Influenced is an interview series featuring authors talking about the works that influenced them.

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Episode XVI: "The great madpeople of literature are, I think, system-builders"

Published 6/28/17
In this installment, Paul La Farge talks about Pale Fire, complexity and warmth, being compared to other writers, madness in literature & more.

Today I'm with Paul La Farge, the author of five novels, most recently THE NIGHT OCEAN, which came out in March from Penguin Press. The New Yorker described it best: "a playfully disorienting tour through the biography of the horror master H. P. Lovecraft, as well as a portrait of a number of men, both fictional and real, who try to decode his life and work." Today we're in discussion of PALE FIRE, Nabokov's second most-read book (albeit a distant second, behind LOLITA). The choice makes perfect sense, but I couldn't figure out why at first; I wanted to label the commonality between your writing and PALE FIRE as "metafiction", but it occurred to me that it's exactly not that. In both your book and his, there is no commentary on fiction itself, and there isn't really structural irony, or any sort of rupture of the barrier between book and reality. But there is a sort of storytelling through layers, or mirrors, the thing itself we as a reader continue to focus on being refracted by more storytellers, and their own purposes, and so we seem to get both closer and further from the truth as the novels progress.

Let's start easy: when did you first read PALE FIRE?

I first read it in college. I'm fairly sure it was on the syllabus of an American Lit class I took with Stuart Moulthrop, who, though I didn't know it, was at the time busy writing some of the seminal hypertext novels of the early 1990s, the best-known of which is probably VICTORY GARDEN, though he's written many others since then. So you can see why he'd want to teach PALE FIRE, I guess. The novel is a study in what you can do with narrative forms. Or with the form of the book, really.

Up to this point, how in-depth was your lit education?

I don't know how to answer that. I think I had a lot of depth but not very much breadth. I'd already become enthused by literary theory and was reading a lot of that; and before that I'd read the Russians and the magical realists and everything by Jane Austen and most of Dickens, and also all of Pynchon and Barthelme, but sort of nothing else.

I have no idea how I got from one to another of those authors, by the way. And I'd also read most of Keats, which actually does make sense in this context—his idea of 'negative capability,' which I despair of recapitulating here, but which seems to me in some vague way connected with Kinbote’s (in PALE FIRE) ability to "see" into the life of John Shade, and with Shade's ability to imagine himself as his own daughter. Oh and I'd also read a great deal of science fiction and fantasy, for what it’s worth, and some Calvino.

I confess that when I started THE NIGHT OCEAN, I had picked it up without much context, and forgot your gender, and when I started reading I was under the assumption you were female. The opening voice (a first person female) is so realistic, and so grounded compared with the lunacy of it all, and the mystery, and that to me seems like a very Nabokovian trait, but that mix also makes sense in context of being a fan of both Keats and Pynchon. It makes me wonder what you choose to read in your spare time?

Ha, my spare time right now is entirely given over to reading things that are related to my next project; but in my extra spare time I'm catching up on some contemporary horror fiction. I read John Langan's THE FISHERMAN and now I'm reading Paul Tremblay's A HEAD FULL OF GHOSTS. And I read Caitlin Kiernan's THE DROWNING GIRL a couple of months back. It's a genuinely disturbing book. And I read a book called IN THE DISTANCE by a writer named Hernan Diaz just this spring. It comes out in the fall, and it blew me away. It's not horror, though. More a travel narrative, with absolutely wonderful landscapes and also a very compelling and solitary protagonist.

I recall reading Pale Fire in college, and disliking it, though I went on to love everything else I read by Nabokov. For some reason I'm hoping your experience was the exact opposite.

Yes, it's an easy book to dislike. It begins with a 999-line poem, which is quite an obstacle to narrative engrossment, and a lot of the action happens in the index. On the other hand, if you're interested in the expressive capacities of literary form, it's pretty compelling. And it's compelling to me at least in several warmer ways as well: first of all the cognitive web spun around (or by) Kinbote's paranoia, which leaves us guessing as to how much of his story is true and how much is self-mythologization; and then also several kernels of what I'd call real feeling: Shade's grief at the death of his daughter; Kinbote's anger at his isolation, and at his experience of estrangement in the US. That said, I don't recall my first reaction to the novel. I suspect that I liked it right away. I was very interested in mad things.

Yes, that opener took me off course from the beginning. And yet your own beginning to THE NIGHT OCEAN is so much different—so much, as you say, warmer, and grounded too. Was that always the point of entry to the story, or was that decision made in a later draft?

That was the plan—not from the beginning, exactly, but from the beginning of this draft. I'd attempted an earlier version of the novel which was narrated by L.C. Spinks, the (possibly) deranged Canadian science fiction fan, and while there was a lot of energy in the voice, it was hard to build out the narrative and also to open it up in a way that would be comprehensible to someone not already steeped in Lovecraftiana and the history of fandom. And my goal with the book was to speak to a reader who didn't know those things—to draw that person into this odd world, and then…well, and then to do whatever the novel does.

I'm always interested to see, in marketing material and reviews, which authors or titles a given book is likened to. I couldn't find much in the way of comparison besides Murakami and Lovecraft himself, which I think speaks to the originality of the book, but also it occurs to me now that PALE FIRE is conspicuously absent, given how similar the two are, especially in device. Why do you think that is? Is it a comparison you welcome?

I'd welcome it if anyone wanted to make it…Or would I? The truth is, it's sort of crushing to be compared to PALE FIRE, the way it's crushing to be compared to Borges or IF ON A WINTER'S NIGHT A TRAVELER or to BLOOD MERIDIAN or to Lydia Davis's stories. Those books (and stories) are limit cases; they're doing what they do so thoroughly that they leave nothing behind. If your book is compared to them it means you tried to do the same thing, but didn't go as far. From that point of view I should be looking to differentiate myself from Nabokov, which I suspect wouldn't be that hard, although I'm not sure now how to do it in a few words.

That's a very honest answer I think, one that's unabashedly undeferential. So I'll ask a question that demands an even more honest answer: what do you think about PALE FIRE failed?

Did something about it fail? 

Seriously, I think it's hard to look for weakness in that book, and to find it…the place where I see it falling down a little is perhaps with Kinbote's sexuality: making him gay (an 'invert') plays nicely into the mirror-logic of the whole but it also makes him something of a type, even in the supposedly real reality of whatever college town it is where the novel mostly takes place. Humbert H has more real sadness than Kinbote, and so does Pnin, who's one of the most moving characters (to me) in all of literature.

It's also perhaps a little mean-spirited of Nabokov to make Shade's daughter die of shame at her physical unattractiveness. A streak of cruelty that you see in some of his stories, too: "The Vane Sisters," e.g. One wishes that he'd spent less time looking at his undergraduates.

And so much of Pnin is taken from Nabokov's own experience of course. In many of your scenes, especially the more domestic ones, it felt as though I was reading autofiction (a notion that's easy to discard when things get weird). If you're comfortable answering the question, how much of the book—and this does feel a bit ludicrous to ask, given the contents of the story—is based off of your own life? 

I can tell you that parts of it are meant to read like autofiction, but very little of it is. I pirated my memory for some of Charlie's story—I too was a Lovecraft fan as a kid, to the point of wandering the Upper West Side dressed in a homemade black robe—but in most other ways Charlie is a fiction, a composite, and Marina is, too. I did live in Brooklyn at one point but not where Charlie and Marina live. What I was interested in was capturing the texture of lived experience, which meant that while I was preparing to write the novel, I went to a lot of places and took pictures and made notes, and I drew on that material to create most of the book's episodes. But they're only taken from life in the sense that I felt like I had to live through something related to the material in order to write it properly.

The idea of living through something in order to write it properly makes me think of madness in literature—particularly THE BELL JAR, but who cares, because we're talking about Nabokov. In PALE FIRE and so much else (my mind goes especially to THE LUZHIN DEFENSE; have you read it?), Nabokov captures the true nature of insanity—or not only captures it but brings it to life—and how often is that device employed in literature to a dull result? What do you think truly enables an author to write insanity without relying on clichés, or that hollow feeling he or she is just guessing at it?

Not having read either THE BELL JAR or THE LUZHIN DEFENSE, it's hard for me to answer your question directly. I've read some books by people who were actually insane, and what strikes me about them in memory is their insistence on a hallucinatory order of things: take Daniel Paul Schreber's MEMOIRS OF MY NERVOUS ILLNESS, for example, or Louis Wolfson's THE SCHIZO AND LANGUAGES, or a very strange LOGICAL GRAMMAR by a Frenchman named Jean-Pierre Brisset. The great madpeople of literature are, I think, system-builders. Which is certainly true of PALE FIRE.

That's a good point. Perhaps any writer who fails at conveying madness is stuck on doing it through chaos, when those with genuine experience do it through order.

Hm, I think there must also be varieties of madness…PALE FIRE is a paranoid novel, and so are the books I just referenced. But one could surely find examples of the Great Depressive Novel (or would that just be, The Novel?).

That's unfortunately accurate. No true novel leaves you thinking, 'Huh, so that's what a normal family's like'. What you've said about doing research for your books makes me think you're the type to reread a book you love. Is this the case? How many times have you read PALE FIRE?

It is the case, and I've read PALE FIRE three or four times. I taught it in a class on writing fiction for digital media—it seemed like a useful model for people thinking about how to make narrative in a non-linear medium. Maybe that was just Stuart Moulthrop's influence reaching down through the years, though.

Although in truth the structure of text and commentary does seem like a good starting point for some kinds of non-linear narrative, and the jokes Nabokov plays in the index are also instructive.

And you yourself have frequently played with the medium of the novel as well—your debut was illustrated; your second and third kept to the conceit that you were in fact just a translator of the book; your fourth features hypertext. It's interesting to me that your fifth is the most traditional, medium-wise, just at a time when digital manifestations of narratives are becoming a sort of bubble into themselves. Was this a conscious decision at all?

Only in the sense that I had exhausted what I felt capable of doing with hypertext fiction—I'd certainly exhausted myself in the attempt to write a hypertext fiction. I wanted to undertake a terminable project, and THE NIGHT OCEAN felt like something that would have an ending. And now, strangely, I find myself thinking about the hypertext again…a better version of myself would have kept going, I think, sometimes; and other times, I think, only a complete lunatic would have kept going.

We're nearly out of time, but if you wouldn't mind I'd love to hear a bit more about what you're currently working on.

It began as a fantasy novel, but it seems to be turning into something quite different. Beyond that, it's too soon to say.

Thanks so much for your time and words, Paul. I'll look forward to seeing what it becomes.

Thank you, Andrew! It was lovely to talk to you.