On "Prose from the Observatory".

I’ve been trying to put my finger on what it is about Prose from the Observatory that I loved so much. What is it that one loves about a book when one loves it? Why is it so much easier to talk about books to which one does not feel any particular connection — or which one loathes — than it is to talk about books one loves? Most of the conversations I have about books that I love boil down to one of two basic modes. The first goes like this:

“Did you read Cat’s Cradle? I love that book.”

“Me, too! Did you read Valis?”

“That book is rad. How about The Diamond Age?”

“No, I haven’t read that one yet.”

“Well, it’s awesome. It’s about nanotechnology.”

“Awesome.”

The second goes something like this:

“So there’s this part where there’s this graph, right? Like a line graph? It’s in the shape of a sine wave or a cosine wave or whatever.”

“Okay.”

“Except it’s a graph of, like, his libido and stuff, and it keeps going up and up and up until he has sex and then it goes back down. Unless he performs a manual override, and then it only goes down so far —”

“Manual override?”

“Um, he masturbates.”

“Oh. Oh, funny.”

“Yeah, it’s a really funny book.”

“Sounds like it.”

And it turns out you misremember what a sine wave looks like and you’re describing it wrong and it’s all wrong generally. But, having failed to land the description of this part, you then launch into a description of the part where they’re hiking down a river in the Philippines and the heroine gets shot with with a crossbow and Enoch has to give her the elixir of life, and this whole time you thought it was a myth even in this science fiction universe …

So, both of these discussions are about science fiction books, which is not a coincidence. There was something subterraneaneously science-fiction-like in Cortazar’s writing that appealed to me deeply. Not that I didn’t believe that his research on the eels was accurate, or that really anything wasn’t accurate: it had to do, I think, with his aim, which seemed to be to disorient without distorting, to give the reader a sudden and new perspective on a familiar subject (the ocean, the stars, the night). A great deal of very great science fiction works in this way, as well, and it’s something I might like one day, if I can figure out how, to do with my own writing.

I guess that’s why I found Cortazar so intriguing: because I can’t, no matter how hard I try, write credible or interesting science fiction, and he seemed to offer an alternate vision of how  one might go about achieving similar aims: rather than go to space, or the future, we instead go to a place where language rolls over and over itself, turns inside out, lives in a surreal space on the border between fiction and poetry, works in concert with visual art: these are things I think I can do. Words are, after all, the only thing in the world at which I am particularly good.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m never going to be one of the great experimental writers. I’m still too attached to stories, scenes, characters — plots. But since coming here I’ve grown concerned that I have, over the last ten years, grown staid and conservative, unquestioning of assumptions that need to be challenged. That I’m taking tools out of my kit for no reason. There are things I used to do when I wrote poetry that I think could inform at least pieces of things that I write now: following sounds places to find new meanings; annulling my marriage to post-Austen sentence-level wizardry. (Though that wizardry, assuming I have it, is something I really enjoy doing. Maybe part of what I’m saying is that I need to make myself uncomfortable. It’s hard to write things that are any good if one spends the whole time on a sort of literary beanbag chair eating popcorn and watching reruns of Saved by the Bell.)

Anyway, I’m wandering off-track. There was another aspect of the Cortazar book that I found really appealing: the fact that it married prose with image. (Which is part of why I included the sine wave conversation — to show how difficult it is to describe even the most basic of visuals using nothing but words.) Clearly, this is not an utterly new idea — in fact it’s old — but it’s one I’ve kind of failed to incorporate into my work. I’m not a great photographer or artist, but neither are my characters: I wouldn’t use the visual art qua visual art, per se; I would use it to illumine story, create jokes, and so on. I’ve been scheming on a Power Point presentation that doubles as a short story: the visual representations in that would not be beautiful; in fact, they would consist largely of graphs, but they would complement the writing (and, ultimately, performance) in a way that would be interesting.

What I’m not interested in doing is something as cheap and ridiculous as what, say, Jonathan Safran Foer does: no, I would prefer to do something in which the images are both orienting and disorienting, strange and ordinary, in which they add humor — not in which they reduce 9/11 to a flipbook with stick figures, which struck me as mordant, if unwitting, self-criticism on Foer’s part.

ANYWAY. So. Julio Cortazar. I liked that book. I’m still in the process of figuring out why or how I liked it, but I did. There you have it.