It’s difficult not to read “Ghoul,” your story in this week’s issue, as a metaphor, though it’s hard to pinpoint for what, exactly. Life? Our current political situation? Stalinism? Any other regime in which truthtelling is punishable by death? Or is it a dystopic vision of the future that may await us post-apocalypse? Or can the story be read as a representation of the actual Hell—spending eternity in an underground space with no exit?
Right. It’s funny—since you accepted this story, I’ve been kind of worried about this Q. & A. Because it’s a weird story, for sure, and I don’t really know what it means or what it’s a metaphor for.
While writing it, I was mostly just trying to get it to corner more tightly—to produce more precise effects, be funnier, more convincing, etc.—and trusting that, if I did that, it would mean something, and that that “something” would be more interesting than whatever I could have planned. What I’m trying to do these days, in the story form, is surprise myself—get out beyond my conscious mind and what I already believe and perform a sort of rowdy, joyful blurt. At this point, with the story finished and published, I might be able to look back and think about what it means, but that doesn’t matter that much to me.
Something like that.
More and more, I see the wisdom of Archibald MacLeish’s “A poem should not mean / But be.” The real value of a work of art isn’t in what it stands for or in the meaning it spits out at the end but in what happens to the reader along the way—that dance between the reader’s expectation and the next thing that happens. So my main goal is to try to get the reader to finish the story—no easy feat—by making each little motion of the narrative compelling.
For the past couple of years, I’ve been working on a book about the Russian short story, for which I chose seven stories (by Chekhov, Turgenev, Gogol, and Tolstoy) and read (and reread) them and wrote essays in response—kind of a technical look at the short-story form. And those stories, which we think of as these tremendous moral-ethical documents, work, really, in the MacLeish model—they mean, yes, but they often mean several things at once, sometimes even contradictory things.
Anyway, in the end, after all that revising, I look up and there’s . . . something. I know, from all the hours I’ve spent, that it couldn’t be other than what it is. And I think (as in that old “S.N.L.” sketch), What the hell is that? But . . . in a good way.
In the story, a man spends his life working in the Hell-themed section of an underground amusement park, playing “Squatting Ghoul Eight.” How did this scenario come to you?
At the end of January, 2019, I went down to Los Angeles and recorded the audiobook for my 1996 story collection “CivilWarLand in Bad Decline” and had a really good time. I’d come to think of it as an old book that I’d moved past, but, as I was reading it, that mode really came alive again for me—I saw the advantages that the voice and mind-set of that book offered. And remembered how much fun it was to write. So I just felt like . . . trying that again. I started this story a few months later, in May, in the same way that I’d started the stories in “CivilWarLand,” basically by doing a kind of “typing improv”—just goofing around, for fun, with as little controlling agenda as possible. The basic idea—underground theme parks, a Squatting Ghoul, etc.—came out of that.
The residents of this theme park—with its clichéd versions of the Wild West, Victorian life, Prohibition-era Chicago, and so on—enact what is essentially a parody of our culture. How did you choose the themes for the workhouses?
Once I hit on the idea of a set of interconnected but differently themed caves, that meant I had to (or “got to”) populate those places. Say the main character is about to encounter somebody from one of those parks. Who should it be? At a moment like that, I’m not really thinking about what that choice “means” but just trying to make sure that what I say next is vivid—striking enough or particular enough or funny enough that, in that split second during which the reader is trying to decide whether to forge ahead, she goes, “Huh, O.K.,” and accepts that little fragment of fictive reality and keeps reading. And that’s about language, mostly—the same joke can be good or bad depending on how crisply it’s communicated.
And then those small choices accrue into a system of meaning, but it’s a system that’s more complex and mysterious and weird than if I’d had some overarching notion of what the place was meant to represent from the outset. That story would be sort of overdetermined—laced with that initial, reductive concept.
This way is more like . . . you do a bunch of things at speed, for fun, then look up and see what you’ve made. And hopefully it surprises you and—really important for me at this stage in my artistic life—it produces some moral-ethical tonalities you haven’t produced before.
Brian, your hero, ties himself in knots trying to find justifications for having caused the deaths of others in order to save his own life. Do you think of him as a moral character? An everyman doing his best in an impossible situation?
For me, “making a character” is really just the process of tuning the sentences that refer to, or are spoken by, the person, over and over. A certain line might just, you know, offend me, as I’m rereading—it plucks me out of my belief in the story. So that line has to go. And, when that line goes, the character changes. Or a sentence, adjusted for sound, causes some new aspect of the fictive world to spring into existence, which gives the character something new to react to—and then he changes (or comes more into focus). So . . . I’m trying to make him appear, with some definitiveness, more than I’m trying to construct him or decide who he is. I don’t know who he is until . . . he is. And he is, because of that set of sentences in which he appears.
Often it happens that, during that process, I might notice something about a character. Here, it was “Aw, Brian seems lonely. He keeps reaching out to people and getting himself in trouble that way.” So then the move is to go, “O.K., he’s lonely. Let’s not forget that.” Meanwhile, on some deeper level, my subconscious had already noticed that (via all that editing) and had been conspiring to present an escalation—in this case, Amy.
Was the story inspired, in some way, by the lockdown of the past few months?
Well, the weird thing is, as mentioned above, I started it about a year before the pandemic began. One of the big questions, even back then, was why Brian and pals were down there, in the bowels of the earth, wearing costumes and so on. I’d considered a pandemic as a possible reason but was kind of, like, “Well, that’s pretty far-fetched.” Then March came, and that notion suddenly seemed viable.
You asked earlier about what the story meant, or was a metaphor for. And I think what you were really asking about was what we might call a story’s “ultimate rationale.” I think a story has to be wild and fun and have interesting things going on inside it and all that, but then there’s a second phase of evaluation, where we’re wondering, essentially, “O.K., but what was this really all about? Why bother?”
And, especially with a story like this one—a speculative story, built around a comedic, over-the-top premise—I think the reader is always asking, somewhere in the back of her mind, “But what does this have to do with me? With now? With my real life?” As I’m writing, I’m continually asking the same thing—trying to get the story to swerve in a direction that takes it away from being just a wacky invention and toward being a wacky relevant invention. (And that imperative might be even more pressing when the real world seems to be falling apart.)
In the end, by my own internal standard, I felt I’d gotten there in two places, approximately.
First, Brian’s feelings toward the end of the story are roughly equal to my feelings about the world right now: “Sometimes in life the foundation upon which one stands will give a tilt, and everything that one has previously believed and held dear will begin sliding about, and suddenly all things will seem strange and new.” Now, is that a good thing or a bad thing? I find I’ve reached the same conclusion as Brian (aided, I’d say, by the process of writing this story): it depends. It depends on what we do next in the face of this new understanding of ourselves.
