Perceptions of a writer:

Striking a balance in conflicting roles

By Ranga CHANDRARATHNE

“When you publish a book, it’s the world’s book. The world edits it”

- Roth Philip

"A publisher is a specialized form of bank or building society, catering for customers who cannot cope with life and are therefore forced to write about it."

Haycraft, Colin.

The conjunction between a publisher and writer is a unique one in turning a writer’s creation into a published work. Money-motivated publisher would tend to throw literary value of a creation overboard over immediate monetary concerns while a writer would embrace a creation purely on account of literary and artistic value of a creation. However, a balance can be strike when a writer becomes a publisher.

In an exclusive interview with Montage, American author Pablo D’ Stair explains how one could wear two hats of a writer and publisher at the same time and do justice to both roles which are often perceived as conflicting roles.

Q: Have you published manuscripts from writers outside of the US? What do you think is the scope for writers from a country like Sri Lanka to reach an audience in the US through such genres as the novel and short fiction?

A: I have and love to publish material from outside the US—I’d go as far as to admit it’d be preferable. This is deep rooted in me, I think, just because I can think of very little literature I, personally, consider formative to me, things that imprinted fundamentally on me, that came from the US—and only a little of it originated in English, even. A writing pair, Natalija Grgorinic and Ognjen Raden from Croatia were on with Brown Paper Publishing and are coming across to KUBOA with a staggering novel called 69, 70, one of the most phenomenal things I fell I’ve had hand in making available. As far as shorter works, I’ve published folks from France, Mexico, the UK, Australia—all over the place.

In the world as I understand it, writers from Sri Lanka should be able to explode the US Scene (at least the Indie, I have no idea about anything beyond that scope—I don’t even know how US writers navigate “big publishing” or why). I think it’s a matter of simply presenting finished material—concrete, uninterested in being considered “an import” or “a dependent” on anything US.

However, (though not to say this is an overwhelmingly true thing) there are pockets of what I consider almost xenophobic mindsets in the States, a lot of it kind of unconscious. There is (at least in my slant on what I’ve observed) a kind of ingrained thought-set that US Literature is The World’s Literature, that US writers are and properly should be on the lips of all the people’s of the world, while World Authors should be niche footnotes to the US—it makes me sad, angry even, at times.

But for all of that, really, I think this is almost instantaneously reversed when contemporary fiction “from outside” is put into US hands—again I don’t mean this in the mainstream way, not like “for a few years the US liked Scottish novels” or “now we’re into Scandinavian thrillers”, I mean on the small, independent, literary scene scale.

Admittedly, I sometimes find myself (and it unsettles me to find the thoughts there) surprised when a German novel written in 2005 or something doesn’t read like Goethe, doesn’t have an old time feel—like it’s a revelation that there are artists (and brilliant ones) everywhere and that none of them give half-a-care about what’s going on in the US or about being on the shelves at Barnes and Nobel.

Excuse the ranting quality of this response, but there’s a lot of attaché to the central question.

Thing about “outsiders” (as in authors from other countries) is that they will be doubly confronted with the cemented “outsider US scene”, a half-genuine and half-affected set of writers.

The “genuine US Outsider” is more welcoming and progressive than you could imagine (I know several) the “faux US Outsider” is about the most cloistered, provincial, closed off sort you’d dare dream of—the “faux” take the idea of Outsidership and make it a kind of micro-mainstream, run it like the status quo except they hold the door key and set the micro-rules for entry.

It’s complicated, as obviously one would expect, and I have a limited breadth of experience and knowledge, but as far as I’ve observed, in the literary scene, the real literary scene, authors from outside the US could be iconoclasts if they let themselves be, if they just barged in and said “Here, this is it, this is the thing” and didn’t bother with timidly asking their way in, didn’t treat themselves as something auxiliary to US contemporary literature.

The US scene needs to be rough-housed a bit and nothing like rough housing with a foreign flair.

Q: Your contributions to Montage can be seen by some as a literary dialogue between thinking of the East and the West? What can you say about this? Do you see it as presenting opportunities to exchange ideas between writers and readers from two very different cultures and further the scope of contemporary literature?

A: I’d hope so. I’d hope the differences in surface culture would be quickly overlooked as a clear, stable, meaningful literary culture is observed. In even the brief time I’ve been involved with the Montage, I’ve found it a monumental breath of fresh air—I know there will be vast differences in what literature has already been produced and the set of references, that the ability to orient oneself in each the other’s (US and Sri Lanka) specifics would be not instantaneous, but that is so wonderful, that is dialogue—not just chit-chat, not just comparing favorites.

I devour any little glimpse of contemporary Sri Lankan literary work or thinking I come across and, love how there is no referent and no apparent care to reference anything remotely associated with the US. Even literature I know of that I have seen mentioned in SL forums is British, is Czechoslovakia, Russian etc. and none of it seems have a “shelf life”—a problem in the US (again, coming only from my personal observations) is that once a piece of writing gets established to a certain degree (either through notoriety or through having been around X number of years) the way it’s approached is as though it has lost potency, as though some fundamental change has come to it, it seems to be considered “less vital” if it’s more than a few years old.

Influx

And so partially, I think an influx (from the Sri Lankan side) of fresh, non-jaded perspective on work that the US oddly treats as dated would do wonders for things, shake something up.

I consider my offerings to the Montage, for example, open invitations to actual dialogue—not debate, not introduction-with-agenda. The US, for whatever reason, is something that’s gotten so vast it’s kind of doubled over into being provincial, has so many grooved out avenues that one steps into flows (or can) without even realizing how pre-treaded out these paths are—I think a sudden focus of earnest, intelligent, hungry literary readership and authorship—as I have found in Sri Lanka—injected into a kind of homeostatic scene like the US has could be a thunderclap, a refreshing turn of things.

One of the reasons I so welcome the exchange and so eagerly pursue it in every way, shape, and form I can think up is because, pound for pound, there seems to be much less nonsense about literature in Sri Lanka than there is in the US and nonsense is something I think is clogging the scene and slowing a momentum that is so feverishly and importantly trying to build.

I think literature-for-the-sake-of-literature would catch on in the states better if it was introduced from elsewhere—it (sadly) seems a trickery or even cynicism to the US ecosystem if someone from here brings it up.

Focus

Q: I would like to focus the discussion on some of your fiction. In the novel Leo Rache, which was incidentally the focus of an article that appeared in Montage some time back, you portray an impulsive youth who can be defined in terms of bohemianism on the one hand, and also brings out a strong vibrancy as a private poet. How do you see this character in terms of contemporary society in the US? How true to life is Leo?

A: Haha—yes let’s change gears for a bit, good idea.

How true to life is Leo? In one sense, he’s autobiographically as real as I could write a character without writing literal autobiography—not just in a sense that I have lived similar events (some identical events) had similar thoughts, etc. but in the sense that the distance he keeps from being revelatory is present in exactly equal measure as his desire to be uncovered or even to reveal.

As far as contemporary society in the US—that’s a bit trickery. I think the world he navigates—or the world that is around him as he navigates some half-imagined version of it—is, both by fact that it is drawn from actual experience and by the fact that it is borne of many only remote observations, certainly actualized without any attempt at being the least bit fanciful. But, I don’t know what “contemporary US society” would be—the US is vast and odd and in my going across it a few times over the years I am struck very much by how foreign it is. It’s not like a country, but like a lot of countries set at overlap.

Impressions

As far as Leo representing my impressions of a tension between Art-as-Personal and a general thrust toward making Art “necessarily and consciously communal” (if not even social and commercial), I did my best to do nothing to glorify Leo, was careful to thread any disdain I had of things through his unglorified persona.

Art—which is what Leo Rache. is mostly about—doesn’t have an individual, personally complete identity as far as I can tell in the US—all the time such grating questions as “Well, if you don’t want anyone to read you, why write?” (or worse “Why call yourself a writer if you don’t care if people read you?”) come up, I have fits of dread about this, really think people have lost touch with something.

Leo’s poetry is his, his motivations are his (exclusively), his ideal audience is nonentity, non-reaction—this is why none of his verse is presented in the text, why the only reactions come through individuals with either direct agendas or else remote, generalized agendas. He writes love poetry for a certain woman not about that certain woman (or any certain woman) in which the love and the poetry remain separate components.

I don’t think he’s exemplary of many artists I’ve come across—I’d like to think there are a billion Leos walking around (and I do think this, they just don’t live in the US) but I don’t come across people who seem to even want to understand art as a self-sustaining entity, as something that is whole regardless of audience, interpretation, that doesn’t need a connection or a desire to anything.

I wanted also, as long as we’re talking about this, to illustrate the complexities of his life in a non-melodramatic way, especially those concerning his sexuality, sensuality, and groping at an understanding of emotional connection as something wholly separate from his poetry—he knows exactly (or feels exactly) that he is compelled to write and to ritualize this desire (stealing notebooks, sending full notebooks to Lea) and doesn’t blink from doing so, but this is not birthed out of a need to express his situation to anyone or an attempt at using the form of poetry to understand himself. He doesn’t care to understand, it doesn’t even cross his mind.

Sadly (in my observations) people aren’t like this, and in equal measure people don’t want others to be like it—even nice, wonderful people much like those Leo encounters (and who represent my US experience) want to contextualize for him (either personally or as part of a social-version-of-something-personal), want to show him places he could accept definition from, be embraced by.

He’s total, but adrift.

Environs

Q: I poisoned you and twelve ELEVEN thirteen are two novels unlike anything you would generally expect to find amongst Sri Lankan fiction. It is ‘intriguing’ to imagine what sort of environs could spur a writer to develop the sort of narrative one finds in twelve ELEVEN thirteen. From a point of socio-cultural interest I’d like to know how would you describe the likes of Jervis Tidmouth in relation to contemporary society in the US?

A: Well, to preamble (and I’m sure we’ll touch on this a bit more) twelve ELEVEN thirteen is one of four thematically connected novella, is one rotation in a turning-examination of a single thing. Jervis is direct counterpoint to the character of Aldous Kline in i poisoned you—both individuals who voyeuristically get caught up in situations not directly having to do with them. However, while Aldous has (though quite unconsciously) personal, rather dark desires that fuel his engine of “needing to know” and dictate the fallout of the violence he encounters/creates, Jervis begins things with rather pure, honestly protective-of-others desires.

Separation

His situation is representative less of anything socio-cultural than of an intrinsic separation I feel exists in the individual, a separation he represents as literally being divided from himself in terms of Physicality and Intellectualism—his body is ill throughout the novella, but in this state is almost the engine, almost the tangible thought process, dictating the specificities of his situation and ultimately his identity, while his thought-self is unable to articulate itself though measured action (as he observes, at one point, he never even feels he is able to settle between several different alternatives, finds he only has to deal with what happens once it has happened because it has happened).

But, less airily than that, he is representative of a grotesque that nonetheless individuates itself from other grotesques—his involuntary state (the severe illness, the reaction to medication) that rather hobgoblins him and (it could be said) perverts his mental states is distinct from the people he identifies as “villains” and “monsters” because they have consciously defiled their physicality (removing eyes, noses, stitching lips shut) they are by their very nature intellectually defined, their physicality follows the dictates of their thoughts/desires.

Jervis posits himself as the innocent and then as the victim (he is certainly initially the former and maybe incidentally the latter) though his actions are literally done out in mimic by the people he thinks are stalking him (whom he stalks first) and invading on him (after he invades on them).

Pablo D Stair

This is a state of the world, I think, of human nature—he is perfectly comfortably, for example, with summoning the police to the neighbor’s apartment based on lies and pretense, but he doesn’t do it out of anxiety and paranoia, but when the people he has positioned as “bad-guys” summon the police to his home through (almost literally) the exact same methods he had contemplated, he cannot even fathom it, it disgusts him that they have manipulated the manipulatable word against him.

I guess I could go so far as saying (but it’s not the artistic or even pertinent thrust of the novella) that I see Jervis in everyone and think the reality of his somewhat grotesque-for-the-purpose-of-being-in-a-specific-type-of-novella is played out on a daily basis all over the place and is televised and sensationally written about—praised in this case, condemned in that—all over the US.

But, the novella (Jervis) is an investigation of individual more than of society—I always have and still do feel that while the latter is composed of multiple of the former, somehow the two cannot be exchanged, have something paradoxically dissimilar to them.

Q: In I poisoned you Aldous Kline comes out as a man who embarks on a personal crusade to ascertain the truth behind his brother’s suspicions of his cheating girlfriend.

How obsessive can one get when set upon a dark voyeuristic trail which is like a truth or fact finding mission?

Please give us your insights in this regard as the author.

A: With it mind all I just said about Jervis, here is the thing about Aldous—Aldous (in my thinking) has no body, he leeches the bodies of others in order to be himself.

As you say, what begins as his desire to know the truth of his brother’s girlfriend’s possible infidelity is rather quickly revealed to have a misshapen aspect.

It is his feelings for the girl that drive him, feelings he has easily and without malice displaced into his brother—he would never dream of trying to take her from his brother, but instead he lives something beyond vicariously through his brother.

Jealousy

But when his brother reveals dark jealousies, the possibility and necessity of exploring his own jealousies becomes central to Aldous—if his brother can be jealous, well, so can Aldous now, he can act ostensible on-behalf-of-another (as another) still without having to connect to his own feelings, his own actual self.

So, turning to your exact question, this is something I also think is true of human nature—this voyeuristic necessity to exist-in-multiple allows an individual to disavow certain aspects of themselves into the ether, to act without acting.

I don’t think anyone undertakes an investigation akin to Aldous’ for anything but self-centered reasons—he at the same time wants his brother’s girlfriend to be unfaithful, opening up the chance that he might be the one she is unfaithful with, but at the same time can only investigate “on behalf” of his brother and so his actions, his physicality is dictated by something other than his own mind—it just so happens that he reacts as his brother intellectualizes he might himself react, the displacement is perpetual, roiling.

Indentity

All four of the novella are investigations of the notion of identity—conscious versus unconscious, absolutely-fixed versus in-flux.

In my life, I have had times where I feel I utterly lost myself, cannot identify with actions I undertook, choices I made, yet know these are the actions that, in a large sense (and one hundred percent to certain parties) define me.

I poisoned you is a sad story to me, because Aldous depends on the rest of the world to be homeostatic, to provide him equilibrium (even to provide him morality)—he would gladly and lovingly disown himself out of trust in this arrangement, but the very nature of the world (and of the individual) does not allow for that.

“You have to be someone and, eventually, you have to be yourself”—there’s no holier and more complete philosophical terror, in my mind, than that—you have all the choices in the world, but choices are immaterial to what defines you.

To be continued

"In an effort to start a across-cultural literary dialogue, my forthcoming literary press, KUBOA, is offering 20 free print copies each of two of our titles to interested readers—the titles are “Man Standing Behind” (an existential noir) and “roulettetown” (a literary novella). These titles are available by requesting them through the Montage: Cultural Paradigm. All we ask is that any reader who receives a copy should offer some form of active feedback—whether your reaction/opinion of the work is positive, negative, or ambivalent it is the content of your thoughts we at KUBOA are interested in, pure, unadulterated response. It is our hope to start a continuing, personal dialogue between authors and readers—each response we receive will be personally, thoroughly responded to by the author with the hope of further correspondence. Further questions can be directed to the Montage: Cultural Paradigm [email protected] or to [email protected]