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‘I Want My Books To Be Irreverent Chimeras’
An Interview with the Author
Aswin Prasanth & Augustine George
The following is an excerpt from an interview that was published in the paperback edition of The Strophes of Job. The interview was conducted via an exchange of emails in 2023, and it has been slightly edited. Note that “Vox Humana” appears in the collection Delta of Cassiopeia, as well as other places. See the article regarding its publishing history.
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Delta of Cassiopeia, a brilliant collection of twenty stories and twelve sonnets, is a telling metaphor for your evolution as a writer over four decades. These highly subjective literary pieces appear as stars in the constellation of your literary career (so said one reviewer) and reveal the intricate relation between a writer, his craft and his biography. How does the spatialization of the highly autobiographical sonnets effectively express the themes of love, life and death, foregrounding your relationship with your father? Can the genric variety of the stories be taken as an index of your craft of fiction? The elaborate introduction discusses the monopoly of the publishing industry and the writer’s difficulty in establishing a fandom of readership. Do you endorse tendencies like cult status, fan following and so on formed around writers?
Delta of Cassiopeia was a challenging project—more challenging than I anticipated. I had all of these stories and poems that I’d written over a thirty-year (or more) period, and they’d been published in journals that had, in many cases, closed their doors. The only way to have them be part of the world was to bring them together for book publication. I initially imagined a book of about a dozen stories with a brief introduction. But it grew in complexity. I kept thinking of (or remembering) pieces I wanted to include. I also decided to expand the scope to include the sonnets I’d written to my late father, so it was no longer just “collected stories” but “collected stories and sonnets.”
And as the book grew, my ambitions for the introduction grew as well. I thought it would take about a week to write the introduction. It ended up being more like three months. Meanwhile, I gave more and more thought to the organization of the book, and to its design. Ultimately I decided that rather than just being a hodgepodge collection of a few stories, I wanted the book to be a multilayered artistic statement in itself. On the one hand, it is a kind of memoir, a tracing of my development as a writer over those three or four decades. But it’s also a reflection of and on the changes in the writing and publishing and cultural landscapes.
Since teaching has been an integral part of my persona, I also work in some of my pedagogical philosophy as it pertains to writing. Even though hardly anyone has read the book (which I predict in the introduction), it has received some very generous reviews, and it won a Maincrest Media Award for story collections, as well as being a finalist in some other competitions. I wound up with twenty stories. There are twelve sonnets to my father, Vince, who passed away in 2012. They have a strong narrative element so, in my mind, they function almost as a story or novel in miniature. Only a couple of reviewers have even commented on the sonnets. Most are focused on the stories.
When I published the book, I discovered that a collection of both fiction and poetry must be an odd thing. When you are setting up the metadata, you have to select from dropdown menus what sort of thing it is that you’re publishing. Neither Kindle Direct Publishing nor Ingram had a menu option that accurately described it as a collection of fiction and poetry. It had to be one or the other. Then you add the meandering introduction that is equal parts autobiography, history, pedagogy, and philosophy—and you really have a strange beast of a book.
Of course, though, that’s how I want all of my books to be. I know books are more marketable if they can be easily pigeonholed. If bookstore managers and librarians are uncertain what section your book belongs in, it’s less likely to be placed anywhere. But I can’t help myself. I want my books to be irreverent chimeras. I want readers to wonder what sort of book they’re holding in their hands—even if that means very few hands will even bother to pick it up in the first place.
Could you explain how and to what extent William H. Gass influenced you as a writer? Do you think that the major concepts of postmodernism, as endorsed by writers like Gass, are still relevant?
It’s difficult to say just how profoundly William Gass has impacted my writing—as well as my reading and teaching and everything else. Gass, who passed away in 2017, thought of himself as a “stylist,” meaning that his emphasis, no matter what he was writing, was on the quality of the language. As a consequence, his prose is inclined to use techniques that we more commonly associate with poetry: alliteration, assonance, extended metaphor, internal rhyming, repetition, etc. Moreover, he was less interested in the usual focuses of narrative—like plot, characterization and setting—and more interested in language, which he developed primarily through imagery and the exploration of a particular idea or concept, even in his fiction.
Since becoming a devotee of Gass, which happened around 2009, I’ve been much more interested in developing the quality of my language than on more typical elements of fiction. That said, I tend to think in terms of plot, characterization and setting more so than Gass did. For many readers, Gass’s work is difficult to embrace because they want the more traditional elements when they read, say, a novel. I like to think that my writing incorporates the best of both worlds. I place a great deal of emphasis on using poetical language in my prose, but I also try to develop interesting characters and plots that are much more page-turning than what Gass tended to produce.
I’m not suggesting I’m a better writer than Gass—not at all!—but rather that I’m more conventional when it comes to storytelling than he was. As I say, Gass has also influenced my reading habits, my teaching, and just my thinking about the world in general. He was a philosopher by training, and he has definitely shaped my thinking, especially about the current state of affairs in the United States (the rise of Trumpism) and how it came to be. It’s been pointed out by others that his novel The Tunnel, published in 1995 but begun in the mid-60s, anticipated the rise of Trump or someone like him.
It used to seem impossible that so many in the U.S. would embrace fascism. But Gass saw it coming—that and the demise of the publishing industry and along with it the quality of thought in our culture, the tendencies toward superficiality and materialism.
Trauma Theory as an Approach to Analyzing Literary Texts offers a multidisciplinary framework to evaluate trauma not only in postmodern literature but also in literature beyond or before postmodernism. How do the recent terror attacks at many places across the globe and war on terror make trauma a part of everyday practice and a benumbing experience?
My trauma-theory book is an updated and expanded version of my doctoral dissertation. I re-released this newest version in 2021, and it’s definitely been my best-selling title to date, especially outside the U.S. (Though, to be clear, not a “bestseller” in the New York Times sense.) It discusses the development of “trauma culture” and how it leads to the production of “trauma texts,” and unfortunately there is no shortage of trauma in the world. The basic idea is that writers (all creative types) produce text according to certain principles when they are creating from a place of trauma, either individual trauma or cultural trauma.
My book discusses the psychological underpinnings of this process, and it demonstrates how to recognize texts that have been produced from a place of trauma. In the U.S. we are traumatized by out-of-control gun violence, and by the far right’s devotion to rolling back civil liberties and basic freedoms. It goes without saying that people of color and members of the LGBTQ+ community are especially profoundly traumatized. Climate crisis is also adding to our cultural anxiety (compounded by the fact that the right continues to be in petulant denial about the causes of climate crisis).
Elsewhere in the world, these and other daily happenings produce individual and cultural trauma. Scholars everywhere appear to be exploring the association between trauma and their culture’s literary production. Last year I was working with a doctoral student in Pakistan who was basing her dissertation in large part on my trauma-theory work—she was looking at Shahnaz Bashir’s The Half Mother (2014) and Scattered Souls (2016) for evidence of trauma in Kashmiri society. Then at the short story conference in Singapore earlier this year [2023] I met a Ph.D. candidate from Louisville who was focusing on trauma. When we got home, I sent her my book—if nothing else perhaps the bibliography would be useful to her efforts. Sadly, I would anticipate that academic interest in trauma is only going to increase over time.
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Aswin Prasanth is an Assistant Professor of English at Jain University, Kochi, India. He holds a Ph.D. in English Language and Literature from School of Arts, Humanities and Commerce, Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham (Kochi Campus), India. He is the Academic Essay Editor of Panorama: The Journal of Travel, Place, and Nature and an Editor at Twelve Winters Journal. His articles, book chapters, columns, reviews, and interviews have appeared in Studies in European Cinema, Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics, Quarterly Review of Film and Video, The Poet, The Cue, Rain Taxi, Asian Lite International, Everybody’s Reviewing, Mathrubhumi, The New Indian Express, and others.
Augustine George is an Assistant Professor of English at Sacred Heart College (East Campus), Thevara, India. He holds a Ph.D. in English Language and Literature from School of Arts, Humanities and Commerce, Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham (Kochi Campus), India. His interviews have been published in the Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics, Quarterly Review of Film and Video, Twelve Winters Journal and Rain Taxi.
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