PULP BITS
Conducted by Lisa Evenson

PULP BITS: You have strong postmodern themes in your writing – paranoia, absence of conclusion, isolation. Do you see your literature in this period?

D. HARLAN WILSON: Certainly. Postmodernism is a complex term and means different things to different people, but generally speaking, I think my writing exhibits a number of postmodern features. When I write, I don’t consciously deploy these features, but I recognize them, especially when I’m revising my fiction and try to view it from a more objective standpoint. The schizophrenic nature of many of my stories seems to me to be the most prominent earmark of postmodernity. By schizophrenic, I mean my fragmentary style and the way in which I position my characters in imploded universes where reality and fantasy have collapsed.

PB: Author’s intent is fascinating, though I draw separate, personal conclusions from each story. What were your intentions when writing “The Snore”?

DHW: “The Snore” is actually a product of a “conversation” I had with my sister Jain at a bar in Washington D.C. We often write short stories together, one sentence at a time, usually by word of mouth, but this night we did it by word of keyboard. We were playing one of those TV trivia games. While we played, we logged in to the chat room on our consoles and began trading off sentences. We went on for a good half hour before throwing in the towel. Later that night, I wrote down what we had written as best as I could remember it. A week or so later I converted what I had written down into a slightly different story. As I was producing the conversion, I was thinking of two things: Nikolai Gogol’s “The Nose” and the film The Matrix. Gogol’s story is about this guy who accidentally gets his nose lopped off, then spots his nose running around town in an overcoat, functioning as an active member of society. I like the idea of a body part (or bodily product, in the case of “The Snore”) taking on a life of its own, and so I appropriated it to my snore character. As for The Matrix, I was simply playing on the absurdity of the gratuitous, spectacular kung fu fight scenes in the film; by placing such an absurd scene (the kung fu fight between the snore and the protagonist) in an explicitly absurdist story, I wanted to call attention to society’s absurd penchant for mindless entertainment.

PB: Some authors write when they feel a muse, others use a consistent routine or free-write. Can you explain what you do for inspiration, generally speaking?

DHW: I don’t do much. I don’t really get writer’s block and I don’t need a great deal of motivation? I write just about every day, even it’s only for a short time, and I have a big backlog of ideas for stories and books. Time is the issue for me. In addition to my fiction, I’m currently writing my Ph.D. dissertation while teaching classes and promoting my latest book, Stranger on the Loose. These days I devote most of my time to my students and to researching and writing my dissertation. But I always make room for my fiction. If I don’t write creatively on a regular basis, I feel empty, sometimes worthless. It’s strange. In a way, I establish my sense of selfhood through my fiction, yet at the same time, I’m not really anything like the characters I portray. I guess it all boils down to the act of creating irreal worlds in which people behave in ways that I find amusing and compelling?especially considering that the circles I roam in don’t offer many amusing, compelling people.

PB: As I told you, a personal favorite is “The Sister.” I can’t put a story down with this first line: ‘And the moment I finished sewing up my little sister, a stranger came along and kidnapped her.” Do you intentionally avoid humanizing characters?

DHW: Sometimes, yes. One of the reasons I do it, I think, is to try and identify with that kind of person. I’m an emotional, extroverted, touchy-feely guy. People who are unemotional, introverted and detached interest me greatly; I can’t relate to them, and I wonder what in their history produced that kind of closed-door personality. You could say that my portrayal of dehumanized characters in my fiction is partly an attempt to come to terms with them. The main reason I dehumanize characters, though, is to reflect the contemporary human condition as a production of the postmodern universe. I’m a firm believer in the notion that our hyperreal, image-addicted, infotainment-oriented, technofetishistic society is increasingly dulling our senses and turning us all into shadows of the television and computer screens that have come to define our reality. In various ways, I try to represent this dynamic in my fiction.

PB: Irrealities can compare to both Darcey Steinke and Edgar Allen Poe. Who were your major influences in literature, and in life?

DHW: Kafka has had the greatest influence on me as a writer. It wasn’t until I began reading him consistently that I found a voice and a style of my own; his absurdist, dreamlike fables opened up new worlds of potentiality to me. My first book, The Kafka Effekt, is partly a tribute to him. But there are lots of other writers that inspired me. Poe, Burroughs, Dick, Barthelme, Camus, Gogol, Borges, Gibson, Dostoevsky, Mann, Edson—all of these guys appeal to me and have informed my writing. More than anything, I admire the unusual and innovative ways that each of them represent the estranged, alienated subject.

PB: When writing short stories as opposed to a novel, what do you feel is the most important differential? Why?

DHW: As a writer, I was a late bloomer, mainly because I was a frat boy in college and more interested in partying than anything else. I didn’t begin writing seriously until I was a graduate student, around 25 years old, and I started out writing novels. I wrote three in two years. None of them were up to snuff, in my eyes, and I didn’t submit any of them for publication. I just didn’t have the nack for writing narratives of that length at that time. So I turned to the story form, and I found myself in much better place. I was always very busy with my studies and teaching, and I could write a story in one or two sittings and be done with it, or at least be done with a full draft (I’m a neurotic revisionist). The sense of accomplishment I felt was great. With my novels, I didn’t feel that sense, because the light at the end of the tunnel was always so far away. Not to mention that, when I finally got to that light, I realized that my novels were crummy. Additionally, when you’re writing a novel, character and plot development are key factors, and for me, keeping up with the dynamics of my characters and plots was exhausting; if I took two days off from writing, I would forget things and find myself spending more time reading and revising what I had already written rather than furthering the narratives. Not so with my stories. I usually have two or three going at a time and I can leave one alone for a while, come back to it and be right on track. This is not to say that I don’t have an interest in writing another novel. Once I get my Ph.D. and finish my next book, Pseudo-City, a story-cycle about an imploded metropolis, I plan to begin one.

PB: You’re a professor of literature at Michigan State University. As a mentor, what would you like to leave with your students?

Well, I’m not technically a professor, not yet. I’ve been working on my Ph.D. at MSU for four years now, and I’m finally in the home stretch. Still, I’ve taught classes there all the while, and for the most part, I’ve had a good experience, pedagogically speaking. Being a graduate student at MSU is another story. At any rate, what I hope to teach my students, above all, is how to harness their imaginative powers and apply them to their critical and creative thinking and writing skills. I’m under no pretenses that, in the grand scheme of things, writing of any kind is becoming a lost art: in this Age of the Image, people don’t read, they watch screens, and they let the screens they watch do their thinking for them. I don’t encourage my students to cast away their screens—I’m a product of sociocultural forces and a big fan of the Image myself—but I do encourage them to become friendly with the Word. Do that, I tell them, and you’ll discover parts of yourself that you may never have known to exist.