Fringe (de)Classified Editor, Heather Falconer, sat down with author Jonathan Callahan for a brief chat on where his writing “comes” from.  Callahan’s piece, “Under Joe’s Volcano,” can be read in this issue’s (de)Classified section.

When I first read “Under Joe’s Volcano,” I was taken with how simultaneously light and dark it was. It was playful in language, but heavier in subject – an interesting combination. I (and I think our readers) would love to know where the inspiration for this piece came from and why you chose to approach it in the way you did. Was there something specific that you were attempting? How does it fit in with the other work you’ve done?

This is a good question. I generally don’t have any specific objective with a given piece of fiction other than to channel twenty pages or so of anguish and rage, but in this case I actually did have something particular in mind.

I’m probably incapable of writing narrative realism, in part because I really don’t think any story as a set of events or facts is inherently worth being told, and I generally can’t stand fiction that attempts to credential itself with particulars of time or place. I think the Flannery O’Connor quote about writers having all the experience they need by the time they’re sixteen or whenever is valid when understood to mean that it’s never the experience itself, whatever the experience, but what’s in the experience that’s worth working out on the page.

Except I really wanted to write about a particularly concentrated period of hopeless desolation that I’ll always associate with my time as a bus-boy at a now-defunct TGIFriday’s on Ward Avenue in Honolulu, before I left Hawaii for good, but after I’d begun to grapple with the idea that the next several years of my life were probably going to be unpleasant. I’ve worked lots of shitty jobs, of course, as I guess most people have, and this one certainly wasn’t the shittiest, but there was something in the shittiness of how I felt while working this one that I felt acutely at the time and couldn’t really imagine capturing in any kind of conventional narrative drawing on my experience of those several months. What Aristotelian sequence of events could mean whatever it meant to me to be in my stupid-looking bussers’ apron, sneaking out behind the store for chemical reinvigoration, not so much unhappy with the work itself—as I say, I’ve had worse jobs—as terrified by my consciousness of the possibility that this might be the best that I could hope for—and I really wasn’t very good at this? So that what I guess I’m saying is that the “story,” if there was a “story” that I wanted to write with “Under Joe’s Volcano,” was a straight transmission of what it felt like during double-shifts in that depressingly gaily decorated place.

I’ve argued elsewhere—successfully or not I still go back and forth on all the time—that the only point of creative work is a kind of empathetic communion in pain (and I’m obviously not the only person to come along who’s felt this way: for instance), and so I think that while the actual composition process tends to unfold organically as I write myself into a given piece, the principle that guides each intuitive endeavor is this sense that some way or another the reader needs to feel the pain that justifies a given sample of material’s eventually taking shape.

The relevance here is that I don’t think I could have a constructed an emotionally compelling realist narrative drawing from my personal experience as a busboy at a well-known family restaurant at which most American readers will have probably at one point or another dined—but there was something in those several months that I think was compelling, compelling enough at least for me to feel the need to write about it, anyway. And of course, I’m fully willing to concede that my inability to conceive of such a story does not reflect inherent limitations to the narrative-realist mode so much as it reflects some kind of shortcoming in me, but you’ve ultimately got to write the kind of work you could imagine yourself wanting to read.

David Foster Wallace talks about a “click” he feels in certain fiction, and this click, at least as I’ve interpreted it, is as a kind of sudden direction change from the superficial horizontal to the vertical—an unexpected plumbing of depths. My short list of authors who’ve clicked for me over the past few years is in fact pretty short: Thomas Bernhard, Don DeLillo, Kafka, Beckett, Pynchon, Anne Carson, David Markson, W. S. Sebald, Donald Barthelme, Lydia Davis, and David Foster Wallace. What I think happens in the work of every one of these authors is that the spirit of the material seems precisely matched with its final manifestation. Another way of saying this, I guess, is that I’m not sure I’d be capable of writing another “Under Joe’s Volcano.” I haven’t had the need.

So we’re drifting away from the question here, but I guess what I was “attempting” with “Under Joe’s Volcano” was to somehow capture the feeling or “thereness” of a particular period of my own life that I think might have its analogues in potential readers’ diverse experience as well, a complex of feeling inexpressible in any other form than the one it took, which is why it finally took it. If “Under Joe’s Volcano” does succeed (and I’m certainly not confident enough in my own capabilities to know whether or not it does), then what’s transmitted is that “thereness,” that substratum that made we want to write it in the first place. Which I guess is what literature’s supposed to do though, right? I’ve never been in search of rivets, stranded at the Congo River’s Central Station, for example, and yet I probably go back to Heart of Darkness at least once every year.

Now, let me ask you: is this what you look for in Literature? How do you select what you’re going to read? What do you respond to most?

This is kind of a tough question, right? I mean, in theory if I knew what I was looking for in Literature I’d be done looking. So I don’t think I could articulate any static set of characteristics that I’m after before opening up the book, but if the book is working it seems to begin to do so for me from the very first handful of words.

As I said earlier, there are a few of authors to whose work I tend to respond pretty consistently. I guess above all it has to be the sentences—if the sentences have that “click,” then I’m at the very least going to keep reading—and the trinity of authors whose sentences click the most consistently for me would be Nabokov, Don DeLillo, and David Foster Wallace, but I’ve read most of their stuff at this point, so I am trying to look elsewhere. Lately I’ve been reading Lydia Davis almost exclusively, and she, too, is phenomenal at the level of sentence and phrase.

But then there’s also a broader, more nebulous criterion that comes into play which I guess I’d define as a sense that the author I’m reading is doing something extraordinary and more, somehow punching through the process of putting words to the page, and while it’s very hard to articulate a coherent definition of this particular quality, I do feel it in some authors, and less so in others. Kafka, Beckett and Thomas Bernhard are all writers whose pages I can’t help but keep reading (often while underlining or even reading aloud when I get a little too pumped up). There’s some feature that’s very hard to pinpoint but present in each of these writers’ work that seems to have something to do with a combination of resonance and extreme enjoyability. A friend of mine once told me that he didn’t know anyone who’d made it all the way through Beckett’s The Unnameable; I don’t understand how a reader could stop reading it once she’d begun.

And then even more so, with an author like Tolstoy, say, I’m not even particularly interested in the sentences themselves—or occasionally I am, but not so consistently—and yet I really trust him. I know it’s not fashionable to say that great literature ought to be a pleasure to read (witness the rampant denunciation of the fairly straightahead prose in Jonathan Franzen’s most recent book, which is, no matter what else you may think of it, a pretty pleasurable, easygoing read), but one quality common to my experience of reading each of the above cited three writers’ work is how fucking engrossing it tends to be—I almost feel guilty, as if something this potent shouldn’t be this much fun.

My most recent encounter with a novel that disappointed me in this respect would have to be C, by Tom McCarthy, whose Remainder I thought was fantastic, but who really disappointed me with the new book: in spite of the admirable breadth and reach, it really felt superficial and indifferent to most of the things that matter to me—people things—and furthermore was a bit of a burden to read.

I would say that as someone who will eventually publish his first book with some independent press or another, one thing I’ve found disappointing about the last few indy publications I’ve read (and I’m not going to name them on the principle that most of these authors are scraping along, and can use all the positive press they can get and none of the negativity they might) has been a quality I guess I’d describe as smallness: some of these books are loaded with phrase-level pyrotechnics but don’t seem to do much more than paint vivid images with their virtuosic wordplay (the equivalent maybe of a guitar-driven album filled with fun technical prowess but devoid of any memorable songs); meanwhile others strike me as kind of addicted to competence: I don’t know how many debut story collections I’ve read that I couldn’t really point to any particular fault in but that didn’t seem to be gunning for much more than publication and invulnerability to criticism. Of the two I guess I’d prefer the former, in that at least the progenitors of spectacular prose are accomplishing something other than publication and the securing of a teaching gig at university, but I don’t think technical proficiency for its own sake is art. Lots of badass guitarists aren’t capable of writing transcendent songs.

I don’t know. I’m temporarily in the interesting (to me, at least) position of having just begun to have a little success with my work without yet having published a complete manuscript, and maybe—probably—my perspective will change after the first book comes out, but for now my thinking is that if it isn’t a grand slam you’re after, what’s the point of swinging the bat? I haven’t yet read Joshua Coen’s Witz, but I’m going to, and even if I don’t wind up liking it I feel like my admiration for his ambition won’t be much diminished. For similar reasons I can absolutely understand why Franzen took nearly a decade to put his new novel together. I like stuff that seems like it’s been agonized over. And I have a hard time getting excited about the kind of writing that seems to come out of a frenzied compulsion to produce and be/remain “relevant.” Maybe the days of a DeLillo-like reclusion between comet-streaking novels are over in the twenty-first century U.S. of A., but I’d like to believe that great work comes out of a deliberate withdrawal from the noise of day-to-day idiocy and stress and pain that is then redeemed with an engagement that runs deeper, means more than could any blog post or kneejerk response to the writer’s immediate circumstances.

Readers: tell us what you think. What did you make of Callahan’s literary choices? Do you have other questions you’d like to have answered?