Quentin S. Crisp is one of my favourite contemporary writers. His writing is unique, eccentric even, roughly situated at the intersection of Japanese fiction and the weird tales of Algernon Blackwood and Arthur Machen. Typical Crisp protagonists are often alienated, introspective outsiders who have slipped between the cracks of the normative 9-to-5 of contemporary life. His prose consists of long euphonious passages, rich in psychological intensity, that envelope the reader in sustained moods of weird philosophical enquiry and dream-like examinations of obsessional realities.
Crisp has written a rich and diverse body of work which includes two novels, essays, short stories and poetry. Tartarus Press published his extraordinary short story collection Morbid Tales in 2004. The novella Shrike was nominated for the 2009 Shirley Jackson Award. His first novel, the unflinching Remember You’re A One-Ball, was published in 2010. Other notable works include Erith, subtitled A Supernatural Anglo-Saxon I-Novel, (2015), his second novel, an unhinged re-wiring of Frankenstein, Graves (2019), and the non-fiction trilogy of notebooks/discursive essays, The Paris Notebooks (2017) and Aiaigasa (2018) and The Flowering Hedgerow (2020).
This interview was conducted via email through the months of April and early May. In late April, I was very pleased to be able to meet Quentin in person and to take the photographs that accompany the interview.
I started by asking Quentin about The Old Doctor Who, a book length autobiographical and philosophical essay that has been a monthly treat for his Patreon subscribers. Released in monthly ‘letters’ addressed to his readership, childhood memories of old Doctor Who episodes work as the stand-in for Proust’s madeleine, a worm hole to explore lost time and the loss of a whole culture. The essays have covered such things as what is lost when a culture no longer writes letters, a biography of the budding imagination and the shaping of sensibilities in relation to childhood encounters with Doctor Who and Sapphire and Steel, a conjuration of a very specific early 1980s in granular and luminous detail, how music listened to in teenage years becomes a conduit to poignant autobiography, amongst many other delights.
KULCHUR KAT – Now, I could be wrong, but I’m assuming The Old Doctor Who is coming to a close. I wanted to ask you about the project in general and how you view it now in these end stages. Do you have any distance from it to have an overview yet? Does it do what you set out to do? I know you sometimes went into biographical detail that you felt was too autobiographical, or that you felt uncomfortable with. I’m thinking of The Cure – Faith chapters here. Did the monthly schedule make it become something else in the telling?
And when it is finished, do you have plans to release it? Do you see it as sitting alongside that stream of your work dedicated to the autobiographical, The Paris Notebooks, Aiaigasa, The Flowering Hedgerow, or is it a different kind of work altogether?
QUENTIN S. CRISP – I’m not sure that it’s coming to a close, but it has definitely attained the kind of length now that makes contemplation of the end (so to speak) natural and even inevitable. I just want to be sure that I’m not cranking it out on autopilot, because if I am, that’s time that could be used to write something that I actually have some feeling for. So, I’m in the middle of thinking about such things, and about what might replace The Old Doctor Who at my Patreon account when (I am supposing some kind of ‘when’) it does wind down. I am, however, about to upload the first instalment of Chapter XI of TODW (the title of which is ‘Repression, Sublimation and Kenneth Williams’) as I write this, and this will be, I think, the longest chapter so far. It might have one or two surprises in it, but I won’t say too much about that.
I have a little distance from TODW from reading over previous chapters, but perhaps not that much. I am, at least, satisfied with the general quality of the writing. I wasn’t sure I’d be able to keep it up with a monthly deadline, but I think I have. In the early stages, from some time after the beginning, I conceived of the project as my version of Tanizaki’s In Praise of Shadows. Obviously, it’s much longer than that work, and different in many other ways, too. As I’ve gone along, I find that it has given me an opportunity to essay first drafts of general ideas that I think will continue to be important to me, like the idea of numinous triviality, which is explored in one of the earlier chapters. On the whole, I do wish more people were reading it.
I think TODW is more or less like the works you mention, though obviously the format used changes its nature in some way, especially in the indefiniteness of the end. I have a vague notion of it now as some kind of rambling, eighteenth-century, or even seventeenth-century sort of work—one of those funny, loosely organised texts that are like an attic full of boxes of odd bits and pieces, of which the author is making a purposeful but perhaps doomed inventory, distracted from his task by chance finds along the way. I do use the word ‘autobiography’ in TODW, I think, but—this might sound strange—in a way I don’t think anything I’ve written is autobiographical. I think of the diary and memoir pieces as continuous with my fiction in the sense that the point is not to talk about the literal events of my life but to convey certain ideas, capture certain moods and so on. Lynda Barry points out that memory and imagination have a lot in common and perhaps this is a key to what I mean.
TODW does dip into memoir here and there, anyway. There’s now a kind of tension surrounding memoir, I realise as a result of writing TODW, because of the existence of the internet. I think the internet age has meant a decline not only in handwritten letters, with all that decline entails, but I predict that it will also result in a general withering of the memoir as a literary form. I don’t mean, for instance, sensationalist memoirs of the celebrity kind, but any memoir that attempts a kind of intimate self-reflection. Who wants their most treasured memories scavenged by internet trolls? Who can steel themselves to write with that kind of personal intimacy after they have scrolled through Twitter, or the comments section of YouTube, knowing that in theory their work could be scattered across the internet at any time? The internet has had a deleterious effect on literature, and culture generally, in many ways. Anyway, I continue to be drawn to the memoir form, maybe partly out of fascination with this tension, you might say ‘despite myself’, or ‘defiantly’ or something like that.
Regarding plans to release TODW—I would like to see general—that is, print—publication happen some day, but I don’t know when that will be. For one thing, I would need an interested publisher.
KK – Well, I’m really pleased that the conclusion to TODW is not imminent. I’m very much looking forward to those surprises.
You mentioned the negative effect the internet age has had on culture. I’d like to talk about your recent novel, Hamster Dam, in which these concerns are embraced. Hamster Dam is a strange and wonderful book, one of your most Crispian novels. (I’m coining that term to denote the juxtaposition of an oppressive, ominous atmosphere with an element of absurdist humour.)
The internet is positioned as the memory of the culture, and in the novel, the internet is re-wiring reality. If culture is the creation of meaning, then this move by the “internet geeks”, the insidious unseen enemy, is reductive and ruinous. There is the possibility of transcendence in the very unlikely shape of childhood memories of a kid’s TV show from the 1970’s, which may or may not have existed. But this push for the transcendent is threatened by the reductionism inherent in scientific materialism, in which the age we live in is completely in its thrall.
Hamster Dam is a heady brew of ideas wrapped in a paranoid conspiracy mystery. Can you talk a bit about the initial seeds for the novel. Where did Hamster Dam start for you?
QSC – It’s actually hard for me to piece together the genesis of Hamster Dam, which in some ways I find reassuring, as it suggests to me that I was inspired rather than working mechanically. I do remember at the time, just before and during the writing of my notes, that I was greatly preoccupied with and disturbed by the fact that the internet presents what might be called a cubist vision of the world, in the sense that it supposedly shows everything at once, without shadow, and is never turned off. You can log off yourself (or we can for now, or suppose we can), but the internet is simply always there. In phenomenology, there is a recognition with regard to physical objects that we never see the entire object. We only see a ‘moment’ of it. This means that we are in our position in time and space and the object is in its position, and we see it from a certain angle at a certain time and so on. There is a quote at the beginning of Hamster Dam from ‘The Call of Cthulhu’, partly because I was conscious of returning to Lovecraftian methods of suspense. But there was also previously a quote from Robert Sokolowski’s Introduction to Phenomenology, along the lines of complete presence being impossible. As one aspect of a thing appears another disappears. For instance, you see a statue from the front, and when you walk around it, the front, for you, disappears. And this absence is actually very important. But the kind of complete presence spoken of in phenomenology as impossible is, it seems to me, precisely the kind that the internet simulates (falsely, of course). Think of the horror of everything concerning you, or any person, being completely known, public and unambiguous. The person becomes vacuum-sealed. All access to the infinite is blocked for them. The ‘moments’ displayed on the internet are considered to be exhaustive, as if they said, “There is no back; only this front.” This idea took hold of me at the time, and it was in the grip of this idea that I started making notes for and writing Hamster Dam. The Sokolowski quote was dropped, incidentally, due to complications around copyright. As it was about the importance of absence, maybe there’s something appropriate to that.
Hamster Dam itself, the children’s programme, has been with me for a very long time. It crops up, for instance, in an unpublished work that I wrote over a decade ago, and was old then.
KK – Hamster Dam also has a most outlandish element of levity in the backstory to the kid’s TV show. Cosmic zen hamsters! A kind of absurdist humour appears in many of your works, going right back to your early short story collections. Can I ask you about humour in your work in general. Is there ever a danger that the humour works against or undercuts those tenebrous atmospheres of dread you are so adept at creating? Absurdist humour is very prevalent in a vain of nihilist mid-20th century European literature, Beckett et al. Are you influenced by that?
QSC – On the question of humour, I remember reading aloud a story of mine called ‘The Legacy’—a fairly Gothic little story about spiders—to a group of friends in the town of Lincoln, many, many years ago, and there was much laughter. I got a similar effect for myself when reading Kafka’s ‘In the Penal Colony’. Recently, someone has told me that I am much funnier in person than in my writing and has suggested that I try to write more humorously. I’ve no objection to this, but I think that what I write is already humorous. You just have to look at it in the right light. In other words, it’s not that it’s full of jokes, it’s more the framing of things. Actually, as I get older, I am less and less fond of jokes in fiction. Often, they’re pretty cheap and they can be like the equivalent of an actor coming out of character. Maybe gratuitous jokes can undercut an atmosphere in the way you suggest, but those are the kind of jokes I feel less inclined to use these days. But the kind of humour that is part of the fabric of something, so that the image changes according to the light, like those lenticular rulers with pictures of stegosauruses swishing their tails and so on—I don’t see that as undermining a macabre or oppressive atmosphere.
With Hamster Dam in particular, I think the fact is that the things that are most important to us are often things that we would be embarrassed to name or describe in detail. There’s a great deal of pain surrounding them because they combine vulnerability with lack of dignity. Sex would be an example of this, although perhaps it is not the best example in the current age since so many people have become complete exhibitionists and over-sharers in this area.
KK – The novella Binturong Time is your most recent work of fiction to be published. It’s exquisitely written, but it’s puzzling and enigmatic in that I keep trying to get a hold of the totality of it in my mind but it’s an elusive thing. I do like the fact that I can’t assimilate it, that the three narrative parts of the novella rub against each other. The directionless protagonist, Colby, has a transcendental vision, an insight into the grand workings of the universe, and he grapples with how this vision should change his life, if at all. It reminds me of Philip K Dick’s mystical vision/revelation that altered his understanding of reality, and you acknowledge PKD by having Colby reading Valis. The second section has Colby failing in his effort to express the importance of his vision to Emmaline, the ASMRtist. And the third section follows Colby as he has decided to do something with his life, he has decided to care about something. But chronologically this section happens before the second. Binturong Time feels like a puzzle or an allegory. Can you say something about the genesis of the story, and how it developed. Did you have any literary models in mind for the structure of the book?
It starts in a zoo in Mexico City. This is one of your few stories set outside of Greater London or Japan. Is there a reason for this change of setting?
QSC – I’m glad you’ve asked about Binturong Time, as so far it doesn’t seem to have garnered much attention.
Setting is both something that is important to me and something in which I feel a lack of confidence. So, if my settings tend to be limited to certain places, it’s not because I have no desire to set things elsewhere. I went to Mexico back in 2015 as part of an Anglo-Mexican cultural exchange. While I was there, in Mexico City, I had, incidentally, star treatment such as I have had at no other time and in no other place. I was assigned a guide, who was very helpful and most generous. Since I said that I wanted to see the binturong at Chapultepec Zoo, she took me there. Sadly, the binturong did not appear in its enclosure, though we waited for some time. My guide asked me if I thought I could write a story about this and I said, “Certainly, this is how I would do it …” And I outlined the story. That outline, by the way, corresponds to the first of the three sections.
Some years later, I decided it was time to write the story, or the story decided that I should write it, and then I realised, as I made notes and thought about the images, themes, and so on, that in order to bring out the meaning of that ‘first section’, I needed to talk about Colby’s later life, too.
I should say that, although I plot things in advance, the meaning of a story is something that has a life of its own. Ideally, I want to have the sensation that the story is telling itself and that I am co-operating with it in some fascinating way. Where I have the feeling of ‘making things up’ or forcing things, is precisely where I suspect I have gone wrong. Therefore, I don’t consider it a bad thing that a story should be an enigma, intellectually speaking, as long as I think I have fulfilled the process that began with the initial idea and notes and have not blundered into problems of continuity and verisimilitude. Some time after I finished the story, I began to get the feeling that there was a kind of secret message in it that I hadn’t intended, but I am reluctant to say what it is, as I hope that the reader will discover these things, or other things, by him- or herself. I can say that two or three people who have read it have commented that there’s a sort of dark underside to it, and I think they’re right. I actually set out to write something that was simply beautiful and a bit whimsical, but in the finished piece there are shadows lurking.
In terms of the story being out of chronological order, I think that is part of the secret message. I can also say that for a long time I have been very much taken with hiding the ‘end’ of a story somewhere in the middle. I feel like I’ve picked this up from Japanese literature somewhere. The most obvious candidate for this is Mishima’s The Decay of the Angel, which has had a huge influence on me. I think it might also be a kind of psychological tactic for dealing with mortality. If one imagines oneself as a kind of spiral-labyrinth with the end in the middle, then the end has already been met and contained, and what is left over is life.
KK – As I mentioned, Binturong Time contains some of your most beautiful prose. The vision of the primordial eternal time at the heart of the book is particularly striking. The extended passage describing Colby’s fall from this state, as he is indelicately (and scatologically) flung back down to reality reads like Rilkean poetry. I wanted to ask you about these ecstatic visions, states, imaginative spaces, fantastical places, and dreams that play such a large part in your fiction. I am especially struck by the attention you give to the transitions between reality and these states, or these zones. (I hesitantly call them the wardrobe-to-Narnia passages. Faye’s walk into the woods/into faery in The Fairy Killer is a stunning example of this). You seem to revel in the margins of reality and non-reality. Can you say something about this?
QSC – You’re right that I do very often return to the Narnia-wardrobe and to dreams. I think this comes down to the simple, or not-so-simple fact that my project has long been to reconcile what I first wanted to write, which I broadly call ‘fantasy’, though it need not imply anything in the ‘sword and sorcery’ vein, with the facts of experience. Does this have metaphysical implications? I would say, “Of course.” Keeping to the Narnia theme, I think we’re not far off the mark if we call C.S. Lewis a Platonist. If you read or watch Puddleglum’s heroic speech in The Silver Chair (you can find it on YouTube, with Tom Baker as Puddleglum), and keep Plato in mind, it will, I think, suddenly dawn on you that the characters are in A CAVE.
Of course, immediately that one realises this, in the context of what I’ve said, all sorts of complications come to mind, such as the question, “Is what I have long thought of as fantasy related to, or even the same as, what Plato seems to posit as ultimate reality?”
There are problems with Plato, but then, there are problems with me. In writing, I am hoping to engage with these. I think the liminal and dream elements are on the one hand instinctive and perhaps, to that extent, resist explanation, and on the other, can be seen as part of a repeated attempt to bring the apparently separated worlds or realities back into harmony.
KK – Seeing life as the spiral-labyrinth is a quite beautiful and profound conception. It’s at odds with the Western linear view of the birth and death, and has something of the ‘death contained in life’ perspective of Buddhism. The Decay of The Angel has gone right to the top of my reading list.
I’m currently reading M. John Harrison’s memoirs, and pertaining to Binturong Time’s enigmatic meaning, he says this in relation to ‘the Weird’:
“A Weird text may not add up. It may not resolve. In fact it certainly won’t. Nevertheless there will be no signposts. The author is not on this tour to guide you. The author’s work has been to strip out affects, conclusions and motivations, then replace them out of order and at an odd angle… The Weird stands for the unwritten, the unwritable: that which, the reader must sense, lies behind the text.”
(In an effort to define the Weird, Harrison goes on to say that it “is not ‘Lovecraftian’: it does not belong to H. P. Lovecraft. Neither is it a subset of the Gothic. It is not the same as Freud’s uncanny. It does not belong to the set of ‘genre-adjacent sui generis’. In each and every case it should be a true idiolect. The weird is not a genre in itself, it is a process.”)
Has your relationship to the Weird changed over the years? Do you see your recent novellas like Out There and Binturong Time related to the Weird in any way?
QSC – I should warn that you really need to read Spring Snow, Runaway Horses and Temple of Dawn before reading Decay of the Angel! I hope you do, though.
From the sounds of it, M. John Harrison has thought a lot more about the meaning of the Weird than I have. I actually don’t think about genre very much, although, of course, Harrison is saying here that the Weird is not a genre.
When I hear the words “the Weird”, that makes me think of a lot of pondering that has taken place this century on the subject. (I recall reading an essay by China Miéville on the Weird, for instance.) I am not sure how much relation I bear to that. I definitely do have some roots in what is called weird fiction, though, which in my understanding simply means a kind of supernatural or uncanny fiction, not relying on the traditional tropes of vampires, werewolves and ghosts, spanning from (roughly) the 1890s to some time in the first half of the twentieth century, its palette stretching from decadence to modernism. There is also the revival of weird fiction in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century. Having said all that, I’ve recently been dipping into the works of E.T.A Hoffmann, who was writing in the early nineteenth century, and we definitely have something recognisable as ‘weird fiction’ here, or the roots of it. In fact, in many ways it seems to render a lot of what follows redundant. And then you have anomalous figures such as Robert Aickman. So . . . I’m actually not sure I can give a firm definition even of weird fiction. But the fact is that I have been greatly influenced by writers such as H.P. Lovecraft and William Hope Hodgson. I still remember the first time I read the opening paragraph of ‘The Call of Cthulhu’. It was like reading words carved into the stone of an ancient monolith. I fell under the spell of the gothic, and I particularly liked what you might call ‘space gothic’, in which we have stories with interstellar scope, but no sense of the narrative of ‘progress’. (The Blake’s 7 episode ‘Sarcophagus’, written by Tanith Lee, strikes me as an example of this mood or aesthetic.) Hodgson presents us with a dying far future world, for instance, and in Lovecraft’s tales, there’s really nowhere for humans to go. We’d be much better off staying at home with the curtains drawn, etc.
So, I do have some real roots in all that. I think that will never entirely leave me, and you can see that coming up in the way I structure stories such as the ones you mention, in some of the atmospheric effects, the strategic withholding and revealing of information and so on. But I simply have other themes to write about now, which require different tools, a different palette, and so on, so I think the weird fiction elements, though they haven’t entirely gone, have become mixed in with lots of other elements and might not be readily recognisable.
Incidentally, I occasionally re-read Lovecraft. I don’t quite get from him these days what I used to, but I continue to find him interesting. The writer John Elliott (who wrote Human Pages) said to me more than once in conversation, “Kafka is not Kafka-esque.” I wonder to what extent Lovecraft is Lovecraftian. I notice peculiar things on re-reading, like how many of his stories have Cartesian metaphysics (‘The Thing on the Doorstep’, ‘Cool Air’, ‘The Shadow Out of Time’). In ‘From Beyond’, the pineal gland even plays an important part: the crucial gland for Descartes for mind-body interaction.
KK – You mention the other themes you write about now, and the different tools needed for that. I wondered, with the short story being the format of choice for weird fiction, and its abating influence in your work, does that explain the dearth of short stories in your more recent output? It’s been a decade since Defeated Dogs, your last collection. Looking at your bibliography and the first decade of your career, you were prolific (forty-three stories published in five collections); the short story seemed central to your writing process. The last decade has seen a move into the longer forms of the diaristic notebook, essays, novellas, and the novel, Graves. (Not forgetting poetry, of which I want to talk about later.) Was there a conscious decision to move away from the short story format? Or is the short story still as vital to you, but your recent material is just outgrowing the format?
QSC – No, there hasn’t been any decision to do that, though I can certainly see how it might look that way. There are actually a number of uncollected short (or shortish) pieces from me, some published and some not. I easily have enough material, in terms of volume, for another short story collection, but I have begun to conceive of my story collections in thematic or atmospheric terms, so that I need enough stories of the right type to have a collection that I can then try and interest a publisher in. I’m almost there with one collection, and in the meantime, I’ve written stories that might be suitable for differently themed collections. But I don’t want to mix the stories up haphazardly. (Some stories, I think, are suitable for more than one collection and can serve as wild cards.)
Having said that, I’ve found writing fiction difficult in the last few years and I don’t altogether understand why. They’ve been difficult years in all sorts of ways, so there’s no shortage of possible reasons.
In the last two or three years, for instance, I’ve made extensive notes for two novels, and then, in both cases, the trail just petered out. And that’s happened with some notes for short stories, too. This is very unusual for me. I was writing notes for one of those novels for a year or more, and it came to nothing. But it’s not necessarily time lost. I hope to go back to them at some point and try again.
I actually would like to write in as many different literary forms as possible. So far I have: novel, short story, essay, poetry, diary . . . there might be others. And these subdivide, too, of course.
Anyway, I haven’t given up on short stories. I hope to publish at least three more short story collections. I’m only afraid that I won’t live long enough to complete my plans, which seems fairly likely.
At present, I am working on four main projects, and also have some slow-lane, back-burner projects. One of the four main ones is a short story, which I am grinding away at in sullen determination.
I think that one factor in all this is that by some understandings of the term (not my own, I should add) I have very seldom written a short story. My two formative influences have been weird fiction and Japanese literature. Most Lovecraftian tales are really novelettes or novellas. They are dense pieces of work. This holds for Machen, Blackwood and others, too. But you see a similar thing in Japanese literature. A ‘short story’ is a ‘shosetsu’ just as much as a very long one. They subdivide by length into ‘tampen’ (short), ‘chuuhen’ (medium-length) and ‘chohen’ (long), but they are all shosetsu. Most of the really prominent names in Japanese literature have left behind oeuvres in which the tanpen, chuuhen and chohen shosetsu are all more or less equally weighted in terms of importance. They’re just different lengths. Higuchi Ichiyo’s ‘Child’s Play’, for instance, is a novelette, in terms of length, but it has the kind of prestige in Japanese literature we tend to reserve for novels.
To some extent, I feel that way about my own writing: the various pieces are just different lengths. I do aspire, though, to greater complexity of construction and so on, which does tend to require more pages.
It pains me to hear about those lost novels, Quentin. Remember You’re a One-Ball and Graves are such bold and distinctive works, I wish there were more of your novels in existence. In an old-ish interview with Justin Isis, he waxed lyrical about some of your novels-in-progress that he had been lucky enough to read, praising them as the best things you’d written. What is the state of play with Susuki, The Hideous Child, Domesday Afternoon and Summerhill?
And I’m sorry to hear that the fiction writing has slowed down; so that makes Zagava’s announcement of the imminent release of Ikaho doubly exciting. It is set in Edo period Japan, is this your first historical tale? What can you say about Ikaho?
QSC – It’s not actually the first I’ve written. I think it might be the first to be published. But Susuki, the sequel to Shrike, which I am currently revising, has sections that are set in the Edo period, like Ikaho. I wrote Susuki ages back in first draft, so that might be my first. What I said about setting before also applies here.
I’m not sure what to say altogether about Ikaho except that I am currently very pleased with it. My opinion of my individual works tends to see-saw, but after a while it settles into a more or less stable assessment for any given work, that is, if I re-read and think about it. Ikaho is an example of the kind of thing I feel will do a decent job of representing me after I am dead.
(Incidentally, I am thinking of putting some kind of ‘do not resuscitate’ clause in my will, if I write one. I want to be represented, if at all, by my own works, not by some sort of digital animatronics that will only represent the triumph of Silicon Valley.)
Ikaho, I would say, taps into a sentimental tradition in Japanese literature. There are the ninjoubon, also called, I believe, nakibon, or ‘crying books’, which are meant to tug on the heartstrings, and often have themes of transience and the parting of ways, and this general strain of feeling and atmosphere is taken up in the enka tradition in Japanese popular music, and you can see it in films and television, too. It’s strongly present in Otoko Ha Tsurai Yo!, the long-running film series. Just listen to and watch the opening titles of that and you’ve got it. Films like The Sea Is Watching and Twilight Samurai also have it. I love it. I feel very much at home in that tradition. Of course, whether I can pull that feeling off in Japanese drag, so to speak, is another question, but that’s for the reader to judge.
On the current status of the other novels: I am, as mentioned, currently revising Susuki. After that I intend to revise The Hideous Child. It’s not good to be too specific too far in advance, but there are hopes of publication. What will happen with Domesday Afternoon (incidentally, Domesday Afternoon refers to the whole trilogy, and Summerhill is the first volume, which is the only one I’ve written so far), that is anybody’s guess, but I hope it will be revised, published, read and appreciated in my lifetime.
KK – One aspect of your writing that we haven’t talked about yet is your poetry. Your ambitious twelve year project is set to re-commence this month (May) and last year saw the release of the very brilliant Autumn and Spring Annals, the largest collection yet from the project. Does the project have a name?
QSC – The project doesn’t have a name. I suppose it should have. Hopefully some day all twelve months, assuming I write the remaining ones as I intend to, will be published in one volume, and that volume will need a name. But I have a few years to think about that.
KK – As an accompaniment to my review of Autumn & Spring Annals on this blog, you kindly gave me permission to print my choice of your tankas. I chose ones that highlighted various themes from the collection and that were self-contained. But on re-reading the whole collection, I am in two minds about what I did. I feel I was quite brutal, extracting the tankas from their natural environment—the other tankas around them. It feels like a desecration, as if I cut up a poem to pull out my favourite verses. So a very basic question is about the form of the poems themselves. The book’s typographic layout seems to privilege the individual tanka as the poetic unit. How do you see it, which is the poem, the individual tanka or the day’s worth of tankas?
QSC – I’m glad you asked this, as I think others have been unsure about how to divide the collections up into single poems. I think I have half inadvertently created a bit of a hybrid form. I say “half inadvertently” because it was, in fact, half by design. The short answer is this: each five-line tanka is a single poem. This is more obvious in my manuscripts, in which each tanka is numbered.
However, there are good reasons, I think, why there is ambiguity about what constitutes an individual poem in these collections. Before I wrote September, I had already experimented with tanka, writing numbers of tanka daily for a year and a day, in about 2012/2013, so I knew I could write them daily for extended periods. What I was not confident about was the consistent quality, as poetry, of the individual tanka, but I thought that the diaristic form would allow the overall context to carry the weight of the weaker tanka, so that those weaker ones could be a bit more like the prosaic, expository passages in a novel and the stronger ones like the peaks of drama or lyrical description. The weaker ones would at least be verse, and the stronger ones perhaps true poetry.
It’s hard for me to judge in these matters, but, of course, I’m bound to try to, and I think this plan has actually worked out better than I had feared, as your reaction seems to testify. The individual poems interact with each other, bringing out different nuances and layers of meaning with interrelationship. In short, they form a kind of web. For this reason, I think that readers will get more out of the poems if they read them in order, though they are perfectly free to dip in here and there, of course.
KK – The form of the tanka is unusual to see used so consistently in English poetry. With its strict lines of 5-7-5-7-7 syllables, you have chosen to work with one of the tightest, most constrictive verse forms there is. At its heart, I suppose it is an aphoristic form, but I find it remarkable how much variation you get out of it. From knotty philosophical enquiry, to bleak humour (“On the Gravesend train. / Someday I’ll go all the way / To the terminus.”), to tenderly observed atmospheres (“The sun/With gold post-rain flow/Burns pale in the net curtains/In transfiguring decline), to dark introspection, to transcendental moments, you have made it your own. I know you have a deep and long standing interest in Japanese culture. What drew you to this verse form in the first place? Especially as its strictures and concision is in direct opposition to the mellifluousness of your prose. What do you like about the tanka?
QSC – As to what first attracted me to the tanka form, this is partly mysterious. The experiment of 2012/2013 which I mentioned, began after a rather heavy night in Plumstead. I was hungover, bleary-eyed and feeling washed out, and began to count out the syllables of a verse on my left hand as if it were second nature and soon realised that I felt at home in the form. This didn’t come entirely out of thin air, though. I had studied tanka during my BA, as part of the study of classical Japanese, and this study seemed to have planted seeds of some kind, which some years later bore this fruit.
I think it was also at around the same time that I found myself suddenly and instinctively drawn to the idea of the aphorism. I have memories of reading over some of my prose and thinking it was too flabby and that it needed musculature and the idea occurred to me, somewhat as the idea suddenly occurs to some people to work out physically, that I should start to practice writing aphorisms in order to develop that muscular, aphoristic tendency in my prose. I have a number of notebooks now that are filled with such aphorisms and notes. This is an ongoing habit with me now. So, I don’t think it’s any accident that there’s an aphoristic quality to the tanka. I think this was also part of the attraction for me.
I have found that I do not feel as at home in the haiku form. Incidentally, I have written over 1,500 haiku (I don’t know the exact number). I’m not saying they’re any good, but I’ve written them. Somehow, the tanka form just feels very different to me, and I’m not sure I can really explain the attraction except in vague, impressionistic ways. I like the feeling of a kernel in a shell that they give me, and the feeling of shifting around rhyme and wordplay like in one of those old sliding tile puzzles. (Rhyme is not a part of Japanese tanka, incidentally, but there are other forms of wordplay.) Have you seen that series of photos of Kate Bush in a box? I think it influenced the cover of the first Tori Amos album. Anyway, in writing tanka, I feel a bit like that–adopting various positions within the same box. By now it must be over 1,200 positions. Over 3,000 if you include the unpublished 2012/2013 project.
KK – Autumn and Spring Annals collects six months/six years of poems. It is the first time that the actual grand scale of the project is seen under one cover. Slim volumes of the single months had been released before, but with this larger book the advance of the seasons and the years could be seen that much clearer. One of the aspects of this kind of diaristic writing is that over time it starts to include history. Especially apparent is that you were sensitive to the dark societal and cultural shifts back in 2015 that seem to be coming to a head now. You summarise these troubling times as “Our lived Atlantis”. One tanka reads “I was born during / A long peace, but soon enough / Normal service is / To be resumed. Unfinished business of apocalypse.” Another points out the dangers of our digital fetishism, “This technocracy / A digital hag rides us / And we might never awake.” My friend, Alex Older predicts that we are living through the end of liberal democracy and heading towards a more authoritarian age, and I’m guessing you would agree with him. He says that a liberal democracy needs mass literacy and a sober print culture to survive, and with the rise of a hysteric digital culture, that sobriety has long gone. Back in pre-Brexit 2015 (which seems like another age entirely now), was documenting this societal transition/collapse part of the project’s initial impetus?
QSC – This question is surprisingly difficult to answer. I’ve had to think about it because it seems to me that almost any answer I might give will be misleading in some way. Perhaps that doesn’t matter, but it seems to matter to me. Anyway, I think I have a way of explaining things that is reasonably accurate.
The first collection in the series, September, could have been a one-off. The specific conception for that collection, which might be called its motivation, was a kind of metaphor involving the titular month, which straddles the end of summer and the beginning of autumn. For many years I’ve loved the month of September, and I thought it would be good to capture that in a sort of verse diary. The metaphorical aspect comes from the fact that I felt, in 2015 when I wrote that, that I had reached the September of my life.
Even as I was writing September, the idea occurred to me to do the same for all the months, in sequence, but over a period of twelve years, so that each successive month was in the year after the last month.
So, at that point there was no specific motivation to chronicle any sort of collapse or transition, and I’m not sure that that has been the leading motivation at any point, though I don’t want to say it’s had no part in my thoughts. What I have been very aware of from before I began the project, and which at some point, perhaps even from the beginning, has formed a significant part of the motivation, is the fact that things are changing so fast now. I have often felt my novelistic instincts defeated by the pace of change. A novel takes years to write, more years to publish, and by the time it comes out, the world might be unrecognisable. It seemed to me that perhaps I could tune into the change more by writing these bulletin-like poems in a real-time kind of format and that if this didn’t help me to write novels that were in tune with the changes, it could at least free me to write novels that stood at a greater distance from the changes and didn’t have to capture them in detail at high speed.
In terms of chronicling specific types of change, the main one is perhaps technological change with its concomitant social effects. Secondly, at some point the feeling became visceral in my daily life that I was no longer living in the country in which I had been born, and that feeling comes out in the poems, too. Finally, there are what might be called political changes, which are not, I think, recorded directly in the poems very much. Political concerns show up, but I would say that these are not party-political concerns. They are either on meta-issues, such as free speech or the breakdown of social consensus, or they relate to broad, geopolitical issues.
As to whether we are seeing the end of liberal democracy, that is something that is in question. I think what we’re seeing is that we’re at the end of the period when we could afford to be complacent about such things. Perhaps we never really could afford it, but we have been complacent nonetheless. In an interesting article published in Foreign Affairs last year, Francis Fukuyama says that we’re currently in a “democratic recession”. To quote: “According to Freedom House, political rights and civil liberties around the world have fallen each year for the last 16 years.” The article is called, ‘A Country of Their Own‘. It’s long, but I would recommend it, if you haven’t already read it. He suggests that for liberalism to survive, it must be enshrined as part of national pride; only the nation state has the real power to defend it. He cites Ukraine as an example here. Quoting again: “With their bravery, they have made clear that citizens are willing to die for liberal ideals, but only when those ideals are embedded in a country they can call their own.”
The phrase “democratic recession” suggests something we might come out of. It’s an open question as to whether the future will be more like that espoused by Fukuyama, or more like that put forward (I don’t think it’s an espousal) by Huntington. In the former vision, it is possible for there to be a single, universal culture or politics based on liberalism, and this is even seen as the likely destination. In the latter, differences among civilisational groups are incorrigible, the world is multi-polar, liberalism can never spread much beyond the West, and we had better get good at managing Détente between fundamentally distinct civilisations.
KK – When the idea of this interview was broached, you said that it felt like the right time to talk to your readership. I’ve asked you questions about your recent work, but is there anything else you wanted to say that I haven’t asked about?
QSC – One of the things that has struck me in the process of answering questions for this interview is the extent to which, in relation to writing, I work by instinct, and that applies to this interview itself. I just had a feeling that now was a good time for an extensive interview, without having in mind something specific to say. From a young age I’ve also had an aversion to the idea of the didactic writer. And on top of that again, I seem to have a natural sceptical streak in me—I mean actual Pyrrhonian scepticism rather than the dogmatic materialism that passes for scepticism today—and this makes it hard for me to be crusadingly unequivocal about my beliefs.
For these reasons, I’m not sure there are any particular things I am determined to say that haven’t come out naturally in the course of this interview.
I could, of course, talk about expected releases and projects in progress, but I’m not sure what to say at the moment except that there are such things and I hope my readers will look out for them. I’ll try and publicise them at the right time. I could say that there will be surprises among my current projects, but people will either be surprised or not, whatever I say.
If I am to take this opportunity to put forward a message, though, perhaps an appropriate message would be a defence of what I have dedicated my life to, which I think needs our defence right now. I mean, broadly speaking, art, which in terms of my own practice has, of course, been the literary art. There is the phrase, familiar from academia, ‘arts and humanities’, and I think it’s an apt pairing, since without art, I am not sure we really have much that can be called humanity.
I recently read the book Reclaiming Art, by J.F. Martel, and would urge people to read it. As the title suggests, this, too, is a defence of art. In particular, Martel is defending art from the two poles of what he called ‘propaganda’ and ‘pornography’, which are constantly commandeering art for their own purposes and which, in recent years, have come to predominate in the cultural sphere. ‘Propaganda’ perhaps speaks for itself. Pretty much any film coming out of Hollywood at the moment subordinates art to propaganda. ‘Pornography’ is not to be taken literally, but indicates a pandering to people’s cravings for commercial purposes. If people see art as only propaganda or pornography, they do not understand or respect it. They are using it (if they have anything to do with it) for utilitarian purposes. This is an important book and what it says needs saying right now.
I would add that I think the reason art is in this predicament, overwhelmingly used for propaganda and pornography, is because of the prevalent materialism of our culture. The fact that funding for arts and humanities is slashed year on year in the universities is another manifestation of this. The culmination of this particular effect of materialism, I think, is the belief that AI can make meaningful art independently of humans. This is STEM triumphalism. It looks unpleasantly like people on one side of the division represented by C.P. Snow’s ‘two cultures’ thinking they now have the power to crush underfoot those on the other side, that of the arts and humanities. It’s as if they said, “We can do everything you can do, and better, with machines.” Even if that’s not the original intention, that kind of rhetoric comes to surround the whole topic. Of course, many artists join in with this, because they’ve bought into the materialist ideology, and they want to be part of that triumphalism and—I suspect—as many artists do, they suffer from self-loathing. But this devaluing of the arts is apiece with the same devaluing that has been the cause of massive defunding of the arts and humanities in recent years.
I suggest we have to be extremely careful here about what path we take. Einstein, apparently (and not uniquely), read Kant, Spinoza, Schopenhauer and many other philosophers as part of his education. Fast forward to 2010 and Stephen Hawking pronounces, in The Grand Design, that “philosophy is dead”, which, if we are uncharitable enough to take him as speaking for his community, and unless other scientists signal their dissent, amounts to the pronouncement that scientists are now arrogant philistines. An article in Physics Today from 2005 (‘Albert Einstein as a Philosopher of Science’) tells us that, “Nowadays, explicit engagement with the philosophy of science plays almost no role in the training of physicists or in physics research. What little the student learns about philosophical issues is typically learned casually, by a kind of intellectual osmosis. One picks up ideas and opinions in the lecture hall, in the laboratory, and in collaboration with one’s supervisor. Careful reflection on philosophical ideas is rare.” So, someone dissents, at least, in order to take up the issue in this article. If more attention were paid to philosophy in tech circles, the conversation about AI would be far less confused. Even something as simple as a widespread understanding of John Searle’s distinction between observer-relative and observer-independent intelligence would make a huge difference in public discussion of AI. For instance, it could easily be that an AI program can be an observer-relative artist, which I think is the most favourable explanation of what’s happening with these programs, without it being an observer-independent artist.
This is a huge and complex issue, but I just want to make one point here. The advent of AI has highlighted, I think, not the death of the author, but the importance of the fact that the author is a living being. Let me give an example. This is from the Old English poem ‘The Wanderer’, which is over a thousand years old. I am quoting from a public domain translation by Edward Fulton:
For him who has few of friends and loved ones:
He trails the track of the exile; no treasure he has,
But heart-chilling frost— no fame upon earth.
He recalls his comrades and the costly hall-gifts
Of his gracious gold-friend, which he gave him in youth
To expend as he pleased: his pleasure has vanished!
He who lacks for long his lord’s advice,
His love and his wisdom, learns full well
How sorrow and slumber soothe together
The way-worn wanderer to welcome peace.
Who can read this and not think that a great part of the wonder and poignancy of it is the sensation of hearing a human voice from a different age echo down to us through the centuries?
I’ve been listening to Flo Read interview virtual-reality pioneer Jaron Lanier in an UnHerd podcast. She says that there are all these people in the tech world, like Sam Altman, who pop up and say to us, “Oh, this AI we’re working on, by the way, might destroy humanity if we’re not careful,” and then they just go back to working on the very thing they’ve said might destroy us. She points out the contradiction here. What amazes me is that we live in a world in which it needs pointing out at all. Would we normally sit unblinking and complacent if someone told us that they’re working on something they fear will bring about the end of humanity, “but excuse me, I’d better get back to it”?
It might be worth mentioning that Jaron Lanier thinks these fears are unfounded, or that these fears, based on treating AI as a living alien intelligence, are themselves the real danger, though some who express these fears are precisely those developing the AI.
So, in the details we see things like the cuts of funding to the humanities and arts because they are not “strategic priorities”. More broadly we see a loss of humanity in the abstract and a possible threat to humanity in concrete terms. Surely it’s not unreasonable to ask, haven’t we perhaps taken a wrong turning?
I think we have, and I think one part of correcting our course is to bring our culture back into balance, partly through the arts and humanities. Art is a capability. If we give it away to mindless automated processes, we are losing that capability in ourselves. We’ll still have to live our own lives, which the machines can’t do for us, but we’ll be less able to. Art is ours. The sciences, with the physical sciences among them, were meant to serve humanity, not replace it.
Many thanks, Quentin, for this interview.
KULCHUR KAT 