My Brain Kept Going in the Machine: Blake Butler

Blake Butler is the author of the novella Ever and the novel-in-stories Scorch Atlas, named Novel of the Year by 3:AM Magazine. He edits HTML Giant, “The internet literature magazine blog of the future,” as well as two journals of innovative text, Lamination Colony and No Colony. His writing has appeared in The Believer, Unsaid, Fence, and Dzanc’s Best of the Web 2009, and has been shortlisted in Best American Nonrequired Reading and widely online and in print. He blogs at gillesdeleuzecommittedsuicideandsowilldrphil.com and lives in Atlanta.

Michael Kimball: The first things that the reader encounters when they begin reading THERE IS NO YEAR, before they try to read any of the words, are some of the graphic qualities – the big, wide page and the line spaces between block paragraphs – these feel like particular choices about how the text might be read. Could you talk about that and maybe also those gray pages that appear at varying intervals throughout the novel?

Blake Butler: Yeah, I think this is the first text I wrote where I started not using traditional paragraphs and instead let each graph be its own area, putting a blank line between each graph and starting the next graph without tabbing. This came to me naturally as a way to get thoughts down, each one standing inside themselves, independent but also ready to lead into the next. More so than sentences, paragraphs have really been a thing I’ve thought about more and more, how they can work as little machines that stack and contain their own inner logic that then kind of circumvents its energy into the next. Paragraphs do more work than sentences, I think, though sometimes a sentence can be a paragraph by itself, and giving these devices room to breathe both as I made them and as they come across the reader gave me a kind of new terrain to manipulate. It really got me thinking about the way the overall structure can work differently, both in generation and in affect. Later on, as the book gathers more of this kind of momentum, further spatial play in the surrounding white and the alignments and layout allows even further manipulation of this nature, which for me in this book opened a lot of conduits and doors; the book is full of them, I think. Since I’ve started writing this way I haven’t been able to go back, and if anything I’ve gotten more and more interested in ways that open those places in the white, to find ways to fix words to them differently. It’s like playing a video game.

The gray pages you saw in the galley in the final book will be replaced by images, though in many or most cases the images contain the same blanking affect the gray does; they are meant kind of as resets, or pauses in the moving forward, not companions. This too allows, I think, a kind of manipulative motion that connects to the vessels of the words and the space between the words by shaking them up in the way they come on, like blinking between seeings. I want a book to be a kind of vacuum that sucks the head and air around it and eats inside the house whether anyone reads it or not.

Michael Kimball: I like the idea of those line spaces as devices that give the reader room to breathe. I feel as if some processing time is necessary – even if it is just a blink of time as the eye moves across the blank space – to make sense of the narrative, all of the doublings and unfoldings. But let’s talk about the book as a kind of vacuum. Within a few short chapters, THERE IS NO YEAR seems to detach itself from this world and create a space around itself. It insists on being read on its own terms, a kind of extreme internal logical. I’m wondering where that started and how that developed.

Blake Butler: I imagine a lot of that internal affect is a result of the conditions under which the book was written. I wrote the first draft of the book all in 10 straight days of working 18 hours a day, while living temporarily at my parents’ house after my apartment in Atlanta got hit by a tornado. I had just read Jesse Ball’s Samedi the Deafness, and read about his practice of writing books from beginning to end all in one short intense span, and thinking about the act of the writing itself as a kind of performance. One weekend right after I read Samedi I went to the mountains with a few friends, and while driving up to the mountains had the image that begins the book proper, of a man and woman sitting next to each other on a sofa without touching. Not a remarkable image by any means, but there was something in the texture of it, and the condition of my mind at the time, that suggested that behind that image was something else.

So I wrote it down, the image, and when I got home went to my desk and just started writing from it. I was also very aware during this period of what I let in and out of my body: I was very specific in what I watched/ate/read/said/heard during the ten days I was working. I had no plan, it just kept coming on, and I didn’t allow myself to get up from the desk like I usually do frequently while typing: I wanted to confine myself. I wasn’t sleeping well at all at the time, so even when I stopped for the day and went to lay down or whatever, my brain kept going in the machine of the idea, and so I never really felt like I was outside of the air of the book. I imagine that claustrophobia and haunting and series of residues had a tremendous amount to do with why the book seems so contained and of a very specific network of feelings/modes, as I really was kind of caving in and in some kind of zone I’ve only been able to reach a few other times in my life since, though I also find that the more I work to consecrate and attend to the zone of it, the more happy I am in the end, and the less I feel I’ve been the actual creator, but more a conduit for something I can’t name.

Michael Kimball: Sometimes I think that the greatest things are things that we can’t think, the things that we are just receptive to, the things that we let be the thing that they want to be. But I want to get back to the internal mechanisms of the novel. On Page 72, there’s this line: “They put their things where they belonged in this new system.” It sounded like a line about writing the novel and it made me think of other things that lend themselves to the feeling that we’re talking about. What I’m trying to get at is all the doubling in the novel. There is the family and then the copy family, the house and the copy house, the other couple that is buying the house, the email man—all of these things narrative doublings of one sort or another. How about I don’t ask a specific question here, but you still say something as if I have?

Blake Butler: Hmm, yeah I think maybe what you are getting at here makes me think about how a lot of the novel felt self-generative, in a different way than letting sound write the sentences, as I had often been into, though sound is still a function here. I think what I really opened up to as a tool for the creation of the book more than anything here is related to what I’ve been thinking of as inherent logic; that is, a logic hidden in the book before the book is made that you must then suss out by locating it among what comes out of you by sound or naturally. I didn’t really have any idea what I was going to say when I started one scene to the next, and the system that the book works out of, where there are many short individually titled scenes that lead into one another, allowed me to explore the space of the novel as I was making it.

So, the book began with an image, and I wrote a scene from that image, and had a page or two that formed a thing that seemed to work on its own fundamental logic. Then, instead of continuing into a new paragraph, or what have you, the next page is a new image, another instance of an image, related to the first but beginning in approach from a slightly different perspective. A shift of energy, if you will. This made writing the book really infectious in practice and lends itself into the system you are referring to I think; each segment of the telling tells its own thing that then falls into the way around it, and dictates the next.

As this is going on, though, as I was writing, I was also paying attention to how the book was coming out of me from a reader’s perspective. Not a reader as another person, but as myself: a witness to what was coming out not wholly intended, but not wholly without aim either. By watching things unfold, and letting them take on their own space, and then responding to that space by certain logical turns, a kind of narrative begins to erupt out of the space you’ve already encircled. In this book, that function causes the doubling, where the book seems to be folding in on itself, which then dictated ideas as to the larger scope of the thing, the blank at the center of creation, and the unknowing of days, which kind of then proceed amongst itself.

What I’m getting at maybe is that the use of sound, which has been talked about a lot recently it seems, is a beginning, but also fundamental to making the sound become something more than L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E, or a flood, is working from within the instinct with your own eye’s logic, and analyzing by image or sound or texture or even intent within the book’s body what kind of approach to swing to when you feel the energy of the book in creation wanting to shift. Like putting your head against a massive pillow where air is and listening for something that’s always been right there, which is frightening to discover in itself: that it’s always been right there and you had no idea.

Michael Kimball: The space of the novel, it’s something wide and tall here, and it continues to expand with readerly attention. One of the things that struck me was the possibility for multiple readings. In a sense, in different senses, it is a family story or a domestic novel. It’s also what used to be called speculative and now usually gets called apocalyptic or post-apocalyptic. There could be an argument made for it as a coming-of-age novel. We would talk about certain metafictional elements or what some people who still read Marquez might call magic realism. I don’t want to do any of that, but I have to ask you a biographical question. There were these terribly moving chapters where I couldn’t help but see you writing about your father and his dementia. The chapter called “Copy Speech” is what convinced me that this was the case, but maybe I’m wrong?

Blake Butler: I can’t imagine that’s not coming out in the book, though it wasn’t really intentional. I agree that there are many layers and angles, which I think is one of the book’s powers: I don’t even know exactly what is going on inside it fully. Working on the book with Cal at Harper was very interesting in that his original response to the book concerned a layer I hadn’t even really considered mostly, something concerning the relationship between the father and the son. It actually scared me to hear him line up these clues that were certainly in the book in that way, because it seemed very correct, and in some sense the book works as a mirror or film of self: I don’t think I’ve talked to anyone so far who’s had the same concerns about what’s going on, including myself, which to me is a wonderful thing, a kind of warbling mirror.

But as for my own father, and his dementia, now that you say it: I think, yes, it has to be. As I said I was writing the book while staying with my parents after my place got destroyed, so I was around him during this period where we first began to realize that something was wrong, with his memory, and his operational recognition. In early stages it seemed just like he was aging, but the way it comes on is fast. Very quickly he wasn’t able to drive anymore, began to misplace things in the house, think other people were in the house, forget who my mom and sister and I were, ask about his parents who had been dead for years, wanting to go home where he grew up as if it was his current reality still, etc. The field of what is real to him is constantly shifting, and it gets worse as time passes. In some way this seems very American to me, a kind of feeling threaded through all days, even for the unsick. Watching my father emerge into this kind of zombie toddler body with fragments of who he was surrounding even the architecture of where he walks and what he says seems like a fully emerged state of what seems like is touched in all of us to different levels. Perhaps dementia is the person finally returning to true form, a recognition rather than a loss, though from our end it looks like damage. That kind of feeling is certainly in the novel, and I can’t imagine if I’d not been in the same air as him when I was working, that the book would not exist, which is a further comment on the nature of air in the book, and the act of monitoring the fieldwork of your creation and creative time. That scares me more now.

Michael Kimball: As you know, sometimes writing and recognizing what you have written can be terrifying. Usually I move toward that feeling, but this time I’m just going to ask a question about the ending, which does not contain a spoiler. The novel ends in a hallway, at a door. Does this mean there will be a sequel?

Blake Butler: I don’t know what happens after the door.

Michael Kimball is the author of four books, including Dear Everybody (which The Believer calls “a curatorial masterpiece”) and, most recently, Us (which the Observer calls “powerful and moving … breathless”). His work has been on NPR’s All Things Considered and in Vice, as well as The Guardian, Prairie Schooner, and New York Tyrant. His books have been translated into a dozen languages—including Italian, Spanish, German, Chinese, Korean, and Greek. He is also responsible for Michael Kimball Writes Your Life Story (on a postcard), a couple of documentaries, the 510 Readings, and the conceptual pseudonym Andy Devine.