There was the time he was eleven and a friend he had a crush on split his
head open with an ax. He woke up alone and covered with blood. Then there
was the time he went hiking in the mountains behind his house. He was 12
and the "freeway killer" had raped and killed several young boys in those
hills. He hiked to where he thought the killings had taken place and had a
strange epiphany.
These formative moments figure prominently in the literary psyche of author Dennis Cooper.
The German intellectual Theodor Adorno wrote that "To write
poetry after the Holocaust is barbaric." The world had passed through a
critical moment and the language of humanism was no longer capable of
witnessing the full horror of that experience. Dennis Cooper's writing is
an attempt at reckoning with the failure of language to describe the
terrors of contemporary life.
His five-book cycle, which recently culminated with the
publication of Period
(Grove Press) is a cornerstone of the literature
of this post-humanist moment. In Cooper's books, the glossy layers of
humanity are stripped away to reveal a rich and terrifying emptiness.
Cooper, 47, grew up in southern California. He attended public school until
the eighth grade, when he transferred to a boys' school and discovered the
Marquis de Sade's The 120 Days of Sodom. He spent his 20s and 30s
renouncing college in Los Angeles and New York, writing short stories,
essays, and poetry, and publishing a literary magazine called Little
Caesar. During that time he came upon the films of Robert Bresson. He
credits that encounter with helping him find his voice as a writer.
In 1985 Cooper moved to Amsterdam to kick a drug habit and pursue love. It was there that he started writing what would become the first book in his
"quintology": Closer. Cooper's most recent novel, Period brings that
cycle to a close. New York University's Fales Library recently acquired
Cooper's papers and an exhibition of his scrapbooks is currently on display
there. At the moment Cooper is starting a new novel that will be published
by Ecco Press. He is also working on a collaborative book of video screen
grabs with the artist Vincent Fecteau and writing the screenplay for a porn
film.
Lawrence Chua: You've described Period alternately as "a disappearing
act" and "a suicide note; an acknowledgment of the work's failure." Can you
say a bit more about what you mean by that?
Dennis Cooper: There's several reasons. The formal reason is that the way
the cycle is structured, I think of it as one book being slowly dismembered
down to nothing. Each book is a stripping away, until you get down to
Period and there's nothing left but this skeletal thing. Then there's all
these cheesy effects to make it seem like it's alive. The failure thing is
because I started out wanting to figure out two things. One was, why I'm so
obsessed with this sex and violence axis. I didn't figure it out, although
I guess I'm a little more sane about it thanks to all this. That was in
conjunction with trying to figure out the hold over me of this friend of
mine, George Miles, who I've written a lot about. Ultimately, I can't
figure it out but I did everything I could to examine it, considering what
skills I have and whatever take I have on this material. The work ends up
being about the exploration and the failure to get to the bottom of it, or
the inability, my inability, to accept an explanation. Every explanation
seems too simple.
LC: What cheesy effects are you talking about?
DC: There are a lot of things. The book is structured like a maze or a house
of mirrors, almost like a carnival fun house. Everything is a reflection of
everything else and ultimately makes everything else disappear. Everything
is just a reflection of a reflection and there's nothing really there
except maybe this kid who committed suicide and some writer who can't get
over that. Then there's the whole goth culture thing and Satanic bands and
online psychics and illusions created by the Web, the mystique around the
Web. All those things are combined to make this kind of magic trick, a book
that is making itself disappear. They're cheesy in the sense that they're
very romantic. They're ways to imagine a kind of magic or other universe or
other world. They're not presented as though they could actually work.
They're cheesy in the sense that their failure is inherent.
LC: In Period technologies like the Internet play a big part in
resurrecting the ghost of George Miles. Can you say a bit about how those
technologies have influenced or challenged your writing?
DC: I'm relatively new to the Web. I really got on when I started working
on "Period," so I had this initial thing that you get, the illusion of this
amazing world of cyberspace. It's just a binary code that creates this
illusion of an infinite universe of images and spaces. In Period there's
that going on, and also I really like CD-ROMs and games, so there are these
illusions of worlds that are created, with secret passages and spaces. I
also like the particular kind of distancing that happens in the ways people
communicate online. There's such a strange rhythm and confusion to online
chats.
LC: Baudrillard wrote about "technologies of alienation": technologies that give the appearance that people are actually being brought closer together
when in fact they're even farther apart. He was writing about the
telephone, but you could easily extend that to online communication.
DC: Right. I have AOL, so I do instant messages with people all the time.
It's such a peculiar form. It's even more alienating than the phone because
with the phone, there's some kind of rhythm in it. There's some respect
for pauses, but when you're Instant Messaging with someone and you answer a question and they ask another question and you're answering their last
question É
LC: And in that lapse, you wind up talking to someone else anyway.
DC: Right, and also you lose tones too. I refuse to do happy faces.
You can't really communicate emotion. You have to try to use language in a
way that can convey sarcasm or whatever, and you lose all that. It's all
about language. It becomes very dependent on language to communicate
subtext and emotion. I find that fascinating. There's this incredible
confusion around it. I also like the way language becomes so emphasized
when you chat. It's not like talking. In "Period," there's so much
communication on. Talk radio communication and all these transcribed
conversations on tape and diary entries and stuff. People almost never
communicate one on one in the book.
LC: Could it be said that part of the failure you were describing before is
also the failure of language itself? That's something that's often cited in
reference to your characters' speech. They're always slipping out of the
grasp of language, and then in Period there's Dagger, a deaf mute.
DC: That's totally core to all the work -- not just language, but printed language too, language that's separated from personal interaction. That's
why I love that inarticulate speech. In those weird umms and ahhs and those
misshapen sentences, that's where the only real meaning lies. It's where
the only real information is. And the only thing you can do is suggest it
that way. I mean, every sentence is a lie. Everything you say is a lie
anyway, because obviously you're compromising a thought to communicate. So, yes, it's definitely about the failure of language.
LC: Can you talk a bit about the genesis of the series? Did you know you
were writing a series when you sat down to write Closer? How did that
evolve? And who is George Miles?
DC: I always thought of it as being a series and I always thought of it as
being one work, but I didn't know how many of them there would be. I had a
sense of the books structurally, but I didn't have a sense of what each
book would be about. I knew that everything I had to use had to be in
Closer in some way and that Closer would be the body of the work and
that was what I would use for the rest of the series. But I didn't know it
would be five books.
I had always written
about my terrible fascination with and horror of sexual violence and
specifically the objectification of boys. So I wanted to get to the bottom
of that and get it out of my system if possible.
And
then there was this guy George Miles. He was my closest friend in high
school, this young kid. We had this very
intense friendship and I sort of took care of him. I was his big brother. He had severe problems and
it brought out this need to help him. I really loved him and I wanted to
help him but I couldn't. There were points
where I was his only friend, because he was so disturbed. In writing these
books, I wanted to try to figure that out.
I lost track of George when I
was writing the books and living in Amsterdam. I told him I wanted to write about our friendship because it
was so confusing and also because it had seemed to dictate all my other
relationships. Ever since George, I had been in friendships with young
people who were really fucked up in a particular way. I always ended up
trying to help them in some way. It was a whole dynamic that was like the
dynamic I had in my friendship with him. Also, the specific person I'm
attracted to, they all looked like him. I wanted the book to be about him.
All the boys in the book basically look the same. They're all just mutations of him. I just wanted to figure those
things out.
I created a relationship between him and the material mainly
because I wanted to write about violence in a way that seemed really
true to my own interests, which were incredibly schizophrenic. I knew that
if I had people like him as the victims of that violence, I would
never lose sympathy for them because I cared a lot about him. It was a way
for me to explore the eroticism and psychosis of that violence, which
interests me and which I share in some way, but also the terror that it
could happen to someone I care about.
When Guide came out I accidentally found out he killed
himself even before I started writing the books. So that dictated Period
for me. At the end of all this, there's this guy who killed himself, who's
the most important person I'd ever known, and then I didn't even know who
he was anymore because he was so lost to me. There'd been so many people
that I'd known since who were like him that I'd lost sight of who he was.
LC: Were you conscious of the way you wrote changing over the course of
each novel?
DC: I think I've become a better and better writer. That just happened. I
didn't decide I was going to be better, but I do think
the books got better as they went along. I just had this idea that the form
of each novel would reflect the damage caused or the activities
specifically that had gone on in the book before.
There's a lot of violence
in Closer, so Frisk to me was a very damaged, maimed body. I was
thinking of it as a body and as a dismembered book. It was the
novel version of that severely damaged or maimed body. In pieces.
All the
books have exactly the same structure, which is this kind of mirror. Try was kind of an attempt to take the novel and let it have a normal life. It was this attempt to let it find love and give it a chance or give it some hope.
And then Guide, again, reflected the damage in Try. In Guide there's
almost nothing left of the body by that point. It's this really fucked up
sparse body and then there's the mind desperately overcompensating for the
fact that there's not much there physically. That's why Guide has so much
analysis and digressions and thinking trying to hold the book together into
something that's whole by connecting it through all these justifications
and analyses.
Period follows and there's nothing, just a skeleton or a
zombie left because there's so much damage done to the book by that point.
So each book determined the one that followed it. Also the books are
influenced by my life at the time. I bring my own life into it in some
way, partially to make the books seem like they're connected to the world
and not completely psychotic. I brought in friends or people I knew at the
time, or music I was listening to or the worlds I was moving through or
bands I liked. That all just came along in the moment.
LC: How do you do that? How do you bring your life into a novel?
DC: The characters in Guide are based on people I knew at the time. Joel
[Westendorf], who's my roommate, is in it, as the main character.
I was fascinated by Blur and had a huge crush on their bass player, and
was going to see bands, and my friends were artists. I was investigating
electronic music and rave culture at that point, so I brought that in. In
Try, my best friend at the time was this guy who was extremely strung
out on heroin, so he became a character in it, Calhoun. I was also really
interested in Husker Dü and Slayer, so it was about the weird division or
person who would like those two things, which are very dissimilar but
sonically the same. I would just use that as a way to construct the
narrative.
LC: You've cited the director Robert Bresson as an early influence on your
writing and you've collaborated with artists like Nayland Blake on Jerk
(Artspace Books) and with Keith Mayerson on Horror Hospital Unplugged
(Juno Books). How do you bring those non-literary influences to the way you
structure a narrative?
DC: I'm just trying to learn from it and trying to figure out what
interests me about it or trying to transfer some of the stylistic and
structural ideas of the things that interest me into prose. I do a lot of
experimenting before I do each book to figure it out, which I never end up using.
With Period I was really into CD-ROM games and was making a lot of
notes and trying to figure out how I could replicate that. I'm
also very influenced by sculpture and all these new sculptors, especially
Vincent Fecteau, who I dedicated the book to. Sculptors have the whole air available to
them. When you look at a sculpture you think of all the decisions the
sculptor didn't make.
When I was thinking about Period, I was really into Erroll Morris' films, especially Fast,
Cheap and Out of Control. I was thinking about the way he uses editing.
I'll just make notes and try to see if there's any way I can do that.
It's the
same with music. Guided by Voices is my favorite band, and when I was doing
Guide I was thinking about how I could take that style and transfer it.
It's just fooling around in language until I've done the best I can
in transferring it over. It's just nerd work, I guess.
LC: People tend to have a very visceral reaction to your writing. I've
noticed that it sometimes provokes two reductive readings of your work. One
is that the work is an affirmation of the kind of sexual violence that
inhabits it. The other is that it's a social condemnation of that violence.
For me, that was one of the biggest flaws of the movie that was made of
Frisk.
DC: I think probably the ultimate mistake of that movie was that Todd
[Verow, the director] didn't connect enough with the material. I don't
think he was involved enough in it. It ended up being too slavish. It tried
to replicate the book too much. You felt like he wasn't really inside of
what was going on. I think it probably would have been better if he had
gone on and done his own thing. It was a strangely flaccid movie. It didn't
seem like it had a point. A lot of people have written about this kind of
stuff or made movies about it, but you have to be really torn about it
yourself or have some really deep fascination or confusion with it in order
to be able to write about it. Otherwise you just wind up making porn or
something. It's such a foreign area to most people that I guess it's not
really a surprise that people haven't made up their minds about it. My work
does have that erotic charge in it and it does have a horror of it too, so
you can read it all sorts of ways.
LC: You were talking before about language being a kind of compromise, that
an idea is compromised in order to communicate it. The first four books of
the series seemed to be implicated in this attempt to communicate with the
real George Miles. Then, before you wrote Period, you found out he had
died. Was communication still an impetus for writing Period?
DC: On some level it's a self-consciously ridiculous attempt to communicate
with the dead or something. That's why I think this book has a weird, sad
hollowness to it. The person I was speaking to isn't there, so maybe that's
why its attempt to communicate is so hampered by form. I have this feeling
that the only real communication in Period are those poems that
Walker Crane writes. Writing a poem is so personal, but it's such an oblique form. I think that's why the book communicates in such a peculiar
way. It doesn't know who it's talking to anymore. That's why the book is
barely there at all.
I said it makes itself disappear. Maybe that's why
it's a suicide note. Because if you write a suicide note, you don't really
know what's going to happen to that note, or who's going to read it, what
they're going to make of it.
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