James Elkins is the author of the new novel A Short Introduction to Anneliese, the second in his Five Strange Languages series. He is the E.C. Chadbourne Professor of Art History, Theory, and Criticism at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
Q: A Short Introduction to Anneliese is the second in your Five Strange Languages series--how would you describe the relationship between the two books?
A: They are completely independent of one another. They have different styles, voices, plots, and formats. However! The series of five books was planned from the outset as a single preposterously large project. A person who reads all five would see how they fit. There are many hidden connections, and they tell a single story. That's the sort of thing you can manage when you work on a project for almost 20 years.
Q: How did you create your characters Samuel and Anneliese, and how would you describe the dynamic between them?
A: I always wonder a bit when authors tell people how they created their characters. A character starts out as a sketch -- a personality, a story line, a problem, an unforgettable tic -- but then, as every writer knows, if everything's going right, the character suddenly sits up and starts talking. And soon they're walking around, doing whatever they want. Samuel started reading my early drafts and just tore them up.
So I think an author creates a character the way women create babies: they just do, without really knowing exactly how it's happening, and then once the character, or the child, is out in the world, they go their own way.
Anneliese is different from any of the other characters in the five books. At first she was Samuel's friend. Back then she was a he. Joachim, as I called him, lived with his sister and a ward in Switzerland.
He talked a lot — in fact he often out-talked Samuel, and from my point of view that was a problem, because in the early drafts there'd be a normal scene with the two of them, sometimes with other people, and whenever Joachim started he just wouldn't stop. His monologues were ruining the nice structures I was trying to build. So I decided on two drastic measures.
First, I changed his gender, and reimagined him as a woman. That changed everything, as gender does, but it didn't change her habit of talking endlessly. So I kicked her out of all the five books but this one, and I let her talk as much as she wanted.
This book is almost entirely a monologue. When you read it you'll hardly get to know Samuel until the end, because she keeps cutting him off. I had great fun with that. As authors know, runaway characters can be the best. Anneliese is like the main character in Ducks, Newburyport on cocaine, or like a cross between Molly Bloom and someone out of Mark Leyner.
Q: Did you know how the novel would end before you started writing it, or did you make many changes along the way?
A: I planned the overall structure very carefully, both in this book and in the entire of Five Strange Languages. In this book, it's important that Anneliese at first seems interesting and fun, then exhausting an irritating (she really doesn't stop), and then increasingly sympathetic as we discover that she is tremendously unhappy and possibly in serious mental difficulty.
All that keeps building—the sympathy, I hope, along with the annoyance and alarm—until she finally stops. (I'd rather not say how, or why.) After that, Samuel can finally breathe, and talk, and we follow him as he discovers what Anneliese had been thinking and writing.
What I planned — what I hope happens for readers — is that the experience of Anneliese in this so-called "short" introduction is overwhelming, that she floods onto the page and then suddenly disappears, like a singer in an opera who breaks your heart and then dies.
Q: What do you hope readers take away from the book?
A: For me, Anneliese is my best attempt, the closest I could get, to recording what a really astonishing person can be like: a person who knocks you over, who doesn't even seem possible, a person with stronger, stranger thoughts than you've ever imagined. People like that, either in real life or in books, can have an astonishing effect. You can love them, but only carefully, quietly, from a distance. But you can't forget them.
I'd like to mention that this book has a sort of appendix: a section of about 50 pages at the end which is actually footnotes. Don't worry, they aren't David Foster Wallace-style faux-academic footnotes. They are notes written by Samuel 40 years after the events in the book. He is over 90 when he writes them.
It's been a very long time since he knew Anneliese, and he has forgotten most of the details recounted in the book. He doesn't have dementia or memory issues—it's just been, as he says, almost two generations since he's seen Anneliese. So he thinks about her, and writes down his impressions.
And what comes to his mind is music. He has been living by himself for a long time, and he's been playing the piano every day. He realizes that some of the music he's been playing is his way of remembering Anneliese: not her words or even her appearance as much as the feeling of listening to her. So the footnotes are proof that she changed his life, that he never forgot her, even though he transformed her into music.
Q: What are you working on now?
A: I intend to spend whatever good working years I have revising the remaining three volumes of this project. I'm not at the beginning of a career, and even if I had started out as a novelist instead of an academic, I can't imagine I would ever have been the sort of novelist who writes a book every year or two.
This project has everything I want to say, in the strongest, most coherent form I can give it. It's complete now, but I have no reason not to keep working on it.
Q: Anything else we should know?
A: There's another dimension to the book. Ever since I started, I've been working on a brochure with all the ideas I put into the book. Timelines, of course, and maps, that sort of thing. But also my ideas about how each book is structured, and cavils and polemics about novels I've read.
The extravagantly adventurous people at Unnamed Press are going to publish this, too, so the novel will have a companion piece where people can go to find answers. Lots of it is posted online, because... well, because I wish that some authors I like had done something like this: it would have given me some companionship as I made my way through their novels.
Oh, and I'm a teacher at the School of the Art Institute in Chicago. Always glad to entertain questions about writing, jelkins@saic.edu.
--Interview with Deborah Kalb
No comments:
Post a Comment