Lynn Tilman interview by writer Lydia Davis:
Lydia Davis: Some writers I know are very unhappy writing, and some fly high. On a scale of one to ten, from agonized to elated, what were your feelings in the midst of working on American Genius, A Comedy?
Lynne Tillman: I ran the gamut, from one to ten. One was my not being able to find the voice that moved it all, told it. A ten was, for instance, when I was writing the séance scene, which was so wacky I couldn’t believe I was doing it. I mostly enjoyed writing the book, when I was writing it. Finding ways to interpolate all that curious information was fun, like making and solving the puzzle. As number one, I’d also include the interruption of teaching. I couldn’t just pick the writing up and put it down. Those very long sentences required a certain cadence and mindfulness I had to get back to each time. Finally, I quit one job and wrote much of it in eight months, though the whole took about five years.
LD: I’d like to go on talking about American Genius, but first I want to pursue this question: do you think there’s any correlation between work that goes well or easily, and how it turns out? I mean, does work that goes well and is enjoyable to write turn out better than work that is difficult almost all the way through? What has been your experience of this?
LT: I’m not sure about that correlation in my work. A reader might feel it, which would bother me, because I want to make the writing seem effortless, at least not labored. I don’t want readers to get bogged down in unnecessary language or linguistic frills. If they need to go back to the beginning of a sentence, I don’t want it to be because it’s cluttered with verbiage that doesn’t ultimately augment and elaborate clearly even contradictory or irrational sets of thoughts. As a reader, and writer, I dislike overwrought sentences.
Electronic Book Review: Can you speak a bit about the syntax used in the novel? Specifically, what aims were you trying to achieve by engaging in the use of very long and circular sentences? What were you hoping to create or evoke through syntax alone?
LT: First, I wanted to play with sentence structure, for my pleasure, and to see what I could do with it. At the same time, I wanted to establish her voice and find the way her mind might work, as unique to her, her ambivalence, her humor, her limits. The circularity and repetition of her thinking seemed to me the way thought, when you’re not thinking, happens. Also, if you’re an analysand, you hear your voice and watch your mind wander, stop and start, you censor it, see inhibitions, you take strange turns, words get scrambled, lead to events and incidents you couldn’t predict, and you contradict yourself often. Unlike “stream of consciousness,” which American Genius is not, the mind returns to themes and incidents again and again in different contexts, but there are fixed points, “blocks.” It’s not all about the free play of language - that’s about writing as writing - but when attached to the unconscious, written thought will represent memories and events you can’t avoid and keep going back to. Everything you know and don’t know.
LD: I love the form of American Genius - what you have just described, the monologue that circles back on itself and picks up where it left off over and over again. The obsessive monologue. I’m not sure the following writers use exactly the same technique, but they are certainly cousins of yours in this: I’m thinking of Thomas Bernhard, but also, W.G. Sebald. Can you say something about how you feel about those two, and are there perhaps other writers working in a similar form that you feel even closer to?
LT: I’ve read Sebald’s The Emigrants, and some Bernhard novels. I didn’t feel close to The Emigrants, which is weird, because he’s a philosophical writer with history on his mind. Maybe this seems strange, but I thought an earlier novel of mine, Motion Sickness, which came out in 1991, had common ground with it. Bernhard is a different case. I feel closer to what he was doing. His sentences, their single-mindedness and fury, have a very different energy and speed from those in American Genius, I think. With Bernhard, you can hardly breathe when you read him. I wanted American Genius’s sentences to make room for breathing, to shift the speed at which one reads. His are always vehement, more directed, like a political tract, in the Viennese tradition of Karl Kraus or Otto Muehl. Henry James, with his bending of sentences to produce diverse, qualifying, tricky, subtle reservations, was important to American Genius, but again, I wanted something different. More contrariness, more disjunction and odd change ups - the writer as pitcher!
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