RH: I was interested by an idea that popped up in an interview
you did with Francine Prose, the idea of a "reverse epiphany" in
short stories, the rejection of that cliched moment near the end of a
story where everything falls into place in the protagonist's
head.
DE: I have to admit that I have no idea what the word
"epiphany" means. It's been explained to me many times, and there's
something about the idea of it that I simply reject. It seems like a
word you'd use to describe something that is only real in the most
vague way possible. As such, it's something that almost can't happen
in writing. Of course it does occur marvelously and beautifully in
many pieces of writing, but it really is so complex and subtle that I
can never quite identify it as a thing you'd call "epiphany."
RH: My favorite moments in these stories are those in which
epiphanies would stereotypically occur, but your characters simply
go on experiencing what they've been experiencing, doing what
they've been doing, just the way we would in real life.
DE: That's the issue as far as I'm concerned. What is an
experience? What does it actually feel like? What is the consistency
of that moment in the mind? What is actually occurring? What does
it actually feel like? Not, how will I sum it up to myself, or how will I
sum it up to the reader, but what is going in my nerve endings?
What's going on in this strange, sloshing organ that's encased in my
skull?
RH: In order to convey that, you avoid using an authorial voice
that 'explains' a character's thoughts or actions from outside. You
stay as close to the characters and their reactions as possible.
DE: To me, in a way the implicit task is always, "What does it
feel like to be a human being?" Whoever the character is, how far
can I crawl into the mental processes of that character? It's very rare
that one says to oneself, "This is what's happening, this is what this
moment is. It means blah-blah..." That's just not the experience of
being alive, the experience of a moment.
RH: That seems especially true of the way children would
experience the world, and your protagonists are often children.
There's a scene in "Mermaids" in which Kyla, the protagonist, doesn't
have time to think, "This is weird and vaguely sexual." It simply
is...
DE: ...Although I never think of myself as writing about
children. I don't have children, I don't understand them, I don't
remember my childhood... Often adults have learned to protect
themselves by monitoring their experience and calling it by names to
alleviate a certain amount of the anxiety of living. One learns to say
to oneself, "Yes, this is a moment that's vaguely sexual. It's weird. Oh,
I get it. I can deal with that." It's just a thin veneer over the life that
we're leading, a way of controlling the almost unbearable influx of
information pouring into us at all times.
RH: What starts a short story for you?
DE: There are a few things that might kick something off, like
an image or a phrase. Sometimes there's a kind of tonality that I
want, almost as if I was writing a piece of music. Unfortunately, I'm
not at all musical and could never even dream of that, but sometimes
in the back of my mind there's...you could almost describe it as a
musical model, really. I think that was particularly true of my first
book [Transactions In A Foreign Currency], something that I
was concentrating on without being particularly conscious of it.
You know how sometimes there's just a certain slant of sunlight, the
fragrance of a certain flower, and a whole world will open up in your
head? You think, "What is that?" That's what I go for, an exploration
of the signals that make you feel that way.
RH: It's a very meticulous process for you.
DE: I wish I were faster, and more fluent, that I knew much
sooner what I was going for. I wish I were more efficient in every
way. I'm just not, and I can't seem to do anything about it. It just
takes many months of scrabbling around in swampy territory to
figure out what it is that I want. There's always a point at which I
think I have a final draft, then I read it and ask myself, "Why have I
written this?" Then I go back and write it again and that's the final
draft.
RH: Is that meticulousness part of the reason you haven't written
much in other areas besides fiction?
DE: It takes me as long to write anything as it does to write
anything else. In nonfiction, you more or less know what the task is.
Of course, you always have to confront that huge discrepancy
between your understanding of what the task is and your ability to
achieve it. I find that kind of disheartening, to know what the goal is
and never quite realize it.
In fiction, the goal changes as you're working. It's very elastic, and I
think your shortcomings and incapacities are your friends in fiction.
They teach you both what you can't do and what you can do. If you
can't do such-and-such a thing you're trying to do, you find yourself
pushed into doing something you can do which you didn't even
recognize as a possibility.
RH: The short story form seems well suited to dealing with
limitations, whereas a novel requires a structure and
resolution.
DE: That's true, and that's why novels are a little less
interesting to me. Of course, any good piece of writing is
tremendously inventive and deals with the world in a completely
idiosyncratic way. If you actually look at any good novel, it's really
quite surprising what's going on. But there is something else that I
can't quite put my finger on about the demands of doing something
long, something that looks just slightly more conventional, I
think...
RH: I've talked to several writers who write in both long and short
formats, and many say that if they had a choice, they would write
short stories all the time, but the pressures from the publishing
industry to write novels are tremendous.
DE: No question about it, there's a lot of pressure. I'm very
lucky that my publisher and my agent don't tell me to cough up that
novel. But with that good fortune comes a knowledge that you're
never really going to be taken very seriously unless you write a
novel. I'm so perverse that I actually find the prospect interesting.
Could I get the same depth, could I play as much with different
tonalities, by sustaining a storyline at that length? I think that it
might be kind of fun, and then I think that it's exactly what "they"
want me to do.
RH: You don't want to write "Deborah Eisenberg's breakthrough
work."
DE: It's just too irritating, too annoying. Part of the pleasures
of writing is that it's the "bad kid" activity par excellence. Why
should you give that up?
