Lance Olsen has published more than 30 books of and about innovative writing practices, including, most recently, the novels Always Crashing in the Same Car: A Novel After David Bowie (FC2, 2023), Shrapnel: Contemplations (Anti-Oedipus Press, 2024), and Absolute Away (Dzanc, 2024). A Guggenheim, Berlin Prize, D.A.A.D. Artist-in-Berlin Residency, Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Center Residency, two-time N.E.A. Fellowship, and a Pushcart Prize recipient, as well as a Fulbright Scholar, Olsen is Professor Emeritus at the University of Utah, where he taught experimental narrative theory and practice.
Curtis Smith: Congratulations on Absolute Away. I really enjoyed it. I’ve read a number of your recent books—and I’ve noticed how histories play a key role in the pieces’ frameworks. I’m guessing you have an interest in history in general, especially the tangled, ever-more-frenetic history of the last hundred-plus years. Is this correct? Are their certain elements of history that trigger the “what ifs” that get these projects rolling? If so, can you talk a bit about them?
Lance Olsen: I guess you could say I’m less interested in history per se than I am in the problem of historiography, how “history” can only happen as narrative. Another way of saying this: we can’t capture a moment, only the impossibility of it. So I’m interested in the difficulties in storying yesterday; interested in who’s doing the telling, when, how, and for what purposes?
From a different angle, I’m also interested in how fiction can narrate the gone in ways, for instance, that normative academic history texts can’t—i.e., from the inside, through various private consciousnesses—in how fiction is built to mine the absence of documentation, the gaps in the official records.
And, as you say, I’m also interested by the catastrophic ruptures in our temporal tectonic plates, revolutionary shifts in thought, in perception, in assumptions over the last two or three centuries—the second world war; the development of the computer; the digitization of nature; the climate calamity; the global pandemic; and so on. Those events, in other words, that have made us us here, now. I’m less concerned in boring into those moments via the broad-brush strokes and data clouds of professional historians than I am in imagining the inner lives of individuals who were often out of step with their times, who sometimes (just like the rest of us) might not even have understand that every gesture they made was to some extent a function of existing in a specific sociohistorical matrix.
That’s where those what-ifs you mention turn into novel engines for me. I’m less taken with asking what a Nazi book burning in the 1930s was like than I am in asking what did a Nazi rally in Berlin then look like, feel like, smell like, sound like to a two-year-old girl brought to one by her parents in order to witness the death of democracy. Less taken with asking what the August night of Jackson Pollock’s drunken suicide was like as he drove his convertible Oldsmobile 88 off a country road on Long Island in 1956 than I am in asking what it was like for the often-unnamed young woman in the back seat of that car as she lived out the last heartbeats of her life.
CS: So that leads to my next question—how did Edie Metzger’s story come to you—and what about it compelled you to unravel and imagine her life? I’m guessing the first incident was the Pollock crash—but when you learned of her growing up in the book-burning evil of Nazi Germany, did that provide the spark that impelled you to connect these two events with her story? If so, what were the first threads that came to you?
LO: The idea for Absolute Away arrived maybe two years ago as I stood before a Jackson Pollock painting in MOMA that I hadn’t really seen before: Autumn Rhythm. You know how it is. You look at a painting forever, pass it for decades, read about it, and then, one day, you actually become aware of it. I was suddenly entranced by the energy of the piece, the play of colors, the layers upon layers of paint that wasn’t used as paint anymore, exactly, but as a kind of three-dimensional sculptural gesture.
That instant led me to pick up several biographies about Pollock. In the one I found to be the most comprehensive and nuanced, Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith’s Jackson Pollock: An American Saga, I stumbled across the most amazing fact: that often-unnamed young woman who died in the backseat of Pollock’s car? Her name was Edith Metzger. She was the little girl whose parents had brought her to witness a Nazi rally and whom Hermann Göring mistook for an Aryan, picked up, and tried to kiss. Edith bit his lower lip so hard it bled.
And that’s all history knows about her: that she bit Göring’s lower lip so hard it bled; that she died in the back of Pollock’s car. What her life was like in Berlin, what happened to her parents, how she survived the Holocaust, how she made her way to America and settled in New York, even what she looked like beyond her stunning blue eyes (the reason for Göring’s misreading)—about that the historical documents are silent.
That silence was very noisy for me. Hearing it launched Absolute Away in my imagination.
CS: One of the things I enjoy most about your work is your use of inventive structures. The first and third sections here are written in short, titled sections that form a kind of collage. I’m wondering how these sections came to you—did you think of the titles and then fill in—or did the titles come later, arising from the fragments you’d been working on? I liked this structure because I think this is how we often view the world—in a kind of fragmented, disjointed way—and it’s up to us to create a narrative that helps make sense of it. And as I was reading these sections, I found myself thinking they must have been really fun to write. Am I correct there?
LO: Oh, absolutely. I’m one of those authors who cherishes the act of writing, of being afloat in language, other consciousnesses, and narrative challenges that ask for new ways of telling. For me, the world never arrives as design and meaning, but rather as bright disconnected splinters, shrapnel, that we readers (of texts; of the text of the world), pattern recognition machines that we are, must fashion into significance.
As I recall, those subtitles came later, after it dawned on me that each section formed, not so much story, as a lyric concentration—especially in that first movement, which for the most part attempts to explore how little Edie might scramble-tell her universe.
Though it’s also the case that those first and third movements are shot through with a narratorial voice that relates other sorts of stories (stories that the characters themselves couldn’t know)—some from science, some from other pasts and futures, some from philosophers, some from news articles. The effect I was looking for (every form suggests a philosophy) was anti-teleological, the sense that the narrative at hand (like my experience of being-in-the-world) doesn’t move toward resolution and redemption, but rather just moves, wanders, reminds us pitilessly that looking for resolution and redemption is a kind of nostalgia for a future that doesn’t exist, just as nostalgia for the past is a longing for a past that never existed.
You may have noticed Derrida blips up as a character a number of times. At the core of his thought is the notion of exile—from clear meaning in language, from clear meaning in the text of the world, from stability, logic, even from the notion of home itself. Derrida’s, then, is an anti-teleological vision that suggests an anti-teleological structure. I had a blast trying to imagine what that might look like, how to shape a novel whose philosophy is incapable of plot arcs and denouements and easy thought and feeling that make us feel warm, fuzzy, and forgetful, and that make corporate publishers tons of cash.
CS: The novel’s second part places us in the car with Edie and Jackson and Ruthie—and while the first and third parts cover years, this section takes a very short snippet of time and expands it. The style shifts to a series of sentence fragments—and while part one felt like how one processes events over a long period of time, this section felt very much like how we process in the moment. Was this what you were getting at with this stylistic choice? And as I was reading it, I again thought it must have been a lot of fun—true?
LO: So much so. Plus: as I say, I’m apparently constitutionally unable at anguishing over my writing practices. The narratological problem behind all the other problems I wanted to engage with in the second movement is this: What would a Jackson Pollock action painting look like if translated into narrative where the page became as much event as his canvases? Hence the dynamism, the language splatter, the rhythmic syncopation, the visual disruptions, and the sense of intuitive immediacy you describe. Behind Pollock’s style stands, in part, a musical influence as well: jazz. He asks himself what jazz’s improvisational impulse and emotional force would look like if translated into art. It’s hard not to look at a piece like Autumn Rhythm and see Coltrane.
More, I was captivated by how we experience time in different modalities, which brings us to your point about how temporality manifests so differently in this movement than in the others. My sense is that if we change the scale of temporality, we change the experience of it, and therefore of ourselves. Our New Age friends might argue that time doesn’t exist, but nothing could be farther from the experienced truth. On the human scale (as opposed to a cosmological one) it of course exists. We feel it shortening our telomeres every second of every day. Also: just try to be a week late to work and explain your tardiness to your boss as an expression of time’s absence. Good luck securing your next job.
The reality is temporality exists in myriad registers and myriad scopes. How that occurs, how fiction might help us contemplate them, has drawn me in for decades, helped me imagine Absolute Away into existence.
CS: The third section is really intriguing. In a way, it reminded me of Slaughterhouse-Five, but unlike Billy Pilgrim, who becomes unstuck only within the events of his own life, Edie becomes unstuck to a much greater degree—in gender, in time, in memory, in questioning of self—all while she/he/they tumble through a sometimes beautiful, sometimes cruel world history. It was like she was released into the all-and-everything of this life (and beyond). In a way, it feels very liberating—yet I also wonder if this was the hardest part of the book to write?
LO: We share a deep and abiding love of Slaughterhouse-Five. So, before answering your question, I have to give a huge shoutout to your autofictional contemplation of it in the Bookmarked series. I remember how profoundly Vonnegut’s novel hit me when I picked it up outside my classes as an undergraduate—both in its ability to handle war at such a massive scale and in its ability to explore (to take us back to Derrida) existential exile. Billy Pilgrim is a wonderer in some mode of temporality that has exploded, a time refugee in a novel that uses that refugee status as an extended metaphor, I want to say, for memory’s warpages.
Until this moment it didn’t occur to me how much Billy Pilgrim’s ghost haunts Edie in that last movement. For me, Absolute Away is, at its deepest level, about the kinds of travel we usually haven’t been taught to think about, the kinds of refugees we become without fully realizing we’re becoming them—through time and space for sure, but also, as you say, through identities, genders, the process of aging, ideas, feelings, and so on—all the while relentlessly hurtling toward the biggest exile of them all: death.
Talk about time’s merciless facticity.
CS: On a personal note, you recently retired, correct? How’s that going? I know it’s something we all look forward to, but it’s still a major life event—and I’m wondering how it’s impacting your work. Some folks get lost in that empty calendar.
LO: Well, I think of this state I’ve found myself in less as retirement than relifement. I thoroughly adored my decades in the classroom. As every teacher knows, there’s something completely, sparkly magical about that arena when all the pistons are firing. I’m not such a fan, though, of soul-crushing institutional bureaucracy or the slow collapse of the humanities brought about by the McDonalization of universities and colleges.
I’m also keenly aware, speaking of, um, that thing we might call The Great Challenge to Immortality, that it’s as easy to get lost in a full calendar that’s been filled by others as it is to get lost in an empty one, that to keep things vibrant at an existential level it’s important to change things up on a regular basis. Thus my leaving the University of Utah and moving across country to the semi-rural northeast about two hours outside New York, where an effervescently different set of assumptions maintains about everything from politics and aesthetics to weather patterns.
So far the result has been wonderful—lots of writing, lots of reading, lots of hiking, lots of trips into the city, lots of re-seeing and re-thinking.
Make no mistake: I hate with a vengeance the idea of these shadows lengthening around me so heartlessly, yet re-exiling seems to shorten them just a little, recast them, at least for a while longer.
CS: What’s next?
LO: I’m working a novel titled (at least so far) An Inventory of Benevolent Butterflies. It’s about the so-called outsider artist, Henry Darger, who at night wrote something on the order of 30,000 pages of prose and created more than three-hundred paintings over the course of his long, brutal life while during the day working as a custodian at various hospitals in Chicago. He never showed one of those pages, one of those paintings, to another human being.
Henry Darger’s art and writing were only discovered as he lay on his deathbed by David Berglund, a fellow dweller in a boardinghouse that had seen better days. David had pitched in at the request of the landlord to clean out Henry’s tiny room crammed floor-to-ceiling with everything from stacks of newspapers to empty Pepto-Bismol bottles, shoes retrieved from garbage cans across the city, and piles of broken eyeglasses.
When David visited Henry in the hospital to tell him about his find and compliment Henry’s work for the first time, Henry responded with three words: “Too late now.”
How can one prevent oneself from beginning a novel after that?
In our unfixable culture of desperate narcissism, radical distraction, and absurd aesthetic stock markets that count quantity as proof of quality, I’m profoundly attracted to a consciousness (and all the narratological difficulties involved in capturing it) that doesn’t create for attention, for fourteen seconds of TikTok fame, in an attempt to put us back to sleep so we don’t have to think too hard about what’s really going on outside our window, but rather for the complex act itself that strives to inhabit a territory (sometimes terrifying, sometimes mysterious, sometimes revivifying) of contemplation, discovery, productive skepticism, something like empathy, and industrious private pleasure.
If we don’t want to strike out for that territory every morning, I really do wonder why any of us open our laptops and minds and hearts and think we should type the next sentence.
Curtis Smith’s novel The Magpie’s Return was cited by Kirkus as a top indie release of 2020. His current novel The Lost and the Blind is currently a Foreword Reviews 2023 INDIES Book of the Year Award Finalist. His next novel, Deaf Heaven, will be released in May 2025.
JMWW 