Head Dust: Koed (Thomas Pors)

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Kafka with missing parts

THOMAS PORS KOED'S NO RELATION REVIEWED BY TED JENNER FOR LANDFALL
Extract: "The ambiguities and the wilful shattering of fiction’s comfortable illusions force the reader to become as much a producer of these texts as s/he is their consumer. Not that reading them is remotely like a chore, for these are some of the most ingenious and strikingly original short stories I have read in the last 10 years."
>> Read Ted Jenner's entire review in Landfall Review Online.

DUCKING OUT OF THE MIRROR - Augusta Szrak interviews Thomas Pors Koed

Before we start the interview, Thomas Pors Koed, whose book of short fictions, No Relation, has just been published by Titus Books, makes it clear that he isn’t about to provide information of a biographical nature. I’m not sure whether this extends to details such as the location in which the interview took place, but I suspect it might.

TPK: I have always tried to be scrupulously uninteresting, at least in the biographical sense. If I have occasionally fallen short of this ideal in other areas it is not through lack of trying.

AS: Can we talk about your new book, No Relation…

TPK: I do share a name with the person who wrote that book, even if I no longer share any cells - it was written approximately ten years ago - so I have ended up being the one expected to justify it, at least to those who think it should be justified.

AS: Do you have a problem with that?

TPK: The sense of remove is enjoyable.

AS: Do you feel qualified to talk about the book?

TPK: Talking about it is the qualification.

AS: No Relation is a book of short stories. They’ve been described as having been written “against the grain of contemporary New Zealand fiction”. How accurate a description is that?

TPK: If there’s a grain, I’m against it. Not that I am exactly reacting to the grain – it’s constitutional. One of the best comments I’ve had about the book so far was that reading it was like reading sandpaper. Sandpaper can be effectively applied against the grain or it can be more painfully applied against your skin, especially cumulatively. It depends on the result you want. We should have done a written interview so I didn’t make any jokes. I recognise that there is not much New Zealand fiction that applies itself to exploring the writing and reading of fiction in the way that some of the stories in this book apply themselves to exploring the writing and reading of fiction.

AS: In what way?

TPK: I wanted to challenge the various expectations that readers bring to reading fiction, and the various assumptions and presumptions they make when reading fiction.

AS: Such as?

TPK: For instance, and it’s rather a broad instance, the assumptions and presumptions a reader makes in completing a text with elements drawn from their own mind, almost always without realising they are doing so.

AS: What do you mean?

TPK: A reader surrenders the contents of their own mind to the authority of the author, who rearranges these contents into new patterns without inputting anything new other than the pattern. But because the contents, so to call them, of what we like to think of as our minds are both adhered to other contents and extremely elastic, the effect of reading a text is always wider than what the text authorises. Whether this is a necessary or merely an inevitable part of reading is unimportant compared with the task of defining just where the line is drawn in the struggle between the author and the reader for control of the text, or for control of the edge of the effect of the text.

AS: I’m thinking of that passage about Hamlet’s ears in your story ‘Milk’.

TPK: Yes. Strictly speaking it isn’t any of our business as readers to even think of Hamlet as either having or not having ears, as they aren’t mentioned in the text. We aren’t authorised by the text to think about Hamlet’s ears, but we always bring more to reading than is authorised by the text. I quite enjoy getting readers into trouble when they do this.

AS: In quite a few of the stories, I’m thinking of ‘Passenger’ or ‘Leather’ or ‘Dry’, when reading them you suddenly realise that you haven’t registered a vital bit of information, even though this has been pivotal to the story all along.

TPK: No spoilers.

AS: The withholding of information by the author, a narrator or by some other character seems common to the formulation and effect of many of the stories. The collection is called No Relation, after all. Why do you do this? Do you do this on purpose?

TPK: [Laughs] Yes, I do this on purpose, even though it can’t be helped. It is the suppression rather than the provision of information that makes fiction different from actuality. Actuality is so overwhelmingly full of detail that we are unable to think about it without suppressing the vast majority of stimuli that assail us. In fiction, this suppression has been done for us by the author, but the text is always a contested membrane between the pressure of what has been withheld by the author in order to potentise the text and the pressure of what is welling up in the reader in response to the text but not authorised by the text.

AS: What, specifically, were you trying to do?

TPK: I wanted to test the potencies of this exclusion. I wanted to test how characters, and how readers, are affected by what is not related, by what is withheld, by what has been potentised by exclusion or by the impossibility of inclusion. I'm reading that from the blurb.

AS: The greater the exclusion the greater the potency?

TPK: The greater the pressure on each side of the membrane. The sharper the tools. The more intense the struggle between author and reader for control.

AS: And if the membrane ruptures?

TPK: What could be better than that?

AS: When David Mitchell spoke recently at the Auckland Writers Festival, he said that he wrote best when he felt that he had bitten off more than he could chew. Can you relate to this?

TPK: I write best when I have bitten of so little that if I do not constantly worry the particle with my tongue I will lose it somewhere in my mouth or swallow it by accident.

AS: Does this apply to the stories in No Relation?

TPK: The particles are small but they could be smaller.

AS: Now I’m going to ask you the stupidest possible question, the question all writers get asked, just because I don’t think you should be exempt, and I want to see your response.

TPK: Alright.

AS [affecting earnest voice]: Where do you get your inspiration from?

TPK: [laughs] I suppose the word ‘inspiration’, if you strip away all the quasi-spiritual connotations, refers to something coming in from outside, an intrusion. I seem to be constituted so that when something intrudes upon my awareness, verbal antibodies are released, latch onto it and begin to break it down, to nullify it.

AS: So your writing is a defence against inspiration?

TPK: Writing is an immune response.

AS: Is there, then, no stimulation without irritation?

TPK: Not in my case.

AS: And if all was well there would be no reason to write?

TPK: That’s impossibly hypothetical, but I suppose I wouldn’t disagree with you. Without your pains you wouldn’t know you existed. Perhaps writing is an attempt to get to that point, an attempt to sublimate the obstacles to cessation or release or whatever you want to call it into stories, to abstract our problems to the point that we gain the illusion of if not control at least of comprehension, or if not of comprehension at least of the ability to formulate questions that seem to help us to think about these obstacles in a way that focuses and then releases our frustration with them.

AS: Do you have to write, then, in order to stop writing?

TPK: Do I have to answer questions in order to stop answering questions?

AS: How much do the stories in No Relation draw from your own life?

TPK: The stories in No Relation are not at all autobiographical, although there is a fairly accurate description of my slippers in ‘Beyond Saturn’. Having said that, though, I must say that biography is only particular on the surface. The things that give literature its valency, such as anxiety, primarily anxiety, are transpersonal. Only the specifics are personal. The specifics are the means by which we communicate our attempts to grapple with our shared anxiety, or whatever. The specifics in these stories have no relation to my biography.

AS: Apart from your slippers.

TPK: Yes.

AS: So you don’t think of literature as a mirror?

TPK: I don’t like metaphors.

AS: You’ve done nothing but use metaphors throughout this interview.

TPK: If it’s my mirror, I want to look at what’s behind me so I need to duck out of the way. If I glimpse myself I would rather do so in someone else’s mirror and catch myself as a stranger.

23.6.15

< Photo: A. Szrak
Cover image (above): Meg Cranston

No Relation is available from Titus Books, or from your independent bookshop.

>> A review by Ted Jenner in Landfall.

The playlist for NO RELATION by Thomas Pors Koed

Apparently books these days need a playlist.
Some of the stories in No Relation take their names from songs (but bear no other relation to those songs):
1. 'Passenger' by Iggy Pop
2. 'Broken Banks' by The Renderers
3. 'Hammerhead' by Snapper
4. 'Frozen Car' by The Terminals
5. 'Salivating' by Scorched Earth Policy
6. 'Detective Instinct' by The Fall
7. 'Spick and Span' by The Gordons
8. 'Red Rider' by The Residents

INTERVIEW WITH THOMAS PORS KOED (8.5.2015)

Man: Hello, hello. Oops. Can I join you? Can I sit down here?

TPK: There’s nobody there.
Man: Pleased to meet you. I’m ****. I’m a friend of ****’s.
TPK: Thomas.
Man: I know who you are. I know who you are: ****’s told me all about you.
TPK: Oh.
Man: And you’ve written a book.
TPK: Yes.
Man: A book of short stories.
TPK: You could call them that.
Man: Yes, ****’s told me all about you. I like short stories. I like them very much. I used to write short stories myself. I was good at them. Rather good at them. Short stories were my thing.
TPK: Oh. Have you had any published?
Man: Well, yes. The highlight of my career as a writer of short stories, it wasn’t a long career, was having one of my short stories published in the school magazine. That was a long time ago.
TPK: So you don’t write any more.
Man: No. No, not since then. And the other thing I wanted to be was a concert pianist. I had set my heart on being a concert pianist. A concert pianist and a writer of short stories.
TPK: But you didn’t become a concert pianist.
Man: No, I became an optometrist.
TPK: You’re still an optometrist?
Man: Yes.
TPK: Do you still play the piano?
Man: Yes, I still play the piano. But only in the dark. I only play in the dark. The music is more beautiful when you play it in the dark. You can hear it better. And you don’t get distracted by looking at things.
TPK: So you spend your days correcting people’s vision and your nights trying not to see?
Man: Ha, ha! Yes, you’re right. That’s absolutely right. You know, there’s a short story in that.
TPK: Perhaps you should take up your pen again.
Man: Me? No, my days as the short story aficionado are over. But there is a short story in it. You should write it.
TPK: Hmm.
Man: You know, I’m an optometrist. In my profession I deal with people whose sight is getting worse. One day I might go blind. I might lose my sight. It happens. That’s why I play the piano in the dark, when I can’t see, to prepare myself. So that I’ll have something if I go blind.
TPK: That makes sense.
Man: Well, I’m pleased to meet you at last. **** has told me all about you, and about your book of short stories, and now I’ve met you. And I can tell you are a person with really good people-skills. You are good at talking to people, you know, getting on their wavelength.
TPK: No. Not really.
Man: Then at least you seem as if you are. You can pull it off. You pull it off. Yes, I can tell you are a reserved person, a bit shy even. But you manage to really talk to people in a genuine way. That’s a very good thing.
TPK: I think it’s a persona.
Man: You know, I’m really looking forward to your launch on Tuesday, the launch of your book of short stories.
TPK: You know about that?
Man: Yes, **** has told me all about it. I want to be there, but look, I’ve just realised I won’t be able to be there. I’m going to be in **** on Tuesday, so I won’t be able to come along. Are you going to be reading any of your short stories on Tuesday?
TPK: Yes, I will have to do that.
Man: That’s a pity. I’ve just realised I won’t be able to come along. Look, I’m really sorry.
TPK: That’s quite okay.
Man: Well, I just need to go through there, out the back, before it’s too late. Can I leave my glass here?
TPK: If you like.
Man: I’ll be back.

GOOD NIGHT, PAPA

THOMAS PORS KOED (2009)
Courtesy of All Footings Firm

HE CERTAINLY DOES NOT THROW A CUP OF COFFEE OVER HIS WIFE

He certainly does not throw a cup of coffee over his wife. He does not throw boots books and other unconsidered trifles at her. Only his wages. He does not beat his wife. After his marriage he does not give way to drink while working at one of the bonded stores on the wharf. He does not get drunk at least once a week. He is never right out whatever that means. He does not stay away from work and is not reprimanded by his bosses. In Pirie-street although there is generally some liquor on the sideboard he positively does not keep liquor in an oven. His wife does not tell him in Pirie-street that she has seen Dr McLean and that an operation has been advised. In regard to money matters his wife is not kept short. He does not say I pay her damned board and that’s enough. He positively does not lock the door when his wife has gone for her bath and Cooke does not come along and ask him to open it. It does not happen. He does not know that Mrs Tregonning’s daughter and his wife have had a row. He does know that the young lady has locked his wife and Cooke in the bedroom where they remain for two hours but he is not in on the joke. When he and his wife leave the Waverley Hotel to go to the Bristol he says it would be better if Cooke does not go with them. Cooke goes with them. Cooke does not pay his and his wife’s bill when they are leaving the Waverley. Cooke does not meet their liabilities in any way. If he does he is repaid. Cooke does not help him to his room in a drunken condition but he does assist him when one of his epileptic fits comes on. He does not go to bed with a bottle of whisky and he does not drink it neat. No he can’t drink whisky neat. He and his wife and Cooke do not lie on the bed together discussing things in general or discussing anything. They do not lie together on the bed. He does not walk around the Post Office for half-an-hour at night in the teeming rain and meet a woman named Allen there and go up the Kelburne tram with her. He does not tell his wife that said woman has been turned out of the Columbia Hotel and that if anyone fills her with liquor he can get anything. He does not say to his wife you are no bloody good. At the breakfast table before all present he does not call her a bloody liar. He knows a young lady called Nellie Roxburgh. Nellie and he are very good friends but they do not have a rare old romp on the bed. Nellie does not walk into his room with morning tea while he is standing on the floor naked. She does not go into the room when he is naked. She does not romp with him on the bed. Except when his wife is there. And only once. He is not cruel or an habitual drunkard or a runner after other women. Mrs Tregonning does not hear any quarrelling. She does not hear the throwing of boots and other trifles. No filthy language is heard. He never behaves as he should not. He does not drink in the house with whisky brought home from the Harbour Hotel. He does not come home on a Saturday afternoon with something in his possession that he should not have. He and his wife do not then have a row. They do not have a row. He does not strike her. They go to Picton together for a fortnight and he is sober all the time they are there. On the day they leave for Wellington he does not have to be helped aboard the ferry.

T.P.K. (editor)

The positive denials of Edmund Earl Furness are taken from the account in the NZ Truth (7 March 1914) of his failed attempt to secure divorce from Blanche Louisa Furness (this editor's great-grandmother’s sister) on account of her alleged adultery with one Leonard Cooke. The full report can be read at http://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/cgi-bin/paperspast?a=d&d=NZTR19140307.2.30&l=mi&e=-------10--1----0-all

UNCLOSABLE I: Impersonal subjectivity and The Unnamable

Returning to the narrow door, stripping ourselves, shedding, defleshing ourselves, shedding, boning ourselves, no not that, narrowing ourselves for the baffles, narrowed by the baffles, aligning ourselves, yet again, shedding.

An oracular text that precludes the possibility of oracular texts, The Unnamable [1] provides extension and demonstration of whatever ontological problems are brought to it, rendering them clearly irresolvable and thus endlessly fertile. A tool so finely honed that it makes clear the impossibility of the task for which it is designed, this novel [2] renders its futility pellucid where the futility of other works may be overwhelmingly obscure.

The fictive nub, in literature as in life [3], is not identity but the assumption of identity, not fabric but the act of fabrication. The nub is the act of mantling the unnameable I [4], not the mantle of character and circumstance that scintillates the reader. In The Unnamable the fictive mantle is abraded to the point of disintegration, tested beyond the limits of its strength, simultaneously knitted and unravelled, shed and assumed and re-shed, the fictive act laid bare [5].

There is an ‘I’ but whose ‘I’ is it? There is a subjectivity but whose subjectivity is it? Not a character’s, not the reader’s, not the author’s. None of these ephemerae who but touch the text and are borne away. The subject is that faculty that makes a subject possible. The voice that occludes in order to exist is that of the impersonal I, that faculty in fiction that allows character but is not character, that clads itself in a character, in all characters, in all characters ever, but is nothing more than the capacity to assume character inherent in the fictive act. The impersonal I is in the nub of every fiction, but, when the fiction is “successful”, it is so heavily swathed in character and circumstance, in virtuosity, that the desperation of the impersonal I, to go on, to exist, is tunicated and obscure.

For that about which all that can be said is that it exists, the imperative is to go on existing. There is inexistence in each pause, in each horrible full stop, but to resume is to re-exist, to go on. No time is lost. But to go on is to be occluded, to be obscured in characters and circumstance. How to go on? The subject cannot be the object. Anything that might be said about the subject replaces the subject but is not the subject. Subjectivity is not a personal force. The impersonal I [6] has nothing but existence, but it cannot exist unless it accretes the qualities that efface it, qualities that are not it for other qualities could have been accreted and may yet be accreted when these qualities have been shed. Personality is a gratuitous accretion. I have nothing unless I am given it. Unless I have either eyes or no eyes I have neither eyes nor no eyes. I am only what you can read.

In its wonderful stuttering attempts to force the mechanisms of fiction to run against their springs and ratchets, The Unnamable interrogates its workings and shows that arbitrary objects and gratuities are ultimately indispensable to the unclosable impersonal subject in fiction's ontological nub [7]. That which must speak in order to exist must dissemble in order to speak. To exist, to go on, the unnameable must accrete and occlude, always cobbling together the desperate fiction through which it is both perpetuated and effaced.

THOMAS PORS KOED

(11.02.2011)

NOTES

[1] The effacement of the author, the relegation of his identity to an oblique reference in this footnote, may be considered a tribute to Beckett’s rigorous self-effacement, a self-effacement posthumously effaced in supremus by the City of Dublin’s decision to offload his name on the world’s ugliest and most ostentatious bridge.

[2] Or “novel”.

[3] Life doesn’t concern us here.

[4] Have I just named it? Oops. Does the Cartesian “I think therefore I am” make the unwarranted assumption of the I? Yes there is thinking going on, and therefore amming, but whose it is is moot. I do not exist; I am merely the result of the imagining of what it would be like to be me. But whose imagining is it? Identity is the product of thinking and cannot be its locus. But perhaps saying ‘I’ is nothing more than an assertion of subjectivity, albeit a clumsy assertion, and it would be a mistake to regard the ‘I’ as implying a pre-existing entity (the spurious ‘me’, perhaps).

[5] In this footnote the essay’s author conspicuously fails to explain why he appears to think that this sort of metaphor, the stuff of poor fiction, should somehow be considered less disreputable in critical writing.

[6] An unnounable pronoun.

[7] To dispense with gratuities is to approach inexistence, an attractive proposition perhaps, but inexistence is not a state and cannot be ‘attained’ by a subject. Beckett may have attempted to write his way to where writing was impossible [8] but there can be no evidence of his success. Texts can only refute the impossibility of texts: they cannot eradicate themselves (merely cripple themselves).

[8] In not writing Beckett differs from the non-writer only in that the non-writer believes that writing is possible for others.

I HAVE ANOTHER SHIRT

I have another shirt but I always wear this shirt. I do not like this shirt. It is ugly. I like my other shirt. I am wearing this shirt to keep my other shirt from getting dirty. This shirt is dirty. The collar and the cuffs are especially dirty. But there’s no point in washing it. Once this shirt was clean and new and ugly and I put it on and I fastened the buttons and I tucked it in and I wore it. Eventually it got dirty on the collar and the cuffs. I took it off and washed it. It became clean but not as clean as it had been before I had worn it. I wore it again. It got dirty on the collar and the cuffs. Because it had not been so clean it took less time to get dirty. I washed it again and it became clean but not as clean as it had become the first time that I washed it. I wore it again. It got dirty on the collar and the cuffs of course but because it had not been so clean it took even less time to get dirty. I washed it again. I wore it again. Each time I wore it it got dirty more quickly. I washed it more and more frequently. It got to the point that I could hardly fasten all the buttons before the shirt had to come off and go into the wash. It got to the point that I had to choose either to wash the shirt continuously without wearing it or wear the shirt continuously without washing it. As an unwearable shirt is no use to me I chose to wear the shirt continuously. I have not washed it since. It is not quite true to say that an unwearable shirt is no use to me. I have after all my other shirt. In my opinion my other shirt is beautiful. Maybe even very beautiful if this could be said of shirts. Of course I never wear it. It has never been worn. I never wear it for the reasons outlined above. Maybe there will come a day when I can wear my shirt without it getting dirty. Not even on the collar and the cuffs. I am saving my shirt for that day. I don’t think I will live to see such a day. So much the better. I will wear my dirty ugly shirt and save the other. Maybe my very beautiful shirt doesn’t fit me or maybe it doesn’t suit me. Maybe others would scorn it. No matter. I will never find out. So long as I never wear it I preserve the perfection of that shirt. And the shirt I do wear? It is ugly. It is filthy. It has attained an indeterminate colour. Except that is for the collar and the cuffs. The collar and the cuffs have attained a colour of their own. A colour unrelated to the colour the shirt used to be. Whatever that was. I’ve forgotten. When others scorn this shirt I am pleased. I am not so unlike them after all.