Fiction Collective 2 -- A Literary Alternative Since 1974

:: INTERVIEW WITH HAROLD JAFFE ::

How do you come up with ideas for your writings and why do you feel you choose some over others?

Always it is some combination of inner compulsion and response to the prevailing culture.

How many rewrites do you usually go through before submitting to a publisher?

Depends on what I'm writing. Generally, I prefer a warts-and-all text with energy to a relentlessly rewritten text with bent knees.

Writers are told to write daily and find their voice. Do you feel you have more than one voice in your writing?

Most writers cannot afford to write daily because of practical considerations. Word processing has sped the process up to the extent that it is much easier now to write when you find the time, even if that is not nearly as regularly as you'd wish. What I mean is that slipping, full throttle, into an ongoing text is much easier than it was back in the day.
Voice? Arguably, we each have a fundamental "voice" which functions sort of like DNA. At the same time, voice as a measure of a writer's individuality is, in my opinion, falsely elevated, associated as it often is in this culture with the egomaniacal, superstar aspect of writing, what Walter Benjamin dismissively called the "auratic" (aura-like). I feel fortunate to have the technical resources to vary my "voice" according to the particular circumstance.

Who are your favorite authors, and why do they inspire you?

B.Traven, Bataille, Artaud, Lispector, Blake, Beckett, Brecht, Elsa Morante, Ernesto Cardenal, Roque Dalton, Richard Wright . . . I'm drawn to reprobates, dissenters, resisters, who have always a keen eye on the prevailing culture and a keener eye on the vegetable pulse of the collective dead.

What new author has caught your eye?

Claire Tristram.

Your style has been compared to that of Tom Robbins. What do you think about this comparison?

I prefer the comparison to Rabelais.

What were you purposefully trying to convey to your readers? What do you hope readers will learn from your writing?

That revolution and Buddhism are, dialectically, not opposed.

Do you feel your writing has changed since your early works?

Twenty years ago most serious North American readers were willing to cede to a text even if it meant putting up with density and some degree of incomprehension. Now readers, influenced by cultural directives, tend to want space and speed, even if the speed is directionless. As a consequence, I've altered somewhat my approach, because art-making should, in my opinion, employ the givens of the prevailing culture, however degraded, in order to turn the culture against itself.

Where do you think your writing will emerge in the future?

I think of the painter/sculptor Giacometti's subjects becoming ever thinner, moving toward invisibility. Further, that is, in the direction of the vegetable pulse of the collective dead.