension absolutely comes across. You transmit it so well, I found myself squirming. But I came to like her more and more as the book went along. Especially when you ask her to tell you the first thing she can think of that she learned from her mother, and she says she learned that boys are more important than girls.
AB: That was a really pivotal moment. My first therapist told me to do that, thinking it would yield some useful information, and it did. That was like the key to my childhood. I also want to say, I genuinely like my mother in a way that I don’t think a lot of my friends do. They love their mothers, they’re close to their mothers, but I don’t know if they genuinely enjoy their mothers’ company in the way that I do. Sometimes she drives me crazy, but she can also seem completely delightful. I can have serious conversations about writing with my mother, which I think is kind of amazing. I’m also still scared of her, so that was the biggest thing I had to grapple with in the book and don’t know if I succeeded. I don’t know if I really took her on in a way that if I were completely honest I would have. Because I’m still afraid of her.
BNR: She is formidable. But then at times she would play with you and make stories with you.
AB: One of my earliest, most powerful memories of my mother is playing this game where I would be a crippled child like the kids I would see at the orthopedic wing of the hospital when I would go to get my fallen arches checked up on. I was just fascinated with these children, with their external signs of disability, their crutches and braces and big shoes. There was something about that that I needed to reenact, and my mother entered into that imaginary space so willingly with me and in such an encouraging way. Even though I knew there was something weird about having this fantasy about disabled children, she didn’t censor it. She encouraged me to go with it, and I feel like she probably did that with me in lots of imaginary games as a kid but for some reason this is the one that I remember the most vividly. And I speculate in the book that it’s because it was a fantasy that she shared to a certain extent as well.
BNR: And when your OCD was making it really difficult to keep the diary, your mom would write down your entries. I remember that from ”Fun Home,” too, and both times it gave me chills. The devotion implicit in it.
AB: Oh my God, that was another pivotal moment. She would sit there and write down everything I said. It was amazing. It also becomes weirdly this template for my relationship later with therapists, other women who would sit there and take down notes on what I was saying.
BNR: Yes! What’s it like to go back and look at those journals now? Those diaries where she wrote the entries for you?
AB: It’s really powerful. I’m at the University of Chicago right now, teaching a class. I moved out here for a couple months, and part of what I’m doing is putting up an exhibit of my work in a space on campus. One of the things that I wanted to show was the way I used all these different archival references in my work.
And so I took a section from ”Fun Home,” a section where my mother starts writing in my diary near the end of Chapter 5. There’s this accident and these people are killed, one of them’s a young boy, and they’re all at our family funeral home, all the bodies. On the wall, along with the printed pages from the book, I show the topographical map of my hometown, the big coloring book page from the ”Wind in the Willows” coloring book when I was a kid. And also I scanned my childhood diary, first the spread of the week before this terrible accident when my OCD was reaching a crescendo and there’s just this childish handwriting with these big squiggles and blocks all over it, and the following week — the next thread — is my mother’s tidy handwriting. It’s still my language but her writing. I think it’s such a visual and striking image of this moment of transmission or connection with her. It’s still, you know, really arm’s length. It’s this intellectual exercise. That’s as much as I got, and that’s what I will take.
BNR: She was giving the gift she knew how to give you. It’s a striking counterpoint to her early days as a mother when she’s trying to breastfeed you and can’t, and the doctor tells her she’s not a good cow, which is (laughing) just awful.
AB (laughing): I know, he really said that.
BNR: But then the journals, the storytelling, was just something she could so naturally share with you.
AB: But what she did is a double-edged sword. Yes, she was teaching me to write, but this cathexis, for lack of a better word, around the diary entries, I feel like that’s what made me want to write memoir. That’s what makes nonfiction so vital for me. That she taught me to write about my particular life, but she doesn’t like that I do that. She really wishes that I were a fiction writer.
BNR: Right, which is…
AB: Like you.
BNR: Well, I’ve written plenty of nonfiction stuff about my mother. A lot of it seems, now that I’m older, not very generous. I was filled with rage toward her when I was younger, and now I feel much more love and empathy. Your work is vastly more mature and more nuanced.
AB: I wonder how much the empathy you’re feeling now is a result of the fact that you wrote about her, you know? Would you be able to feel that if you hadn’t done that writing?
BNR: That’s a good question. Do you think writing ”Fun Home ”and ”Are You My Mother? ”helped you move beyond and change some of your own feelings?
AB: I totally do. That’s why I do it, and it feels so fraught to talk about this because writing is not supposed to be therapeutic. A sort of analogy has occurred to me. People ask me, was writing “Fun Home” therapeutic? And I feel like, yes it was, but that’s kind of like asking somebody if swimming the English Channel was a good workout for them. That’s not why they did it — “of course “it was a good workout. Both of these books have entailed transformative processes. You can’t engineer or will yourself to undergo a transformation, but that’s what both of these books have involved. I kind of set out on a journey, and I know that that’s what I have to do, and it’s sort of a high-wire act in that respect. Especially with this book about my mother, when I had a book deal for it, I couldn’t really promise that I was going to figure this out in three years or whatever my initial contract was for. And in fact I didn’t; it took me a lot longer.
BNR: How long did it take?
AB: Six years, almost as long as ”Fun Home.” “Fun Home” was a seven-year project, but I was also writing my comic strip for that time, and with ”Are You My Mother?,” for two years of that I was writing the comic strip, and then for the next four years all I was doing was writing this book. It’s kind of crazy.
BNR: But the work shows. And your process is so painstaking. You’ll take photographs of yourself in various positions and then translate them into drawings.
AB: Yeah. That’s really crazy, I do that for every figure in the book.
BNR: One of your therapists advanced this theory, and it dovetails with some of Winnicott’s ideas and ”The Drama of the Gifted Child,” that in encouraging your diary to the extent she did, your mother was teaching you to be the repository of all of the emotions that your family couldn’t process. And so in addition to predisposing you to the memoir form by helping you write your diary, your mom was also — if that’s true — making it fraught for you.
AB: Yes. Very much. Interestingly, my father too, I feel, was complicit in the diary thing, because he’s the one who physically started me off writing in a diary. My very first entry, he wrote the first sentence or began the first sentence, “Dad is reading ‘The Trumpet of the Swan.’” Both of my parents sort of ceremonially made me the, I don’t know, repository for all of this emotional anguish.
BNR: They really liked the idea of their daughter taking on that role. I guess it’s typical to give a girl a diary — to hope that she’ll write secrets in it and use the little key that comes with it.
AB: You know, that’s so interesting. I didn’t address at all the archetypically feminine role that the diaries have, but that’s so much a part of the story too. Why is that? We don’t give boys diaries.
BNR: I laughed out loud when your mom says, after reading an early draft of the book, “You must have a pretty good memory.”
AB: Yeah, I don’t quite know how to take that.
BNR: But then she also seems pleased. She says that it coheres and there are clear themes, and it’s a meta book, which goes back to what you were saying about being able to talk with your mother about stories and about literature at a really high level.
AB: I feel like she’s at a higher level than I am. She thought of it as a meta book; I hadn’t even been thinking of it in that way. So you know, she’s actually much more well-read than I am, much more up on what’s happening in literature at this moment.
BNR: Well, as someone who spends a lot of time reading opinions about books online, I’m not really sure for a writer that that’s a good thing.
AB: In my mother’s case I wonder too if she’s so — she’s following the state of criticism so closely that she can’t write because she feels so scrutinized.
BNR: To have the level of critical acumen that she has and to have the very precise ideas that she seems to have about what stories should be and the best way to tell them — for many people, that’s death to more creative kinds of writing.
AB: As I worked on this project about her, my image of who she could have been or what she could have been kept morphing. At first I thought, oh, my mother was a frustrated poet. Then I saw more of her frustrated actress part, and in the end I feel like it’s really her frustrated critic part that is maybe the most… maybe that’s who she really would have been. Like when she says she wishes she could’ve been Helen Vendler.
BNR: And how your dad had her read books for him and help him write his papers.
AB: She should’ve been an academic, I think. She did teach high school English, but I think she could’ve gotten a PhD and been a really kick-ass poetry professor.
BNR: You write early in ”Are You My Mother?”: ”My foremost difficulty is the extent to which I have internalized my mother’s critical faculties.” Apart from all your second-guessing of your writing itself, I’ve noticed that you’re really hard on yourself for using a font based on your handwriting to letter your frames.
AB: I do feel guilty about it, like it’s somehow cheating to use a digital font, and to not actually hand-letter my work. But at the same time, I have these lengthy passages of quotations from Winnicott or from Virginia Woolf that I have obsessively hand-lettered.
BNR: So interesting: the parts that aren’t your language.
AB: Yeah. In fact those things are treated as drawings in the book, even though they’re text. I frame them as a drawing and often overlay them with my digital narration. It’s almost like I’m giving those words more attention than my own words, but not really.
BNR: I’m so interested in — and ignorant of — the mechanics of putting together graphic novels. Were all of the quotes from other writers treated as drawings, or the longer ones?
AB: Pretty much all of them. I mean, there are very short things that are just half a sentence that I might have quoted in my own narration, but most of them are actually copied from the original text where I read them. Part of it was trying to replicate my own experience as a reader. Well, not replicate but transmit. To get people to read kind of through my eyes. In my early drafts the quotations went on a lot longer. My editor really pushed me to cut them down.
BNR: How was that, working with an editor and showing her the book in stages?
AB: I had an amazing connection with my editor about this book. She’s the same editor I had for ”Fun Home,” which seems like a great gift in this era, to have that kind of continuity with a publisher. Let’s go back to the question of how I actually do the book. I do write first, but my writing is very drawing-based. I actually write in a drawing application, in Adobe Illustrator. So I’m not just writing in a word processing program, I’m creating these panels on the page and I create little text boxes for the narration or dialogue and I’m able to move that stuff all around. I’m thinking about the page as a two-dimensional field as I write, which feels to me like a kind of drawing even though I’m not drawing with a pencil or not drawing much. I will do occasional sketches. So that takes a really, really long time and that’s how I get the whole story mapped out. If you saw the pages at that point, it would be just blank boxes with the text and the dialogue, with the narration and the dialogue and maybe a few images dragged in here and there.
BNR: Is that what your mom had seen when she said that she couldn’t imagine how you were going to draw it all?
AB: Yeah. It was hard for her to read that, and it’s hard for anyone to. It doesn’t make sense unless you’re really comics literate, and my editor is somehow able to see how that stuff is working without the pictures, and then proceed to edit me the way she would edit any book. I’ve never really talked with other cartoonists about how they work with their editors. It’s hard for me to imagine Chris Ware or Joe Sacco being edited at all. I feel like drawing is more primary in their work somehow. Maybe not. I don’t know if they work with editors, but I just somehow imagine that they don’t, but who knows.
BNR: Your work feels more literary to me than a lot of graphic novelists’.
AB: Well, you know… I’m sorry to use this word in this way, but I think I probably do privilege the writing more than the drawing. I mean the drawing I do work very hard at, but it’s a little more in service of the writing than vice versa, and I think that mix varies a lot for different cartoonists.
BNR: Your visuals are wonderful, but I always feel very connected to the internality of your characters.
AB: You know what, Maud? I feel like cartooning for me has been like a way to be a crypto-writer. I couldn’t ever say I wanted to be a writer because my mother was a writer, and even now I’ve had to find this alternative way of expressing myself as a writer. I don’t want to diminish the drawing. I think it’s integral to what I do. But I’m kind of a secret writer.
BNR: Not so secret really, I hate to tell you. I was reading another interview in which you said that each of your parents had carved out and claimed huge portions of the artistic sphere. Your dad was so visual arts driven, and your mom was a writer and an actor, so you felt like cartooning was this little sliver of creative self-expression that neither of them had claimed.
AB: Yeah.
BNR: When I read about your font, I had the image of you sitting there trying to decide which –
AB: Actually, I basically did that. This guy had me write five or six versions of each letter, and then he kind of averaged them out.
BNR: Does it help with the niggly copyediting problems — “its/it’s” and whatnot — that pedants like me notice in a lot of graphic novels?
AB: Yeah, it enables me to make corrections of typos or to make last-minute editing changes in a way that would be just way too onerous to do by hand. You’d have to go in and manually erase and re-draw the “it’s” and take the apostrophe out and move the space. It would take you forever; it’s insane. So I feel like I’m able to write more carefully because I’m using a digital font. A lot of cartoonists, their stuff is filled with typos. It’s part of the charm, but I feel like my kind of writing I can’t do that. I can’t live with that.
BNR: Your work is so precise and well-considered that I would imagine you’re constantly revising. Do you ever find yourself having to choose a word that will fit in the spot?
AB: Oh yeah, very much. I’m very wordy for a cartoonist. I’m always struggling against that, because the more space your words take up the less room you have for pictures. So it’s always this precarious balancing act. I will often use a word that’s shorter than the word I really want just so I can fit it into three lines instead of going to four. I can’t give you an example right now, but I do that constantly. Editing decisions based on that really minute kind of space.
BNR: So as you’re creating the panels, as you’re drawing, do you ever find yourself shortening things so that you’ll have more room to include some other object in the panel?
AB: Well, just as a general principle, I try to keep the words at an absolute minimum. What’s interesting, as I continue with the drawing process, is that I often find spots where the words become kind of vestigial because I’m conveying something in the picture that makes them redundant. I can delete the words and get these powerful moments in the story that way. There was that one section, when I’m talking about my parents and their courtship and how my mother would like go to my father’s grad school classes with him occasionally. I had a line there saying explicitly “I think my mother should have gone to grad school” or something like that. And it became very clear as I was illustrating this that that my opinion was much more powerful as an implied thing, and so I took that line out and then it came to life. Sometimes the words overdetermine it and kill the energy of the writing. I guess that’s true of any type of writing, you hope to get to the phase when you can just delete stuff and get rid of all that baggage. But in my case, a lot of the time, it’s things I’ve already done in the drawing that enable me to get rid of words.
BNR: Your mom wished you’d written ”Fun Home” as fiction, but in the end she capitulated. She read the draft and said some perceptive things about it –
AB: I feel like she hasn’t really capitulated. She has this really amazingly schizoid response to what I’m doing. On the one hand, she’s very excited about the book actually coming out. She’s sort of anxious that it do well as a book, but just like with ”Fun Home” she doesn’t want to talk about the content of the book. And she’s really — beyond those few things that you just said, like that she observed that it coheres and it’s a meta book, she really hasn’t said much to me about the substance of the book. Has said nothing to me.
BNR: Were you conscious when writing of trying to communicate something to her about your relationship, or did you try to put her reaction out of your mind?
AB: I feel like this book is at its core just a simple and quite pathetic effort to get my mother to hear me tell her that I love her. I could not possibly do that in person, I mean I’ve tried that. I’ve done that. It goes OK, but it’s never what I want. And even having done this, I don’t… you know, I’m still waiting for some kind of response from her that I’m sure I will never get. She really feels like the book is — she sees the hostility; she doesn’t see the love. And that is distressing to me.
BNR: It’s so clearly drenched in love and in longing for that kind of response from her. But part of the tragedy of the book is that she doesn’t feel like — well, like the kind of character who’s going to be able to give that sort of response.
AB: Something that really captures her sort of split response to the book is that I got a pre-pub review that talked about my “substantive yet essentially distant” relationship with my mother, and I showed her that review and she was really psyched about it. She thought it was good. It was a starred review, and she was happy about that. She did not seem the least bit fazed to hear our relationship described as “substantive yet essentially distant.” I think she would agree that’s accurate.
BNR: Have you ever heard your mother describe your relationship?
AB: No. No, I haven’t. I have no idea what she would say. I know that she talks about me to other people, like in this kind of bragging way. I know that she’s proud of me and takes some vicarious pleasure in my successes, but she doesn’t say that to me. I only gather that she says that to other people.
BNR: So other people will tell you, “Your mom is so proud of you. She told me that your new book got a starred review in Kirkus?
AB: No, actually, I feel like I overhear her at her house. If I’m visiting, I can hear her saying to her best friend on the phone or to someone else on the phone. That’s how I know she does that. It’s like she doesn’t care if I’m overhearing her or not, I’m not really part of the – she’s not factoring me in, I don’t think.
In essay collections like “The Disappointment Artist” and last year’s acclaimed “The Ecstasy of Influence,” best-selling novelist Jonathan Lethem brought his sharp critical lens and personal passion to bear on Marvel Comics, Roberto Bolaño, Bob Dylan and the John Carpenter movie “They Live.” Add to that diverse list of cultural artifacts the Talking Heads album “Fear of Music,” the subject of Lethem’s latest book, and published as part of Continuum’s 33 1/3 series of music writing.
The collision of Lethem and Talking Heads makes perfect sense. Both can’t escape being identified with New York – or, in Lethem’s case, Brooklyn – and despite working in disparate modes, each brings the formalism and precision of the high arts to popular forms. Lethem fans already know of his love of the band – composed of David Byrne (vocals and guitar), Tina Weymouth (bass), Chris Frantz (drums) and Jerry Harrison (keyboards, guitar) – from his essay “The Beards.” There, he connected his love of “Fear of Music” to the aftermath of his mother’s death from a brain tumor. “I have an obvious predisposition to handling the material of 1978 and ’79 with an exaggerated, personal intensity,” he told me. We spoke via Skype, Lethem from his office at Pomona College where he is the Roy E. Disney Professor in Creative Writing.
What drew you to Talking Heads’ music as a youth?
In 1978 I launched myself out of a very difficult Brooklyn public school and got into the High School of Music and Art, in Manhattan. It was like crossing the threshold. Suddenly I was hanging out in Harlem, trying to figure out who the cool kids were and how I could become one of them, or whether I somehow already qualified. Everyone had their band; it was pretty much like a menu: You could be into the Ramones or Cheap Trick or the Dictators. U.K. punk was this attractive signal coming in, but we had a special affinity for the New York bands. I had a friend that semester who was into Television — he was a little hipper than I was.
I was just at the right conjugation of nerdy, alienated and hyper-alert that I identified instantly with Talking Heads. They sang songs about books! I got it immediately.
In the book you call “Fear of Music” a paranoid album, and other works of art you’ve written about – some Stanley Kubrick films, and Philip K. Dick’s novels, for instance – have this bent as well. Are you a paranoid person?
Paranoia is closely related to a subject that’s right at the heart of the album: fear. Paranoia is an intellectual shading on a somatic experience, a physical reality that is fear. I experienced a lot of fear — not only my mother’s death, but I lived through a rather desperate chapter of New York’s urban history —and it shaped me. Paranoia is a kind of utilization of fear, like “Let’s pick this fear up and shine it around like a flashlight and see what I can see with it.” As it invests itself in certain kinds of artworks, like in Philip K. Dick’s novels, paranoia tends to be a mode of inquiry and exploration — a philosophical mode, really. In that sense, it was attractive to me, because it was a lot less passive than just lying there and trembling.
But I try to disentwine my inclination for conspiracy and paranoia in artwork from its general lack of not only usefulness but interest in everyday life, where it’s actually a way of shutting possibilities down.
Do you have a favorite song on “Fear of Music”? From your description of “Heaven” – “If heaven’s impossible to know, ‘Heaven’s’ hard to recollect” – that seems to be your least favorite.
I received, in a very specific way, skepticism about “Heaven.” I have a friend, John Hilgart, who was a sounding board while I worked on this book. Hilgart said, quite passingly, “I always felt on Side 2, after ‘Air,’ there’s a three-song lull. I like ‘Heaven’ in principle, but to listen to it is kind of boring.” And then he felt, and I think this would be a much more common remark, that “Animals” and “Electric Guitar” are buried on Side 2 because they’re less inspired melodically or fully realized, and bear less relistening.
I had always held the whole album on this pedestal, where, in a way, it was all exactly as good as itself. I saw it as fractal, “This album is perfect, therefore everything on it is perfect.” Besides, I had always taken “Heaven” as a sacred object — everyone knows this is one of the masterpiece songs. But when Hilgart said that it was like – click! – “Heaven” is one of those things that I listen to and tell myself I’m loving it, but it’s actually boring. I started focusing on the idea of tedium, because the song’s self-referential; it wants to be boring.
In fact, I like “Heaven” a lot. The only song I’m uncomfortable with is “Electric Guitar.” The song is crippled by its disorganized quality, and it doesn’t seem as pure conceptually, because how do you put an electric guitar up there with air, heaven, animals, mind? It doesn’t belong on that stage. Also, it’s been played live barely ever. It’s a sitting duck if you need there to be a worst song on the album, though, really, I don’t know if “Fear of Music” needs to have one.
I do know that my favorites are the two side closers. I wouldn’t want to have to choose between “Drugs” and “Memories Can’t Wait.” Those became the most rewarding songs to write about; they just got richer and richer for me. I actually made myself like them even more, which I didn’t think was possible. Of course, “Life During Wartime” is pretty good too. [laughs]
Did you find yourself liking the album more in general as a result of writing about it?
It was like having any subject before you when you’re writing a book — your own characters, your childhood, some stupid idea you made up about Tourette’s syndrome, whatever it might be that you’ve committed years of your life to — you love it and hate it a lot along the way. There were days when I felt utterly under its hobnailed boot, and there were days when I did not want to listen to “Fear of Music” again. I wrote through those feelings, of course, as you do with your contempt for all the different assignments life has given you, and I was enraptured by the end.
What’s weird is that I put it on for pleasure now. Your iTunes counts listenings, and my entire top 25 most-listened-to tracks on iTunes is all “Fear of Music” and different live versions of the songs. It was ceaseless, to the point where my wife would force me to switch to the headphones.
How did you start?
I rarely delay — and certainly proportionate to how many pages the piece was, I don’t think I’ve ever delayed starting a project as long. There are novels that I had in mind for three or four years, or even more than that before I began writing them, but those were very long novels. I took three years circling around this.
I kick-started myself in a really specific way. I accepted an invitation to the Experience Music Project Conference to be on a panel about urbanism. I said I would talk about Talking Heads’ relationship to urbanism and the evolution of their vanity as urban dwellers, starting with the “More Songs About Buildings and Food” song “Big Country,” which goes “I wouldn’t live there if you paid me,” to “Fear of Music’s” “Cities,” “I’m finding a city I’m going to check out,” and ending with “True Stories’” “People Like Us,” where they’re pretending to be hicks from Texas. I saw this as a topic I could make an interesting presentation on, but of course I was thinking, I’ll start writing about “Cities” and then I’ll have myself on the page about “Fear of Music.”
There are small traces of that presentation in the chapter on “Cities” in the book. A lot of it had to get thrown out, but at least it got me thinking about how to make something actually occur. I knew that I would write about each song directly and that I wanted to intersperse those chapters with provocative side questions about the album as a whole — I had that structure sitting there. I wrote about the commercial, the radio spot advertising “Fear of Music,” and then I wrote about the album jacket, and then I started writing about “I Zimbra.” Except that I had this weird chunk of thinking about “Cities,” which I incorporated, I wrote the book straight through as it reads.
Were there critical works or other texts that influenced your approach?
I was very conscious of the 33 1/3 books. I’ve been an eager customer, so I was thinking of some of the ones I loved best, like Franklin Bruno’s “Armed Forces,” Douglas Wolk’s James Brown book, “Live at the Apollo,” and Carl Wilson’s book on Celine Dion, “Let’s Talk About Love.” Not that I was going to ape their approaches, which are quite divergent anyway, but I write to enter into a conversation that books on shelves are having. I wanted to be a really exciting member of the 33 1/3 team, I wanted to come in with something that only I could do, but that also was recognizably a contribution to this recent but very interesting tradition.
In terms of critical writing, I followed less a specific example and more the general idea of close reading. I had written a book on the John Carpenter movie “They Live,” where I had just stared at the movie and free-associated. I wanted to do that but more so. “They Live” had a relatively high number of outside comparative texts brought in — other films, artworks and some theoretical things. With “Fear of Music” I thought, let me bring in fewer, and let me sometimes bring in none at all, let me just be with the sound of the songs and say what I’m hearing.
You write that it’s never unimportant asking what was going on in the artist’s life at the moment of creation. Let me turn that on you. Why write this book now?
How can I reconstruct or account for such a sprawling intention? I began fantasizing that I might do a 33 1/3 book before I had even agreed to do one, and “Fear of Music” was always the record that I knew I would write about. Then three years elapsed between agreeing to do it and actually starting.
I have been amazed to find myself doing so much critical and cultural writing, a lot of it being a weird mix of criticism and memoir, or covert memoir pieces pretending to be critical pieces. There’s a long evolution for me, thinking I would write fiction that was all going to be invented, and that I like to read criticism but I would never want to write it, then having it invest in the fiction itself. “Fortress of Solitude” is where that really starts, but “Chronic City” extends it. I incorporated a lot of critical impulses, cultural commentary — even things like liner notes crept into the voice of the book.
Having come into this hyper-developed critical voice without ever meaning to, I wanted to both do it service and quarantine it by writing this book. Like, you go over here and write a whole book about “Fear of Music,” then shut up. This and the “They Live” book would be both a summit and a farewell, which has to do with an intention for what I want to have happen in my fiction next, which is that I want to stop incorporating the critical voice into it in the same way.
Simultaneously, I think I’m also done with the tokens of my 14- or 15-year-old self. I can’t really imagine anything after this climax of “Fear of Music.” It’s like I finally came out of hiding, like once you show yourself you can slam the door, because the internal paparazzi are satisfied, they got their shot.
In the liner notes of “Sand in the Vaseline,” Jerry Harrison said, “There is a shared sensibility [with Talking Heads fans] that would make friendships immediate.” What’s that sensibility?
They’re pretty bookish. One of the things I thought interesting was how underwritten the songs are. They’re not wordy, really, but the sensibility is so fundamentally literary. Usually people think about Leonard Cohen or Bob Dylan or somebody recent like Craig Finn, who have these cascades of descriptions and evocations. Byrne never did that and it doesn’t seem like there was ever a phase in his songwriting career where he was even thinking to do it. But in another way I think Talking Heads are a very literary band in their fundamental stance, their ambivalence and sense of inquiry. I think even when he’s switched to nonsense lyrics there’s a spirit of inquiry that pervades all of Byrne’s best work, and “Fear of Music” is dominated by it.
Kelle Hampton, the author of the eye-opening new memoir “Bloom: Finding Beauty in the Unexpected,” left for the hospital to give birth to her second child with “everything just — perfect,” packing not only the birth music, the blankets she’d made herself, the baby’s coming-home outfit, a special nightgown and a crown for the baby’s big sister, but also hand-designed, beribboned favors to pass out to visitors. Yet the moment her newborn daughter, Nella, was placed in her arms, Hampton’s concept of perfection altered in an instant: Though ultrasounds had signaled nothing unusual, Nella was born with Down syndrome.
Hampton writes with bracing, brave honesty about her initial response to Nella’s condition — “I think I cried for seven hours straight. It was gut-wrenching pain” — and her struggle to find hope, joy and an expanse of possibilities in what first seemed to bring only sadness. As on her blog, Enjoying the Small Things, the journey Hampton records in “Bloom” becomes a call — and not only to parents — to rethink our concepts of perfection, discover our capacities for resilience, appreciate the family and friends on whom we depend and, yes, find beauty where we may not have noticed it.
We asked Hampton, via email, about “Bloom” and the experiences and impulses that inspired it. It may be typical of the author that she immediately turned the task of tackling our questions into an event worthy of celebration, writing, “I’ll put some good music on tonight, light a candle, grab a beer, and completely enjoy the process.”
The Barnes & Noble Review: One remarkable aspect of your writing is your knack for tapping into emotions, both your own and your readers’. Has motherhood — and particularly Nella’s birth — made you more connected to your emotions?
Kelle Hampton: I feel emotions very intensely. Expressing them is another story. I think we’re all conditioned to mask certain emotions because we think they won’t be accepted or they’re “too much.” Motherhood definitely compelled me to express emotions more freely. The depth of love, the fear of losing, the need to protect, the unearthly joy — it was too much for me to contain. That’s why I started writing more. And writing something I was thinking seemed more acceptable than saying it out loud. Then with Nella’s birth, there were these contrasting emotions that were so difficult to deal with — grief, fear, sadness, shame. But once I expressed them through writing and realized other women related to them, it gave me the freedom to express myself in a way I had never done before.
BNR: ”Bloom,” like your blog, uses photos and text to tell your story. Why did you choose to combine both elements?
KH: The book is a testament to my journey that first year, and writing and photography played equal parts in my healing and perspective shift. Because the book deals with Down syndrome, a condition that has many negative stereotypes, the photos are a powerful way to showcase the beauty of these children and the beauty Nella brought to our family.
BNR: Early in “Bloom” you mention a book you read shortly before Nella’s birth, Donald Miller’s “A Million Miles in a Thousand Years,” which spoke to you of “the power of challenges — how living a life of comfort does nothing to make us grow, and how hard times shape us.” But you also say you couldn’t fully grasp Miller’s message until you went through your own challenges. Can we learn life lessons from books or only from our own experiences?
KH: I’ve thought about this question a lot, especially from a parent’s perspective, because we make efforts to keep our children from pain and to give them happiness. No one wishes heartache for their child, and yet I know a lot of my happiness and contentment today comes from challenging experiences and sadness in my past. I think we can learn a lot from others’ experiences, and books give us an opportunity to do that. But life without any pain is unrealistic, and the great thing about reading books and learning from others is that when we do go through hard things, we’re more equipped to handle them and don’t feel quite so alone.
BNR: I initially assumed that, before Nella’s birth, you’d led a life without much difficulty. But then you discussed challenges you faced during childhood, in particular the breakup of your parents’ marriage when your father, a preacher, came out as gay. Did those childhood challenges help prepare you for those you’ve faced as a mother?
KH: My siblings and I talk about this a lot — the fact that we are so grateful for our past, even though it has a lot of pain, because it made us tough and definitely more compassionate. Once I started writing those chapters from my past, it really hit me how much those painful memories created a foundation for later challenges in my life. Does that mean someone who had a dreamy, heartache-free childhood is at a disadvantage for handling hard times as an adult? Not necessarily.
It’s important to me, as a mother, not to shield my children from life’s more disheartening realities but to bring awareness to them in a way that gives my children both a sense of gratitude for what they have and the motivation to bring positive change to their world. I want my girls to know that life isn’t going to be without pain, but I also want to equip them with love and confidence and a perspective that allows them to face these challenges when they come.
BNR: You learned fairly early in life to embrace difference. But still you struggled at first to embrace the ways Nella was different from the daughter you had envisioned. How has your sense of “perfection” changed since you had Nella?
KH: I’ve definitely shifted my views of perfection away from image and more to inner happiness, and that shift has taken away so much pressure and allowed me the freedom to really be myself. That, in itself, is happiness.
BNR: After Nella’s birth, your close circle of girlfriends — your “Net,” as you call them — stayed with you, giving you incredible support. What do you think is the secret to having such close female friends?
KH: I think women’s friendships get a bad rap in the media. They’re portrayed as catty, jealous and unsupportive. That saddens me because I know how amazing it is to be part of a group of women where you find love and support. I think women have high expectations for each other, and sometimes we are inclined to run or drop a friendship at the first sign of drama. I embrace my friendships with the understanding that because we are all women with fiery personalities, big dreams, and a hell of a lot of passion, some drama is inevitable.
You have to approach it with compassion and forgive mistakes, because we all make them. Of course, yes, you also need to make choices to surround yourself with people who bring out the best in you, who challenge you, who bring good energy. Those who don’t aren’t worth exhausting efforts.
Secondly, if you want close relationships with friends, you have to be vulnerable. I know how much it means to me when a friend admires me enough to call, crying, asking for help or trusting me with an intimate conversation. Likewise, I want to do the same and reach out to my friends, revealing my own vulnerabilities. My friends are great for shopping, laughing, or going out for drinks, but the best, most beautiful moments I’ve experienced with them are far more serious. And when you experience heartache with a friend at your side, it is bonding in a way that can’t be forgotten.
BNR: Do you think women can support each other in ways that men (even husbands) cannot in tough times, and particularly those involving parenting?
KH: As much I support equal rights for men and women, there are certain gifts women possess that men don’t naturally have and vice versa. Even though Nella is [Hampton's husband] Brett’s child and he, of course, was the only one who could sympathize with that personal parental loss of receiving her diagnosis, there was something so comforting that came from my friends — women who understood, in a way Brett couldn’t, the emotional aspect of the end of a pregnancy, a mother’s expectations, the ideal birth experience.
BNR: You write that you knew immediately, before anyone told you, that Nella had Down syndrome and worry that you didn’t show her enough love at that moment. We all sometimes feel a disconnect between the mother we want to be and the mother we fear we are in a particular moment. Should we even have a concept of what makes the “perfect” mother? Does that give us something to strive for, or give us only impossible standards we’ll never measure up to?
KH: I think we all have this imaginary version of the perfect mother we want to be. There is a quote I love about the fact that there is no way to be a perfect mother, but there are a million ways to be a good one. I try to focus on that, to know that when I try my best, acknowledge mistakes, follow my instincts, and remind myself of what’s most important, that is perfect parenting.
BNR: I wonder, too, about the dangers of our expectations for our kids. If we have a preconceived notion of who they should be, we may fail to appreciate them as they are. That’s a lesson you say you’ve learned. Is it something you feel is important for all mothers to learn?
KH: Yes! I’m learning it with Lainey [Hampton's elder daughter] just as much as with Nella. I’ve been challenging myself not to push Lainey to be a leader all the time. I have a preconceived notion that kids need to be leaders, not followers, and my husband recently reminded me that we do not need to tell our children to be leaders; we need to tell them to be themselves. It makes us all happier — to sit back, to lead by example, to accept what we are given, and to love our children no matter what path they choose to take in life.
BNR: Motherhood can be a touchy topic. Some of the emotions and responses you talk about in the book are bound to incite strong responses — mostly positive, but perhaps also negative. Were you afraid, writing about such personal topics, that you might be misunderstood and attacked?
KH: When I first published Nella’s birth story [on her blog], I discovered right away that being honest about touchy things is not always well received. It was good for me to read responses, even those “Oh my God, what kind of mother would say they want to run away!?” remarks. It initiated a personal process for me of challenging myself to write what’s true — in a respectful way, of course — and not to change my writing to cater to other people.
BNR: Did you ever find yourself pulling back? Or did you just write through those concerns?
KH: There were parts that I went to write and stopped to ponder the effects first. And, most always, I proceeded, hoping that people will understand this is my journey. Memoirs are personal, and not everyone is going to shake their head “yes” to every line, and that’s OK. The other side is that it has been incredibly fulfilling to read e-mails from women who have said, “Thank you for saying that. I felt it too, but didn’t want to say it, and you make me feel normal for admitting it.”
BNR: Do you worry about how your kids will respond to what you write when they’re old enough to read and understand it?
KH: What I wouldn’t do to have my own mother’s thoughts and photos and words and things that inspired her preserved from when we were little. I hope my children, through reading everything I’ve written — the good, the bad, the beautiful — will always read between the lines and be inspired by the constant truth of “Wow, she loved us. She celebrated life.”
BNR: One of the things you consider is how much you let your sense of how society perceives you shape how you feel about yourself. Was writing this book a way of shaping your own identity — and taking charge of your own narrative?
KH: I can’t begin to explain what writing this book has personally done for me. I owned every word I wrote, and as I typed it, I believed it even more. Empowerment — that’s what it is. I realize how much stronger I am, how much more effective I am in living purposefully, when I take control of how I feel about myself, my family and raising my kids, write it down, and put it out there for the world to see.
BNR: It sounds like writing is deeply therapeutic for you.
KH: There’s something mysterious and enlightening about the space I give myself when I write. It’s when I take all those loose philosophical/emotional thoughts I’ve had throughout the week and weave them together. I learn a lot about myself. I face my pain and struggles head-on, and I overcome them through the process of expressing myself. And, for me, when I write I’m going to do something? It’s even more powerful than saying it. When I write, “I’m going to rock this out,” it’s almost as if I hear the band in the background with each letter I type. I feel motivated, eager, excited. I’m inspired in a way I can’t explain. Writing is powerful — and it doesn’t cost near as much as therapy does.
BNR: Is it the same with photography?
KH: After taking pictures for a while, you begin to look at life a little differently, continually scanning landscapes, people, situations for that “framable” shot. In those first days, taking photos of Nella brought light to her beauty and made me recognize how perfect she was — the new, wrinkled skin on her fingers, those sparse rows of tiny eyelashes, her soft cowlick of silky hair. And it went beyond Nella as well. When I thought my world was this depressing reality, I’d pick up my camera and see the opposite — oh look, a sunset. Vivid blue skies. My child holding an ice cream cone with rainbow sprinkles. A dimpled smile. My husband rocking his new girl to sleep. I never stopped taking pictures of these things, and it sinks in after a while: Look for the good, and you will find it.
BNR: What are you most hoping readers will take away from “Bloom”?
KH: Life is full of challenges. But life is also as beautiful as you create it to be.
Why did Bob Dylan compose the classic “Like a Rolling Stone” only after he had become so disgusted with his own music that he was planning to quit the business permanently? How did Silicon Valley become a hub of innovation while other genius-packed cities did not? And what does the placement of a company’s bathrooms have to do with the number of innovative products it makes?
These questions –- and many more like them — are at the heart of Jonah Lehrer’s new book “Imagine: How Creativity Works.” The journalist and author of “Proust and the Neuroscientist” and “How We Decide” has taken on one of the most deceptive and beguiling problems in the science of mind, what he calls “our most important talent: the ability to imagine what has never existed.” His investigation into how we invent new things, and why some people and communities are more creative than others, takes the reader on a wide-ranging journey through the work of social scientists and neurological researchers — but also into the lives and insights of inventors and engineers, writers and salespeople, musicians and magicians, teachers and students. The result is a bracing, entertaining and counterintuitive guide to an aspect of ourselves that often seems an unsolvable mystery.
Jonah Lehrer spoke with us via email about his new book, and what he’s learned in the making of it.
The Barnes & Noble Review: One of the things that stands out in “Imagine” is how creativity is frequently misperceived, or partly misperceived, as associated with pure freedom of the mind. But in so many cases you highlight the opposite perspective — the one expressed by Milton Glaser’s words as he describes creativity as “a very time-consuming verb”: You highlight the effectiveness of the harsh group critique to enable ideas to grow, or the centrality of “grit” as a building block for a young artist to cultivate.
Jonah Lehrer: There are all sorts of romantic misconceptions about creativity. We’ve long believed, for instance, that the imagination is hindered by constraints and constructive criticism. But the scientific evidence clearly suggests that the opposite is true. We think of creativity as being an innate trait — you either have it or you don’t — when studies have consistently shown that even seemingly minor factors, such as the color of paint on the wall, can dramatically increase creative output. And then there’s the myth of effort. Because creativity has long been associated with the muses, we’ve assumed that creativity should feel easy and effortless, that if we’re truly inventive then the gods will take care of us. But nothing could be further from the truth. Instead, creativity is like any other human talent – it takes an enormous amount of effort to develop. And then, even after we’ve learned to effectively wield the imagination, we still have to invest the time and energy needed to fine-tune our creations. If it feels easy, then you’re doing it wrong.
BNR: The discussion of brainstorming is particularly counterintuitive; you point to research that indicates how “criticism and debate” — despite the former term’s association with repressive negativity — is a more fruitful model for groups working together. If brainstorming is so unsuccessful a strategy for generating innovation, why has it held on for so long?
JL: I think the allure of brainstorming is inseparable from the fact that it feels good. A group of people are put together in a room and told to free-associate, with no criticism allowed. (The imagination is meek and shy: If it’s worried about being criticized it will clam up.) Before long, the whiteboard is filled with ideas. Everybody has contributed; nobody has been criticized. Alas, the evidence suggests that the overwhelming majority of these free-associations are superficial and that most brainstorming sessions actually inhibit the productivity of the group. We become less than the sum of our parts.
As you note, researchers have shown that group collaborations benefit from debate and dissent; it is the human friction that makes the sparks. Alas, the presence of criticism means that a few people are going to get their feelings hurt. So I think one reason we’ve clung to brainstorming for decades is that it increases employee morale, even if that comes at the cost of creativity. That’s an unfortunate truth, of course, but that doesn’t make it less true. There’s a reason why Steve Jobs always insisted that new ideas required “brutal honesty.”
BNR: Much of your book explores what might be said to be the central paradox of creativity: It seems to require both resolute, disciplined focus and, in Yo-Yo Ma’s phrase, “the abandon of a child.” Is this because when we are talking about the imagination we are really talking about multiple neurological functions? Or is it that creativity is a kind of protean idea itself, that changes with the artist — one might approach everything through “getting in the flow” and another who exists in the world of endless, patient revision?
JL: One of the most dangerous myths of creativity is that it’s a single thing, separate from other kinds of cognition. In reality, however, “creativity” is a catch-all term for a variety of distinct thought processes, each of which is well suited to particular kinds of problems. And this is why different parts of the creative process require different kinds of creative thinking. For instance, a big epiphany relies on a very different set of brain structures than the editing that comes afterward. A pianist in the midst of an improvised solo is thinking very differently from an inventor tweaking a gadget, even though both are in the midst of invention. So whether we should aspire to the abandon of a child or seek out focus depends on the kind of creativity we need at that moment. There is no universal prescription for creative thinking.
This also helps explain why there are as many creative methods as there are creators. Some people smoke joints; others chug coffee. Some go for walks; others stay late at the office. Some need collaborators; others need solitude. Creativity, like most interesting things, resists easy generalizations. I wanted “Imagine” to capture this complexity, not pretend that it doesn’t exist.
BNR: Some of the most thought-provoking insights in “Imagine” describe creative methodologies that seem to aim in one direction, but actually seek to trick (or perhaps hack) the brain’s programming. For example, you describe how students of improvisation at Second City spend a brief session before each class sharing maximally intimate confessions from their lives. The point for the actors isn’t, as it might appear, to get in touch with deep emotions. Rather, it’s to simply shut off the censoring part of the brain, so that in the work that follows, ideas and associations emerge freely. Should more of us be employing these sorts of strategies?
JL: Creativity is so hard that I think we need all the help we can get. Some of the mind hacks I describe in “Imagine” come from watching the time-tested habits of successful creators, such as those comics at Second City. And other hacks come from science, from the controlled conditions of the lab. Did you know, for instance, that people solve 30 percent more insight puzzles when they’re slightly drunk? That’s my kind of empiricism.
BNR: So much of your previous book “How We Decide” described ways in which we have difficulty understanding how our brains are actually working — the “emotional brain” secretly working away inside, with our assumptions about the supremacy of the “rational brain” leading us into constant miscalculation. ”Imagine” has a similar focus on the mysteries of thought, but, perhaps in keeping with the title, the emphasis seems to be more on collaborating with the unknown parts of the self. Did you see it that way? Are your books on a continuum in your own mind?
JL: I think both books revel in the fact that so much of our wisdom — whether it’s those inexplicable hunches that lead to good decisions, or that moment of insight that comes in the shower — emerge from mental places we have no access to. This is strange, no? The mind remains a black box, even when it’s our own mind!
And this is where modern science comes in handy. All these fancy experimental tools help us peer below the surface of consciousness, illuminating those darkened corners that we’re not even aware of. As a result, we’re able to understand ourselves in a new way and hopefully squeeze a few more epiphanies from those three pounds of Jell-O inside the skull.
BNR: Although your book is largely not a prescriptive one, an idea that your last three chapters all strongly support seems to be designing ways for more “creative collisions” to occur in schools, at work and in everyday life. Over the last several years, the focus in many aspects of our culture has been on building a digital “social network.” Can this do the work of physical and conversational interaction? Do we need to spend more resources, as a culture, encouraging the power of the “emergent property of people coming together”?
JL: In the late 1990s, when the dot-com fever was at its peak, many technology enthusiasts predicted that cities and physical offices would soon become obsolete, a relic of the analog age. After all, in an online world of email and video chats, why should we sacrifice our quality of life to live amid strangers? Cheap bandwidth would mean the end of expensive rents: The zeroes and ones hurtling across the fiber optic cables would supply us with all of our human interactions.
Of course, this pessimism has not come to pass. More people than ever before are moving to cities; we still commute to skyscrapers. (One of my favorite factoids is that attendance at business conferences has doubled since the invention of Skype.) And I think the reason Skype has not killed off cities and offices is because something magical happens when we cram ourselves together. It turns out that all those random interactions add up, which is why the most innovative cities and workspaces have a way of hurling people together, forcing them to converse and share knowledge.
I’m reminded here of that great Steve Jobs story about the Pixar headquarters. When he was planning the studio in the late 1990s, he had the building arranged around a central atrium, so that the diverse staff of artists, writers and computer scientists would run into each other. But Jobs soon realized that it wasn’t enough to create an airy atrium; he needed to force people to go there. He began with the mailboxes, which he shifted to the lobby. Then he moved the meeting rooms to the center of the building, followed by the cafeteria, the coffee bar and the gift shop. Finally, he decided that the atrium should contain the only set of bathrooms in the entire building. (He was later forced to compromise and install a second pair of bathrooms.) At first, people hated this design, since it meant they were constantly schlepping to the atrium. But now lots of people have their bathroom breakthrough story, describing how some errant conversation while washing their hands led to an insight.
BNR: Has working on this topic changed the way you think, your approach to “creative” tasks? Do you work differently than you did before you started this book?
JL: It definitely has. I think the single biggest change is how I respond to a creative block. Before, when I was stuck on a piece of writing — and I’m often stuck — I’d chain myself to my desk. I’d drink strong coffee and will myself to focus until I found the answer. I assumed that the answer would only arrive if I searched for it relentlessly.
Of course, I’d often wake up the next day and realize that my “answer” was often an illusion, that I’d stayed up late to get a fix that didn’t really fix anything. And so I’d be forced to begin again.
And here’s where the science comes in handy. Now, when I’m really stuck, I think about all that research on moments of insight, which suggests that insights are far more likely to arrive when we’re relaxed, and better able to eavesdrop on the murmurs of the unconscious. Instead of staying at my desk, I go for a long walk. Einstein once declared that “creativity is the residue of time wasted.” So I guess you could say I’ve gotten much better at wasting time.
Jonathan Lethem 
Sanjay Gupta (Credit: AP/Mark Lennihan) 
