From Dramaxes. De la fiction policière, fantastique et d’aventures, ENS Editions, Fontenay/St Cloud (1995): 113–28. Reprinted by permission of Marc Chénetier. Translated by Sophie Vallas.
MC: What is the place of crime fiction in your work?
JC: I don’t regard the books I write as belonging to a genre. There are so many prejudices against that type of writing that it is difficult to move in and out a genre. The only thing I can say is that as my brother happened to be a police detective he was indeed able to give me elements thanks to which I could create a sort of tapestry, a dynamics, thanks to the language and all the paraphernalia that the police really use. I do not have the impression that those books are in the least different from the other books I’ve written. The only criterium is language itself, and the texture of language. If the language collapses, the books collapse. From my point of view, I was trying to write explosive texts whose heroes and heroines happened to be police people. I think one of the difficulties most readers of traditional detective stories come up against is the fact that they don’t understand what the books are all about.
In the first of those novels, Blue Eyes, the hero dies in the very middle of the story and the novel goes on, which seems quite strange. Which means that the true problem raised by the text is that the invention only starts after the death of the hero. And what do you make of a text that only begins once the hero is dead? Not to mention the complete reinvention of the hero through his death, as well as seven other novels whose invention rests entirely on the pretext of this death. In my opinion this is exactly the same kind of challenge that you find in Pinocchio’s Nose. You may see in the novel a rewriting of the legend of Pinocchio, whereas I see a form of parody of a given literary genre. The word parody is crucial: one plays with a text and with a genre. And such a game is a success or a failure only depending on the power of language.
MC: In the 1950s you worked on the “voice project” with John Hawkes at Stanford. The Lime Twig dates back to that period. It is also a novel in which the character dies in the first chapters, a sort of criminal investigation. Do you see an influence on your own detective fiction?
JC: No, even if Hawkes did represent a powerful influence when I began to write. He was probably the best of all American writers because he pushed the language to extremes, and because he could perceive the silent cruelty of language. The point is not to compose a cruel story; the point is language itself and its potential of cruelty. The Lime Twig was an extraordinary text written by someone who had never set a foot in England and who could nevertheless grasp—and capture, so to say, in a parodic form—the precise language an Englishman could speak. His capacity to create a context thanks to imagination was amazing. Hawkes has never been an influence as far as narrative is concerned, but he has influenced me as far as language is concerned, undoubtedly.
For me there is no feeling in language. I believe that the potential of cruelty rests in a juxtaposition of words that is devoid of feeling, and that in Hawkes’s very best texts there is no feeling. I remember a wonderful story he once told me: while he was in California after writing Second Skin, he went to visit his greatest fan, a prisoner in San Quentin. And this prisoner told him: “Listen, what you write is great, but I have the feeling that you’re turning sentimental. Cut into the flesh or you’re going to fall flat on your face,” and this is exactly what happened since all of a sudden he gave this color to his language, he felt the necessity to obtain from language more than what it can give. If we go back to The Lime Twig, it’s an amazing book because it is never judgmental, it only describes. I would draw a link between Hawkes and Dashiell Hammett. Crime fiction only starts with Hammett. Nobody could ever analyze what is at stake in his texts because when you look at his short stories, they’re completely flat and stupid. Whereas when you take his first novel, Red Harvest, you can see an indescribable revolution. There is no visible stance taken on what is being described. There is an extraordinary sensitivity to the space between each sentence so that when you read the text, your imagination feeds not on the sentences but on the space between the sentences. This is where Hammett’s considerable contribution is, and nobody has analyzed it yet. His short stories remain limited to the genre, they are rather shaky stories. But when you take the novels, and Red Harvest and The Glass Key especially, you suddenly find yourself in a very different world, a world which is in no way picturesque and which is not trying to mimic the gangsters of the 1920s. In his writing there is suddenly this extraordinary distance between sentences, between words themselves, and because adjectives are almost completely cut out, you get very naked, very dry and cruel sentences.
MC: You said you admire the fact that Hawkes uses language to build a whole world which is not familiar to him and that the result is even better than if he actually knew it. And yet you write using very familiar elements. I’m thinking of New York City.
JC: I admire those constructions of language, those cities of words, and it doesn’t matter whether the author knows or not the place he describes. What is important is the idea of a pure, whole construction which manages to create or to re-create something. Walter Abish, in Alphabetical Africa, invents and reinvents a story only by going through the alphabet. In the first chapter there are only words starting with an A, in the second words starting by A or B, in the third words starting by A, B or C, and so on until he reaches the end of the alphabet. And then he takes away letters down to the initial A, and he does it while telling a story at the same time. To me—and even if people like Queneau did similar things—what this novel suggests is something in which I deeply believe, namely that language is completely artificial, and that one can say whatever one means even within the most rigid constraints. Abish, for that matter, manages to tell a stunning and frightening story in this most rigid framework. In a way this is what crime fiction is all about: very strict constraints which give birth to horror. That’s what Hammett invented. It’s not a matter of amnesia, but of a conscious reduction of language deliberately contained within certain limits, because such limits reinforce the impact and the emotional quality of what one means.
Denis Mellier: Is not this constraint that can be found in the framework of crime fiction the reason why crime fiction and contemporary fiction often meet—I’m thinking about Borges, Perec, Auster, or Ackroyd. The stricter the system of constraints, the more at stake the formal reinvention is, which could explain why many authors like to mix a more open form of literature with a form that is usually said to be closed upon itself?
JC: You’re right. What you mean is that a sort of confusion occurs. I’d like to evoke a passage from a recent text by Joyce Carol Oates on detective fiction, which raises the problem one generally stumbles on when talking about the genre. To sum up, she says that the essential characteristic of detective fiction is probably the creation of a pact between the author and the reader from the very first sentence on, and that a detective novel must not betray this initial commitment, that it must not crumble into ambiguity and irresolution, which is what the literary novel, in which real life collapses, does. And she goes on evoking some writers who drift away from this tradition, only to say that their examples are abnormal cases in what remains, she says, essentially a mass genre whose function is to quench an insatiable thirst for narratives whose plots entirely rest on action. She concludes by saying that the best traditional crime writers never allow themselves to get involved in form, because what’s the point, she wonders. Inventiveness can give free rein to itself within the limits of the genre.
Such a statement could apply to 90 percent of crime fiction writers, who explore nothing, who exist within the genre by limiting the risks. But the same could be said about 90 percent of writers, whether they write crime fiction or not, who don’t take risks, who make sure they have something to fall back on. So such a criterium cannot be used to define anything. The best writers, whatever the genre, are always those who play with the form, who work within limits and constraints, and who draw something new—except when they fail in their attempt. I think that modern writing chose two different directions, either an expansion of language, a proliferation of words—let’s say Joyce, Faulkner, and Nabokov—or a contraction of language, a contraction that also allows you to create something new. In crime fiction, Hammett was the first one to show that language itself, when given very precise limits, could create something that has never been seen before.
DM: Have you kept in your writing formal constraints that are usually considered as inherent to crime fiction?
JC: I don’t feel I’m facing constraints or restrictions. I don’t see myself as operating within a framework. It so happens that my books deal with policemen and that there are therefore elements that are determined by their way of behaving. You can’t turn them into heroes of the absurd and oblige them to catch criminals at the same time. The only constraint is linked to the methodology of criminal procedures—it’s the only one I feel concerned by. Secret Isaac, for instance, is a sort of Joycean homage to my vision of Dublin, seen through the eyes of Joyce and through the prism of language. It becomes extremely difficult to pretend to describe any form of crime literature once you start considering it in terms of genre.
MC: But then if you don’t acknowledge any of the constraints of the genre, how can you play with those limits and therefore with the possibility to go beyond them and to turn them into something else?
JC: I was speaking about the constraints of language. I intend to talk about only one thing, which is language. It’s not by strengthening the picturesque or the vocabulary that you push language to extremes, it’s only by setting limitations. That’s the only difference. It’s a way to abolish the bifurcation between the two directions I was mentioning previously: you can try to use language in order to obtain some effects, but it’s through a loss in terms of vocabulary and not through an expansion of this vocabulary. It has nothing to do with the constraints of form. I don’t think that this form exists in a purest state. If you take Paul Auster, or whoever else for that matter, the best texts are always a matter of language, period.
MC: How do you turn an infraction into something productive?
JC: If you’re writing a crime novel, you can take it out of its context which is that of the elucidation of a crime. Okay! Then you fall into easy parody. Or else you think, no, a crime will indeed take place and will be solved, and I won’t have much room for maneuver. But as I move in this narrow margin many things will take place, whether you can see and recognize them or not, and I’m not going to do it playfully, I’m going to do it threateningly. I’m going to build terror not on the crime itself and its resolution, but on all those side elements. The only interesting and important thing is to use the limits, whether they apply to your subject or to the context, to work them again and to turn them inside out in order to transform them into elements of power, of strength instead of elements of dispossession. I think that is what you always find in the best novels.
David McFarlane: In the preface to Blue Eyes you evoke very precise themes—this “gigantic combination of fathers and sons,” for instance—but also a context and your desire to escape the genre. Everything is therefore not only a question of language.
JC: The label I mentally attach to it doesn’t matter, and what the novel is linked to doesn’t matter either. When I wrote Blue Eyes, my only obligation was to go from one sentence to the next, to create a sort of uninterrupted music that could carry you further into the text. I wrote this preface in order to try and explain why I was writing. I was at the time in the middle of a one-thousand-page novel that was completely devoid of music, and I was completely at a loss. How could I find the music back? I had the subject but no music to go along with it; I was powerless to find a language that could give it life, to find an interior landscape that could breathe life into this so-called subject I was writing about. I was able to do that in my crime novels because they were somehow parables of my own experience in relation to my brother. I was able to find the appropriate music to tell this story, and we could have an endless discussion about what this story is all about, but I will only say that a novel is working or not depending on its capacity to maintain the music or the language from the beginning to the end—what you could call the rhetoric.
The most interesting text in twentieth-century American literature is “The Pedersen Kid” by William Gass. If you look at the text closely I defy you to tell me what it is about, I defy you to sum it up. It’s a text on nothingness, on the whiteness of nothingness! This text does not tell anything—it’s all about the snow, empty spaces, the icing quality of language. Gass manages to tell you something, thanks to various sentences, about the joy you experience when discovering language, because it’s one of his early texts and he will never find it again—it’s something that happens only once. He can write the most perfect novel in the world, fifteen pages, two thousand pages. In fact it will happen to him a second time, in his essay about the color blue, because he explores and discovers the same thing again: I’m going to write about nothingness, about the blue of nothingness, and then you have the same kind of formal perfection, not only because you’re dazzled—you can be dazzled by anything—but because it is so upsetting that he manages to carry you in that way to the limits of language.
And it’s also a crime story, because in the end, when writing is at its best, there is always this lurking nihilism that suggests “what the heck?” After all, what’s language? They say language is what enables us to communicate, but as far as I’m concerned, I think that very often it’s exactly the other way round, language is what keeps us apart even more. It’s the thing that keeps us at a distance, a necessary distance. I’m speaking about written language, not oral language, and we need that to survive. We would be unable to survive without such distance, it would be too frightening. Language is our second skin.
Language always finds its coherence around a subject. This is unavoidable. If it wasn’t the case, we’d become crazy. We wouldn’t be able to read language. One has to present a sort of formal image. The subject is inherent to language, otherwise it would be impossible to move forward. It’s in the very nature of language to go from the abstract to the specific in order to create myths. In American mythology, it may be this confusion of fathers and sons. In English mythology it may be something else. But whatever the mythology may be, it is language only which, by operating around it, makes it work. A text operates in what I would call the substratum of the text, a sort of underlying emotional tonality that all text must possess and without which language would become uncertain or opaque.
Luc Ruiz: Why did you choose crime fiction to carry out this reflection on language and writing?
JC: Why do I write crime fiction? I would see a link with cinema here. It’s a sort of democratic institution in which you don’t have to bring your own stock of knowledge; you don’t need any literary heritage to read crime fiction. You don’t need a context, you don’t need to know Joyce, you don’t need any background to read those texts. It was a way for me to escape my own “literary heritage.” It was like setting on another kind of journey for which I didn’t have to present a mirror to the texts I had read before or to enter into a dialogue with other writers. It was for me the first somewhat “democratic” way of writing because you only needed your own intelligence, just as when you’re watching a movie since movies undoubtedly create their own landscape, their own genre, their own vocabulary. This is why I believe that modern crime fiction only starts with the invention of cinema, of course, but also photography. I think photography is the perfect example of an image which has its own power and which, even when it has its own coloration, goes on existing in the most extreme and strict monochrome.
MC: Many contemporary writers use the detective or criminal framework in their texts [ . . . ] as a way to get rid of the “what it is about.” The word “about,” to me, can be seen as an indirect commentary on your own theory of composition. What I would call the “aboutness” of literature has nothing to do with the transitive use of the term. There is in English an intransitive use of “about,” as in “one walks about” or “one dances about,” two phrases which suggest a way of getting round, of dodging the issues, of being around instead of being inside. And it seems to me that your writing consists in “writing about,” not “writing about anything,” but “writing about.”
JC: When John Hawkes speaks, I don’t need to say what the text is speaking about. It’s something you have to make explicit as the text becomes more and more difficult in our quest for meaning. I think that very often, as far as meaning is concerned, we find ourselves at the very heart of language, and that very often we make errors of judgment, and it’s only thirty or forty years later that the key text suddenly emerges. This is what happened to Faulkner, or to Melville for that matter. A whole century went by before the values of a new century enabled us to grasp the terms of Melville’s own language. The detective novel, the mystery is, in my opinion, specific to our century, and the enigma is not only a matter of language but a matter of all kinds of values, human possibilities, and human circumstances. And I think that the emergence of the genre was only possible thanks to the scientific revolution of the beginning of the twentieth century which enabled us to realize that the more we learn about something, the less we know about it. We are therefore in a lull of the twentieth century. We probably have to wait for new discoveries to take place in order for us to reexamine things that we thought we knew, but that we don’t really know. And that is the major obstacle.
Cécile Bloc-Rodot: Would the quest of literature, and perhaps the quest of the crime novel, be to find precision “in the aboutness?”
JC: It’s the closest you can get to a definition of the potential of language. But could we use this formula to describe an isolated text? If you take a novelist such as Bernard Malamud, you realize that in the awkwardness he shows when he manipulates language there is also a sort of power, a power that originates from this very awkwardness. The human quality often comes from an aspiration to precision and from the failure of such an aspiration.
David McFarlane: You insist on the democratic dimension of crime fiction while at the same time you keep referring to a literature that’s very ambitious and complex, but that isn’t popular.
JC: The texts that are not decipherable at a given moment very often end up opening up through indirect and perverse ways. Conversely, most of the texts that are successful when they are published very quickly fall into oblivion. The so-called best-sellers which have a tremendous impact at a given time no longer represent much twenty years later. The problem for best-sellers—and best-sellers can be great books, such as One Hundred Years of Solitude—is that language is literally absent from most of them. It’s only content and not language. It’s language at the service of content. It could be said that very often, any sentence read at a given time describes the world at that precise moment, even if you attempt to hide this, even if you’re a twentieth-century writer who’s trying to pass as an eighteenth-century writer. A writer always evokes his own time. That is why cinema offers the most convincing history of our century because even in a costume drama about Pompei or anything else, a moviemaker is describing the values, the drawbacks, and the virtues of his own time. That’s where the power of cinema is. I think that if you took a real film geek and that you had him listen to a soundtrack he would be able to give you the year the movie came out simply on the basis of the way people speak, because it’s so revealing. The same holds true for language. Language is a sort of schizophrenic echo of what can happen at a given time. Only the twentieth century could invent crime fiction.
MC: Which brings us back to the importance of cinema in your conception of the novel and of writing.
JC: I grew up with cinema and the radio. The importance of music for me partly comes from the fact that I used to listen to the radio for hours, going from one type of show to another: historical dramas, adventure serials, and then Hollywood. And also from the fact that I was the product of a society or a culture which had absolutely no markers, which was powerless to understand the outside world. I belonged to a culture of immigrants that was unable to interpret the symbols of its own environment. It was a completely senseless situation. What language could you be willing to talk when there is no language? The only language I had was that of the radio, of the movies, period. At the time I wasn’t interested in scriptwriters or moviemakers. To me the true authors of the movies were the actors—and I still believe in this. It’s not only a matter of interpretation, it’s the very presence of the actors which fashions and defines the texture of a movie. So that those heroes, once wrenched from the screen, reappear in my novels not as parodic figures but as real heroes.
Today we have this amazing luxury of being able to comfortably enter into a movie: you go to a movie theater, you know at what time the film is due to start, and you see it from the beginning. When I was a child, you never knew the times of the different showings, there was no program. You went in at seven and it was right in the middle of the movie. And I used to be able to say, word for word and without having seen it, what had happened in the beginning of the movie simply because by watching what followed, you ended up developing an intuitive sense of what came first. In other words a novel does not begin at the beginning of the novel. It starts somewhere around the middle, a middle that you create, and the beginning is somewhere but there is no need to write it down in black and white.
MC: Were you influenced by film noir?
JC: I’m not sure, but I think that its visual impact was considerable. I discovered cinema while film noir was at its highest. And what was especially striking was this juxtaposition of black, white, and grey that had never been seen on a screen before. All of a sudden it was a matter of finding the meaning not so much of the shadow but of the criss-cross of black, white, and grey lines. It was especially striking in a movie entitled T-Men: I’m probably one of the only persons in the world who saw it, but there was this crucial scene with a black and white blind that defined a sort of grey world. And the interpretation of this interpretation—not so much the fact that the world was seen through the blind, but the fact that the blind projected shadows onto something else—was enough to add a context that did not exist before: of course we had already seen things through a misted-up window pane, in a bright sunny day, in a rainy day, or in a misty day, but we had never seen reality thus criss-crossed by those bright black and white lines. And I think that this is what the film noir offered us: this extraordinary use of color without color. That is why I was unable to watch a Technicolor movie after having watched all those marvelous films in black and white. It seemed to be such a reduction of the material, such an intrusion.
So for me cinema was less a process of education than an incomparable means to hone my own tools. It was the perfect formation for a writer because today, much to my embarrassment, I can confess how many books I read before I turned eighteen: I started with Pinocchio, went on with Bambi, and then I read a few history books in school, but that was it. How did I dare to become a writer? When I finally went to the university and when I walked into the library for the first time, with this amazing labyrinth of books all around me . . . I’d love to be able to say today that it was Kafka, but no, it wasn’t. It was Sophocles and Euripides. And I lost nothing by not having read them earlier. The kids I used to go to school with, who had read War and Peace at fourteen, never recovered from it! They were completely lost. To me, this is what American literature is all about: empty spaces that you appropriate in your own groping, mysterious way.