Recently, I went to Random House’s Toronto offices to interview Michael Turner about his latest fiction, a study of war and migration called 8×10. The book is made up of a series of short sections, guided by a grid pattern that prefaces each. The title, in the author’s own words, “is derived from a commercial portrait format (the 8×10 glossy) and is related to the structural layout of the book: the lives of eight people — and the lives they come in contact with — told over ten events, each.”
There is a detail about this discussion that should be revealed up front ⎯ I have had a fangirl crush on Turner (Company Town, Hard Core Logo) since he released The Pornographer’s Poem close to a decade ago. This was a fact that I desperately (and poorly) tried to conceal when I was invited to do the interview. In addition to this obvious source of anxiety, Turner did not remove his (rather handsome) overcoat the entire time we spent together on a (rather handsome) leather couch. People leaving their coats on indoors is one of those things that makes me neurotically uncomfortable. My resulting inner monologue was, well, neurotically uncomfortable. Thankfully, Turner seemed unaware.
At the end of an epic one-hour-and-forty-five minute discussion that covered everything from pro-sex feminism to the tyranny of yoga mat–pushing–big box bookstores, he was generous enough to say that I seemed like a confident, competent, and strong woman. And that I should get more physical exercise to deal with my stress. Honestly? I don’t think the interview did much to curb my crush.
Some people have referred to 8×10 as a puzzle. Do you feel when you’re writing that you’re putting together a puzzle? Are you a collector of sorts?
Composition and form — the form carries a kind of content. The book is a three-dimensional object, it’s suggestive of a certain kind of activity; you prepare yourself when you look at it. You look at a poem and you prepare yourself to fill in things.
I’m interested in how everyone’s touting the book as “experimental.”
Every book is experimental.
Well, it’s interesting to me because I actually found the book really accessible.
Well, thank you. Part of [the reason for] me not using names, places, races, and dates was to create that accessibility.
It’s almost as if the reader is in every piece of the story, because they’re not so distracted by detail. The readability is unbelievable. Were you deliberately against using specific names to create that feeling?
Names stop thought. Once you have a name for something, you can only think in a certain direction. There’s something to be said for holding back on the name. In The Pornographer’s Poem, the narrator was nameless, and to give him a name — what if I had called him Vito?
Names mean different things to different people; they change the whole tone of things. Vito, obviously —
When I say stops thought, I mean it stops abstract thinking, and it’s all about figuration. I want things open. The book is about things that are absent. If you were to go through it and find the squares [on the grid] that are blacked out, you’d find a prize. And no one’s done it.
It’s like an Easter egg.
No one’s done it! And for it to be done would be interesting, because the figure that emerges is the absent signifier. It is the thing that turns the book in a certain sense.
That’s a gem of knowledge to have.
It’s called 8×10. You expect eighty stories, but really there’s only sixty-four. It’s like people want their money back. It sounds disingenuous to say that what the book lacks is that which is not there, but I do think there is something to that. It’s like the white space around a poem, or the Ian Wallace tableau where he had a photo imprinted on a canvas with two monochromatic paint panels…If you’ve read The Pornographer’s Poem you remember the Bullshit Detector: it’s about where you’re coming from, where you’re going, what did you do to get there, and what will you do to get from there. It’s always about the back story.
The stereotypical Canadian narrative is always laid out for us, telling us the feelings we should have. At the end of every piece in 8×10, we’re left with our own feelings as a reader — it’s like you don’t give us enough to give us more. It’s a very generous thing for a writer to do, to trust readers enough to take something unique from the work. That sounds lofty, but it’s an honest reaction to this notion that you’re not going to give it all to us so we can figure it out for ourselves.
Yeah, you can either go with it, or you can be happy with an instance of pattern and recurrence. The portraiture is based on a pattern of behaviours as opposed to a visage, the face.
Do you feel that some readers will look at 8×10 as an experiment or something mathematical, whereas others will perceive it as telling all of our stories? A lot of reviews of the book have been very technical in terms of breaking down its structure, but I tend to be more of a romantic. Did you deliberately write it that way, to allow such varied approaches?
Well, everything I do is deliberate. But there are things that happen serendipitously. Or apart from my knowledge. Or at the expense of my knowledge. Like I said earlier, I’m interested in form, and like Beckett says, “form carries content.”…The toy, the prize in the book, is in the middle of the book, and it’s the middle of the title. The book is an attempt to reorient people but it’s really hard to do, because the narratives are in us. We’re born and we’re raised with them. The master narratives have atomized now. But grand theory and politics and party politics, it’s all breaking up, right? More than ever, I think people need to cling to those old ideas for comfort, so they’re always going to bring those narratives to something new until they can accept a work on its terms. They can go, “I’m having a feeling here. I’m having the feeling that maybe I’m supposed to have.” It’s a sensation, as opposed to something being over and done with. The modern novel is all about ending with suspension. It’s not about ending with —
Closure.
Closure. You know, therapy is destroying literature. It insists on closure. “I need closure! That man has to have his head cut off in order for me to feel better about my son or daughter being killed. Or that man has to have lethal injection in order for me to feel better. And I have to be there to see it.” We live in a violent, militaristic, vengeful world culture. It’s not just war, it’s pestilence. So if it’s not Afghanistan or Iraq, it’s SARS or H1N1. We’re kept in a state of fear. I’m trying to reflect the times somewhat. To comment on the times. Hence the beheadings.
I’ve always been intrigued by how you write about sexuality. There’s a simultaneous repulsion-attraction thing going on. It’s very arousing, but it’s not the stereotypical “this is a sexy scene.” There’s this filth aspect to the way you write about sex that doesn’t necessarily make it ugly, but it’s definitely not what we think of when we think of sexy.
Theories of desire are all based on attraction-repulsion: we are attracted to that which we are repulsed by. That dialectic. I do believe that pornography operates as a burlesque in the mainstream. There is no mainstream anymore. [Porn] is at times repulsive and repetitive, but it does mirror other things. It mirrors production. It mirrors social relations.
I actually think it’s a style of writing that appeals to women. From a feminist perspective, it’s so much more honest. It’s a more realistic portrayal of the way sex actually happens, instead of a floral or degrading way of presenting it. Your approach sits nicely in the middle: it’s honest, at times gross, but it’s beautiful. I don’t see a lot of literature that’s written that way. Is there anything you’ve read that you can appreciate on that level?
Well. About a year and a half ago I was invited to the Witte de With [Center for Contemporary Art] in Rotterdam to take part in a show called Bodypoliticx, which was about representations of sexuality. They asked me to have a live public discussion with Xaviera Hollander.
Wow.
And I was like, “Yes.” So I went and read The Happy Hooker, which I’d never read, but I’d read Xaviera!, the sequel, because my mom had it. I can’t open an old paperback now without being reminded of that book. The smell that comes off the old paperback — I mean, I feel it, down here. [Xaviera!] was a book that I would go to late at night. I liked the way that she wrote about sex the way she wrote about shopping, about running a business, about a travel schedule. It was all even. It’s that Dutch matter-of-factness. So I read The Happy Hooker, and after finishing it I thought, this would never be published now. She has sex with a boy. She has sex with a dog. She does S&M…It is a repulsive, repugnant book, but at the same time it is not. She is so honest. She is a very intelligent woman and she lets you know that. You could tell she loves sex, but she loves life, she loves everything she does.
Do you think there’s a sanitizing of our culture now that makes that attitude just not possible? You said a book like that would never be published today.
Well, it would be illegal to publish it. And immoral as well.
You’ve worked in a variety of different media over your life. Is there any experience you enjoyed more than others? Do you think of yourself as a writer? Do you think of yourself as a musician?
As a musician, I was writing songs. It’s always been about writing. It always begins with writing. Breaking it down by genre — “Michael Turner is a novelist”? I hate that. Just writer is fine by me.
Is there something that you haven’t done that you’d really like to do?
[Silence.]
Not like horseback riding, or something.
I’ve ridden on horses. [Pause.] No.
No? You’ve done it all?
No, I’m not saying that. I’m not saying I’ve done it all. I think my nature is a little more existential. I just go through life and get surprised.
You’re not very ambitious?
No. If I want to do something I’ll make a point of doing it, but that’s the point. If you ask me, “Do you want to go for lunch?” I’ll tell you, “Sure, let’s go here.” I’m not the kind of person who says, “I don’t know, where do you want to go?” I’ll have an idea. Okay. Okay. The first thing that comes to mind is just travel. Certain places I haven’t been to. I have to go to Shanghai because my father was born there; I’d like to go to South Africa one day. I’ve been everywhere else. But what would I like to do as a writer?
As a writer, yes.
I would probably like to have the kind of time I think I need in order to write poetry.
I read that you’re less interested in the prose novel now.
I’ve never been interested in the novel. I’ve always been at odds with the novel. I can and I can’t understand why it persists. Whatever. I try not to refer to my work by genre. I think Pornographer’s Poem is [considered] a novel only because there was confusion because it was called a poem. 8×10 has been reviewed as a novel, but nowhere on there does it say novel. I made sure of that. We’re calling it fiction. “But they’ll think it’s short stories.” No they won’t! It’s a fiction. I’m a writer, not an author.
What is validating for you?
My favourite thing is when my work is taught. If my work is added to a course and it’s discussed and I’m asked to come in, I’ll be there in a second. All I ever want to be is engaged in a conversation, and if my books are part of a conversation, that’s great. So when I’m writing, I’m writing my conversations with the literature. All of it. Whatever’s been written…I read what you read. I know what you read. I can tell what you read. And I can tell you about it on its terms. My arrogance is such that I can tell you why I think you like it. Bear in mind that what I do is based in some ways on what you read. And how your narratives are formed. Or reinforced.
All right.
One more thing!
Absolutely!
Just to go back to the Xaviera Hollander, Happy Hooker, Pornographer’s Poem: I will say that the narrator of The Pornographer’s Poem was a repressed kid, and I think that’s reflected through certain aspects of the writing. But Xavier Hollander was a literary woman in a time — in the early sixties, when she started to write the book — she was always a liberated woman. Her achievement to me is as significant as what Angela Davis did, or what Gloria Steinem did, or what Betty Friedan did, or Germaine Greer. She’s a pro-sex feminist, despite herself. Actually, what she is is a libertarian, and certainly a libertine, but really she’s a very conservative woman. Much like the most repulsive pornography she does create an effect, through her being in the world.
(Portrait by Judy Radul)
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