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In
his first collection of short stories, How Did You Sleep?
(Porcupine’s Quill, 2000), Ottawa writer Paul Glennon eschews dirty
realism and thinly-veiled autobiography for clever conceits and
absurdly-extended metaphors. In one story, the president of a
corporation is voted out of power by his executive board, which then
votes unanimously to change him into a bear. In another, a man awakes to
discover that his entire world appears to him as being made of chrome.
Fiction which is funny and smart, without being either cloying or
disposable, is a rare commodity in Canadian literature.
Nathan Whitlock got in touch with Glennon to find out what the hell he thinks
he’s up to. This interview was conducted in winter 2000/01.
Read
some fiction by Paul Glennon in The Danforth Review (Jan. 2002).
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I.
WHO IS PAUL GLENNON?
The Danforth Review: The
stories in How Did You Sleep? are unlike just about everything
else being published in Canada. Does this a) unnerve you; or b) make you
feel like a giant, standing and laughing with both massive hands upon
your hips?
Paul Glennon: It is
unnerving. I sometimes feel like I've brought my prize ostrich to the
Olympics only to find out that ostrich racing is not an Olympic event.
I'm fond of my ostrich though, and I've endured a long apprenticeship in
the ancient art of ostrich racing. I can hardly switch to rowing or
triple jump at this late date.
TDR: There are a number of
subtle nods in the book to its stylistic antecedents — the question
and answer form of the title story, pioneered by Donald Barthelme; the
double-reference to 'Osberg' in one story, the anagram of 'Borges' which
Nabokov uses in Ada; even the notion that some of the stories are
really 'found' diaries or notes has a long history in English
literature. How important do feel it is for a writer to feel himself
part of a tradition, however much self-defined? How important is it to
have peers?
PG: No writer exists in a
vacuum. (Or at least not for very long, because they asphyxiate don't
they.) You must have one or the other, either peers or precursors with
which to compare yourself. Those precursors provide a test for the
authenticity of your work. And a self-constructed tradition is as good
as any. Borges famously said that a great writer creates his precursors.
Even the moderately good play at being demiurges, inventing influences
to justify what they are doing.
TDR:
Who, living or dead, writers or otherwise, do you perceive as your
peers?
PG: Borges and Barthelme
you've already mentioned. You could quickly add Calvino and Kafka to
that. I've always been fascinated too with willful perverseness of the
OuLiPo movement - Perec's La Disparation and La Vie, Mode
D'Emploi. I often use the Oulipian device of an artificial
constraint, nothing so grandiose as a novel that doesn't use the letter
E, but a story based on a list of historian's fallacies, maybe, or a
story in which two personalities can only express their incompatibility
in architectural terms. I also feel affinities with older, less
categorically experimental writers. I see much of what I've tried to do
in HDYS as metaphysical conceits, the project of extending an
outlandish but necessary metaphor. My mitochondria and flotation on the
bourse have their predecessors in Donne's flea and Marvel's
"vegetable love". And while I'm picking teams, I'll take Keats
and Coleridge too. Keats "negative capability" is my
justification for laziness, not having to spell it all out. Coleridge
shows how philosophy can wreck a poet, which is an important example for
me.
II. WHAT DOES PAUL GLENNON DO?
TDR: I
am curious whether the ironic playfulness exhibited by this collection's
stories is something you came to self-consciously, or was always your
inclination.
PG: Other than in technical
journals, I've doubt I've ever written without irony. An unambiguous
expression makes me cringe. Can you believe me now I've said that?
TDR: Did you serve a long
apprenticeship with straight-ahead narrative, or have you maintained a
consistency of vision since beginning to write?
PG: I don't think I know
what straight ahead narrative means. I suppose that means having a real
plot, and the whole art of my work is avoiding that. I can't say whether
my vision has been consistent or even all that acute, but I don't recall
ever being on the road to Damascus either. I suppose I always wanted to
find a writing of otherness or strangeness, Even before Kundera or
Breton told me, I always felt life was elsewhere, and I wanted to write
the stories of elsewhere. I enjoy writing that shows me something new,
and I want to discover something new every time I write.
TDR: Were you ever what John
Barth called a "determined young traditionalist"?
PG: I think I am a
traditionalist. In my own little world, which is bounded by my computer
screen and my bookshelf, I stand in the main stream of English-language
literary fiction. It's Geoff Chaucer, Johnny Keats, Sammy Beckett then
me. It's the determination I've always lacked.
TDR: How has your writing
changed since the completion of these stories?
PG: My writing changed more
over the course of writing these stories than since. I began writing
more found texts like "The Anthology of Nestorian Literature"
and "Via Crucis". Towards the end I gravitated to the
dialogues like the title story and the last story in the collection,
"The Secret Agent". While I was writing these stories I was
also trying to find a way to write a longer work. I drafted two
consciously-conventional novels and a series of
linked stories that amounted to novel length, but I
wasn't happy with any of these efforts. Since the completion of the book
I've been developing a strategy for something not entirely unlike a
novel.
III. WHAT ARE PAUL GLENNON'S CONCERNS?
TDR:
Do you worry that readers and critics may get hung up on the odd
qualities of these stories, the quirkiness of their execution, and, as
is often the case with assessments of Barthelme, miss the sympathy and
sadness that resonates through the seeming flippancy?
PG: I worry about a lot of
things. This is about fourth on the list. I worry that readers or
critics won't accept the strangeness and just ignore the book. I worry
that they'll over-analyse, thinking that I've posed them the challenge
of deciphering exact allegories. I worry that people won't get the
jokes. I worry that they'll think I'm some manifesto-shaking punk,
raring to deliver a smack-down to neo-realist convention. And yes, I do
worry that readers will see these as mere formalist exercises without
other concerns. So far these fears haven't been substantiated. The
responses I get from readers have reassured me that they see that the
absurdity and irony is material to the story.
IV. BONUS QUESTION:
TDR: You
are one of the few writers with a "real" job — one outside
of both publishing and academia. (Glennon works as a "human factors
specialist" at an Ottawa-based software company.) Does this
influence your writing? Does it help or hinder you?
PG: Most writers do have
other jobs. Mine is just, as you say, a "real" job: in an
office, in an industry that the business section cares about, with
nothing to do with the arts. I'm comfortable with the apparent
dichotomy, though I suppose it contributes to my literary
marginalization. I rather like my job and while it does impinge on my
writing, it also gives me the freedom to write out of the mainstream.
I'm not counting on royalty cheques to pay the rent. The biggest
downside is that I don't have an extended period of time to put in the
necessary sustained effort on an NLW (Novel Length Work), but there are
ways around this too.
Nathan Whitlock's short fiction won
the TWUC 2000 Short Prose Competition for Developing Writers and was
short-listed in THIS Magazine's "Great Canadian Literary Hunt"
2000. He lives in Toronto. (nathan_whitlock@hotmail.com) |
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