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Sunday, Nov 8, 2009
How does this miss the point of literature? What is the point?
To connect you to lives to which you do not belong. The notion that all literature is a kind of membership club that mirrors your face or your sexual orientation or your handicap is an absurdity. I gave a reading at the University of Arizona and the lesbians are waiting for the lesbian poet and the Mexican-Americans come to my reading and never the twain shall meet. It is so antithetical to everything that I loved about literature.
I read in the Washington Post that you've stopped reading fiction. Why?
There were suddenly a lot of unfinished novels around my bedroom. Maybe 10 years ago or so. I just lost an interest in narrative. I still don't understand exactly what that is but in some sense as I developed as an essayist, nonfiction seems to me more urgent, more interesting as a reader, as well as a writer. For example, when there are writers who write both fiction and essays, I tend to prefer their essays. James Baldwin, for example. None of James Baldwin's novels, with the possible exception of "Giovanni's Room," are as interesting to me as his essays. Or Joan Didion. I just can't finish her fiction, whereas her essays are absolutely wonderful. I always yearn to sit next to Joan Didion the essayist at dinner parties in Santa Monica or on the Upper East Side, but I always end up sitting next to the Joan Didion novel-heroine, who instead, has just had a nervous breakdown.
Does this have to do with something about contemporary fiction in particular?
No, because it's as true about 19th century [novels]. It's something to do with the clanking of narrative. I could hear the devices clanking away. I just knew, "Oh God, now I have to be here for 300 pages of this." And it was also that I belong to an age where we have almost too much narrative. There are too many stories; what we are interested in is what the story means. Which is why in our graduate schools of literature, no one reads novels. They only read critical theory. All of my friends who are in analysis have plenty of stories to tell, but they have to hire somebody to tell them what the story means. There's that movement to try to deconstruct or decode or make sense of narrative. And in that sense, I think the essay is very much alive because the essay really engages the history of an idea. Within the essay, I dramatize how I come to know something. It becomes a kind of intellectual diary.
Let's move to Richard Nixon. I was surprised, as I'm sure many people were, to read that you identified with him. Was that it, though? You identified with him?
Yes. I love Richard Nixon. What I knew that night when I was watching him sweat on that first televised debate was that Whittier College [Nixon] would always be defeated by Harvard College [JFK]. That the game was fixed in America. And I knew that in the same years that I was going to professional wrestling matches -- that the whole thing was fixed. Columbia University and the New York Times are all in cahoots -- the whole game is fixed. Kennedy wins the Pulitzer Prize for a book that he may or may not have written and there's nothing to be done about it.
There were always those nights in Sacramento at the wrestling matches, when I used to go by myself in my Boy Scout uniform, and the crowd would move its affection away from the hero because we sensed at that moment that he was the villain. He was the liar because the game was fixed, but he always pretended to be virtuous. Whereas Gorgeous George, the bleached blond villain, was in fact telling us something true about himself -- that the game was fixed.
There was something about Nixon, his insecurity, his ruthlessness and his crudeness that always struck me as true in the same way, in a way that the Kennedys never satisfied me. They always seemed, in their noblesse oblige, to be spooky people.
Then, Richard Nixon becomes my godfather and teaches me how to cheat in America by playing at being Hispanic. Richard Nixon the Californian -- perhaps wanting to undercut the black civil rights movement, but nonetheless begins to describe America in color, as white, black, Asian/Pacific Islander/yellow, American Indian/Eskimo/red and Hispanic/ brown. It is under Richard Nixon's administration that the whole spectrum now exists. After Nixon, it becomes easier for people to say that you have an ethnicity, you are Hispanic, you are Latino.
I thought you were against those classifications, though.
I disagree with it, but in its acknowledgement that we do not live in a 1950s television world of black and white, it seemed to me that Nixon was saying something important. In actual fact, though, I consider myself brown -- of all colors. Brown is not a singular color; it is the metaphor of impurity. By saying that I'm brown I'm saying that I'm Chinese, that I'm Irish, and I have to mean that I'm African.
Did Nixon also have that impact on you because it touched on your sense of the importance of class rather than race?
I was moved by Nixon's story. And Benjamin Franklin was very important for the encouragement he gave me to strive and to strive and to succeed. That basic American narrative I got from Franklin. But it was Nixon's conniving and dark eyes that also told me about the scheming that goes on in America. And his willingness to betray his own memory of himself by anointing me Hispanic was part of the seaminess of the whole story. It's a very complicated affection I have for Nixon. That chapter is probably my favorite. I weep when I come to the end of it. It's so sad. It's sad the way that "Citizen Kane" is sad. There's a dark story in America. Nixon comes very close to telling it for me.
