The full text of the following interview is available in Volume 25.1, the 25th anniversary issue, of The Southeast Review, which you can order online by clicking here.
from "Windows in the House of Fiction: An Interview with Rick Moody"
SER: Several years ago you interviewed
for a teaching position here at Florida State, yet you have
written about your own misgivings about graduate creative
writing programs, most recently in The Atlantic Monthly,
where you offered some specific, prescriptive advice on how
to avoid the least-common-denominator effect that many graduate
creative writing programs seem to inculcate. If you could,
just by fiat, impart a new pedagogical approach upon the graduate
workshop, what would a Rick Moody-inspired apprenticeship
look like?
RM: That’s a loaded question from the
outset because part of the problem for me is the existing
structure of the graduate writing workshop itself. To impose
my pedagogy on a form that I think is flawed from the outset
is problematic. But I will say that right now, I have one
student, a thesis student at Columbia, and I think pedagogically
that relationship is quite sound. I think one-on-one is a
good way to impart your ideas about what fiction is, and to
try to pass along some of that so someone else may make good
use of them. My problems are with the workshop. For the record,
I don’t see that piece in The Atlantic as prescriptive,
I see it as diagnostic, for want of a better word, as to the
flaws in the system.
I do think the workshop has come to dominate instruction in
fiction writing and now it seems that there is no way around
that approach. And yet I think that there can be other models.
Low residency, for example. The vast majority of low-residency
work tends to be done in relationships that are not traditional
workshop relationships. A student-teacher relationship exists
but it is dramatically different from that 14-to-1 dynamic
in a traditional workshop.
SER: But doesn’t that one-to-one model
rob the apprentice writer of the chance to develop those relationships
with peer readers? Isn’t one of the most valuable parts
of the workshop developing those lifetime connections with
writers at the same stage in their development. What happens
to those individual students after the thesis is complete,
or what happens to the low-residency student after the semester
is complete?
RM: In some ways, the community is the important
vehicle for the writing program. And that resource is still
available to you after you get your degree. If you build your
foundation effectively, which I certainly did at Columbia—there
are people, Helen Schulman is a great example, and David Means
was there, Jill Eisenstadt—many of my peers have remained
close friends and readers, and this was especially the case
in the first ten years or so after I originally got out of
Columbia. But the workshops themselves were so negative, competitive,
and counter-productive. Having friends available to read my
work was often more valuable than the workshop itself. But
in that case you are paying thirty thousand dollars, or whatever,
taking out enormous loans, in order to have friends. What
is the workshop for then?
SER: Most writers who have been through the
workshop experience have a great story about their lack of
acceptance in workshop or by a magazine. I’m thinking
here of the famous Harry Crews anecdote, when he received
a rejection letter that read, “Fire is the great refiner,
son, and I suggest you burn this.” So what was the worst
reaction your work received in a workshop?
RM: I don’t want to name names but
my first semester at Columbia I did have an instructor who
said “I don’t have anything to say about this
story. Why don’t you guys talk about it.” That
story later got published in The Antioch Review,
not changed substantially.
SER: This fall seems to be the end of a season
of manifestos. Perhaps it began with the B. R. Myers essay
in the May 2005 Atlantic Monthly, which asserted
that we were listening to the death rattle of the postmodern
novel. Now, we’re in the middle of an ongoing debate
between Ben Marcus and Jonathan Franzen about the role of
experimental fiction. It seems to me that what Ben Marcus
is saying is that the world needs less of the safe and familiar,
close, third person point of view domestic novel (of which
Franzen’s The Corrections is essentially a
series of short, third person narratives). Is this a debate
in which you’re willing to publicly take sides?
RM: I find the whole kerfuffle a little tedious,
but I’ll try. Ben does go to great pains in the essay
to say that The Corrections, for what it is, is extremely
effective. I think that he intends on narrowing the particulars
of his essay to Franzen’s piece about William Gaddis,
“Mr. Difficult,” from The New Yorker. In truth,
I detested that piece. I found it inexplicable. And I don’t
actually think that Franzen believes that stuff, either. I
think he just likes to provoke.
Yet I think it would be possible to come up with an attack
on “Mr. Difficult” that was less, slightly less
hysterical and more a point-by-point response, a kind of rapid
response model that would do a better job of rebutting the
argument of “Mr. Difficult.” And actually The
Believer published a letter around the same time by this
guy called Andrew Ervin, in the September (2005) issue, that
does just this by quoting Adorno and some others. Ervin proceeds
point-by-point against Franzen’s piece, and I thought
his was a more effective piece of rhetorical writing. Ben’s
essay is beautiful literature and it really sings in spots,
but it’s so emotional that it doesn’t do that
great a job of eliminating the problem.
SER: Isn’t it ironic that Ben Marcus
is asking for a literature that takes more risks? Because
if you draw an SAT-type analogy, Franzen is to Cheever or
Updike as Marcus is to William Gaddis. The distance in innovation
between these pairs is very similar. Do you think Marcus intended
to call for a return to fiction that abandons the ironic stance,
or a call for a return to postmodernism, or was he asking
for more fiction that is innovative on its own terms?
RM: I’m not sure. What I want is for
the house of fiction to have many windows. I think that there’s
a window that will suit Jonathan Franzen just fine. Meanwhile,
I am so far from being a recommender of the post-ironic. I
find that whole argument (“What we need is post-ironic
literature!”) vulgar and pedantic, brought to you by
joyless “Morning Edition” listeners whose tote
bags are too small to carry a range of items. It’s not
where I’m at at all. I think comedy is great and it’s
joyful and celebratory and because joy is a legitimate human
emotion it belongs in fiction as much as anything else. As
I experience Ben, I think he’s just saying, Look, you
can write your realistic novels, that’s fine, but just
don’t tell us that we’re not allowed to experience
delight and excitement about innovative fiction. Which is
exactly what “Mr. Difficult” did. It said, You
can’t possibly like these so-called status novels; you
are just reading them because you think they are a feather
in your cap. That’s the part that I take issue with.
Because for me, JR is an incredibly fun book to read. I read
it like I read comic books, every day, all the time. Life
was an interruption.
SER: There seems to be an almost sense of
shame among readers about tackling a big book. More people
read The Crying of Lot 49 than any of the books in
the Pynchon oeuvre, especially Gravity’s Rainbow.
People tackle White Noise or Libra instead
of Underworld. Why the fear of the big book?
RM: Book reviewers, because they have too
many assignments ahead of them, panic at the sight of these
big books. They rarely want to review or recommend them. I
ended up reviewing Mason and Dixon for The Atlantic
for the simple reason that they couldn’t get anyone
else to do it. I think that’s a real problem. If the
first rank of reviewers, such as it is, isn’t recommending
these books then it’s hard for the readers out there
to know what they are getting into.
SER: But the marketplace makes it a lot easier
for a book like Infinite Jest to be published as
a third book in someone’s career, rather than the first.
What needs to happen so that, in the Rick Moody-model workshop,
apprentice writers are taking risks and writing big books
instead of perhaps tailoring their ambitions to the marketplace?
RM: I tell people never to think about the
marketplace at all. I think it’s soul death to be writing
with a consciousness of the marketplace. You have to write
what you have to write. And I hope there are some obsessive,
would-be experimentalist writers out there who are producing
1,500-page manuscripts as their first novels.