WDS Interview with Ben Marcus
  May 8, 2001

     Sean Singer

Ben Marcus was born in Chicago in 1967. He grew up in the Midwest and in Europe, New York and Texas. His undergraduate degree was earned in philosophy at New York University. He received an M.F.A. from Brown University, and has since taught writing in New York, Texas, Virginia and Rhode Island. He is a former senior editor of the literary journal Conjunctions, and edited a portfolio of new fiction for the Spring 1996 issue, "Sticks and Stones." His first book, The Age of Wire and String, was published in 1995 by Knopf.

Short fiction of his has appeared in Grand Street, The Iowa Review, The Pushcart Prize Anthology, The Mississippi Review, The Quarterly, Conjunctions, and Story Quarterly, and he reviews literature for The Village Voice.

Sean Singer: What are you working on now?

Ben Marcus: A series of longer pieces that may or may not go into a novel that might or might not be called Notable American Women. In the past year I've written several pieces that deal with emotion removal: techniques to feel less. I've also done a series of pieces called "The Least You Need to Know About..." These are attempts at simple disclosures of the basic attributes of things like bones and radio. A set of statements for children. One of them appeared with images by Richard Tuttle in the art magazine Frieze, another is forthcoming in Parkett. The possible novel is a kind of fictional history of woman in America, centering around a cult that protests silence and motion. It's written in a style that mixes narrative and essay. It's pretty abstract and conceptual, but it has some story in it, and some family fury as well.

SS: Do you think of your work as being phenomenological, as if you’re watching a film and describing it?

No. There's too much you can't see, fairly abstract language, conceptual stuff with no visual counterpart. I do put a high standard on the visual, and feel that my work succeeds better when it can be better seen, but it's not always what I end up doing; parts of it are inevitably heady. Some things are necessarily invisible and I try to get at them. And some things are interior, or psychological, with no real visual manifestation. So there are many components, and the visual is just one of them. I would add, though, that when 'difficulty' is talked of in writing, it seems to sometimes indicate that an image cannot be formed from the language. Yet, to me, this territory is exactly what language alone can access, and if a literal film can be made from a work of prose, then maybe there's something missing from the writing, a range of language going unused.

SS: What do you think about form’s relationship to emotional content?

For me, form triggers potential emotion in really direct ways, and I look for forms that will allow me into a territory that I am otherwise prevented from. Form is access, a route toward genuine feeling, not that it's particularly easy to follow, or that any guarantees can be made. I wrote a piece called "The Father of Fathers" (in Fence, fall 2000) that is written by "my" father, and it allowed me to write a kind of angry screed against "myself" (the character with my name), to condemn my life and practices, while creating a portrait of the father character. It was a formal conceit that seemed to tap into a sort of rage I wanted to get at, an impersonation through which I could try out another identity. I've done the same for the mother character, in a long piece called "The Launch," which will come out in Conjunctions this spring (2001).

SS: In your list of terms, you describe yourself as a “false map, scroll, caul, or parchment.” Do you feel you try to describe the dilemma of being trapped in a certain physical form; the problem that who a person is somehow is always limited by their physical limitations?

Well, first of all, I'm not describing myself that way, but my name. It wasn't exactly an attempt at auto-biography, but rather a way to detach a person from his name, or the opposite: to suggest that his name dictates how he will behave, regardless of his desire in the matter, and this is something that my book-in-progress is proposing. In that book that you quote, almost every object comes up for re-definition, a kind of cruelly detached alteration, so I filtered my own name through that process as well, using it as a category instead of a single instance of a person.

SS: Your work seems to be characterized by a Kafkaesque combination of happiness and sadness. That you want to laugh and cry. Were you at all influenced by the blues?

I am interested in reconciling emotional extremes, and hope to try to get at a kind of crushing sadness while still attempting humor, but too often it is easy to be cute or clever and miss out on the potentials for sadness. I think it is terribly hard to render true sadness in fiction, to actually make people sad. There's quite a bit of saccharine, sentimental manipulation out there. Much of my earlier interest in seemingly cold, objective prose was an attempt to avoid sentimentality, yet the result was often the reverse, which might be equally forbidding. Sadness is clearly a goal of a lot of writers, and I guess I have my feeble attempts at it, with humor being a sort of surface noise that bubbles up as I fumble along, that can maybe disarm a defensive reader so that deeper emotion might be possible.

SS: What is your process of revision?

Nothing fancy. Long, dumb, boring labor trying to get things right. Plenty of line-by-line stuff, a lot of it to do with how things sound, how the sentences swell together. I generally let things sit for months, to see if they can surpass the loathing factor that sets in after the pride erodes--pretty quickly, sometimes in minutes. If I still care for a piece a few months later, I tinker some more, then try to use it in something, or send it out somewhere.

SS: Do you feel more fulfilled by the process of writing or the product of writing?

Process.

SS: Do you think the implications of fiction are larger than the compartmentalization of technique, form, or content? How do you cope with trying to express yourself through the manifestation of fiction?

I don't know if I cope at all. It's doubtful that I do cope. I may have coped once, briefly, but mostly I can be seen failing to cope. But I don't think expressing myself, as you say, is really what I'm after. I am not after expression. Making things with language, maybe that's a better way to put it. Creating spectacles, visions, scenarios that interest me. Using language to redefine what we think we know of the world. Tearing down false knowledge that was achieved through language alone, exposing how totally our world can be made up of the words we throw at it. This isn't exactly expression as much as it is a kind of builder's craft, and I should add that I can't claim any success at it. Of course there are personal elements mixed in, it's not all dry science, but I don't hold much fascination for the literality of my experience, or for other people's inherent interest in "me."

SS: Do you think your writing comes out of the culture you’re living in? Would you characterize your work as “American?”

I am always glad that it's not my job to "characterize" my work, or even interpret it, but it certainly must come out of the culture I live in, because I don't see where else I might have gotten it. I do think I share interests with many other writers. There's been a resurgence in odd catologs, satires of forms, subversions of various bureaucratic communication styles, ironization of the self, etc., and it may be that someone one day will decide that this is particular to our time or place.

SS: Who did you read as a student?

Donald Barthelme, Alain Robb-Grillet, John Ashbery, Thomas Bernhard, Raymond Roussel, Flann O'Brien, Flannery O'Connor, Jane Bowles, Samuel Beckett.

SS: What distinguishes your approach to literature from other approaches?

Nothing.

SS: What other profession would you choose besides writing, time and space not being a factor?

If time and space were not a factor, I would probably be a better writer.

SS: The last time I saw you read, you did a very dramatic performance. What are some ways a good reader can convey his text?

I like it when writers read with a bit of conviction, some force of voice, the sense that what they're reading matters to them. It's hard to listen to someone read who appears not to care about the writing, whose voice is small and weak and indifferent.

SS: Do you have a writing routine? Do you write every day or only certain times of the year?

I try to write in the morning. Some days I don't. I do it better on days I don't go to a job.

SS: Do you see the erotic as having a place in your work?

Not yet, really, but I'm practicing at home.

SS: What is the responsibility of the writer?

You know, I really don't feel equipped to talk about that, to speculate on this creature called "the" writer, because I don't view writers as some marauding group sharing a set of laws and responsibilities. I have a sense of responsibility to myself, but even that is dim and hard to get at, so I'm far away from any sort of social commentary on writers in general and what they should be doing.