NOTHING MORE REAL THAN THE IMAGINATION
A CONVERSATION ABOUT THE CREATIVE WRITERS WITH W. D. CLARKE, PART TWO OF FIVE
“The static, the finite, and the solid had seen their day.” Henri Michaux, Major ordeals of the Mind and Countless Smaller Ones
WDC: I think we need to keep the Michaux quotation in mind when reading the phantasmagoria of chapters 2 and beyond! But let's not get too far ahead of ourselves—we need to discuss the cliche elephant in the room... that reality-piercing first chapter! Kafka would weep and laugh as convulsively as I did over it, no doubt: it felt to me like if a piece of sirloin cinema verité had been cooked at sous vide temps by a chef who was following Bertolt Brecht in lieu of a recipe:
“Methods become exhausted; stimuli no longer work. New problems appear and demand new methods. Reality changes; in order to represent it, modes of representation must also change. Nothing comes from nothing; the new comes from the old, but that is why it is new.” (Aesthetics & Politics, Verso)
I mean: in Chapter 1 (the only one primarily "on campus" as it were), for all the ludicrousness and hyperbole (as with a film like Terry Gilliam's Brazil, e.g.), I do feel like you are trying to give us "reality" in some important sense, e.g., how the bureaucrats and colleagues treat George, a mere adjunct, how they have also treated other adjuncts in the past, and what their chief concerns are/what's driving them. The fact that a Trumpian megadonor is always listening in also feels...vitally pertinent I guess, and—it feels to this reader, at least—this chapter is representing that, doing a new realism, "anarchic realism" if you will!
The Dunning-Kruger Chair for Creative Effort
The Francis Galton Chair for Epigenetics in Literature
a new major in Spiritual Entrepreneurship.
The Five Adjectives
The Donald Ewen Cameron Chair for Young Adult Literature
The Associated Writing Programs annual conference: “What You May Do and What You May Not Do: Sensitivity Readers and Desensitized Writers”
GA: What happens in Chapter One is awfully close to a report on what actually happened. For instance, the program in Spiritual Entrepreneurship was real. (I think classes are still being offered.) The Five Adjectives was also real. My Gilliamesque (yes!) hyperbole is not far-fetched. I taught my classes as George does. And my Substack is called Anarcho-Realism! The imagination is anarchic (with no controlling rules or principles to give order, but not "lawless"), while my style, if that's the right word, is anarcho- in the old Wobbly sense: no god, no boss, no hero, no dogma.
W.D. I also feel this part of George's "lecture" is also ...meant for us?
“You would think, too, wouldn’t you, that there’s nobody better to tell your story. But that is simply not true. You are not a reliable indicator of who you are and what you do. No one is. But I want you to tell me what you think it takes to be happy and succeed in life. That is the only assignment you will have for the entire semester. It must be at least a thousand words long. [...] Draw up a list, from a dictionary or TV shows, of words that attract you. We will workshop those words into sentences.”
GA: Well, "meant for us" only in this sense: imagination transforms selves and transformed selves tell transformed stories. There's no question that the lives we live are the raw material of our work, but even a rigorously controlled autobiography is transformed by imagination/ memory. And in the course of setting in motion a transformed self, we can't help but see the whole world in a different light. This different world points the way our narratives should progress, should grow and change. The comic exaggeration of "the assignment" mimics how literary imagination actually works. Fascinating words call up fascinating worlds.
WDC: "Fascinating words call up fascinating worlds [...] Anarchic ☛ Anarcho..." As in: ☛syndicalist? We readers (and students in the strict and looser senses both) participate, to the extent that we resist the offerings of the creative-industrial complex, and really let our own imaginations come into contact with the—fully alive, or at least, demonstrably attempting to be—work of another's? When I read Moby Dick or The Creative Writers, say—to me, in both cases, it seems that I am being called to break free of something...my God, can I say that it almost feels political, "of the polis"...when the imagination travels ☛ I (feel like I) commune with Melville’s "Isolatoes" and your sailor George-all-at-sea, both...the process opens up (or seems to) a helluva lotta possibilities that Romantasy and Spiritual Entrepreneurship, etc., etc. seem to shut the hell on down?
GA: Yes, that's it exactly, and thank you for rescuing "political" from the infantile propagandists who have ruined publishing, the theater, the humanities, etc., etc., with their prissy Manichaean insistence on a stark divide between right opinion and wrong. The polis needs imagination and the imagination needs a polis.
Novels have one requirement. Saul Bellow said it was "to be interesting." I take interesting to mean "an exciting or pleasurable evocation of the truth that there is more to life than we know, more, even, than we can know." "Novel" of course means "new."
WDC: Returning to something you said above about colleagues and departments and caving to fears of litigation and their own "lawless administration, “there is a passage near the end of Chapter 1 where George is having his nose rubbed in his supposed transgressions before being summarily dismissed:
“I think you’ll agree,” says the Sensitivity Trainer, “that one damaged student is more important than ten who responded enthusiastically.”
“‘Damaged student’?”
“Re-traumatization is a very serious business. There’s not a whole lot of wiggle room.”
“‘Re-traumatization’? ‘Wiggle room’? Oh wait, I see, I see: if I was a tenured prof there would in fact be wiggle room, but because I am a temp worker getting paid $3000 a semester, there is not? O, lost, the democracy of the common man! Who is damaged? What is the nature of the trauma and how was the damaged person retraumatized?”
The strings providing the ground note go up a note, then down a note, as super Yin and Super Yang produce their conducting batons and begin fencing with them. The trumpet makes its mournful cry. The woodwinds shriek in anger. Super Yin whispers something unintelligible to George, who makes a face.
“Can one of you tell me why the simple, ordinary, human solution to this problem was not pursued? One that has me being told what happened, me apologizing, several of us talking it out, all of us emerging wiser and friendlier than before?”
“Questions of legal exposure,” says Alice, “outweigh all other considerations.”
[...]
The disembodied voice of Ike Perlmutter crackles like thunder from the phone on Kenny’s desk: “QUESTIONS OF LEGAL EXPOSURE OUTWEIGH ALL OTHER CONSIDERATIONS PERIOD!”
Kenny [B. the Dean] is hyperventilating now, and mops his brow. Alice leans back in sober triumph. The late comedian Bill Hicks appears before George, like Christ, ironically, in a sinner’s hour of need. This must be what Super Yin was whispering about. Bill is very cool, beatific in fact, wearing sunglasses, a leather jacket, and smoking a cigarette. He offers one to George, who takes it. Bill lights it up for him. All anybody else can see is a smoky light around George’s head like a halo.
Bill feeds George his lines [...]
I have three questions about this passage...
(i) If (as you remind us Martin Amis says), "The novelist cowers in the boiler-room of the self, where he works in his stinking singlet, his coccyx-bearing jeans" —this kinda places him/her in an already-precarious position, giving way to the imagination like that perhaps also an always-already potentially self-degrading (!) one (at least in society's eyes—"stinking singlet/coccyx-bearing jeans"), and so he or she does seem like something of an easy target, no, for the likes of Alice and Kenny G. here, in service of the priorities of the likes of super donor Ike (of MAGA fame), as well as for the likes of his own self-destructive imagination/unconscious, which all too easily allows the likes of Bill Hicks into the room to "feed him the lines" that put paid to his teaching "career"?
GA: Yes! Giving way to the imagination is flat-out dangerous. (Just ask a schizophrenic.) That's why artists suffer: not because they're cosplaying some Romantic idea, but because they are wiggling in the grip of the dream or nightmare of "creation ex nihilo. It really is a Pandora's Box. It contains all the evils in the world, but also what is commonly called hope (which I and the Buddhists call "continuance"). Imagination is also deadly in the workplace, where the slogans call for excellence and thinking outside of the box (!) but in fact want nothing more than docile obedience. Just like the prissy queens of punctilio who fired me. I guess I can say, see my novella Peasants for more on this kind of well-paid slavery. That this kind of horseshit can be found in people nominally devoted to the literary imagination just...well, it breaks my fucking heart.
One other kind of danger: I don't think artists commit suicide more often than plumbers, but they're famous for it--in the popular imagination! And that is because, yin and yang being what they are (not the characters in the novel now, but the cosmic force of constant and eternal change), the counterpoise to creation is destruction. It can seem—other conditions encouraging it—seem like the greatest act of all. Did Ahab set out to kill Moby Dick, or to be killed by him? Likewise Melville himself, if Ishmael's "hypos" mirror the author's debilitating bouts of depression, the cure for which is to risk his life for three years?
WDC: The other two questions about that above passage are interrelated, both to each other and (I think crucially to understanding where the book is going) to Chapters 2 and beyond:
(ii) Are we already in a movie and this is the score, or only in George's head? Or...?
G.A. The reader is witnessing a dream in which the characters are also dreaming. I throw up road signs, some guidance, some warnings, and at all times strive to give the impression that there is a foundational/structural reality—but there is none. It's a burlesque. I'm making fun of reality and literary realism. All the while an adjunct prof is sitting in a campus office getting fired, infinite causes and conditions are assembling and destroying possible realities within the imaginations of reader, writer, character. It's a tumult, a descent of rapids on dangerous river.
(iii) When the comedian Bill Hicks appears to George to "feed [him] his lines" we get a partial answer to (i) above—or do we?
GA: I don't want to give the impression that I know exactly what's going on in the novel, because I don't. The most accurate or helpful thing I can say is that it is a dream. Everyday reality and everyday narrative integrity simply do not obtain. I was imagining a campus office, peopled with fictive characters, doing and saying things that seem to have everyday rhymes-and-reasons at their point of origin, but the reality of it is exactly like the reality we experience in a dream, where we accept rhymes-and-reasons that are simply impossible. We feel the impossible not only as possible but ordinary: this is how it works and we are not making decisions about it in a rational way.
When I was sitting in that dean's office, I did think, in a flash or a murmur, of Bill Hicks— probably because it was so hilariously inept and illegal. You know, they squared the pages of the supporting document I'd given them, and steepled their fingers, I dunno, prayerfully? Soberly? There was even a hint of compassion: what a crazy guy I was and now we will come to an amicable conclusion. But there was Bill Hicks in my mind, in just the way Bill Clarke is here and now. The characters in the dream-narrative sensed a presence in just the way odd things occur to us in the middle of serious business. And I dare say, the dean and department chair in the actual office sensed something too: fleeting, faint, certainly not an image of Bill Hicks, but something in my eyes and gestures that, for instance, dogs depend on and which people do, too, though they are usually unaware of it, being practical Gradgrinds or something. Pillars of Society. Men of Principle and Business.
While I, Gary Amdahl, was living in something a lot like what George Joutsen (Swan in chapter one, Joutsen—Finnish for swan—later) was living in: an imaginary world that left me defenseless. I should have demanded proper representation, should have demanded due process, should have threatened to sue them. But I didn't. It was too despicable to bear and I fled.
WDC: Which brings us back to how "Giving way to the imagination is flat-out dangerous"... I do think it is pertinent that, after that incident, by "fled" we mean that the real you went out and wrote this novel, published another, and got deep into a third, while George...well, in Chapter 2, George is now unemployed and for some reason thinks it a good idea to go visit a Hollywood producer to drum up some writing-adjacent work...In a recent column, the author John Ganz reflects upon our current punditocracy, and...
“There’s a whole racket, an industry, with a division of labor: you’ve got podcasters, you’ve got opinion writers, you’ve got the owners of the websites and platforms, that is to say, a whole vibes-industrial complex. If you are part of that and don’t just want to be a drone or an LLM, it’s part of your duty to be critical and self-reflective about what you are doing when you write. Fortunately, the aesthetic and the political coincide here for once: if you are repeating clichés you might succeed in your career, but you will fail at your vocation. But hey, we all do it, after all: we’re just journalists, not James Joyce, but we have to try to catch ourselves doing it.”
...and here is where, I think the life ends and art begins: you are pursuing your vocation (critical, self-reflective shaper-of-dream), while George trundles off to fail at his career (to "pitch" his life-experience in the navy—see question to Ch. 5 below) in the vibes industrial complex...
GA: By "fled" I mean I thought the whole affair was disgusting and I wanted to have nothing more to do with it. I had witnessed the ethical collapse of my friends! One of them was somebody who watched our pets, for Christ's sake! I watched hers, and drove her to the repair shop, etc. Friends! "Legal exposure trumps friendship." That's a quote, man. My friend actually said that to me.
This happened, by the way, in February 2018; I published my last books in 2016, wrote The Creative Writers in 2019, and published a story from a work-in-progress about Christopher Marlowe—aka Christ Merlin in most of the novel.
When I was writing CW, I did not feel I was pursuing my vocation. I was stupefied with depression/ anger. I'd published six books in ten years. Then the door was slammed. Crickets was all I heard as I debased myself with begging and pleading to agents and editors. When I lost my teaching job, there was nothing for me to do but, well...continue, not because I was "driven" but because I literally do not know how to do anything else. But yes, I admit it, the dream is one's life and one's life is the dream. I was pursuing my vocation. But if not for my wife, Leslie Brody (author of a memoir, Red Star Sister, and two bios, one of Jessica Mitford and the other of Louise Fitzhugh), I would absolutely have pursued my vocation into an early grave. (Early is a relative term.)
Here, though, is another way to understand the novel: it began as a document of descriptive defense; then an essay that James Fallows showed to Conor Friedersdorf at The Atlantic (Fallows is a Redlands native, and was at that time on the UR board of trustees). I also showed it to Joanna Biggs, then at London Review of Books, presenting myself as a nobody who had somehow gotten a letter about Wallace Stevens printed in the magazine (and discussed by Seamus Perry and Mark Ford in their LRB poetry podcast, choosing to keep me anonymous, the chiselers....) but that of course didn't fly either. (I wasn't thinking clearly!) I began to think of it as a novel at that point, just when my friend, Tom Smuts (a writer/producer for Mad Men and...a former student at UCLA!) suggested I write a screenplay about it. He shoveled some desperately needed moolah my way and I wrote a terrible screenplay. That episode blew the novel wide open. A little bit of actuality, of verifiable reality, resulted in the Hollywood fantasy that follows Chapter One.
WDC: Your own tertiary connection to Hollywood resulted in an experiment, then, which caused you to reassess and then experiment yet some more (the only method for "creativity" that I know of, outside of, of course, The CWer's standardized, routinized and franchised...fast food recipe in this novel)... while George's own trip to Hollywood precipitates the funhouse of mirrors of the rest of the novel, of course...For the benefit of any reader (such as myself) in search of spiritual Gravol (what we in Canada call your Dramamine), would you like to give us any historical context (if any applies) to Freddy Funston III and IV? With that name, I'd assumed he was a cartoon figure, but Wikipedia tells me he was a hero, "Fearless Freddie", of the Philippine-American War?
GA: Frederick Funston was indeed a hero of the Philippine-American War. FF II I know nothing about. FF III I invented. He's based on Clancy Sigal, a wholly fascinating person who did work at a talent agency, did drop radical leaflets over LA, did live with Doris Lessing for years.
WDC: Further to the above, Freddy's grandson [or great- ??] shows George a video clip on his phone, of his father dropping leaflets and turds on the city...when suddenly they are in said cockpit... Are we in George's imagination here, or watching them on film, or...?
“Fred is standing at the window, looking at the parking lot. “Dropping leaflets from a Piper Cub. It’s crazy. You know my father used to fly around with this other blacklisted guy and dump anti-McCarthy leaflets on Beverly Hills? Said he also took shits over Orange County.” Fred and George find themselves jammed impossibly behind the two seats of the little airplane. Fred’s father, Fearless Freddie the Third, who is just Fred Four with a pencil-thin moustache, is wiping his ass with a leaflet.”
GA: Both and neither. Mainly in the reader's imagination of a dream. I think my answer above applies generally. Whatever happens in this novel implies, if not its exact opposite, at least another aspect of causes and conditions flooding the zone.
WDC: You speak here of the implying of opposites and "the zone", and the novel includes a film version of Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow, famous for advancing, complicating, perhaps even retracting the notion of a "Counterforce" to the dominant (masculine) technologies of the They-system ruling the (capitalized) Zone... would you like to comment on how the Pynchonian imaginary meshes (or not) with your own? I guess I am thinking of those cartoon counter-forces Super- Yin and Yang throughout the novel, but I'll paste a couple passages from Chapter 3 below for readerly context, at least...
“Fred’s brain collapses further [...] A calm and beautiful voice says, “By hundreds and then by thousands, behold my manifold celestial forms of innumerable shapes and colors. Behold the sun that is greater than a thousand suns and see its death at the end of time.
“We may regard the present state of the Universe as the effect of its past and the cause of its future,” whispers her favorite movie producer. “An intellect which at a certain moment,” whispers Super Yang into his other ear, “would know all forces that set nature in motion, and all positions of all items of which nature is composed, if this intellect were also vast enough to submit these data to analysis, it would embrace in a single formula the movements of the greatest bodies of the universe and those of the tiniest atom.
“Neither Yin nor Yang are in their costumes. George, who has dyed his hair orange since Fred last saw him, is with them. Yin and Yang both want to sign him. Fred is with Yin but Yang wants him. They think George will be the Greatest Screenwriter in History, a man who achieves success on his own terms, who never chases the spotlight but whom the spotlight chases. George and Fred are perceived now as a package.”
GA: If Pynchonian imagery meshes with my own, I will have realized a fifty-year-old dream. I turned twenty in 1976, gave up on my ridiculous druggie dream of racing motorcycles, and read in quick succession Moby Dick by Hoiman Melonville, Ulysses by Joyce James, As I Lay Dying and The Sound and the Fury by that guy, who was he, in that Coen Bros. movie Barton Fink? and Gravity's Rainbow. I got the idea that Shakespearean prose was possible from Melville; that, contra Melville, a novel could in fact be written on the flea from Joyce; from Faulkner that depth could be achieved by repetition (which echoed certain acting schools I was familiar with as a playwright, e.g., David Mamet's mentor Sanford Meisner); and that the universe was wide open to novelists from Pynchon. For instance, that middle quote is from Pierre-Simon LaPlace--another scientist famous for a "demon"—in his A Philosophical Essay on Probabilities.
In any case, I filled notebooks with imitations of the work of those four novelists.
END PART TWO