TDR Interview: TIM CONLEY
Michael Bryson interviewed Tim Conley
by email in October 2003. Read a review of Joyces Mistakes on The
Modern Word.
Okay, Tim Conley, tell us something
about yourself (your biography, I mean, however you choose to interpret
and present it) and how JOYCES MISTAKES came to be.
 Ever since I learned to read, at age
four or whenever it was, I have loved it. Now I’m not going to veer
onto the crowded highway of anecdotes about escaping into fiction, being
transported to distant times and imaginary places, and the like, though
of course that’s all good fun; but lately I’ve preferred to take the
naturalist’s woodpath when it comes to talking about reading. On this
path I am studying the very fact of my motion forward, noting my
relation to and perspectives of the trees and land around me. My
interest lies in the cognitive feat of reading, what happens when we
open a book, in the same way that we might prefer to think about what it
means to be transported or go from place to place rather than just hop
in the air-conditioned SUV and try to forget or ignore that you’re
moving, never mind wonder how it happens. Doubtless this will sound
simple-minded or remedial to some readers, but to me it’s fundamental:
how and why we read are at least as interesting as what we read. When I
came to write JOYCES MISTAKES, I was wondering very seriously about all
sorts of bizarre questions about reading (e.g., does every book have to
"make sense?" Can I be said to interpret a book without
reading it? Is "meaning" best understood as a noun or a verb?)
and that book represents an attempt not to answer those questions with
any finality but to understand their value.
JOYCES MISTAKES was originally my
doctoral dissertation, written at Queen’s University and completed in
2001, but the whole thing was written as a book, and was conceived of as
a book and not simply as a "dissertation" from the beginning.
The University of Toronto Press accepted it for publication the next
year.
JOYCES MISTAKES explores mistakes
(or "mistakes") in the work of James Joyce, but it is also an
attempt to articulate a larger literary issue: the aesthetics of error.
Could you describe briefly what it was you were attempting to grapple
with in this book?
You’re right that the book is only
partly about Joyce, and that other word in the title is the larger site
of investigation. Is there such a thing as an error in a work of art?
That’s the question, the drive of the book. The structure of the book
points to a two-sided approach, a writer’s perspective and a reader’s
perspective, and Joyce, whose work in my view raises the stakes on this
question so high that in fact his work depends upon our inability to say
absolutely "yes" or "no" to the question, is kept as
primary focus, though I do occasionally give some attention to the
aesthetics of error in works by other writers – Melville, Proust,
Marianne Moore, and so on. The narrative of a book like ULYSSES isn’t
just about a single day in Dublin, as a reader will discover the moment
he or she discusses the details of the day with another reader of the
novel who holds another edition. ULYSSES as a book, as a reading
experience, is also about the editing history of ULYSSES, and the
significant differences between editions and absence of an absolutely
"correct" or authoritative text exacerbate problems we face
when, for example, we read Martha’s letter to Bloom and she writes (or
Joyce writes?) "world" where we may expect "word."
FINNEGANS WAKE is the extreme, the furthest limit and, as Terry Eagleton
once said, one of the ultimate tests for any literary theory one cares
to advance. When you open the WAKE and come across a word like "cyrcles,"
can you even assume or hypothesize that it’s a typo for
"circles" or "cycles" or some other word? For that
matter, do we dare take that strange word as it is, and have a word we
acknowledge is "correct" but without a dictionary-supported
meaning? At nearly every word Joyce’s book dares us to answer. Some of
the grappling in JOYCES MISTAKES is with our desires as readers to
ignore, accept, or shy away from this dare. With every page I turn and
every word I read I’m still grappling.
How many times did you read
FINNEGANS WAKE during the process of writing JOYCES MISTAKES? I'm
tempted to ask (teasingly) what the WAKE is about (so, like, what's the
story, man), but I'll settle for asking you what has revealed to you in
your confrontation with it.
Jacques Derrida has remarked that it is
naive to speak of "having read" Joyce. That’s not a gesture
of intellectual intimidation, suggesting that nobody can make any
headway with this notoriously difficult author, but a valuable insight
into the design of a book like FINNEGANS WAKE, which begins in the
middle of a sentence, ends in the middle of what may well be the same
sentence, and is simultaneously full of possible meanings and void of
any fully demonstrable ones. When I’m asked how many times I’ve read
ULYSSES, I feel I can give a numerical answer, because it’s a novel
with more or less sequential events and is read front to back and line
by line, but with FINNEGANS WAKE the only sincere answer to make is that
I’m still reading it. I first climbed aboard Joyce’s merry-go-round
in 1995 and I’ve been going in circles since. That statement also
answers the other (equally popular) question, "what’s the book
about?" Samuel Beckett wrote one of his few essays on the WAKE and
very perceptively and concisely said that the book "is not about
something; it is that something itself." The WAKE is about
reading the WAKE: that’s how I appreciate a lovely phrase like
"as you sing it it’s a study."
To be sure, there are those who want a
story and look for a story and find one among the WAKE’s "plotsome
to getsome" mess of broken words, and I wouldn’t begrudge them
whatever pleasures or treasures they find. Yet it’s that synonymy with
experience Joyce is reaching for that is most amazing. As readers
(especially readers of fiction, but all readers generally) we can get
all too complacent in our understanding of the relationship between
words, symbols, writing, and the allegedly "real" world with
its "real" people and places and events. Somewhere Northrop
Frye remarks that all reading is allegorical – that is, every word we
read we understand is something other than that word. I remember how as
a young man I used to marvel at the crystalline quality of that idea,
until I arrived at the WAKE, which defied me to say what definite
"other" meaning the impossible words found therein might be.
Consider any act in the "real" world other than reading:
having sex, say, or washing dishes. Few people (apart perhaps from the
most occult and pedantic sort of psychologists) would say that when they’re
having sex they are doing something other than having sex, and those who
enjoy having sex enjoy it for itself, as it happens, not for what it
represents. The WAKE is for me less a representation than an experience.
This might take us on a bit of a
tangent. It seems to me that the aesthetics of error that you articulate
in JOYCES MISTAKES might well be the antidote to the aesthetics of the
politically correct, which might also be phrased as the aesthetics of
perfectionism or the aesthetics of idealism. I'm thinking, for example,
of the PC critics who took writer X to ask for writing about something
outside his or her immediate experience, as if writers ought to have a
zone within which they must operate and not stray beyond. Comments?
I hadn’t really thought of it that
way before. Well, first of all, you’re too generous in assigning the
term "critic" to this pusillanimous way of thinking. Every act
of writing is presumptuous, not just because of the anxiety of
representation ("will she write him correctly?") but also
because writing presumes reading; an audience is invoked and expected.
There are and will probably always be people who are affronted by the
fact that someone else is telling the story. In some ways this response
strikes a significant chord, points to the innate "wrongness"
of art. All representation is misrepresentation, every fiction by
definition an untruth, every song an imposition against honest silence.
That’s the rule. However, tolerance begins at the same point art does,
by striving to take or make exception, and then greater and greater
exception, to any such rule. Courage and compassion are needed to
violate the rule, to be "wrong." So, if you like, errors are
what make us human.
The Danforth Review published one of
your short stories. I'm wondering how your academic work has affected or
interlaces with your creative writing (if you can accept the division of
those two categories).
A couple of years ago, Viking published
a handsome set of Borges in three volumes. For reasons known only to the
editors, they separated "fictions" and
"non-fictions" despite the fact that Borges’s work
emphatically defies the division. For example, "Pierre Menard,
Author of the Quixote" is simultaneously a wondrous
fabrication and a deeply meditative essay on historicity, translation,
and writing. I am in complete accord with Borges when he calls literary
criticism just another branch of imaginative writing. Saying that
criticism is secondary to "creative" work, which does get said
by a surprising number of otherwise very intelligent people, is like
saying the egg is secondary to the chicken. "Academic" is a
social qualification, though, and bespeaks professional status and an
institutional mandate. The word often gets used as a pejorative tag, and
while there is certainly no lack of dreadfully written books by
professors and it’s often fair comment by non-academic writers who
want to criticize their critics in turn, the fact that a writer works at
a university is hardly sufficient reason to reject the writing. I
suspect that attitude’s symptomatic of a romantic conception of the
writer, whereby the noble, often male writer is a loner against the
world, as heedless of respectability as of regular income, but it’s
also part of a pronounced anti-intellectual streak in North American
culture today.
I teach literature and enjoy it
immensely. My students compel me to rethink everything I understand
about literature on a yearly basis, and that’s very good for a writer.
When I write an essay or story or a poem I am trying to question what
those forms are and what they can do. The best novel redefines what a
novel is, and a writer, critical and creative both, is at best a lover
of possibilities.
Joyce is obviously a literary giant
and a fit figure for your study of literary error. Because TDR is a
CanLit mag, I feel I should ask you how you might approach an
exploration of error in CanLit? Any writers or book leap to mind as
readily relevant folks or works to study?
To the extent that a study of literary
error is, or at least ought to be, a material concern with production,
the editing history of a given text, any writer’s work is fair game.
If you’re looking for writers whose poetics specifically address that
concern at any level of sophistication, of course, you have to be
choosy. And by that I mean it’s a subjective matter. For my taste, the
work of bpNichol would be an obvious choice (even though I think he
misunderstood Joyce). Just look at the "Probable Systems"
series of poems and you’ll see why. Although it doesn’t get as much
attention as it should, Helen Weinzweig’s novel Basic Black with
Pearls asks a lot of good questions about misreading and the desire
for meaning. Jay Millar’s poems of ghosts and fungi beg questions of
origins and roots as well as of ends: when is a mushroom finished? But,
like I say, such choices are subjective – in fact, from my point of
view, Joyce asked me the question, not the other way ’round. If Joyce
is a "giant," it’s because enough readers have found his mis-takings
of the world enriching enough to try to engage with and respond to them.
Error, like beauty, is where you find it.
Michael Bryson is the
publisher/editor of The Danforth Review. |
