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
Cover image (above): Meg Cranston
No Relation is available from Titus Books, or from your independent bookshop.
>> A review by Ted Jenner in Landfall.
