I first heard David Fiore read in Montreal early last winter. My interest in his book Chimera Lucida: A Technodiegetic Romance was piqued when I overheard him say that he felt the book would be difficult to read aloud in the snapshot space of the literary reading as it was set up as a series of electronic forum posts, each one responding to the one before. Increasingly, the blog-as-organizing-medium is entering into fictional works and in some cases, actual blogs are being published as texts – Sina Queyras will publish Unleashed, a selection of posts from her blog Lemon Hound later this year. So, in keeping with the organizing principle of Fiore’s book, I decided to conduct the interview with time and date stamps even though it reveals my shameful response time.

Jenny Sampirisi | August 31 at 7:58pm

Hi David, I'm glad to finally have a chance to sit down "with" you in the virtual ether to talk about Chimera Lucida. There's much chatting to be done around this formally innovative and oddball narrative. I want to dive right in and skip the usual "what's your book about" question, partly because I think our discussion around form and language will reveal the "aboutness" of the text just fine.

Let's just start with the mucky business of classification. This is a self-published title (a point we'll return to should the discussion allow), which means you were the sole designator of a genre category. The back cover states that the book is a "prose-poem-in-internet-message-board's clothing" while the top left hand corner proclaims that it is fiction. At times there are long stories about your iconic protagonist, Roberta Flackjacket, told by a variety of very literary listserv posters. These segments read very much like short fiction, while the "Fall and Response" sections play with language and sound, and even meander visually on the page, and so, resemble something closer to poetry.

I'm interested in how you've negotiated genre in the text. Do you find the designations limiting? Freeing? Did the book resist a genre or is this a stylistic choice?

David Fiore | September 1 at 10:10am

Thank you Jenny--I look forward to the discussion!

On the question of genre: I wouldn't say the book defies classification, because the taxonomists always win out, in the end--but I had no specific designation in mind, while I was writing it. I did have a model, however (in terms of my approach to the central figure--and her dilemma)--Nathanael West's Miss Lonelyhearts. That's a problematic book in itself--a 57-page novel (which the author often described as a "comic strip").

I wanted to go West one better by turning his paneled narrative into a panel discussion--and I reached for whatever literary tools I could get my fingers on, in an effort to realize the plan. In conversation, I began describing the book as, alternately, a "prose poem" (because huge chunks of it are ruled by rhythm and assonance) or a "novella" (because it's short)--but I'm happy to let it be whatever readers think it is.

Jenny Sampirisi | September 1 at 10:41am

There are certainly many instances where the language is poetic. Not just in the sense of presenting a collection of images with well turned phrases, but in that the book is very tuned into language as a sonic experience and as a theoretical concept. The characters use puns often, and others engage in full on rhyme (most notably, one post has Roberta Flackjacket relating what is undeniably a gruesome and traumatic encounter to the meter of "T'was the Night Before Christmas").

In the original transcript between Roberta and her last interviewer she says, "Words are excuses. Rationales--not rational. And we use them to inflict our frustrations upon the world." I'm wondering if you might talk a bit about your relationship to language in this text.

David Fiore | September 1 at 11:49am

Certainly--it's definitely a central problematic of the text. I wouldn't call Roberta Flackjacket a spokesperson for my ideas--however, in that interview, she makes herself pretty free with some of the darker implications of post-structuralist thought, and I'm just as susceptible to those as anyone else.

Psychoanalysis advertised itself as the "talking cure"--advancing the thesis that life's difficulties could be identified and dispelled through precise description. This idea of language as a surgical tool--and an unambiguously good thing, if only we could sterilize away all traces of oppressive hierarchizing concepts--is now as prominent in the academy as it is on Oprah. It's a Freudian structure dreaming of liberation from Freudian content.

That sounds like a problem, doesn't it?

However, in order to go on speaking (in good faith), people NEED to believe that they are working toward bringing some kind of intersubjective reality into being. Healing up the rifts between speakers. But what happens when you lose all trace of that hope? (not an uncommon occurrence in a world that features a lot of "preaching to the converted"--and even more "talking to walls")

Conversation becomes total war--and that takes its toll. You might not even care to "win"--after a while. I suppose you could say that Chimera Lucida is an effort to imagine a person coming to a linguistic impasse that I never hope to reach.

Jenny Sampirisi | September 3 at 11:37am

Interesting. I'm wondering, along this line, about the voice your characters inhabit and the presence of theory in the book. Roberta Flackjacket and her devotees are very educated. Some of this is explained by their vocations or their natural inclinations, but it does seem that they, as a whole, speak as graduate students or highly educated individuals. The text, at times, acknowledges this through forum-posters who seem to call out the others. One poster says, "I can't tell these punsters apart" and indeed, as a reader, I was having some trouble as well.

Could you speak a bit about voice in the text?

David Fiore | September 3 at 1:57pm

Yes, I'm very interested in grappling with the concept of heteroglossia--the notion of embedding "cookies of otherness" in a program generated by one author. It's certainly a noble dream--the aesthetic twin of intersubjective ethics--but what's the recipe? And how do we reconcile this prescription with our need to recognize a distinctive style or personality in an author's work?

It's one of my favourite questions--and there's no way to answer it conclusively...

I guess one of the main things I wanted to do with Chimera Lucida was to make a mystery-in-plain-sight (or site) of the good ol' "omniscient narrator." I had a perverse urge to stage a frustratingly blinkered free-for-all within the supposedly wide-open confines of the web. I conceived of the relatively unvaried conversational palette (in terms of subject matter and, especially, cadence) as a way of undermining the objectivizing pretenses of those carefully documented user names and time stamps.

Jenny Sampirisi | September 3 at 2:18pm

Yes and in many ways we readers get to feel like archivists. Amid so much "factual" evidence of time and date and even photograph, there is much that is disputed around Roberta's life. It doesn't read as a biography, but more as a collectively failed memory, which in many ways goes against the expectations that each page sets up. I'm absolutely intrigued by the rare presence of uncertainty in fiction. This goes against the grain of most popular writing, which often relies on presenting a realistic and fully disclosed account of fabricated or real life events.

Your book pushes uncertainty, yet page after page, your reader feels the pull of facts. This is clearly tied up with your interest in intersubjectivity, but the overall effect for me was a book that undid the usual realist tropes of fiction and highlighted language and genre as malleable. We've already touched on the role of language and genre but i'm wondering if you're aiming at sticking a knife in realism too?

David Fiore | September 3 at 4:32pm

I suppose I do have it in for conventional psychological realism--although you have to respect its staying power, as a mode that has been under pretty constant assault since the advent of Modernism. I've spent a lot of time wondering about the source of its strength (and I would never deny that I--as a reader--am just as susceptible to its charms as anyone else)...

I think the desire to capture a moment, a scene, in all of its plenitude, is as close to a universal impulse as we're going to find, amongst beings who are aware of their finitude. That, in itself, is worth examining.

Chimera Lucida, in fact, grew out of the desire to create a "subjective correlative" for feelings generated by a very real encounter that I had with a rabbit and a hawk.

She turned out to be Roberta Flackjacket.

As you say, the book's focus is definitely on language and genre. I wanted to perform a biopsy on biography--to lay bare the structure of memoir by setting my speakers' sights upon the ghost of an emotion, rather than an objectively quantifiable person. They're definitely failing, en masse, to create the "round character" so prized by psychological realism--and who can blame them? They're straining to remember someone who is, for all intents and purposes, a figure of pure dissatisfaction.

I wanted the reality, such as it is, to come out of that strain. The urge to invest a chimera with concrete attributes. And I definitely didn't stand above my characters, judging their folly, because I shared their desire to find a way to Roberta... I wanted every scene and detail (and perhaps especially those presented in mpeg form) to feel like a possible stepping stone to someone... despite my theoretical commitment to the reverse proposition.

Jenny Sampirisi | September 6 at 12:22pm

And I think you've infused the text with that urgency as well.

I'd like to switch streams right now and talk a bit about your decision to self-publish Chimera Lucida through iUniverse. Self-publishing used to be stigmatized but in recent years it's become a more common and accepted practice. There have been some reactionary arguments stating that self-publishing signals the end of editorial process and the standards of the book publishing industry, while others have championed self-publishing as a more democratic and art-centred process that bi-passes an industry mired in fiscal bottom lines.

Can you speak to your decision to self-publish?

David Fiore | September 7 at 3:11pm

Oh yes--I'm quite familiar with the argument you refer to. I encountered it daily when I was culture-blogging in a serious way, about 5 years ago... It seems to me that the people who make it are practically begging to be labeled "cultural gatekeepers"--and everyone knows that's a bad thing, right?

I don't think there's much warrant for discouraging anyone from putting their creations before the public (unless we're talking about hate speech--a slippery thing to define, but one of the few consensus-directed discussions I'm interested in participating in). I think of internet self-publishing as the metastasized form of 'zine culture (with Amazon providing the bridge between the local and the global). To me, that sounds like a good thing--a benign form of parasitism upon the corporate structure. Of course, anyone who didn't like 'zines isn't going to like iUniverse either...

That's my general position on the matter. The more specific context for this particular decision is a little more complex. My current project (a collection of short pieces called Montreal Fiores), for instance, will be published through traditional channels (and with the help of an editor)--or not at all. It was conceived that way, and I'll do everything I can to bring the plan to fruition. No avid reader of Thomas Wolfe can dismiss the role of the editor out of hand (Maxwell Perkins may have done more to make Of Time and the River a great novel than the author himself!). However, Chimera Lucida obeys such a purely personal logic that I couldn't see any way to submit it to that process. That's not an arrogant statement--I'm not claiming to be above the process. (And it goes without saying that I had no guarantee there'd be any interest in the book!) It's just that I needed this particular book to appear exactly as is--to put the work, as Frank O'Hara would say, "squarely between the poet and the person." I feel very lucky that I had the opportunity to do that.

Jenny Sampirisi | October 8 at 11:16am

A month later, Jenny finally responds after some much needed polite goading:

As an editor of innovative fiction, I would enjoy getting a book like Chimera Lucinda on my desk. It's trying something that most books shy away from, which is challenging the accepted format of a plot-based “novel” and focusing more on language (similar to how a poet prioritizes). It still has elements of character and plot in it too, so it hasn't strayed too far from what most once-in-a-while readers of fiction would recognize as a story. But, I will say that the editorial process entails a lot of time and back and forth between writer and editor and a willingness to shift the text or at least explore it together with the goal of creating a text that really hits the notes the author was aiming at. Your response suggests that it was important that the book appear exactly as it is. Do you mean this in terms of words on the page? Design? Plot arc or character?

You might be selling the book a bit short by suggesting a publishing house wouldn't be interested in it. There is certainly a place for prose-that-plays in small press publishing. Or at least, I hope so.

You said it's a matter of how you conceive the project from the start. What kinds of decisions lead you to a conclusion about the final form of publication the book will take?

David Fiore | October 9 at 9:55am

Thanks Jenny--it's very encouraging to know that this kind of work has the potential to reach people in the literary community. It's quite possible that I did Chimera Lucida a disservice by adopting such a stubborn attitude re: publication (I suppose that's one of the dangerous side-effects of 2 years of cloistered composition--you begin to worry that the entire structure will collapse at the touch of a comma).

I don't think I'll allow that to happen again. Certainly, my current project (Montreal Fiores) is designed to "open up intercourse with the world," Hawthorne-style--and part of that operation entails a willingness to accept editorial guidance. These stories (when I'm done--they'll number between 20 and 30) are far more straightforward in conception and composition (at the sentence to sentence level) than Chimera Lucida, but they are just as concerned with problematizing the biographical subject. In this case, the pieces aim to draw a chalk outline around the traditional autobiographical protagonist, portraying the character's activities (if you can even call them that) as completely subservient to the anticipated act of narration. Also, they're supposed to be funny. We'll see if anyone agrees!

Jenny Sampirisi | October 9 at 10:18am

I wouldn’t say a disservice. The book is a fascinating read. I look forward to reading Montreal Fiores, and very much hope people have the opportunity to pick up a copy of Chimera Lucida. It's great to see emerging writers playing with form and language in fiction and taking some risks with their work. Thanks for talking about the book with me. And thanks too, to the Agora Review for allowing us the space to have such a discussion.

David Fiore | October 9 at 1:37pm

Thanks so much Jenny--it was a real pleasure! You really helped me to think about (and articulate) some important aspects of the work I'm trying to do! I'll be going back to the well of this interview often in the months ahead--and I'm grateful that it will have a home on the Agora Review site.

Bios:

David Fiore is a copy editor and occasional English/History professor at Concordia University in Montreal. He also taught American Radical Thought at Michigan State University in East Lansing, Michigan, where he spent much of his time dwelling upon the violent habits of the animals on the campus. Chimera Lucida is his second published narrative, following 2002's Darkling I Listen.

Jenny Sampirisi is a poet, novelist, editor and teacher. Her first novel is/was was released in November 2008.