Matthew Roberson

Department of English
University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee
matthewr@csd.uwm.edu

 

Larry McCaffery, Some Other Frequency: Interviews with Innovative American Authors. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1996.

 
For two decades few critics have done more than Larry McCaffery to map the terrain of contemporary American fiction. His book The Metafictional Muse (1982) was one of the first in-depth studies of 1960s and 1970s American metafiction. His edition of essays on contemporary science-fiction, Storming the Reality Studio: A Casebook of Cyberpunk and Postmodern Science Fiction (1991), is a seminal collection of some of the most interesting and genuinely serious essays about the current SF scene. Editor of the journals Fiction International and Critique, McCaffery has also in the recent past been in charge of an issue of Postmodern Culture devoted to postmodern fiction. Add to these things his more recent work as an editor–his massive Postmodern Fiction: A Bio-Bibliographic Guide (1986); his editions of Avant-Pop fiction, Avant-Pop: Fiction for a Daydream Nation (1993) and After Yesterday’s Crash: The Avant-Pop Anthology (1995); as well as a forthcoming edition of essays on one of America’s first postmodern fictioneers, Raymond Federman: From A to X-X-X-X–and it becomes clear just how extensive and expansive is his contribution to the study of the diverse field of contemporary writing.

 

This bibliography, however, does not cover what is perhaps McCaffery’s most significant contribution to the study of contemporary fiction: his continuing series of interviews with cutting-edge experimental American writers. Beginning in 1983 with Anything Can Happen: Interviews with Contemporary American Novelists, which he co-edited with Tom LeClair, McCaffery went on to produce Alive and Writing: Interviews with American Authors of the 1980s (1987), which he co-edited with Sinda Gregory, and Across the Wounded Galaxies: Interviews with Innovative Science Fiction Writers (1990). These collections have now been joined by a fourth, Some Other Frequency: Interviews with Innovative American Authors.

 

While McCaffery is careful to avoid broadly labeling as “postmodern” the contemporary writers he interviews, the ideas that the first three collections trace, in one shape or another, are ones most readers will recognize as postmodern. Anything Can Happen, a collection of 1970s writers, focuses on artists in particular with a “common sense that crisis was [in the 1960s and 1970s] at hand, for literature and society at large–and that extreme measures were needed to rescue the novel and the community from the grips of outmoded assumptions” (AW 1). Alive and Writing is primarily interested in seeing how this crisis comes out; its galvanizing question asks how 1980s writers take advantage of the battles won by the writers included in ACH. The writers included “in this volume simply take it for granted that many of the features of postmodernism that once seemed extreme…are perfectly valid ways for approaching the creation of fiction” (AW 2). Across the Wounded Galaxies takes as its premise that the study of SF has by 1990 become a serious institution; this is because SF itself is not only a central influence upon the styles of our times, but because it has been influenced by some of our time’s major ideas. These ideas, one of which is that in this quantum age we cannot divorce science from the arts, is for better or worse recognizably postmodern.

 

Although continuing the earlier collections’ interests in innovative (or fringe or experimental)¹ American authors, Some Other Frequency seems at first glance unwilling to commit to McCaffery’s overarching interest in postmodernism. In terms of the authors that McCaffery includes, there is no postmodern party line, or at least certainly not the kind of party line shared by some of the breakthrough postmodern innovators–Coover, Barthelme, Sukenick, Federman, Katz.² In fact, it seems at times as if the only party line ascribed to by the writers included in Some Other Frequency is that they are not postmodern, or even necessarily avant-garde. As McCaffery sums up this point in his introduction, not only do “very few of the authors interviewed [in the collection] feel any sense of kinship to the concept of ‘postmodernism’ however that term is defined,” but it is also difficult for these authors to be avant-garde when the avant-garde’s “relevance as an artistic movement may have permanently ended during the 1960s, when artists like Andy Warhol helped dismantle the distinction between an aesthetically radical, adversarial ‘underground’ and the ‘mainstream'” (SOF 3).

 

The authors included, to be sure, make up a disparate group with diverse backgrounds and aesthetic goals, and a group that on the largest scale McCaffery justifies pulling together only because they are part of a community of American writers who publish “formally daring and thematically rich works of fiction, mostly outside the ‘official channels’ of our commercial presses” and the strictures of traditional realism (SOF 2).[3] The end result here, then, is that although some of the included authors–Kathy Acker, Clarence Major, Kenneth Gangemi, and Harold Jaffe–are, and have been for some time, considered postmodern, these four in particular have all always been in one way or another on the fringes of postmodern fiction, not strictly postmodern or not always postmodern.⁴

 

Mark Leyner and William T. Vollmann belong to a post-postmodern generation less interested in fighting postmodern battles than in absorbing the aftereffects of those battles and in searching for new struggles with which to engage and new subjects to plumb. A good number of authors who have done some work that must be considered postmodern “fiction,” but who are not typically considered postmodern writers (and certainly not postmodern novelists) are also included: Gerald Vizenor, Richard Kostelanetz, David Antin, Lydia Davis, Lyn Heijinian, Derek Pell. They are poets, visual artists, multimedia artists, and translators. McCaffery also includes two authors who for all intents and purposes seem to have very high-modernist sensibilities: Marianne Hauser and Robert Kelly.

 

When all is said and done, though, it becomes clear that certain concepts and tropes can best and perhaps must be employed in order to discuss the innovations of this varied group. The concepts and tropes that pervade the interviews are as McCaffery himself lists them: textuality, defamiliarization, narrative, the “I” narrator, realism, history, reality, originality, invention, appropriation, authority, representation, and collaboration. These terms refer, noticeably, to issues bound up in the postmodern moment. Considering this, it is clear that even if postmodernism does not seem to be an immediate concern of or influence upon these innovative writers, and even if the writers in SOF in many ways disavow a connection to postmodernism and postmodern fiction, the ideas involved in postmodernism do in many ways seem to subtend their work.⁵

 

What is unique to the postmodernism that emerges in this collection of interviews, however, is a valuable new understanding of “the real.” Like the writers included in Alive and Writing, the writers in Some Other Frequency have no static tradition of realism against which to rebel, unlike the breakthrough postmodernists. What they have instead is a primary understanding of the fluidity of reality, “a casual acceptance of the view that both reality and the self are in fact discontinuous entities” (SOF 9). As McCaffery sees it, their texts are distinguished by an immanence to this fluidity, and he is particularly interested in the ways that they “reconfigure assumptions concerning relationships between author and story, inner and outer, self and other, history and imagination, and truth and reality” (SOF 10).

 

The notion that the interviews frequently pursue, then, is that contemporary innovative writers do not abandon realism’s need to “tell it like it is,” but instead they do their telling with an awareness that “the real…is not some discrete, isolable identity that can be represented objectively but is in actuality a network of relationships that can be rendered ‘realistically’ only via formal methods that emphasize rather than deny the fundamentally fluid, interactive nature of this network” (SOF 10).⁶ They are motivated by, as McCaffery puts it, an interest in exploring this new kind of “reality,” and writing in order to enlarge “readers’ perceptions” and inject “meaningful choices, diversity, and unprogrammable possibilities into lives and imaginations that seem to be increasingly drained not only of originality but of the ‘real’ itself” (SOF 6).

 

One consistently notable quality of McCaffery’s interviews is that they are, in a way, postmodern artifacts themselves. As collaborative pieces aimed at opening up a dialogue between interviewer and interviewee, they often seem to be freefloating; they are obviously conducted only after the most careful preparation, but they also always operate with a feel for improvisation. Ideas in these interviews are taken up without undue anxiety over a preset plan or structure into which they should fit. There is due insistence, too, that although the interviews will eventually be presented in written form, they are not simply transcripts of some “real” event. McCaffery makes very clear in his foreword to the interviews that each is left open to extensive, communal revisions between McCaffery and the interviewees.

 

That is, although the question and answer format is retained in the interviews in Some Other Frequency, the pieces are in many ways “collaborative texts based on actual conversation rather than as a direct rendering of that conversation” (SOF 12). To interviews, then, McCaffery brings a clear sense of poststructuralism’s insistence that we be aware of the complexities involved whenever “reality” is transformed into words. He also insists on making evident the interplay that occurs when throughout the interview process spoken words are in many ways translated to written, revealing how the entire process is a slippery, and, where he is concerned, a self-conscious game.

 

McCaffery claims that there are four things crucial to successful interviewing:

 

You've got to flat out know your material, be able to think on your feet (because an interview is a kind of live performance involving the improvisation of ideas and structures), to be able to read people, and have the ability to communicate at both the intellectual and human levels, so that people are willing to answer questions about their intimate feelings, about their work or failed marriages fifteen minutes after you've first met them. ("Interview with LM" 157)⁷

 

Where the first of these things is concerned, what flat out knowing your material equals for McCaffery in Some Other Frequency is an enormous familiarity with not only all of the works of all of the authors in question, but all of the secondary work relating to these authors, as well as the various traditions leading to and surrounding each novelist. (An extensive and tremendously helpful bibliography of every writer precedes his/her interview.) With Kathy Acker, for example, conversation can range freely from Baudelaire, to John Cage, to Deleuze and Guattari, to Sade, to Bukowski. In the very next interview, though, with David Antin, conversation can switch with seeming effortlessness to discussions of Kafka, Dostoyevsky, Gogol, and Tolstoy. Not only are there fluid switches between traditions and authors, but genres as well, and McCaffery throughout seems as comfortable discussing translations with Lydia Davis as he does discussing language poetry with Lyn Heijinian, or performance art with Richard Kostelanetz.

 

In a way, the other interviewing skills mentioned by McCaffery are intertwined; they all involve being sharp in a swift and frequently personal way. This translates in Some Other Frequency into knowing who will receive and actively engage highly theoretical questions (Acker), and who is not going to be particularly interested in discussing postmodernism, at least in the language of postmodernism (Kelly). It involves a tremendously fast dance when the overarching concepts and tropes of Some Other Frequency are met with clear resistance, and a turn to a discussion of craft and personal background is clearly the preferred avenue of conversation (Davis). It also involves a full-throttle engagement with questions postmodern and avant-poppish when the writers are game (Leyner, Vollmann). At times McCaffery can seem a bit indulgent, letting writers strike what (dare-devil) poses they will (Kostelanetz), but this also bears fruit in a kind of high-energy, larger than life, extremely animated sort of way.

 

McCaffery’s comments about the interview form also point to perhaps its most appealing quality–its unique entrance onto the personal. For readers, one imagines that this “personal” view of a subject is at times the interview’s greatest draw; it can tap into a writer’s immediate insights, for example, about his or her work; it can also offer, in many ways, interesting voyeuristic moments, glances at the “real,” behind-the-scenes workings of an interviewee’s life. In any case, the interview does often, more than many other discourses, offer a more direct, one-on-one connection with a life, a mind, a personality. For the person interviewed, this personal side to interviews often seems to offer itself as a form through which to “write” autobiographically. In Some Other Frequency, Marianne Hauser is able to deliver not only ideas about contemporary fiction, but stories of a life that has spanned the whole of the twentieth century. Kenneth Gangemi supplements a discussion of his work with a revealing look at the charged (night)life of a New York City bartender. And it is also possible to see in Some Other Frequency the details of Harold Jaffe’s life as Buddhist (as well as “hear,” I must note, that virtually everything that comes out of this man’s mouth is remarkably insightful).

 

In all, probably the greatest strength of McCaffery’s collection of interviews is its diversity of authors, ideas, angles of approach, and insights both into the life of writing and writer’s lives. At times this diversity of authors, in particular, seems to be had at the cost of hearing from many other talented contemporary writers for whom there did not seem to be space in Some Other Frequency: Carole Maso, David Foster Wallace, Steve Erickson, Eurudice, Richard Powers. On the other hand, one can hope that the desire to interview some or all of these writers (and certainly others as well) will motivate McCaffery to generate his next important collection.

 

Notes

 

1. Obviously, one can find a host of terms used to describe the contemporary avant-garde. Settling upon a label for these writers is certainly no easier now than it was in the seventies, when critics trumped one another almost daily with new terms: surfictionists, superfictionists, metafictionists, fabulationists, and so on. The way the subtitles of McCaffery’s interview collections sample from this grab-bag of terms shows that he is not unaware of, and possibly not (a bit) unamused by this situation.

 

2. As Steve Katz says in an interview with McCaffery, for this group of writers, certain shared things were “in the air,” in a manner of speaking: “…all of us found ourselves at the same stoplights in different cities at the same time. When the lights changed, we all crossed the streets” (ACH 227).

 

3. McCaffery finds that this community of writers is in some ways like the Tristero of Pynchon’s Crying of Lot 49, existing on some other frequency of American life (and it is from a scene in Lot 49 that McCaffery draws his title).

 

4. They are considered postmodern in as much as they have shared “streetlights” with the breakthrough innovators mentioned earlier; they are frequently interested in exploring unusual typography, discontinuous and nonlinear narratives, and self-consciousness. They are not strictly or always postmodern in as much as they can also, variously, be categorized as feminist-postmodern, African-American postmodern, and so on.

 

5. As McCaffery notes, postmodernism, “like Melville’s white whale, is forever destined to elude all human efforts to categorize and define it” (SOF 3).

 

6. This new realism is in many ways tied to the “avant-pop” fiction that McCaffery discusses in a number of essays, and in the forewords to his recent editions of avant-pop fiction. Avant-pop fiction wants to “tell it like it is” in a late 20th-century world colonized everywhere by consumer and pop culture. That is, it wants to survive somehow as “serious” art in a world that is less a “literal territory than a multidimensional hyperreality of television lands, media ‘jungles,’ and information ‘highways,’ a place where the real is now a desert that is rained on by a ceaseless downpour of information and data; flooded by a torrent of disposable consumer goods, narratives, images, ads, signs, and electronically generated stimuli; and peopled by media figures whose lives and stories seem at once more vivid, more familiar, and more real than anything the artist might create” (AYC xiv).

 

7. It strikes me, too, that these are qualities that one finds in the very best of teachers, and it’s not hard when reading through the interviews in Some Other Frequency to imagine that in them McCaffery is (superbly) leading a seminar peopled by some of America’s most precocious and talented and contentious students.

 

Works Cited

 

• McCaffery, Larry. Across the Wounded Galaxies: Interviews with Innovative Science Fiction Writers. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1990.
• —, ed. After Yesterday’s Crash: The Avant-Pop Anthology. New York: Penguin, 1995.
• —. Alive and Writing: Interviews with American Authors of the 1980s. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1987.
• —. Anything Can Happen: Interviews with Contemporary American Novelists. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1983.
• —, ed. Avant-Pop: Fiction for a Daydream Nation. Normal: Fiction Collective Two, 1993.
• —. The Metafictional Muse: The Works of Robert Coover, Donald Barthelme, and William H. Gass. Pittsburgh: U of Pittsburgh P, 1982.
• –, ed. Postmodern Culture (Special Fiction Issue Devoted to Postmodern Fiction) 3:1 (1992).
• —, ed. Postmodern Fiction: A Bio-Bibliographic Guide. New York: Greenwood Press, 1986.
• —. Some Other Frequency: Interviews with Innovative American Authors. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 1996.
• —. Storming the Reality Studio: A Casebook of Cyberpunk and Postmodern Science Fiction. Durham: Duke UP, 1991.
• Shiner, Lewis. “An Interview With Larry McCaffery,” Mississippi Review 20:1-2 (1991): 155-167.