"I follow my eyes": an interview with Clarence Major.

It was during the period of turmoil and transformation of the 1960s that Clarence Major first achieved literary recognition, initially as an editor, poet, and anthologist, and then - following the controversial publication in 1969 of his sexually charged, highly controversial first novel All-Night Visitors from Maurice Girodias's Olympia Press - as one of postmodern fiction's most versatile and radical innovators. Major's first publication was a pamphlet of (mostly forgettable) poems entitled The Fires That Burn in Heaven (1954); following a stint in the Air Force, Major began editing Coercion Review (1958-61), which gradually brought him into contact with such leading poetry figures as William Carlos Williams Robert Creeley, and Allen Ginsberg. Over the years, Major has made editorial contributions to such journals as The Journal of Black Poetry, The American Book Review, and The American Poetry Review, as well as editing two collections of student work - Writers Workshop Anthology (1967) and Man Is a Child (1%9). He gained national attention with the publication of The New Black Poetry (1969), a controversial anthology of contemporary black poetry which he edited. Its eclecticism drew criticism from conservative and liberal factions of the black artistic community, who were both already heatedly discussing the implications of the "Black Aesthetic" being promoted by writers like Ishmael Reed, Ed Bullins, and Amiri Baraka. In addition to his creative work as a poet and fiction writer, Major has also published a wide variety of reviews, manifestoes and critical essays (some collected in his 1974 critical study The Dark and Feeling: Black American Writers and Their Work).

Major's first important poetry collection, Swallow the Lake (1970), explored some of interests that would recur in his later fiction (music, alienation and psychic dismemberment, male-female relationships, the relationship of art and reality, sex and death, etc.) in a wide variety of styles and voices. Three more collections followed rapidly: Private Line (1971), Symptoms & Madness (1971), and the Cotton Club (1972). Major's poetry is characterized by the same rich, unsettling mixture of humor and anger, passion and intellect, self-consciousness, free-wheeling energy, and formal daring found in his fiction.

Because Major has mainly avoided the social realist mode favored by most black American writers in favor of expressionistic, metafictional modes, his fiction has subsequently been analyzed primarily in terms of its "experimental" or "anti-realist" features. Unfortunately, this focus has tended to relegate Major to the "avant-garde ghetto," where his works have never attained the popularity or critical acclaim given his more publicly visible contemporaries such as Alice Walker, Toni Morrison, and Ishmael Reed.

However, as with many other figures from postmodernism's "first wave" of literary innovators, what once seemed "anti-realistic" to a generation raised on the illusionistic assumptions of traditional realism can today be recognized as new approaches to realism. These approaches either describe a reality that itself seemed "unrealistic" by earlier norms or, as seems more relevant for Major's work, find fresh methods to depict irrational contradictory inner lives and selves that resist traditional formulations. Many of the features of Major's fictions are in fact designed to give voice to various irrational impulges and contradictory versions of self and personal identity that traditional realism couldn't give expression to. Thus, Major's best fiction often presents a fiercely passionate vision o jagged, tortured beauty that is analogous to that found in Goya or van Gogh, Hendrix or Eric Dolphy. While such non-literary analogies are always suspect, they are appropriate in this case due to Major's convictions concerning the inadequacies of verbal logic, which sustains the realistic novel, as a means of conveying the truth about experience.

The themes and forms of these books seem to trace a movement away from the radical sense of personal fragmentation and insecurity, graphic sexuality, and outrage found in the early works (All-Night Visitors [1969] and NO [1973]) to a middle period in which his interests in metafictional explorations of the fiction-making process and metafictional methods and formal concerns find their most extreme expression in Reflex and Bone Structure and Emergency Exit, to his recent explorations of more narrative styles and formal structure in works like Such Was the Season (1987). But as Major takes great pains to suggest in the following interview, such an evolution represents less a move "away from anti-realism towards realism" than different stages in an ongoing effort to find a suitable means to give expression to his sense of himself.

As it happens, most of the early versions of "self" are prismatic, cubistic constructs reflecting not self but a shifting series of public, private, and imaginary selves. Most of Major's fiction unfolds as a bewildering array of discrete bits of visual images, fragments of contradictory plot elements, different voices, and reflexive ruminations about fiction. Major's novels nearly all focus on men whose lives are either coming apart or never had achieved any unity in the first place. Reading Major's important middle works like Reflex and Bone Structure (1975), My Amputations (1986), and what is perhaps his most successful single novel, Emergency Exit (1979), one feels much as one did in reading Kerouac and Burroughs, Rimbaud and Artaud - figures who, like Major, felt the need to refashion an entire new language and set of narrative assumptions in order to conjure up "spaces" of the imagination and emotion never given voice to previously. Major thus developed a variety of discontinuous, continuous, collage-like structures to capture the movement of a mind which refuses to reduce his experiences to the sorts of unified narrative voices and causally related plot elements found in the realistic novel. As with other writers from this period who were exploring similar methods - for example, his fellow Fiction Collective writers Steve Katz, Raymond Federman, and Ronald Sukenick - the result for Major is akin to a jazz musician's improvisations, whose various tones, rhythms, motifs, and other sound patterns, expressed in different keys and tones, provide a means of access to the artist's inner self. The act of writing down the work we are reading thus should be seen as being not an effort to find a unified self, voice, or plot but an attempt to provide a means to give expression to the multiple, contradictory aspects of himself His novels, then, represent not the illusions of realism but the illusoriness of those illusions.

Although the influence of jazz and poetry on Major's fiction has been widely noted, his writing has probably been even more deeply influenced by the visual. Major began his artistic career as a painter (he attended the Chicago Art Institute briefly at age seventeen), and has continued to produce paintings, which he has exhibited in galleries and exhibitions on numerous occasions. Major remarks in the following interview that he is "a visual thinker," and this quality is evident in the important role that visual descriptions and imagery have always played in his narratives. Although Emergency Exit (1979) is the only book in which Major has introduced reproductions of his paintings to reinforce or analogize the written materials, his use of visual images as objective correlatives that reveal emotional resonances of the inner, literally unspeakable emotional lives of his narrators and characters has been a constant feature of his fiction.

The following interview is based on a conversation that took place in January 1992 at Clarence Major's home in Davis, California. Before the interview, the interviewers, along with McCaffery's wife Sinda Gregory and Majors wife Pamela had gone out for lunch in order to catch up on the news and gossip. Back at Major's house, there was time before the interview to roam about, examining the plants and small trees (whose presence indoors seemed not at all incongruos congruous) and the many paintings by Major that hang on the walls. The conversation with Major was friendly but serious, the atmosphere and mood combining with Major's reflective comments and soft voice to create an aura of quiet reflection.

Kutnik: To what extent do you see yourself as consciously working out of a sense of a "black aesthetic," or black narrative traditions?

Major. There is no single "black aesthetic." re has been a sequence or series of scenarios that can be defined as "black aesthetics," corresponding roughly to historical periods. There were the black writers of the Antebellum (1853-1865), the Postbellum (1865-1902), the Old Guard 1902-1917), the Harlem Renaissance (1917-1929), and the Social Protest (1929-1959) periods. They had their ideas about what a black writer in America should be doing, whom a black writer should be addressing and so on, that emerged out of specific literary and historical contexts. Despite all the different agendas throughout all the various periods, black writers were always working against a single dominant impulse in American culture: the use to which white America put blackness. Whiteness was about not being black. Thus, black people were invested with aU the negative crap against which white America defined itself. Black writers worked always to humanize black people and to overthrow the burden of this symbolism. To be human meant to be whole - good and bad, complex, and so on. At the same time, the Old Guard, for example, resisted the young writers of the Harlem Renaissance, who were trying to assert a new kind of black presence and consciousness.

Kutnik: And this presence wasn't likely to be accepted by whites?

Major: The point had less to do with white models or white acceptance and more to do with feeling they had to be "proper." The accommodationists were about putting one's best foot forward for the white world, or for an equal reading public. In other words, you should never hang your dirty laundry out, never let the world know what's going on behind the scenes. If you have marital problem, family problems, drinking problems - all that should be kept quiet. Meanwhile you emphasize the positive, put your best face forward, that kind of thing. That was the black middle-class take on reality, and the same take was presented in literature, which was to be very uplifting. Then along comes Claude McKay with a book like Home to Harlem, which lets it all hang out, which shows the prostitutes and the pimps and the numbers runners and all the other good-time people - it was about people and situations that people like Weldon Johnson were calling the dirty laundry.

The point is that what people refer to as "black aesthetics" isn't some mysterious, inherent set of guidelines, but a set of historical motives. Aesthetics aren't a set of abstractions existing outside historical circumstances and daily reality; they're always grounded in the needs and aims of specific artists and audiences, influenced by the social setting and context. Richard Wright was concerned with the conditions of poverty, injustice, and so on that Sinclair, Wolfe, and other white protest writers of the thirties were. Chester Himes wrote about those kinds of conditions, too, in books like Cast the First Stone and in some of his other forties novels. Later on in the sixties, you get this idea of the black aesthetic which comes out of Black Nationalism and operates as the cultural arm of that political movement. It's meant to be purely functional in relation to the political aim, but it seemed to me to be essentially replacing Eurocentric thinking with Afrocentric thinking.

McCaffery: It's always struck me that fl= was a risk in this whole approach. Even if Afrocentric thinking seems somehow more "appropriate" to the experience of black people, the insistence on having black people adopt this mode of thinking winds up substituting one set of limitations, controls, norms, for another.

Major: not was essentially the problem I wound up having with this whole black aesthetics concept. The thrust of the movement wasn't so much an attempt to say Eurocentric thinking is limiting our attempts to function as artists and as individuals - I would have obviously supported anything concerned with opening up fresher or more liberating options for black people. Instead, you had this attempt to replace the Eurocentric with something that closed down the view of the writer and restricted it to the service of certain political ideologies that were as stifling as the ones they hoped to replace. That's why I instinctively opposed it, even before I could articulate the sources of my opposition. I knew there was something wrong. What I tried to propose even that early in the sixties (and what I still propose today) was something far more flexible, which is what I am trying to do with my anthology Calling the Wind. Twentieth-Century African-American Short Stories - namely, to find the terms on a more personal level to get the best of all the different kinds of cultural influences feeding into my experience, and to come up with a personal aesthetic. It might at least be liberating for me.

McCaffery: You can make the same argument about the great debate raging these days on college campuses about the canon.

Major: Exactly! We talk about opening up the canon so that we can bring the rest of the world alongside Western thinking, get outside of the restrictions we've traditionally imposed on our educational system, and somehow open up the whole process. Now of course I'm all in favor of the opening up of Western thought to other modes of thinking (who couldn't be?), but the minute you start talking about challenging the Western canon, the people who depend on it for their living get very terrified. It's not that anybody wants to derail Shakespeare - everyone should have to study Shakespeare. But everyone should also have to study equally important writers and philosophies of other cultures. Why not?

McCaffery: Since you started publishing fiction back in the late sixties, your work has consistently been discussed by critics like Jerry Klinkowitz and myself primarily in terms of its concern with its own processes and status as pure invention. Unfortunately, this emphasis on your works" alleged "non-referential" or "non-realistic" features ignores the possibility that these features might function in the service of a new kind of realism; it's also been used to relegate your work to the rarified "art for art's sake" (or the "narcissistically self-indulgent") category, and hence to marginalize it. My question, then, is: How would you yourself describe the role that formal innovation has played in your fiction? Is the common distinction between "realism" and "experimentalism" valid?

Major: Absolutely not. Those distinctions have always seemed superficial. Since Such Was the Season looks very much like a piece of realism on the surface, some people claimed that I had jumped ship, betrayed my experimental goals. But that book is just as "experimental" as my other work in terms of realistic norms. For example, even though Juneboy appears in what passes for a realistic setting, he's also being presented through this folksy, down-to-earth woman's point of view, which filters everything through colloquial speech mannerisms and idioms in an utterly subjective manner.

McCaffery: You once described writing as a way of finding yourself both as a writer and as a person, adding, "I think the two processes are integral and interchangeable and inseparable, the continual redefinition of the self and the process of learning how to write every day. I find it's an endless lesson. You don't really carry that much information and skill from one piece to the next unless you're doing the same thing over and over again. Each act of writing becomes a whole new experience, which is why it's so difficult." You went on to say that your writing reflects the fact that you literally feel different every day. I mention this because, subjective or not, Annie Eliza's perspective in Such Was the Season is undeniably more stable or consistent than what we find in your earlier work. Is this stability a reflection of your now feeling less fragmented personally, more certain of who and what you are?

Major: In terms of my own psychology, I do feel more secure-secure enough at least so I don't feel the need to ask the same questions that drove me to create characters like the ones you find over and over again in All-Night Visitors and NO. But what we're talking about here, both in terms of my writing and my life, is an evolution, not a sharp break. Exploring different personae in my earlier novels was something that grew out of my sense of personal fragmentation. Those feelings have changed somewhat as I've gotten older and had the opportunity to resolve some of those conflicts about myself and recognize integration rather than separation. When you're young, you haven't had the experiences that allow perspective on who you are or how to know what "you" consist of. From a personal standpoint, of course, this confusion can be very troubling, but an artist needs to take advantage of these things to produce anything worthwhile. Back when I was starting out to write, it felt perfectly natural to have my work reflect this sense that I was liberally a different person every time I sat down to write. It was an interesting challenge to find narrative contexts for different parts of myself that needed voices to express themselves. So in something like Reflex and Bone Structure I consciously played with this whole concept of author/narrator identity, though in fact there were several personae there: the narrator, the protagonist, and the implied author. In My Amputations I had an implied author, the protagonist, and the narrator all working together in a concerted way. To write a novel in those days with stable" characters or narrators would have basically falsified my own experience. Today the opposite would be equally false. All along it's seemed that to do anything but reflect my own self (or selves) wouldn't make sense. Why write out of some phoney sense of narrative stability if that doesn't reflect how I feel about myself? There was a sense I didn't really want a stable identity, at least in terms of being an artist. There was something liberating about not knowing who I was going to be when I sat down to write. Projecting myself into these different personae let me discover things about these concrete presences which were outside of myself but also coming out of myself. In the process, I learned a lot about myself.

Kutnik: In this regard your presentation of Annie Eliza in Such Was the Season seemed a departure for you in that she didn't seem to be someone based on yourself.

Major: There's been a steady movement in my writing toward diminishing that dependency on self. By the time I got to the creation of Annie Eliza, I had made an enormous breakthrough: This was my first novel in which I was not the model for the main character. The Zuni novel, Painted Turtle, was a further leap in that direction, and now I'm writing a novel whose main character is not anything like me.

McCaffery: Granted that readers of Such Was the Season may not be encouraged to identify you with the narrator - but what about Juneboy? Weren't there autobiographical impulses that started the book?

Major: I started Such Was the Season after I had taken a trip to Atlanta, and to some extent Juneboy is based on some of my experiences on that trip. But - and this is pretty true in terms of all the autobiographical material in my work - those correlations start to break down very quickly once narrative and aesthetic demands and all sorts of other things start to operate on these "facts." Like Juneboy, I hadn't been to Atlanta since I was eighteen, but I didn't stay a week like he did. And I didn't make a trip with my aunt to try to find my father's gravesite either - or discover that it was under ten miles of concrete, in or rather under, a housing development. There was also no political scandal in the works like there is in the novel, although though Juneboy I did meet the mayor of Atlanta and Martin Luther King's wife, Coretta, at a dinner party at my cousin's house. But overall I'd say my own presence is so diminished in Juneboy's identity that he is at best a catalyst rather than a true persona. By the time you get to Painted Turtle, "I' am not present at all, except in the design and creation of the book. These very general connections between autobiography and fiction are always present in my books, somewhere, though you may have to dig deeper in some works than others to recognize them. But as a novelist I've always felt that my obligation is to follow whatever ideas I'm trying to work through m a particular book, not to dramatize something which actually took place.

Kutnik: Your DLB autobiographical essay mentions that you began Painted Turtle with a woman narrator but finally decided you couldn't write it effectively that way. Were you feeling that it was somehow inapproptiate to write from a woman's perspective? What finally allowed you to maintain a female narrator's voice throughout Such Was the Season?

Major: I don't credence gender-specific arguments about the impossibility of men writing from women's perspectives (and vice versa), just as I don't believe that blacks can't write about whites, or whites can't write about blacks. If you can make it come alive, you can write anything. With Painted Turtle, what happened was that, for various reasons, I was unable to make that particular Zuni woman come alive. Painted Turtle taught me that, if I were going to write in a woman's voice, it bad to be a voice I felt comfortable with - one that would come naturally rather than something I'd have to invent completely. That was a big help when I started Such Was the Season a year later. For reasons that are hard to explain, I found in Painted Turtle that I felt doser to the voice of the guy who falls in love with her. Strangely, a lot of people remember the book as being narrated by a woman. Maybe her voice is still present as a kind of sub-text. At any rate, from the outset I felt more secure with the woman's voice I was using in Such Was the Season. I didn't have to think about inventing that voice because I'd grown up heating it, I knew its rhythms from the way my relatives in the South speak. It was already there, so an I had to do was just sit at the computer and correct the voice by ear, the way you would write music. If the rhythm were wrong or the pitch off, I knew it instinctively because I'd lived with that voice all my life.

Kutnik: Do you recall what the origin of the Zuni novel was?

Major: It had to do with the fact that a black man - a huge African - apparently visited the Zunis in the 16th century with a group of Spanish explorers and then stayed on. He must have seemed extremely commanding to the Zuni, because he became some kind of god for them - he had dozens of wives, and he appears in a lot of early Zuni legends and stories, and so on.

Kutnik: I don't remember him appearing in the novel.

Major: He doesn't. He is irrelevant to contemporary Zuni culture, which is finally what I would up wanting to explore. And since, in effect, he's been dead for them for a long time (since the 19th or maybe even the 18th, century), I decided he wouldn't have any presence in my novel either. Letting go of this story was disappointing - after all he had triggered my interest in the Zunis in the first place, which had started me going down to New Mexico, visiting the reservation, and getting to know some people. But in the end his presence just didn't fit into my story.

McCaffery: What sorts of research did you do for Painted Turtle?

Major: The trips I made to New Mexico (I was teaching at UC-Boulder then) helped me get a sense of the Native American cultures in that part of the country; I also did a lot of research while I was teaching at UC-San Diego in 1984. To make that novel come alive, I had to learn a whole different culture. This took three years of research during which I absorbed tons and tons of stuff that was arriving from every conceivable discipline and in every conceivable way. I read the myths and anthropological transcripts, plus lots of sociology about the kinds of health conditions you find at Zuni, their education - really just about everything. I started writing the book at the kitchen table in San Diego while still fascinated by the African man, so in early drafts he was present as a kind of mythic figure.

McCaffery: Gerald Vizenor has recently argued that there are interesting analogies between Native American narrative traditions and those being described today in terms of "postmodernism." He suggests that these connections have to do partly with the primarily oral nature of Native American literature which, once written down, undergoes certain transformations that non-Native Americans would find "experimental" or formally unusual. Maybe even more importantly, of course, their Writing grows out of a completely different way of looking at reality - they certainly don't view life in terms of the linear, rational, causal kinds of structures that are the essence of what the realistic novel is. As you got to know Zuni storytelling modes better, what kinds of conclusions did you draw about their writing practices?

Major: Zuni storytelling is completely non-linear. The traditional stories about Coyote never build towards a resolution the way Western narratives tend to do. Coyote wanders around involving himself in a complex network of activity that defies morality (and sometimes common-sense logic). He gets involved in one thing after another, but these episodes aren't put together in terms of progression, tension-and-resolution, and the other things we associate with the novel. It's the same with the birds of the various festivals. They have their acts, their routines, but there's always an open-endedness, a resistance to closure. Things don't have to turn out the same way at the end of the process.

McCaffery: Did your own experiences as a black American make you feel a special sense of empathy with Zuni culture?

Major: I think so - certainly in the sense of identifying my own experience with that of the Zunis as a subculture. Being a black man also probably allowed me to sense things that individual Zuni characters might feel in any given situation. I could immediately relate to what they would feel in social situations where they would feel uncomfortable, marginalized, that kind of thing. In fact, I found that Native Americans often suffer as much discrimination as black Americans, right in their own area, the minute they cross the line of the reservation. Indians can walk into just about any motel in New Mexico and find themselves being turned down for no good reason. That's just how it is. This might not happen as often to a black American in the West.

McCaffery: One of the things about Such Was the Season that rang very true to me had to do with Annie Eliza's being so wrapped up with the soap operas that they seemed every bit as real as anything else. Your early novels and poems also frequently examined technology's effects on people - usually from a negative perspective, it seems.

Major: Television is a very "real" part of life for a lot of people. It's an extension of what their daily lives are all about, not something removed from them. I've known any number of people who are basically house-bound or who simply don't go out doing things in the world for whatever reasons. People like Annie Eliza become personally or even metaphysically wrapped up in the world of television so that its boundaries literally become the boundaries of their world.

McCaffery: It's like what Baudrillard talks about regarding Disneyland - the illusion does not just seem as red as the real world, it is more real.

Major: Right, since Annie Eliza's television is never turned off, that world is always "on" for her; she goes to sleep with it on, and it's on when she wakes up - what could be more real than that? It's the way she lives. Besides, it's what she needs. When old people who have always had their family around them suddenly find themselves in a silent house, well, you can imagine how much they miss the bombardment of voices. Television fills the void, provides familiar voices, even if the voices are artificial. At least that space that's been vacated isn't empty.

McCaffery: Since your generation of innovators emerged in the sixties, there's been an ever-increasing expansion of the so-called "media culture" - this rapid expansion of images, advertising, information (the "dance of biz," as Bill Gibson refers to it) - into just about every conceivable aspect of our public and personal lives. This expansion may have especially dramatic, and potentially harmful, effects on black people because the images, the people and the situations, they're encountering in the media are so predominately white and middle-class - and as such they have the potential to distort people's perception of reality. But you seem to be looking at the positive role that, say, television plays in Annie Eliza's life rather than implying she's being manipulated or having her sense of racial norms or values impaired.

Major: That's because Eliza is looking at human issues - love, death, pain-that she's known all her life (and known completely) rather than racial issues. In her own life she has always identified with universals - like raising children, deception, infidelity, seduction - that have nothing to do with relative things like color or caste. Another important thing about her situation is that she's middle class. She's owned her own house for thirty years, and she identifies with the financial level of these people she's watching on the soaps. So on the social level their world is accessible to her. In my view, this is not such a huge leap either. Writers, too, can make this entry, imaginatively, into other cultures and genders, and make it viable and real in their works.

McCaffery: In an interview you did with Jerry Klinkowitz in the seventies, you said: "All words are lies, in any arrangement, that pretend to be other than the arrangements that they make on the page." The idea that words and fiction are essentially formal aesthetic constructions rather than representations of something existing off the page was, of course, very much in the air in the early days of postmodernism. Do you still agree with the point you were making back then? Or was this something that very much needed to be emphasized at a certain moment, but not at others?

Major: Using such an emotionally charged term as lies in that statement may have deflected readers away from the point I was trying to make. What I meant to say - and this seems as perfectly reasonable to me today as it did then - is that a word is just a sign, a symbol, and as such it can never really represent the thing it names. Words are entirely different from things, separate from their referents. They're autonomous entities, with their own linguistic realities, their own histories, their own separate presences. Like other authors working against the grain of traditional realism, I thought it important back in the seventies to keep reminding readers that when writers start putting words on the page, they're not "representing" anything except the way their mind works. But once you say that, what does a writer do with it? Having said this fifteen years ago, and then worked through all those reflexive concepts in my books, I simply don't need to do that again.

Kutnik: And except in very broad ways, you don't repeat yourself very often, either thematically or in your formal concerns. With each new book, it's as if you've thrown yourself into a literary void - which is a risk for any artist. But in this sense, choosing to write Such Was the Season in a seemingly realistic mode was perfectly in keeping with what you'd been doing all along - that is, trying out new approaches.

Major: Like I said, writing Such Was the Season that way didn't mean I'd abandoned an interest in innovation. I was trying out all sorts of new things when I was writing Such Was the Season, even if these didn't have to do with my earlier compulsion to keep readers constantly focused on the page. The voice is what is innovative in that novel. I wanted to give voice such a commanding presence that it would, in fact, become the main subject matter of the novel. I wanted to make it impossible for readers to stop thinking about the voice once they had started reading the book, to make that voice always uppermost, so that even though it was describing the things that were going on (the way voices do in traditional novels), they'd be constantly having to confront its own presence.

Kutnik: Were there any models you bad in mind for the kind of thing you were after here with voice?

Major: Huck Finn. Before starting Such Was the Season, I had reread Huck and once again, sentence after sentence after sentence, I found myself wondering, How did Twain make that voice come alive like that - make it so real? I may not have succeeded, but what I wanted to do in Such Was the Season was create a voice that would have the same kind of undeniable presence as the one Twain created for Huck. I wanted to create a text in which the voice is literary the book's main subject matter - as I believe it to be in Twain's book.

McCaffery: What you're saying would at first seem to contrast with the work you did for the Dictionary of Afro-American Slang, which distinguishes Afro-American idioms and voice from their English equivalents. I'm reminded of the remarks made by certain black writers to the effect that "English is my enemy." Having someone like Twain be such a strong influence indicates that you don't personally feel the sense that, as a black American author, you have to be constantly working "against" the English language - the language of oppression, and so on.

Major: There isn't any conflict. I'm now working on a new, revised edition of the Dictionary Afro-American Slang, but my interest in this area doesn't really conflict with my appreciation of mainstream American idioms. What black people speak is actually very much in the mainstream of American speech. Not only is it not separate, it actually informs American speech in all sorts of ways. You can even argue that it's the nucleus of American speech, one of its roots. Black speech, as a matter of fact, influences Huck Finn's voice, as well. The history of the American language can't be separated from black speech. It's just been there all along, so intrinsic to American speech that there's no conflict whatsoever.

Kutnik. Has black slang changed much in the last fifteen years?

Major: Absolutely, especially with all the new slang that's been emerging out of these new subcultures - hiphop, rap, and so on. I've compiled thousands of words and phrases that have been coined or just surfaced in the last ten years. I find them in different places, and not necessarily print sources - magazines, journals, and novels - but also rock videos, songs, film, street talk.

McCaffery: In the courses I teach in rock music I use rap as a way of taking about the role that language has played in the black communities and the admiration for the person that can speak well. This whole tradition of "rapping" and "dissing" - improvised contests to see who can use language the most skillfully - has always been there in black culture.

Major: The saying always was, "He's well-spoken. He's got a preacher's voice. That boy's gonna grow up to be a preacher, he's so well-spoken." [Laughs.]

McCaffery: You were immersed in blues and jazz, growing up. You lived in Chicago in the late fifties and early sixties, when the music scene there was really happening. Muddy Waters, and so on. That scene obviously had a strong impact on your work, just as it did for so many others, white guys like Kerouac, Coover, Sukenick, and Federman, as well as black writers. Is rap going to have a similarly liberating effect or influence on young black writers today?

Major: It's already happening. I'm editing an anthology that includes works by the younger writers, and I can see the evidence of rap running through a lot of their work.

McCaffery: Jazz, blues, and rap are distinctly black art forms that use black vernacular, the idioms you hear out on the streets, in the ghetto, and so on, as well as having formal roots in earlier folk arts. But at least in this century, you've also got all these white musicians just waiting to "borrow" features of these forms and turn them into something the more "refined" that white audiences will relate to (and purchase). You've also got brilliant, formally innovative black artists like Charlie Parker, Ornette Coleman, Jimi Hendrix, and Prince who keep pushing things to the next level practically reinventing the forms, maybe to stay ahead of the white guys.

Major: Yes, although I personally have trouble with the concept of artistic "refinement" whenever this winds up moving so far in certain directions that it becomes inaccessible to people. You can see this in the social history of jazz, in particular - the way it's become institutionalized and removed from our fives. Jazz has its roots in the folk tradition - in blues and even going back beyond blues. When you follow its evolution, you see a progression of refinement that removes it from everyday accessibility. After a while, it becomes an acquired taste, in order to really hear what's going on, you have to be educated in classical music, and it becomes something you have to learn to appreciate. Pretty soon you find yourself putting on a tux when you want to go listen to it, rather than having it as part of your daily life, the way it should be, even if it is highfallutin' music.

McCaffery: You began your career apparently thinking you were going to be a painter - you were at the Chicago Art Institute for a while, and so on. Did this background in the visual arts have any lasting impact on your literary sensibility?

Major: No question about it. I was drawn to painting in the first place because I'm a visual thinker, which isn't something that's going to disappear later on when you're writing.

Kutnik: Who were some of the writers and other artists who had a significant impact on your literary sensibility early on?

Major: Van Gogh and among the painters. Gertrude Stein, Jean Toomer, Rimbaud, Henry Miller, D. H. Lawrence, Richard Wright, Radiguet, and Genet among fiction writers. Bud Powell has to be mentioned in here somewhere as well.

Kutnik: What do you mean when you say you're a "visual thinker"?

Major: I remember things better visually than verbally. I make connections between things more on the basis of visual associations than verbal or logical ones. If you tell me your name, I may not hear it as well as I can see it.

Kutnik: How does your being a visual thinker relate to writing fiction versus poetry? Is there a difference? Most people would say that in poetry you think more in terms of images, visual things.

Major: That's true, creating poetry is more directly involved with images. But this isn't an either/or thing. I often try to get those same kinds of images in my fiction writing.

Kutnik: Do you find any basic differences in the creative process involved in writing poetry versus fiction?

Major: There are, of course. When you're writing a poem you're concentrating on pushing language in certain directions that you don't ordinarily travel in when you're writing fiction. I try to use the language of poetry when I'm writing a novel but only up to a certain point. You don't want to push things so far that your material becomes inaccessible as a story.

McCaffery: What "poetic qualities" are you looking for in your fiction writing?

Major: Mostly a certain lyrical quality - tone, pace, cadence, the music of speech. This isn't true in every case: There are things I attempt in fiction that don't lend themselves too well to a lyrical treatment. That's okay. I don't need to do the same thing over and over. But overall when my fiction is at its best, it usually has a kind of lyrical quality. I think Annie Eliza's voice, for example, has a kind of lyrical quality. Even though her voice seemed familiar to me, it wasn't something I thought of as being my private voice, which meant that the lyrical poetic quality was something I had to think of consciously while writing.

McCaffery: You've said that you think of some of your recent stories as being prose poems really; you've also said that some of your poems wind up being stories. When you start out writing something, how clear is it that something is going to be a story or a poem? What's the basis of this judgment?

Major: I don't always immediately know. Usually I do, because there's a different engagement involved in writing poems versus fiction. This gets even more complicated when you factor in other kinds of writing I do. For example, Surfaces and Masks started off as a journal I was keeping when we were living in Venice. Somehow these entries kept resisting being turned into prose, so after a very short time I let them come out in terms of lines. I realized that something about the material needed to be rendered in terms of measure, meter, and stanza breaks rather than in journal entry forms.

McCaffery: Is there any actual difference between the narrative voice you create in your fiction versus the one in your poetry?

Major: Formally, yes, and in the classroom I always try to make those distinctions because I don't want to confuse students. But for all practical purposes, I don't separate things out like that. In fact, I'm usually trying to bridge the two by informing the narrative possibility with a lyrical quality.

McCaffery: When an interviewer once said that audiences tended to have difficulty with even relatively mild disjunctures in fiction that they would readily accept in poetry, you made an interesting point about audience acceptance of truly radical narrative structures in film. Can't fiction writers take more chances today precisely because readers are now used to dealing with film and TV shows based on the principle of juxtaposition and montage?

Major: The problem is that audiences today tolerate a lot less disjuncture in fiction than they do with other art forms. People were much more willing to accept innovations in film even as early as the twenties. Audiences had no trouble with any of the stylistic innovations introduced by Chaplin or Buster Keaton. Jump cuts, leaps, animation, and all that camera technology stuff - they all made perfect sense to audiences. When you try out something analogous in a novel, you're somehow put aside as unreadable, inaccessible. I guess narrative or fictive conventions have had a longer time to rigidify, so readers have more difficulty when somebody is doing something different with narrative material, whereas with film or rock videos or whatever, the medium is so new that its audience just accepts the idea that its conventions are more fluid.

Kutnik: Why didn't the radical experimentation of work written by your generation of postmodernist fiction writers help break down these readerly expectations?

Major: What happened is that the spirit of radical experimentalism and innovation gradually mellowed out during the seventies and eighties, and is now finding its way into the mainstream of American writing. That's true of a lot of other things about the sixties that have filtered into our daily fives without our really being aware of it. Certainly that's true of fiction. The radical fiction that writers like Barthelme, for example, was doing in the sixties was so radical in nature that it had to affect later writers. Subliminally their influences are there throughout just about the whole spectrum of American fiction today - so much so that we don't notice that they're present in a more diffuse way in the culture and in American fiction writing. This summer I read two hundred novels for the National Book Award, and I can see the innovation there. It's more muted today than it was back when I was starting out as a writer, but it's there nevertheless. I remember a story about a couple of guys who are waiting beneath a precipice to shoot a lion. A couple of lions are up above them, not knowing the men are down there, and the guys can't move, of course, because the lions might come down on them. So what does the writer do with this situation? At the end of the story he says: "Well I've given you this dramatic situation, and I hope that's enough. I mean, what more do I need to do? This is it, this is life, what more do you want?"

McCaffery: I agree that the sixties brand of radical experimentalism has had a pervasive effect on recent writing, but there are also some crucial differences. Part of this has to do with changes in the world today, especially the expansion of the media culture, the greater bombardment that everyone today is subjected to, the greater facility with which everything can be reproduced, reified, commodified. This changes the whole function of innovation: "The new" becomes merely another commodified style rather than having any social or aesthetic impact.

Major: Part of what's new is the constantly changing technical means by which literature is being made and consumed. I'm thinking of computer network fiction, hypertexts. The speed with which new technologies erode is equally staggering. The minute I upgrade my computer it's already obsolete. So, what's new? "New" in the Ezra Pound sense no longer stands still even for a moment. And at the same time - even with all our questing for the self-directed technologies - the younger generation of writers seems to be desperately reaching back for the homespun, the tried-and-tested formulas of the past, despite the innovations they've absorbed. I see all of this as exciting and very promising.

McCaffery: You've said elsewhere that trying to create the distinction between poetry and prose turns out to be a trap and that "a book that was written a hundred years ago becomes not only a literary experience when you read it, it's like a historical experience because the language is not our language anymore .... literature is unlike any other art form because it has the problem of language as its material and also the problem of our perception which is always gouged out of this thing we call reality." You seem here to be making a distinction between perception and language, and then locating literature's uniqueness as having to do with the fact that, since its "materials" - language - change over time, there is always necessarily this "problem of language." But isn't this true of other art forms as well? For instance, in painting don't you find changes in perception also affecting the "materials" art's created out of? If you look at Impressionist paintings (which I know you love), you can see artists registering these sorts of changes in their work. In order words, is literature really unique in its ongoing concern with the elements that produce meaning in it?

Major: Literature is unlike the other arts. If we're talking about oral storytelling - the essence of literature - we're talking about pure language. Naturally it's going to be limited to those who can speak and understand it. And it's also always evolving in ways that lines and colors (in painting) and stone (in sculpture) are not. Those materials evolve in their own very different ways and aren't subject to the constant practical communication uses language is subject to. A word's purity can be destroyed in a way that the color yellow, theoretically, cannot.

Kutnik: Do you see any connection between your painting and your writing, beyond your having such a visual imagination? For instance, are there any formal issues or problems that you found yourself being drawn to early on in your painting that you took up in your fiction as well? It would seem that painters have to be reflexively concerned with the materials they're using in a way that's analogous to the reflexive concerns you were dealing with so much in your early novels.

Major: The reflexive "problem" all writers have to face is that the materials fiction is created out of - that is, words, language - "mean something," in the sense of making references to the outside world. That's why I feel these materials are so different from those used for painting and sculpture. Colors and textures and shapes in these other forms don't "refer" to anything. The same is true for dance, of course, which has no "material" except the body - and the body isn't really operating in the same way that paint, texture, and color do in painting, or the way language does for literature. With dance you have space defined by the presence of the body.

McCaffery: I am struck with a passage in My Amputations in which your narrator says: "He came to realize he wanted it all flat, or upright and permanent like cubism. Like things, surfaces." Did that express what you're aiming for when you're writing? Why did he want it this way?

Major: He wants it flat like cubism because in art you control, define, and assign meaning to things otherwise swept along in the tide of time and space. In cubism, he would be able to use all sides of the experience - stop, weigh it, think about it, reflect on it. Cubism is just a term to refer to an attempt to gain control of the shape of his life and to give it meaning.

Kutnik: An unusual formal feature of My Amputations is the way the prose is presented almost as a series of physical objects - "blocks" of material that aren't related in the way that paragraphs or other organizing principles are in linear narratives. This seems like it might be related to the visual orientation of your imagination.

Major: That's because I literally tend to "see" my books this way. In the case of My Amputations, I remember the very day the book came to me. Pamela and I were walking up a hill to the Jewish cemetery in Nice, and I said, "I'm going to write a book in blocks of prose. Just panels. Not paragraphs." The only thing I needed to know at that point was that this book had to be a book composed in blocks or in panels.

Kutnik: The title Such Was the Season has its source in Jean Toomer. What's involved for you in selecting titles for your works?

Major: Sleeping on it seems to work best for me. I let it be the last thought before I fall off to d", and by the time I wake up the title will have taken care of itself. I always have a title when I'm working on something, although I don't always end up using it. I grabbed My Amputations, for example, somewhere along the way in the middle of the book. The same was true with Such Was the Season, which was called "Juneboy" for a while; then I realized that wasn't a good title since it's not Juneboy's story at all which made me start shopping around for another title until I was eventually led to Such Was the Season.

McCaffery: Your first two published novels, All-Night Visitors and NO, dealt obsessively and relentlessly with sex (which may not be a strange preoccupation for a young writer) and also with death - but individually, and in the way it connects with sexuality. How do you explain that fascination?

Major: Thank you for bringing that up. When people talk about those two books they always mention the sex, but they forget the death. [Laughter.] But is there anything particularly unusual about my preoccupation with death? In fact, this preoccupation with sex and death is probably more of a young man's thought or activity than it is for an older person who's had a chance to adjust after the initial shock. If they're alert at all to what's up, young men are inevitably very interested in sex. That typically comes first, followed a bit later when they're around twenty-one by the shocking news that they're going to pass on. It may take five or six years for the shock to wear off. Death really is one of the biggest discoveries you ever make in your life: "My God, I'm going to die!" That news can kick your ass for quite a while until you get used to it.

McCaffery: Were there any more abstract sources of your interest in the relationship of sex and death? Had you been reading Freud early on, for example?

Major: Yes, I had read widely in psychology when I was young. There's no escaping Freudian thought for any of us in the twentieth century, certainly not for our generation. I was definitely aware of that as a young man, but I was also interested in trying to define another kind of the self outside those kinds of definitions. But all that sex/death material was gut-level stuff that came not from anything I had read but out of my own personal reaction to getting the news. I honestly wasn't consciously putting much of anything into those early books. Beyond wanting to keep the energy level up, I was just including whatever bebopped into my head and hoping for the best.

McCaffery: I gather that you find yourself incorporating intellectual interests into your recent works more than you did earlier. Does this interfere with keeping your creative energy level up?

Major: Maintaining that early energy level is just as hard as the creative recklessness we just talked about. And, yeah, I'm reluctant to try and write out of areas that don't have any experiential, gut-level basis to them. So I consciously try to keep my intellectual interests out of my writing. I've found that those things interfere with my writing rather than help.

McCaffery: Tell us a bit about the circumstances surrounding the publication of All-Night Visitors. The story goes that Girodias forced you to edit (or hatchet) the book, the result being that all the sex was left in but much of the background material was jettisoned. Being edited that way certainly made your book have a very peculiar "feel" to it. Granted that you must have been disappointed in the way your book was cut, weren't there some benefits that came of this? For instance, the cuts probably made it look more radically experimental than it would have if the full version had been published.

Major: Well, it's important to note that, since I did all the revisions myself, I had some control over the end result. This wasn't a matter of having somebody else go through my book and having no input on what happened. I thought about it and decided I wanted the book published enough so that I was willing to do what they were asking, and then I tried to edit the book in such a way that it would still be something I could live with.

McCaffery: You mentioned at the outset of the interview that your early works seemed to feed off your own personal sense of fragmentation. I'm wondering about the "creative problems" that being in a more secure personal position pose. Many of the writers I've interviewed admit that they were rather displaced people when they were younger - and that this m a sense helped them gather material for their works, that the incoherence of their daily lives and the kind of experiences that they were having fed into their work But what happens when you find yourself a more stable person? Can that fuel your imagination as much as in the earlier situation? Or can you simply "recall" this earlier point in your life and feed off of that?

Major: You're describing something that most writers don't want to admit (or talk about at all!) but that affects almost any artist who does a significant amount of early work living on the margins, somehow, of success. In my own case, becoming a university professor, having a stable relationship with Pamela, and a more secure sense of myself - these things have placed me in a radically different lifestyle and personal situation than those I was in when I started out writing. Of course, these changes have been enormously beneficial to me from a purely personal standpoint, but almost inevitably they are also going to present creative challenges. What happens is that you sacrifice some things - certain "negative" emotional energies that you can sometimes channel into your work, maybe a kind of direct empathy and contact with situations and people you don't encounter later on, or a kind of attitude like, "Since I'm out there on the margins, I'm going to do this really wild stuff that seems right to me, and fuck the establishment!" In other words, there are frequently all sorts of frustrations, financial and personal difficulties going on in the lives of many artists that can produce a positive, exciting sense of creative recklessness and originality in their work (though it's only fair to add here that, most of the time, these circumstances wind up destroying the artist). If you do manage to make worthwhile art out of this situation and gain some recognition, that youthful sense of recklessness and energy will almost inevitably be sacrificed, but hopefully those sacrificed, are offset by the other things you've gained - financial security, medical insurance, middle-class comfort. Sometimes I don't think people are really fair about this with artists, who wind up being put on the defensive when "The Good Life" finally appears one day, miraculously it seems, after everything that's come before.

It's as if the audience is pissed off because now they're not going to be given their vicarious share of pain and anger and humiliation any more.

Still, there's no question that lessening your anxieties and gaining these middle-class comforts do wind up having an impact on your work. I know I'm not so adventurous as I used to be - or let's say that being adventurous doesn't come so "naturally" as it did when I started out. I have to work harder to find innovations. I have to struggle against being content with what's familiar or the experimental approaches I've already used. Having a lot more experience in doing innovative work limits your options. I do know that I have to work harder to achieve the kind of genuine recklessness that came as second nature to me when I was younger. I remember sitting at my desk when I was twenty-five, banging the typewriter, throwing the carriage bar, radio going on this side, the window open, the neighbors beating their children. I was in that world, watching and listening and writing and getting the sounds of that world into my work. I was not thinking about it, just letting whatever was in my soul come pouring out on the page. Well, I can't do that anymore. What I can still do, though, is try to be daring. I still find myself sitting down to write something (now at the computer terminal rather than the manual typewriter I used to peck away on) and feel myself pushing for some of that sense of recklessness I used to possess. Come on, come on, push for it! Devil may care, get it in there!

In terms of creativity, the good side to all this is that I don't think you ever completely lose touch with whatever it was that drove you to do what you did earlier on. Or at least if you want to keep it bad enough, you don't have to lose it. For instance, I think this six-hundred-page novel I've been working on recently has some of that craziness. It's just that now I've got to want it, whereas earlier it was just in the air, all around me, something I didn't have to grab because it was the air I was breathing.