Interview: Ryan Ruby
"The popular conception of poetic form is that it’s a kind of ornamentation to language. But that’s not true, and never has been."
Ryan Ruby is the author of The Zero and the One: A Novel (Twelve Books, 2017) and Context Collapse (National Poetry Series Finalist 2020). His criticism has recently appeared in the New York Times, The Nation, New Left Review, and elsewhere. He lives in Berlin.
You can find him on his site and on Twitter.
His responses to the Nameless Questionnaire can be found at the bottom of the interview.
The following interview took place on January 24, 2022, with some corrections made in April. It has been edited with fidelity for the reader.
All right, Ryan Ruby. Critic, novelist, poet—are you one of these more than any other?
I think if I had to choose, of those three, probably critic. What I’ve tried to do in both my poem [Context Collapse] and my novel [The Zero and the One] is, in a way, a form of criticism, or philosophy if you like. The critical urge explored through other genres or forms: that’s the essential activity.
I do want to talk about each of those aspects of your career in turn. But let’s begin with your novel, The Zero and the One (2017). It’s about two friends—one who’s sort of shy and one who possesses a commanding, almost Whitmanic energy—who meet at Oxford and form a suicide pact, which goes horribly wrong. How did you arrive at this idea?
Often people ask novelists, “what is the first thing you think of when writing?” For some novelists, it’s a character they want to develop, or a story, or even a single line that they hear in their minds while walking down the street. For me, it's almost always a formal idea, a way of telling a story that I want to enact. So I want to find the story that can be retconned into the form. For me, the form itself is the generative idea.
For The Zero and the One, what I wanted to do was narrate a story where you would have two parallel narratives, each with distinct narrative styles, that would gradually interpenetrate and converge, a variation on the Wild Palms, if you like, except that one narrative voice starts to haunt and contaminate the other. Then I took this metaphor literally: one narrator would be a living person, and the other would be a ghost, and each would have a narrative style appropriate to their ontological condition. Once you have that in place, you start to ask yourself properly novelistic questions: How did these characters come to know each other? How did one character come to be dead? Why is the dead character haunting the living character? The answer I came up with was: a failed suicide pact: the ghost (who has gone through with it) wants to complete the job from beyond the grave. Now a lot of this did not end up making it into the final published version of a novel, but it left its residue: the failed suicide pact remained, as sort of the kernel to the plot, but the alternating narrators were replaced by alternating tenses, and the living and posthumous voices were replaced by British and American English, and so on.
As for the setting, it’s set in Oxford, because I happened to be at Oxford at the time—my first time back in the city since 2003-4, when I spent a year there, like Zach, as a visiting scholar at Pembroke. I suspect that for many novelists, this is how incidental details end up in their books: you’re faced with a rather arbitrary decision like, where is my story set, and you look out from wherever your desk happens to be and think: here is as good as anywhere else. Of course, once taken, these arbitrary decisions function as future constraints, and can significantly determine what happens in the book, as the Oxford setting does for The Zero and the One.
All writers choose their constraints, but you began with yours. Was this, even in a muted way, an Oulipian experiment?
Not in this particular case. Sometimes at a micro or local level, I do sometimes rely on or think through Oulipian techniques, but insofar as all writing has a form, form itself is a kind of constraint. What makes the Oulipian approach to the notion of form distinctive is the semantically irrelevant or arbitrary nature of the constraints themselves, which has the upshot of revealing how much we take for granted formally when we’re constructing, for example, a narrative.
You “share” the title of the novel with a book by Hans Abendroth, whom you quote in the book’s epigraph. Can you say a bit about that book?
Yes. First of all, it does not exist. [Laughs.]
[Laughs.] The reader’s first instinct is to look him up. But of course one finds nothing.
Precisely, it's a fictional text by a fictional author. Each of the chapters is prefaced with an aphorism from Hans Abendroth’s The Zero and the One—or Null und Eins, as I have it in the “original” German. It’s the part of the book that, to this day, several years after having written and published it, I like most about it. The dream was to actually write that book, Null und Eins, have it translated back into English, and publish it separately so it would have an independent existence, and people would go and look for it. I want to put a fake book into the world and have people treat it as a source text. Things didn't work out that way, unfortunately, but that’s just the sort of thing I find amusing, and the sort of thing that makes the novel, loosely defined, such a pleasantly capacious form to work in.
I love that. It’s one of my favorite things that, say, Michel Butor does in Portrait of the Artist as a Young Ape. But also, of course, and perhaps most famously, Nabokov does it. I’m wondering if he was in your head as you were creating your fake author.
The character you’re referring to is Pierre Delalande, who “appears” in two of Nabokov’s books: Invitation to a Beheading, where he provides the epigraph, and in The Gift, where his book, Discours sur les ombres, is quoted by one of the characters. Nabokov would go on to say, of Delalande, “This is the only philosopher who has ever influenced me,” which is an excellent, and characteristically grandiose joke. [Laughs.]
I first read The Gift on a very long car ride back and forth from New York to Maine, back in 2008. And I hadn’t revisited it until very recently—just these last couple of months, for a piece I’m writing. Had you asked me even a year ago what the most important Nabokov novels were for me, it wouldn’t have been in my top five. And yet in The Gift, there’s not only a fictitious philosopher, but also a failed suicide pact, a love triangle, and of course it’s set, like parts of The Zero and the One, in Berlin. Clearly, I sucked up a lot of ideas from The Gift and, totally unconsciously, put them in [my novel.]
To circle slightly back to the nefarious question of influences. Something you’ve said elsewhere—in the “Discussion Questions” appended to the Twelve Books edition of the novel—which I think is quite true, is that your novel wears its philosophical inheritances on its sleeve. But it's also very allusive in less explicit ways. On Ben Shore’s “Beyond the Zero” podcast, you talked at length about how James Joyce's work formed the gateway into your career as a reader. Has Joyce had a similar effect on your writing? And is he in the novel?
Oh, first of all, I should just say that I've forgotten that that afterward existed. [Laughs.] I have no idea what I said.
So far, you repeated the answers more or less exactly.
Maybe that means they're true. It's a very strange thing to have written a book, especially a book that one is no longer attached to. The Zero and the One went on the road in March 2017 and sort of disappeared by April. In the subsequent period of time, I've had to go on and do other things. And if anyone knows about me, it's not for this novel; it's probably for the criticism. As you may discover yourself, when you finish a book, you become a different person than you were at the beginning of writing it. That person, the person who wrote the book, sort of dies. And both you and the book go on to have this strange, parallel afterlife, and sometimes you’re called upon to answer questions on behalf of the person who wrote the book, who no longer exists.
But getting back to the question of influence. When people are asked about their influences they tend to answer aspirationally: these are the authors I like, would like to write like, wouldn’t mind being compared to or read alongside of. But influence is usually real only insofar as it operates in ways the author isn’t entirely aware of at the time of writing—as with, in my case, the unconscious borrowings from The Gift. Which is why it’s usually better to ask a third party, like a critic, who an author’s influences are, rather than the writer.
Regarding Joyce, there’s very little of him in this book, so far as I can tell. The first draft ended with a long Molly Bloomish monologue—which is to say it used stream-of-consciousness techniques pioneered by Joyce in that chapter of Ulysses, but it eventually got rewritten in a more Bernhardian style as a result of other changes that had been made in the meantime. But I think this is less a question of influence as being able to name the source of the tools and techniques you’re using to solve particular narrative problems in composition. Now it’s true that there’s no one who reads all of Joyce who doesn’t then go on to do something that Joyce has already done. In that sense, he’s there in the novel, along with thousands of other writers whose books have left some kind of eiditic residue on the brain that wrote it.
My last question about novels is: do you plan to write another?
I think the next thing that I do will be something more along the line of creative nonfiction or para-fiction or what have you. I have a project in mind for that, but no novel on the table at the moment. I think many novelists think of themselves as novelists, and they stick to writing novels. I’m just looking, at any given instance, for a form into which I will sort my ideas and set of concerns. Sometimes that’s a novel, but in another case, it has been a poem. In yet another, it’s creative nonfiction, or it’s a straightforward critical essay. I’m at the point in my writing career where it’s a matter of contingent chance which one of those forms has legs and will come to fruition. Should the novel be the best thing to execute the idea that I may have, I wouldn’t preclude it of course. But at the moment, what I’m thinking about doing is in the creative nonfiction vein, to use publishing speak. The idea that I have in mind for that, of course, will bring to bear the arsenal of novelistic techniques at my disposal. But it’ll be primarily discursive.
For all the people who are interested in the material influence of economic circumstances on the production of particular forms, here’s a concrete example. One of the really attractive things about creative nonfiction projects, as opposed to the novel, is that you get to write a proposal. You’re then given an advance for the book and have the time and freedom to write it. Given the way The Zero and the One did, no one’s knocking on my door and asking me to write another novel, and I don’t have the money nor the amount of time to complete a full draft of a new novel. So my options have been limited as a result, making creative nonfiction a much more attractive proposition. I know it sounds vulgar, but these are the sorts of concerns that influence one’s choices as a working writer, and I think we’d all be better off if we let go of some of our more romantic notions about the relationship between art and commerce and talked a little more frankly about them.
I want to talk about one of the most formally interesting things that I’ve read, period, and that’s a poem of yours. You were a finalist for the National Poetry Series Prize for your book-length poem, Context Collapse. Can you say a bit about what that is?
Of course. As you say, it’s a book-length poem—in seven parts—about the history of poetry, a verse essay written in blank verse with footnotes in blank verse, which narrates the history of poetry as a medium. It begins in the Greek Dark Ages with Homeric bards, it moves to Classical Athens and discusses drama, it discusses the poetry of the Renaissance, before and after the printing press, and moves all the way up through the various technological and media developments of [the modern era]. It’s a didactic poem in the classic, 18th-century sense. The argument is that two things influence and mediate the relationship between a poet and the audience—media technology, and the economy surrounding this technology—and that poetic form is not unrelated to those two things. I’ll make the exaggerated claim and say that poetic form is determined by those two factors.
The popular conception of poetic form is that it’s a kind of ornamentation to language. But that’s not true, and never has been. Over and over again, throughout the history of poetry, poetic form is determined by its function—usually as a mnemotechnical device—which later becomes vestigial as storage and transmission technologies change, and as reception contexts change along with them. The technology, the way of reading, and the means of producing and consuming poetry really change the way that poetry is written. That’s true of Homer and Petrarch and it’s true of Whitman’s free verse revolution and Baudelaire’s prose poetry revolution and of modernist experiments with the image. And it remains true in the 21st century. The last part of Context Collapse discusses Insta poetry and GPT-3, which seemed to me the most recent instances where economics, media technology, and poetic form all coalesced.
Context Collapse argues that poets have always been the canaries in the coal mine where technology meets language. And what these poets are doing is really a sort of research and development, unconsciously pioneering all these media-technological forms which later on get used by the broader population. But the poets always get there first, they are experimenting with the technologies first. The avant-garde, in that framework, is always this group of people called poets.
It’s an excellent argument cleverly made—I hope it gets picked up as a full book, sooner or later.
[Laughs] Me too, though I doubt it will. Context Collapse is basically unpublishable, sort of my last indulgence as a writer. But for now I’m happy to report that more is on the way. Three sections of it should be published this year. The first two will be published in the Oxonian Review. And Section Four, which is the fun one because it’s about modernism—everyone likes modernism, it’s the high point in poetic history [laughs]—will come out with Exacting Clam sometime later in the year.
Maybe we could zero in on that final, most recent stage in your techno-materialist evolution of poetic form. Can you say more about the technologies and economic pressures that are shaping poetry today? How are they doing so?
The single most important fact to know about poetry today—which is obvious if you think about it, but people rarely do—is that there's more of it published every year than is possible to ever read. There is extreme abundance, extreme surplus. And that’s not just online, where we think the flood of information and of poetry is more generally, but also in print venues. There are more print journals and more physical books of poetry produced every year than any one person could ever read, meaning that you can never get a sort of full clear view of what's happening in the world of poetry. In some respects, that’s unprecedented. I’m speaking primarily of the United States here—though I’m sure similar conditions obtain elsewhere.
What’s happened is that the amount of people who write and publish poetry now exceeds the number of people who read poetry by something like an order of magnitude. What this means is that there are no professional poets anymore. Why? Because extreme amounts of supply have dropped the price of poetry to zero. James Sherry [the publisher of Roof] liked to say: if you print a poem on a piece of paper, which otherwise has a definite economic value, it loses that value. And that’s true. Sherry ran the numbers and basically concluded that it’s next to impossible for a publisher to break even on a collection of poetry, let alone turn a profit.
What does that mean? It means that almost no one is exclusively a professional poet. It means that poetry is written for free or requires heavy subsidy, from prize foundations, universities—a very important and powerful player—and most insidiously from poetry contests and competitions in which the submitters, i.e. the losers of the competition, subsidize the publication of the winner of the competition, which is pretty much a mirror of the way neoliberal societies work in general.
It also means that it is extremely difficult to make meaningful generalizations about contemporary poetry. The poetry world is so diffuse that it doesn’t even make sense to organize it according to schools, as we used to do. The audience for a physical book of poetry is pretty much known to the poet—mostly their colleagues and fellow poets. The main way to get a broad “audience” is to write a really bad or offensive poem and have that go viral online. [Laughs.] That’s the way our poetry culture, such as it is, operates at the junction between the vestigial medium of writing and storage and distribution methods of digital media.
This point about the restricted audience for poetry—this is at the heart of the term, “Context Collapse.”
Right. This is the important moment. You’re writing for an audience, which is known to you exclusively. You can have a reasonable idea or sense of what your audience desires, because that audience is a micro- or even nano-audience. Then, sometimes, that poem escapes its interpretive community—which regulates the features of its meaning—and enters into a whole other world, in which the original reception context is missing.
I should add that there are a handful of commercially successful poets out there. The famous instance is Rupi Kaur—everyone gives me a hard time for taking this person seriously, but I think she’s extremely interesting. Her poetry, aesthetically, is terrible. But I don’t think of it as poetry. We’re attached to the canon of poetry that is written. Rupi Kaur is not writing poetry at all, she’s creating images of poetry; specifically, digital images of poetry, which, in their early instance, are content for Instagram, which is owned by Facebook. So, the economy they work in is no longer a commodity economy—i.e., books—or even a prize economy, but an attention economy. People will object that indeed Kaur has written bestselling books of poetry, but it is through this relationship they have with the platform—that they are visual content, digital images of language—that they can be spun off into merch. Just as a Rupi Kaur poem is not a poem but an image of a poem, a digital image of language (it is translated twice over), a Rupi Kaur book is not, in fact, a book. It’s merch; and so you don’t really read it, as such. Actually, the thing that makes the poem effective when you look at it on the screen dies, quite literally, on the page. It doesn’t have the same meaningfulness as an interaction in the Jurassic form of the printed book. What you’re doing when you’re buying the book is buying a badge of ownership in this community that is essentially a feeder for content, clicks, and data—ultimately to Facebook. Kaur is so interesting because she’s right in the middle of the intersection between technology, the economy, and this now antiquated form we call poetry.
What else is happening to poetry now? Tell me about GPT-3.
The other interesting thing going on now is the GPT-3. People who are trying to program computers to generate poems in the form of, say, a stanza à la Dickinson or a Shakespearen sonnet, or what have you. The people who are doing that really don't actually care to produce good poetry. They’re just interested in artificial language learning, and in using the huge amounts of data at their disposal to reproduce human language, which they will use for other purposes (poetry is just a pretext). The history of computer-generated poetry is actually pretty old by now—it started in the early 60s. So we’ve been doing this for some time. And it’s much like with the computers that play chess: the point is not to create a chess-playing computer; the point is to prototype a kind of machine that will have at its disposal the ability to analyze large quantities of data.
What makes all of this interesting is that we’ve arrived at a situation in which artificial intelligence is doing “individually” what we are all doing collectively when we write poetry; that is, we are just producing huge quantities of different combinatory possibilities using the alphabet as a generative sign set. And we're doing it over and over and over again in quantities that have never been seen in history. GPT-3 is, then, a metonym for the production of contemporary poetry as a whole. To our credit, I suppose, we do it far more efficiently, but then, we’re a vastly more complex kind of artificial intelligence than what we call AI is.
And that’s what, I think, is most interesting about what’s happening in poetry today. Of course, no poet that I can think of will agree with this particular assessment. [Laughs.] It’s an unflattering way to talk about this very important cultural phenomenon. But it’s important to look at this very important phenomenon and its history—which is coextensive with that of humanity—in this broad, external way. What is becoming clear is that the issues that animate poetry today are, for instance, the relationships between poets and audiences, or that between poets and their dissemination technology, or between poets and storage, or between poetry and education, and so on. What we’re not doing is having conversations about, say, form. We’re not having aesthetic conversations, we’re not debating imagism or objectivism or whatever. What we’re talking about is: Who gets to be a poet? And under what conditions? We’re talking about media concerns, not formal concerns, and that too is a very distinctive feature of contemporary poetry.
In a way, then, the only way to say or do something different—something other than Insta poetry or GPT-3 poetry—is to find a third way: the meta-poetic poem, which is what you’ve done with Context Collapse. I sympathize with the desire to not simply participate, but to look around and identify what it is that other people are doing without really thinking about it. Maybe we need to take that step back if we’re to have any chance of doing something new.
You know, that this poem is a poem in the first place sort of began as a joke. I originally conceived of it as being maybe five to ten pages long. I did not think that it would go on for approximately 100 pages, but there you have it. It began in much the same way as the novel. I asked myself, “Wouldn’t it be funny if this were a poem?” Of course, the interesting thing is that Context Collapse is not published, right? It’s very easy to publish poetry, and yet this poem will probably never be published. And the reason is—if I may also say something in its favor—that the discursive in poetry is more or less an archaic tradition. Not so much a third way, but a buried possibility. The poem has all the formal features of an 18th-century poem, as I was saying, the kind that might have been written on Grub Street in Alexander Pope’s day; but it also borrows parodically from systems theory, cybernetics, Bourdieusian sociology, and so on. It incorporates all these discourses in metered form. But its discursivity marks it as eccentric. It doesn’t trope in the way that we typically expect from contemporary lyric. It contains the full canon of poetic techniques, but its function is not to trope; it’s to be discursive.
So poets look at it and they say, “Well, this is not really a poem.” (Of course, the irony is that today anything is poetry if you’re an acknowledged poet; what contemporary poetry produces is not poems, but poets, remote centers of poetic utterance that are recognized by other remote centers that recognize them as such.) And editors who are doing theory or criticism look at it and say, “Well, we can’t publish this—this is a poem.” As my agent is always telling me, all of my work falls between two stools. So what amuses me to no end, and what is the reason why I said this is my last artistic indulgence, is that, in a world in which publishing poetry is one of the easiest things to do, this particular poem cannot be published.
Indulgences aside, then, let’s talk about your work as a critic. If one goes to your website, there’s a long list of reviews and essays you’ve published in several venues, but it seems like you’ve really kicked into another gear over the past year or two, if I can put it that way. Are you in a new phase of your career?
Yeah, my website is one of the more unfortunate-looking websites on the internet. [Laughs.] It’s simply a list of my published work that I keep there in the hopes that, one day, I will be able to afford to revamp it and make it palatable.
Anyway, the answer to your question is: yes. And again, whereas we always tend to think of these decisions as art-driven, this was necessity-driven. What happened was very strange, and surely very rare. I moved to Germany in 2014 on an artist visa—this was the only visa that I was able to get at the time, and it locked me into being a freelance writer. So writing, editing, teaching, copywriting, and translating were what I was led to do work-wise, as an immigrant to Germany. My healthcare is tied to something called the Künstlersozialkasse, which is my de facto employer, and it’s contingent on me producing a certain amount of work every year for a certain amount of money.
But in 2020, when the pandemic hit, all of the editing jobs, teaching jobs, copy editing jobs, and translating jobs dried up. I was broke, I had a one-and-a-half-year-old kid, and the one thing I had at my disposal was a small backlog of criticism. I decided that the only thing I could do for work was to write, and writing criticism was the was going to be the easiest thing to do. And over the course of 2020, I decided, since this was now my only source of income, that I would treat it as an actual job for the first time in my life. What I discovered about myself is something very unflattering, which is that the fear of not being able to make my rent is an extremely good motivator.
There's the famous Samuel Johnson line, which is that no blockhead ever wrote except for money. I always thought this was the worst attitude one could have towards writing. And 2020 really made me come to see the wisdom of that line in my particular case. [Laughs.] At one point a friend called me up and said, “You know Ryan, it’s time for your to start treating your writing like a hack. You need to do whatever is necessary to pay your rent.” And that’s what I did. In the meantime, though, the novel, the poem, and the sporadic works of criticism I had done prior to that point lucked me into projects that were not hack work in themselves. But I approached them as if they were, and this has allowed me to be more productive than I’ve ever been in my entire writing career. This was a matter of making a virtue of necessity.
I also was not on Twitter before then. In April 2020, my partner was like, “You’re going on Twitter now.” For years, people have been telling me to do this, and I’ve refused. Then I get on it, and not only do I discover that it’s very useful, but, of course, I also discover that I really quite like it. Probably in an unhealthy and addictive way, but I really like this medium. Through it, I’ve gotten to meet a number of wonderful people and people who, though I have never been in the same room as them, I now get to think of as colleagues in this great public sphere.
And the timing is particularly good, because as I never tire of saying, it’s a really good time to be a critic. There are a lot of good critics around, and it’s really fun to exchange ideas and see what other people are doing and writing about, and to construct them as imaginary readers or audiences. [Twitter] has a nice collegial and quasi-competitive socius to it, and that has, in my view, immensely improved my work.
How would you characterize the kind of reviews that you tend to write? And what do you feel is their purpose, if they have a purpose?
I think about that in a number of senses. As you know, reviewing and being a working critic is primarily about having a bunch of different relationships with a bunch of different editors, each of whom has a different personality, and works at a publication which itself has its own personality. In a way, I would say that I also have different sorts of personalities, depending on where it is that I'm writing, and what the freedoms and constraints I'm writing under are.
In my case, I got lucky, in that I got hooked up with the new blog of the New Left Review, which is called Sidecar. For them, I’m writing mostly about American and British contemporary fiction, which is not something I tend to read, and have never been particularly interested in. But what they allow me to do is something I really like, what one of the editors there calls “left formalism”: high-level critical discourse, which looks at the form of the work in question and asks what the form says about the world in which it’s embedded, and to find in the formal structure of the novel something revealing about the politics of the novel. This could be, in the case of Franzen, the relationship between his use of the 19th-century English novel and the contemporary American Empire; or, in the case of Chris Power, the relationship between metafiction and gentrification; or in Rivka Galchen, the limitations of standpoint theory for historical fiction; or for Lauren Oyler, the return of 18th-century literary techniques of address in the Internet Novel that mirror the return of 18th-century economic conditions in the 21st century. So this is my “critical personality” when I’m reviewing contemporary anglophone fiction for Sidecar.
You’ve written criticism from a subjective perspective, as well.
Yes. Elsewhere—like The Point and Believer, for example—editors gave me the opportunity to do something different: to embed criticism of a particular text in the story of the circumstances under which I came to read it. The Point piece is about reading Peter Weiss’ The Aesthetics of Resistance against the backdrop of the Trump era and The Believer piece is about Wittgenstein’s Word Book as a new father. Doing work like this requires a different kind of critical personality altogether. When I write about poetry for POETRY or for The Nation, the one theme I seem to hit on pretty constantly over and over again is the relationship between writing and death, which seems to me to be key to its social function, even at this late point in this history.
I have two more questions for you. I’d love if you could just tell me a bit about Berlin. Coming from Montreal, and having visited Berlin a few times, I feel that the cities have a kind of kinship, a fundamental similarity having to do with their size, and by extension the kinds of people who can afford to live there. They're big cities that feel local. (At least that's my perception of Berlin.) I'm wondering what Berlin has meant and done for you.
I guess I should begin by saying why I’m here. I’m here because my partner is from here. We were living together in New York, but her visa expired. It was almost impossibly expensive to renew, and so she had to return home. For me, by contrast, it was extremely easy and cheap to get a visa here, so I moved with her. Relative to New York, Berlin is basically a middle-sized town, much quieter and more liveable. I like to say that it has three-quarters of the things that make New York nice to live in, and only a tenth of the things that make New York unlivable. It is very difficult to be a working writer in New York. I certainly could not have been both a working writer and a parent there.
So yes, I’m in Berlin for very contingent reasons, because of a person and not the place—although it’s been a very lucky place to have ended up in. Aside from the economics, though, there are other things that make being an anglophone writer in Berlin an attractive proposition. First of all, it’s not a publishing city in the way New York or London is: it’s dominated by the electronic music scene and the visual arts scene. The publishing industry is much more geographically diffuse. And this means, as someone writing in English, you can fly under the radar, as it were. That said, a number of the world’s best writers live here: László Krasznahorkai, who was here until recently, Samantha Schweblin, Svetlana Alexievitch, Jenny Erpenbeck, Helen Dewitt, Alexander Kluge. And many great writers—I just saw Fernanda Melchior give a reading—pass through.
That’s great company.
Yeah, and those are just the heavy hitters.
Okay, this is the last question, but maybe it's the biggest one. I think of you as a champion of modernist writing in a post-post(-post?)-modernist era—a late capitalist one, certainly. Does that label feel right to you? And can the term modernist even apply anymore?
Well, to answer your first question, that is absolutely correct, and fair. That is what I think of myself as doing. Part of that has to do with something you alluded to earlier, when you were talking about Joyce. I really do have this strong belief that there is, for every person, a book that forms their taste as a reader. To use a culinary metaphor, you sort of burn your tongue on this book and the flavor never goes away. The very strange thing that happened to me was that I was given modernism much too early in my life, and it created the standards and expectations for what I think I want from literature.
Now, that has changed a bit, in the sense that, having written a book myself, I’ve become much more generous about and interested in things that, previously—when I was a younger, louder, more opinionated person—I had dismissed as formally or aesthetically retrograde. In doing so, I’ve given myself a much more capacious understanding of what the imaginative possibilities of prose are. But, at the end of the day, the thing that I would like to see “continued” is the modernist tradition—I use quotation marks because, of course, the “modernist tradition” is a contradiction in terms. But in a vague umbrella of associations, I mean: formal experimentation, requiring difficulty, and what is traditionally described as high cultural associations.
Now we’re getting into your second question. There are many different ways in which we can see that “a return to modernism” is at least somewhat impossible. That’s to be expected. There’s a set of unique cultural conditions, which were operating somewhere between 100 and 150 years ago, that created a very special outburst of aesthetic production. Those conditions do not obtain now and are not themselves replaceable. Even if you were to write works that were clearly written in the tradition of a high modernist novel today, you would be writing them into a reception context which the original work was not written into. It will therefore be received very, very differently, and the aesthetic effect would not be the same.
The other thing we might have to discuss are the differences between modernism, late modernism, and postmodernism—if that was the nature of your question. There’s a way to think of European late modernism and North American postmodernism as allies of convenience existing at the margins of a literary culture, which, at least in the United States, Britain, and probably anglophone Canada, has really retreated into a sort of pre-modernist formation. I think of them as allies—to use a martial metaphor—in the war against the retraction of interest in difficult, formally challenging works of art.
The reason I’m interested in formally challenging works of art is not just for their own sake, but because I believe that novelty—doing something formally different—is a justification for them being written in the first place. And here we have another paradox, which is that we also have, as a culture, the storage capacity of some 3000 years of literary history, which we have total access to, and so there is a sense in which the notion of novelty, that anything can be differentiated, is purely ideological. Of course, there’s no world in which you write a book and the genre of that book cannot be identified. Genre is just a series of generative conventions. What is an avant-garde work of literature? Well, it’s a work of literature that defies a certain set of conventions and names another set of conventions. The notion that we could ever get out of the circle is somewhat naive, in my view.
But the reason that difficulty and formal experimentation are important is not only this activity of differentiation, of seeking a new idea about what this medium of written language can do. I also hold to that old modernist view that the aesthetic is a kind of spiritual experience, even a quasi-religious experience. To produce that experience of virtuosity, of awe, is important to me. The experience of transcendence, if you like, though I think it can be accounted for in purely materialist terms. And among the things that art should “stand outside of” is an extremely alienated set of cultural, sociological, economic, and political circumstances—even the ones that inevitably contribute to its production.
The production of Meaning capital-M and Significance capital-S in our world is itself important for people, because one of the things that whatever-this-is-stage-capitalism steals from us is the sense that our lives have meaning outside the market, or that we have any reason for being except as sites of profit extraction. This is a very modernist critique. What are you doing when you’re writing a work of criticism or a poem or a novel? You’re creating a vision of the world that you would like to see. It’s quasi-utopian, in that sense. Every time you have a meaningful experience with a work of literature, you are having it at the expense of an economy that would deny it to you, and denies it to us all, on a pretty regular basis.
It’s about exercising your consciousness against misuse, then.
I don’t want to be misunderstood, here. Up to this point, I’ve given you a typically conservative critique of capitalism—that it robs us of our ability to have meaningful lives. But the thing I’m really interested in is an avant-garde literature with left politics, the marriage of the two. I believe it is only left politics that will create the cultural conditions for the kinds of experiments of living and writing that the conservative critic of capitalism identifies as stolen under capitalism.
We’re always focused on what art can do for our society. But what we should also ask is: How do we create a society in which art can have the effect that it’s supposed to have, in which it can give our lives meaning? As a critic, that’s the utopian society that I have in mind whenever I write. That’s what I want from a work of literature, and from the society that produces that work of literature.
The Nameless Questionnaire
Each of The Unnamable’s guests is asked to respond to the following questionnaire. Here are Ryan Ruby’s answers.
1. A novel, a poem, and a short story you’d teach in a college seminar
Musil, The Man Without Qualities; Stevens, “Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction”; Borges, “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius”
2. The title of that seminar
Fictional Nonfictions
3. The great work no one has read
“No one” of course is relative, like a degree of negative infinity, but if it's taken here to mean “too few people,” the unjustly forgotten novel I'm putting my energy behind this year is Marguerite Young's Miss MacIntosh, My Darling.
4. The terrible work everyone has read
I suppose related caveats apply to the term “everyone,” but that Hemingway is an author we still assign in classrooms, and whom non-historians read of their own volition never fails to surprise me. Also Sabbath's Theater is the only novel by Philip Roth that I finished without first throwing it across the room—of his works American Pastoral hit the wall hardest.
5. Three books you’d send your enemy on a desert island
Oh if my enemy were safely confined to a desert island, I'd bear him no ill-will, so I think he should only have good books to read there. I'd pack him off with The Making of Americans, Finnegans Wake, and Bottom's Dream.
6. The doorstopper that should really be used as a doorstopper
The Magic Mountain
7. Who do you read in order to write
Very much depends on the needs of what I'm writing at the time, so I'd have to take it on a case by case basis, but Proust, Benjamin, Sontag, Nabokov, Davenport, Sebald are all writers I reliably return to over and over again when I'm working.
8. “Poetry makes nothing happen.” Agree?
Yes, but only if this is taken in a positive sense (one of the things poetry does is it makes Nothing happen) rather than in a privative sense (poetry doesn't make anything happen).
9. What can be found on your cutting room floor?
Most of a book-length verse essay; a short story about a bronze-age aiodos; notes for and fragments of essays on (military) partisans, utopia and tragedy, post-literacy, Alexander Kluge, Jan Potocki, James Merrill; and hundreds of sentences that dozens of editors across the years have decided had too many subordinate clauses.