{"id":36083,"date":"2009-04-18T12:46:00","date_gmt":"2009-04-18T19:46:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/test-inside.ewu.edu\/willowspringsmagazine\/?p=36083"},"modified":"2025-02-18T09:38:47","modified_gmt":"2025-02-18T17:38:47","slug":"issue-65-a-conversation-with-charles-baxter","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/test-inside.ewu.edu\/willowspringsmagazine\/issue-65-a-conversation-with-charles-baxter\/","title":{"rendered":"Issue 65: A Conversation with Charles Baxter"},"content":{"rendered":"
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\"Issue<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Found in Willow Springs <\/em>65<\/a><\/strong><\/strong><\/p>\n\n<\/div><\/div>\n\n

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April 18, 2009<\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Jonathan Frey, Samuel Ligon, and Melina Rutter<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

A CONVERSATION WITH CHARLES BAXTER<\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/h2>\n\n<\/div><\/div>\n\n
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\"Charles<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Photo Credit:\u00a0Wall Street Journal<\/em><\/em><\/em><\/em><\/em><\/em><\/em><\/em><\/em><\/em><\/em><\/em><\/em><\/p>\n\n<\/div><\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

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There is a kind of consensus among professional and amateur reviewers <\/strong>that Charles Baxter is a writer\u2019s writer. Everyone says so. Baxter, who has called himself a \u201cformer poet,\u201d is the author of five novels and four collections, including Believers<\/em>, which he described to us as probably his best work. His novel The Feast of Love<\/em> was a finalist for the National Book Award in 2000, and he has received National Endowment for the Arts and Guggenheim Foundation grants.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In an interview with the Atlantic<\/em>, Baxter said, \u201cI feel as if I\u2019m in my family\u2019s house when I\u2019m writing short stories since I know where everything is. I know the logic of them so well.\u201d But he didn\u2019t publish a collection of stories until he was thirty-seven, in 1984. It was his first book of fiction and came on the heels of three failed attempts at novels. Baxter\u2019s career is marked by this kind of persistence and flexibility and by a generosity that is evident in his teaching.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Unlike many writers employed at universities, Charles Baxter doesn\u2019t complain about his day job. For many years he directed the MFA program at the University of Michigan, and he now teaches at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis, where he was born. He treats his teaching and mentoring of young writers as a natural extension of his vocation, and in the past twelve years he has published two exceptional books of essays on the craft of fiction, Burning Down the House<\/em> (1997) and The Art of Subtext<\/em> (2007). So the cumulative impact of Baxter\u2019s work is\u2014like that of the literary giants he cites: Stein, Brecht, Barthelme\u2014more than the work of a prolific writer. It is the work of an artist, teacher, and scholar. We met with him at the Spokane Club during Spokane\u2019s annual Get Lit!<\/em> literary festival.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Samuel Ligon<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

In your writing about fiction, you talk about postmodernism and about Barthelme and about being enamored of postmodernism\u2019s ethic or ideal. But you\u2019re not a postmodernist writer.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Charles Baxter<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

No, but I once wanted to be. I wanted to be one of the writers who flies way up there and looks down at people like little dots on the map. That\u2019s power: to think of people as little objects moving around on a chess board. That\u2019s what a lot of postmodern writers do, though it seems unfair to Barthelme to say so. The characters don\u2019t come to life; they have a kind of symbolic importance, but you don\u2019t view them completely as human beings. They\u2019re placeholders for certain ideas that the writer\u2019s moving around.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Jonathan Frey<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

How\u2019s that different from Kafka? You mentioned at your reading last night that you think Kafka is one of the greatest writers of the 20th century.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Baxter<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

In Kafka you don\u2019t even know what the system is<\/em>. The characters are trying to figure out what they\u2019re enmeshed in, and there\u2019s an overflow of feeling<\/em>\u2014mostly claustrophobia, but it can be mixed with other emotions too. Kafka is down here with us, looking around, trying. His characters are always asking, \u201cWhere are we? What is this that I\u2019ve gotten myself into?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

When I was trying to get my PhD diploma at Buffalo, I kept going to the registrar to find out if I was going to get my degree, the one on paper. And, though it\u2019s a trivial example, I thought: Kafka was right about this. Every time you go to an airport, it feels as if it\u2019s the Franz Kafka International Airport. You\u2019ve seen that video thing in the Onion<\/em>? The Franz Kafka International Airport? It\u2019s fantastically funny.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But that\u2019s fundamentally it: Kafka is always down here with us, and I don\u2019t get that feeling with some of Pynchon, and I don\u2019t get it with Gaddis or some of the others. They\u2019re snobs, saying, \u201cI\u2019m looking down at this, and I\u2019m telling you how all this works. Oh, and by the way, it\u2019s all chaos, or it\u2019s a system beyond our knowing. Did I forget to mention that?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Ligon<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

But you use some of the structural devices that came into prominence in the time of the postmodernists\u2014what somebody might call metafictional elements. I\u2019m thinking of the structural devices in The Soul Thief<\/em> and The Feast of Love<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Baxter<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Right, that\u2019s true. But in The Feast of Love<\/em>, it just disappears. It functions as a frame, but by the time you\u2019re on page thirty, it\u2019s gone. I thought somebody opening that book and starting to read and seeing that there were these voices coming at them would say, \u201cWhere are these voices coming from? Who\u2019s listening to these voices?\u201d In The Decameron<\/em> you have a similar structure of people telling each other stories, hiding from the plague. In The Canterbury Tales<\/em>, they\u2019re all on their way to Canterbury, so they\u2019re telling each other stories. And I thought, I can\u2019t just have these voices coming from out of nowhere. I have to have a reason for it. So there\u2019s a guy with insomnia, he can\u2019t sleep, he goes out to a city park in the middle of the night. And there\u2019s somebody else there who\u2019s got love trouble and can\u2019t sleep, so he says, \u201cAll right, I\u2019ll tell you my story.\u201d And the insomniac writes it down, and that\u2019s where the voices come from.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Frey<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

And the fact that the insomniac\u2019s name is Charlie Baxter is just play?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Baxter<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Yeah, it\u2019s play. But we\u2019re all used to that now. Philip Roth did it. It\u2019s something we can play around with. It\u2019s something we can do, and most readers won\u2019t be shocked by it. Naive readers won\u2019t like it. But it\u2019s not all that new, this device; it\u2019s as old as the hills.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Part II of Don Quixote begins<\/em> with the false Quixote coming in. The first part of Don Quixote<\/em> was such a success that another writer wrote The Further Adventures of Don Quixote<\/em>, and, of course, Cervantes was outraged. So the false Quixote runs into the true Quixote, and so, to some degree, metafictional devices are as old as the novel. Writers never quite get over the pleasure of reminding their readers that it\u2019s made up. That there\u2019s an author behind it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Frey<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Is that related to Brecht? Or is it different?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Baxter<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Brecht\u2019s idea was that we spend so much time in capitalism, being taken in by the systems of commerce\u2014newspapers, commercials, political advertisements\u2014that it\u2019s one of the tasks of art, to wake us up. To remind us that people are trying to sell us things. All the time. So, the alienation technique\u2014as it\u2019s called in Brecht\u2019s term\u2014is to make you aware of the techniques people are using to get you to think or do something in a certain way. My novel does keep reminding you that this is a novel. You are going to fall asleep into it. You are going to dream. And then I\u2019m going to wake you up.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I think that we\u2019re all conscious of the fact that when we enter a novel, we are going into a kind of dream, like Alice at the beginning of Alice in Wonderland<\/em> reading a book and then getting drowsy and then going down the rabbit hole. Reading is like going down the rabbit hole.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A French critic said to me, \u201cYou Americans fall asleep more easily into fiction than we do.\u201d There\u2019s more of a rationalist tradition in France, he was saying, and they have a harder time falling into the dream of fiction than Americans do. I think his argument was that Americans fall into a dream world fairly easily.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Ligon<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

I hear what you\u2019re saying about the dream, but it\u2019s not dream logic that governs a novel. So how is that different? What kind of a dream is it?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Baxter<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

It\u2019s half-waking. When you\u2019re reading a book, these characters are in the scene and they\u2019re talking to each other, and you\u2019re reading it, and reconstructing something in your head in a twilight way. And if I write, \u201cShe walked in wearing a blue blouse, and a white skirt, and she had a red pin in her hair. And she turned to the right\u2026,\u201d you\u2019re reconstructing this. You\u2019re imagining it. You are reimagining it, and it\u2019s not a dream, but you\u2019re participating in the story, aren\u2019t you?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Jane Smiley and I had an argument about this a few years ago in Houston. I was reading a paper about how faces are represented in fiction, and she raised her hand and said, \u201cI don\u2019t think you see anything when you read a book.\u201d And I said, \u201cNo, I\u2019m sorry. I do.\u201d You say, \u201cA woman wearing a blue blouse and a white skirt, wearing running shoes, came into the room,\u201d I\u2019m going to see her with\u2026a frown on her face. I\u2019m going to reconstruct her.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Ligon<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Unlike Barthelme\u2019s metafiction\u2014like \u201cThe School\u201d\u2014yours is character-driven. I don\u2019t think \u201cThe School\u201d is a character-driven story. Much of his fiction asks us to reconsider how fiction works. What does drive \u201cThe School\u201d? What is \u201cThe School\u201d interested in?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Baxter<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

What drives a lot of Barthelme\u2019s stories is the way that we\u2019re caught in a world of representations. Everywhere you\u2019re surrounded by representations that are taking us over. It\u2019s like product placement has entered our lives. So Barthelme\u2019s characters are always asking, \u201cWhat am I doing here? What am I doing in this school? What am I doing in this house?\u201d Barthelme\u2019s always asking, \u201cHow did I end up here? Why am I in this world? Why am I wearing this Campbell\u2019s Soup can illustration on my necktie?\u201d Why?<\/em> Because the representation of the soup can is going on in this world, and I guess it\u2019s on my necktie.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What drives Barthelme is ideas\u2014ideas and existential unhappiness. That\u2019s what motivates Barthelme\u2019s characters. They\u2019re ill suited to live in the world. Barthelme always felt as if he wasn\u2019t suited to life in the world. Not this world. That particular sadness animates his stories.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Melina Rutter<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

If you\u2019re not a postmodernist, where do ideas fit into the process? For instance, in First Light<\/em>, you use the ideas of astrophysics, and I\u2019m wondering if you made a conscious decision to have those ideas inform, in some ways, the structure of the novel. Or if that just arose.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Baxter<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

It arose. Because the character I first imagined was Dorsey; I saw her pasting stars\u2014little adhesive stars\u2014on the ceiling of her bedroom. And I thought, Oh, she\u2019s going to grow up to be an astrophysicist. Then I thought, That\u2019s too bad for me. I don\u2019t know anything about astrophysics. I had to go into research mode to find out about that. And then because that was what she was doing and researching, it made narrative sense for the book to go backwards in time. I could get this whole historical, cultural level into the book having to do with the atom bomb. In an odd way, physics was the grounding of that book and took you into a realm that was somewhat away from the family structure of Hugh and Dorsey together. It opened it up for me.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Rutter<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

I felt oriented when I was reading it, but I would think that there\u2019s a risk involved with including such content.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Baxter<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Fiction readers want to find out about stuff. You tell them, as Philip Roth did, how gloves are made, leather gloves. People love to find those things out. If you tell them something about the nature of astrophysics or even certain kinds of fireworks, readers love that. The factual basis has always been part of the novel: how you do something, where something came from. Nicholson Baker\u2019s first novel, The Mezzanine<\/em>, is full of this kind of material, and I wanted to give First Light<\/em> a doubled kind of perspective.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But, at the same time, it\u2019s a very emotional novel. The material facts, I hope, balance out the emotion, particularly Hugh\u2019s idea of being lost in his own light. Dorsey has found her own light, but Hugh is married and has children. He\u2019s one of these guys who was a jock in high school and was popular with girls, and then he marries and settles down, and he doesn\u2019t know why this life hasn\u2019t been as good for him as it was in high school. Once he becomes an adult, it\u2019s a mystery. Dorsey had an unhappy life in high school. She\u2019s one of those smart girls who frightens everybody, but she grows into her life, and she\u2019s okay with it. For me, it\u2019s very emotional. It\u2019s soaked in feeling.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Frey<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Why are so many of your books about love?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Baxter<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

For some people, it\u2019s just not an important subject. It\u2019s something that they take for granted, and it\u2019s something that they can get past. It has not been something that I have ever been able to take for granted. My father died when I was a baby. My mother was unstable. I always knew where the next meal was coming from, but I developed what therapists call hypervigilance. The question of whom I would love and who would love me became almost a matter of life and death for me. Almost by necessity, given the nature of my early life, I got attuned, I got obsessed by it. When The Feast of Love<\/em> came out, I made statements of this sort, and some readers said, \u201cBut this is not mature love in your novel.\u201d Well, of course it isn\u2019t. It\u2019s not stable. The kind of love that\u2019s portrayed in that book has to do with infatuation and instability, and that\u2019s the reflection of somebody who has never found that landscape to be particularly stable.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Rutter<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Brecht\u2019s idea of the destruction of the fourth wall is theater theory. Can you talk about how theater has influenced the ways you think about writing and literary theory?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Baxter<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

One of the reasons theater has come into my thinking to such a degree is that I noticed that in the stories I was getting in my workshop, and actually, in some of the fiction written by contemporaries of mine, the stories are not particularly dramatic. As if drama were some kind of embarrassment. We can all talk about character; we can talk about setting; we can talk about dialogue; but if you begin to say, \u201cWell this isn\u2019t very dramatic,\u201d it\u2019s as if you farted, and you\u2019ve said absolutely the wrong thing. But I think that we have to get back to the idea that, if people are going to read these books and stories, we have to consider the dramatic elements that underpin the great books. I noticed, some years ago, when my students at the University of Michigan were taking corollary classes, the ones who were taking acting classes often seemed to improve their writing by having gone through the techniques of learning characterization, and scene-building, and the structure of the play. So I began to read the work of my students and think, You know, this is under-staged. We don\u2019t know where these bodies are in space. We don\u2019t know whether they\u2019re turning to or away from each other. Often it\u2019s not even notated whether these people are listening to each other, whether they\u2019re looking at each other, what they\u2019re doing with their hands.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Now, it\u2019s true you can overdirect. I know of one writer, a friend of mine who\u2019s a very fastidious writer, but when you read her work, you\u2019re getting too much of the line readings, and you\u2019re getting too much of the tiny details. And you think, C\u2019mon, get on with the story.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Focusing on that kind of minute detail only works when the psychological atmosphere gets really congested. If the couple is about to break up with each other and they\u2019re meeting for coffee, everything they do becomes important. Like Hemingway\u2019s \u201cHills Like White Elephants.\u201d He\u2019s trying to convince her to have an abortion, and she hates the way he\u2019s doing that. So Hemingway pays attention to everything they do in that scene. I mean, you could put it right on stage. I don\u2019t think that\u2019s overdirected because the emotions are so thick. If they were just talking about whether they were going to get on the train or not, it\u2019d be unbearable. There has to be something big in the scene, emotionally, for that kind of thing to work.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Ligon<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The kind of dramatic action you\u2019re talking about, that you see missing, is that plot?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Baxter<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Yeah, it\u2019s plot, and it\u2019s getting a character out there performing an action that may result in bad outcomes. I don\u2019t know about you, but I read fiction because I want to see bad stuff happening; I can\u2019t get enough of it. I want to see people misbehaving and getting themselves into real trouble, serious trouble. That\u2019s what I go to fiction for. That and the sentences and the sense that I\u2019m learning something about people.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Rutter<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Is the antagonist that you see missing always taking the form of a person, a villain?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Baxter<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Oh, sure. You have an antagonist in you. I have one in me. We\u2019re all self-divided. The antagonist within ourselves is that part of us that wants to indulge in an impulse of some kind that leads to various addictive behaviors. The antagonist can be located inside the self very nicely. I like it when it\u2019s externalized, but it doesn\u2019t have to be. When it\u2019s externalized, it\u2019s almost always easier to write because then the dramatic materials take over and you, the writer, don\u2019t have to explain everything. And of course, an antagonist can be a force in the world.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Rutter<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Like the capitalist system?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Baxter<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Yeah, or fascism. Or militarism. Or environmentalism.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Greed is probably one of the most powerful emotions. I think it\u2019s more powerful than lust, I really do. It makes lust look kind of innocent. They\u2019re related, but lust dies and greed goes on until\u2026forever it seems.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Ligon<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

In Burning Down the House<\/em>, you say that you\u2019re nostalgic, as a writer, for mindful villainy. What does that mean?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Baxter<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

In Henry James\u2019s The Wings of the Dove<\/em>, there are two characters who are down on their luck and poor. Over here there\u2019s a rich, beautiful young woman who\u2019s dying, and the poor woman says to her boyfriend, \u201cI know what you should do. You\u2019re handsome; you should go over there, and you should woo her and get her money.\u201d That\u2019s mindful villainy. In a way it\u2019s rational, and people are deliberately making choices that they know are not quite moral. Those sorts of situations have an overtone of melodrama to them, but they\u2019re interesting because they reveal a lot about the way we behave.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In Elizabeth Bowen\u2019s The Death of the Heart<\/em>, there\u2019s a character who reads her stepdaughter\u2019s diary, and thinks, I know I shouldn\u2019t be doing this, but nothing\u2019s going to stop me because I want to know what she\u2019s thinking. Oh Jesus! Look what she\u2019s thinking. Small things like that. You know, it\u2019s often the small things: We violate somebody\u2019s privacy. It\u2019s really revelatory. You don\u2019t have to run somebody over in the street to practice mindful villainy. It\u2019s the small items that accumulate that are really interesting for the fiction writer.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

We see less of it now, and I think there are two reasons. We have a form of self-righteousness that results in people thinking, Oh, I didn\u2019t really do that. Or, The outcome was good, so I really didn\u2019t do anything wrong. After all, if we tortured people and got information out of them to prevent more violence against us, it wasn\u2019t really wrong, was it? And I think the other reason is that young people going through writing programs right now are largely decent people who are kind of bookish, and very observant. And so, we\u2019re not used to action. We\u2019re used to observing. It\u2019s hard to get these mindful actors into our fiction because many of us are not like that.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This also goes to the question of plot. When you\u2019re young, you don\u2019t like the idea of plot because it seems to lead toward something that becomes inevitable after a while, and nobody likes the idea of inevitability when they\u2019re young. You like the idea of everything being open to possibilities. It\u2019s that progressive idea too: that things can always change. After a while you realize things can\u2019t always change.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Frey<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

So, do we like inevitability more when we\u2019re older?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Baxter<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

You come to accept it. You don\u2019t like it. Trust me, you don\u2019t like it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Ligon<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

But we do like it in story. You\u2019ve said that the sudden recognition of inevitability makes a piece beautiful.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Baxter<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Yeah, but you don\u2019t want the inevitability to be built into it and completely predictable. Sam Shepard said about his plays that what he really was striving for was a combination of surprise and inevitability, that the best plots bring you to that particular combination. You think, What a surprise! I should have seen it coming.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Ligon<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

O\u2019Connor talked about that inevitability with \u201cGood Country People.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Baxter<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Her stories are interesting in that way. In \u201cA Good Man is Hard to Find,\u201d the story starts out when the grandmother says, \u201cLook here in the paper. It says the Misfit has got himself loose.\u201d Then the family gets in the car, and they\u2019re headed out on the trip. And where are they? They\u2019re near Toombsboro. They\u2019re near Toombs<\/em>boro! You can\u2019t say you weren\u2019t warned. Toombsboro, and the Misfit drives up in a hearse.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

If you read all of Flannery O\u2019Connor\u2019s stories in a row, some of them can look as if\u2026.I mean, their plots are great. Somebody\u2019s always being run over by a tractor, or having their legs stolen, or drowning in a river, or hanging themselves from a rafter in the attic. But after a while some of it does feel\u2026.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Ligon<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Manipulated?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Baxter<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

I\u2019m not saying.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Ligon<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

You wrote in Burning Down the House<\/em> that the truth writers are after can be dramatic only if it has been forgotten first. That the story, in other words, pulls something contradictory and concealed out of its hiding place. How does forgetting or concealment create drama or drive fiction?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Baxter<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Suppose Grandma is dying, and you have a scene in which she\u2019s in bed and she\u2019s dying. We have all read scenes like this. When she\u2019s dying, certain events of a sort are happening to her, but it\u2019s not dramatic until you bring up something important. So, in Katherine Anne Porter\u2019s \u201cThe Jilting of Granny Weatherall,\u201d Grandma is dying, but actually what\u2019s happening as she dies is that these layers are being peeled back. Suddenly she\u2019s four years old again, and it\u2019s a four-year-old who\u2019s lying in bed, dying. She never stopped being the four-year-old she once was. She never stopped being the sixteen-year-old she once was. Those things are still inside of her. We all forget that, and Katherine Anne Porter reminds us, so that scene becomes interesting and dramatic. We\u2019re all, to some degree, writing about things that are familiar to our readers, and what you have to do is find the off-kilter detail that makes it come alive again, the part that nobody else had noticed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Frey<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

This kind of critical approach\u2014talking about antagonists and plot and drama like you do in Burning Down the House<\/em> and The Art of Subtext<\/em>\u2014this isn\u2019t the way we normally hear contemporary writers and critics talk about writing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Baxter<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

What we\u2019re talking about this morning are critical terms that academics are not especially interested in using. This is formalist criticism, and they would all say the discipline has gone past that.
In formalist criticism, you\u2019re looking at a piece of fiction, and you\u2019re asking what elements it has in it formally: how it\u2019s shaped, how it\u2019s put together, how that shaping\u2014that form\u2014contains the subject matter. So: form and subject matter and the way that they define each other. To a degree, as a writing teacher, I\u2019m a formalist. I\u2019ll ask, \u201cHow is this story shaped? To what degree is it made out of scenes, expository material, transitions? What seems to be its central trajectory? What are the subplots?\u201d I mean, that\u2019s all formalist.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Now<\/em>, mostly, our cultural studies are in the wake of Foucault and French theory, but even that\u2019s beginning to fade from the scene. The focus there\u2014I can\u2019t summarize Foucault\u2014but the focus there is how literature is a form of cultural production that mirrors or duplicates power relationships, how literature is an arm of power that has been deployed in culture.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Frey<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Where does formalist thinking fit into the writing process?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Baxter<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

You can\u2019t think about these matters when you\u2019re putting your draft together.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Ligon<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

You\u2019ve said that, in the context of initial composition, the act of writing anything can be as much consent as creation. It sounds like you\u2019re talking about mystery there. What does one consent to?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Baxter<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The original act of writing, sitting down and trying to get a story or some characters on the page, is still to me a complete mystery. How it\u2019s done. How I do it. How anybody else does it. The more I write, the more I think that everything you\u2019ve done up to the point that you\u2019re writing isn\u2019t much help. You always start out in the dark. When you sit down and you start writing, you agree with yourself that you\u2019re going to make mistakes, that you\u2019re going to blunder your way through the damn thing, and you\u2019re just going to give yourself a lot of permission to get it done any way you possibly can. The critical skills that you have, that all comes later.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

When I\u2019m writing I\u2019m not thinking about anything. When I\u2019m writing a first draft particularly, I\u2019m not thinking anything but, Who are these people? What are they saying? What do they want? Where are they going? I don\u2019t even ask, Why are they interesting to me? I just write them. I have a friend who read two of my recent stories and said, \u201cWhy are you writing about these unpleasant people?\u201d And I said to him, \u201cBecause they interest me. I can\u2019t help it who I\u2019m interested in. If I\u2019m interested in scumbags, those are the people I have to write about. I\u2019m sorry if you don\u2019t like it.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Frey<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

It seems that young writers can become enamored of the initial creation, the mystery, that sort of unnamable aspect that you\u2019re getting at. They\u2019re enamored of that, and so they turn around and eschew formalism later in the process.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Baxter<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

When you\u2019re a young writer and it\u2019s going well in your first draft, it feels sacred; it feels holy; it feels like something that shouldn\u2019t be interfered with. It\u2019s hard to break through that and say, \u201cYes, I was in the zone, but I also made mistakes. So the first draft is not as effective, not as pointed, not as clear as it should be. I need to go back and fix it.\u201d To the degree that young writers don\u2019t like revision, it\u2019s because that initial state feels so wonderful, as if nothing could possibly be wrong in the way it was coming out, given the way you felt about it. Which is why it\u2019s a good idea to put it in the refrigerator, and then go back in a few days or weeks. You have to get away from the spell you cast over yourself.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

You get some distance on it. Then if you go back and it\u2019s still casting the same spell over you, that\u2019s a good sign. You can start to muck around with it, but you have to pay attention to those moments where you think, You know, I\u2019m a little bored. This scene is a little boring. I didn\u2019t think it was boring when I first wrote it, but it seems boring now. That\u2019s when it\u2019s time to go to work.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Ligon<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

In Burning Down the House<\/em>, you write that \u201cWhen writers over-parent their characters, they understand them too quickly. Such characters aren\u2019t contradictory or misfitted. The writer has decided what her story is about too early.\u201d Why is it a problem to understand characters too quickly, to decide what a story is about too early?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Baxter<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

It makes the story over-determined and the character over- determined. Before very long, as a reader, you think, I know what this character\u2019s going to do. It flattens the characters. You say, \u201cOh, Jaime, she\u2019s the quiet one. She\u2019s the one who always worries things.\u201d So in the story all she does is sit in the corner and worry things. That\u2019s understanding her too fast. It lessens the interest in the story. It\u2019s not just over-parenting, it\u2019s bad parenting, because it stereotypes your own children and turns them into flat characters.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Ligon<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

And what about understanding a story too early? Do you ever understand stories?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Baxter<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

We have undergraduates all the time who sit down and write stories, and they attempt to prove that this fraternity boy, Jake, is a cheap bastard who really doesn\u2019t care about women. The story\u2019s there to prove that point. Most writers go through a stage in which they write stories that are point-making. One of the best things to ever happen to me was that I gave one of my stories to a poet I know, and she drew an arrow to the opening paragraph, and said, \u201cToo point-making.\u201d Often you don\u2019t see it when you\u2019re doing it yourself.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Regarding my own stories, I don\u2019t always understand them. Sometimes I do. Sometimes I think, Well, this is about that particular subject, that particular trouble. But I don\u2019t think so until I\u2019m halfway or three quarters through the story. Sometimes I\u2019ll come to the end of the story and think, What the fuck is that about? I don\u2019t mind that feeling.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Frey<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

If formalism is beneficial not in initial drafting but revision, is Foucault valuable to writers ever?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Baxter<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

I think so. Foucault was always asking, \u201cWho has the power here? How did he or she get it? How is he or she using it? And what bigger things does that person tell us about power in the culture?\u201d The easy way to summarize this is by saying, \u201cDo you think George W. Bush just happened to be this guy who was elected president, or was George W. Bush a symptom of something?\u201d If we say George W. Bush was a symptom of something, then that sort of sends you in the direction of Foucault, who will say, \u201cYes, of course he was a symptom of something, and we need to talk about what. What is he a symptom of?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Ligon<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

What was he a symptom of?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Baxter<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Oh, let\u2019s not go there. [Laughs.] For me they were the years of nightmare, his presidency. I was in France when he was elected and somebody interviewed me and said, \u201cOh, it makes no difference who the president of your country is.\u201d And I said, \u201cNo, you\u2019re wrong. This is a catastrophe.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Rutter<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

How do you reconcile the reality of an individual being caught in a power structure with your idea of a victim narrative, where characters never take responsibility for anything?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Baxter<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

It\u2019s irreconcilable. You can\u2019t. I\u2019m saying two contradictory things at once. And both of them are true, I believe. We\u2019re individuals; we have agency; we can change things. That\u2019s a politically progressive idea: Everybody can do something. Barthelme said, \u201cThere are always paths, if you can find them, there is always something to do.\u201d I love that. I believe it\u2019s true. I also believe that we are inside a vast system, and the system has tremendous power over us.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I went to the Republican convention in St. Paul last summer, and if you\u2019ve never seen the machinery of the state\u2014and I don\u2019t mean the state of Minnesota, I mean \u201cThe State\u201d\u2014guys in riot gear and tear gas canisters and trucks. Guys on horseback with revolvers. I\u2019m not naive, but I\u2019d never seen it. I\u2019d never seen guys look at me like that. It\u2019s a reminder that you\u2019re a speck of dust to them, a dangerous speck of dust, and they want to put you in your place\u2014the dustbin.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I think all of us feel both things at one time or the other. Sometimes we think, This whole thing is too fucking big for me. There\u2019s nothing I can do about it. At other times, we think, I\u2019m going out there. I mean, politically, I\u2019m going to do this. I can<\/em> do this; I can do that. I believe that I am able to shape my life.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Going back to the victim narrative, certain political or economic systems are more likely to breed that narrative. Totalitarian systems do it. The great fiction of the Soviet era is largely about people caught up in the Soviet system. To the degree that state power makes itself obviously felt or corporate power makes itself felt, the victim narrative becomes visible. Catch-22<\/em> is a great novel of being caught up in a military command structure during war. Heller\u2019s next novel, also a great novel, Something Happened<\/em>, is about being caught up in a corporate structure. People are paying a lot of attention to Bola\u00f1o right now because he seems to be interested in the kinds of political structures that were arising in South America.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Rutter<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Do you view your writing as a political act?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Baxter<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Sometimes. Shadow Play<\/em> was a very political book. The novella Believers<\/em> is political. There are parts of Saul and Patsy that I believe are political in the sense that the book, in its second half, is about the problem of who will take care of the kids who are under-parented, whom no one has taken care of. What\u2019s going to happen to these kids? That book is also about the political nature of grieving, and how important it is to grieve and not just react with violence. I thought that one of the things that happened to this country after 9\/11 was that we went into attack mode without grieving first. That made its way into Saul and Patsy<\/em>. I think that my work is political, maybe by implication, if not directly.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Frey<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Last night you mentioned that your first three attempted novels were conceptual\u2014avant-garde, you said\u2014and that that was the problem. You said that the experiments of the avant-garde were fine at the time but they\u2019re over now. So is that whole movement dead, or is there space for that kind of experimentation?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Baxter<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

There\u2019s a book by a critic named Paul Mann, called Theory-death of the Avant-garde<\/em>. His argument is that the avant-garde has suffered a theory death, that every time people talk about experiments now, they\u2019re basically talking about modernist revival. The kinds of experiments that they do are no longer experiments. These experiments have already been done. Some of them have succeeded, others haven\u2019t. This isn\u2019t to say that there isn\u2019t something new that you can do with a novel. There is always something new you can do. But that particular idea of the avant-garde, stretching say, from 1900, before the first world war, to Samuel Beckett and the sort of allied experiments and abstractionism in painting, I think that\u2019s over. I think we\u2019re in a post-avant-garde era. I don\u2019t think you can do something to a text conceptually that somebody hasn\u2019t already done.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Frey<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

So experimentation is sort of like a closed system that happened for a while and now it\u2019s\u2026.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Baxter<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

So you\u2019re Gertrude Stein, and it\u2019s around 1914 and you\u2019re interested in what happens if you free sequence structures from narrative necessity and some of the words from their word-locks. You sit down and you write Tender Buttons<\/em>. And people are shocked. Actually, you can go into an undergraduate class today with Tender Buttons<\/em> and the kids will still be shocked. That\u2019s kind of great. And you can take William S. Burroughs\u2019s Naked Lunch<\/em> into an undergraduate class, and they\u2019ll get upset. You can take Lolita<\/em> in, and they\u2019ll be upset.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But for those of us who have sort of tried to keep track of what\u2019s happened, somebody comes along and says, \u201cI\u2019m going to write something experimental,\u201d and it looks like Gertrude Stein. I just think that\u2019s like redecorating this room in the form of art deco and saying, \u201cThis is contemporary.\u201d It\u2019s not contemporary; it\u2019s art deco. So, I just don\u2019t think that the forces that gave the avant-garde its particular energy, aesthetically, are there. And it\u2019s partly of the nature of capitalism to absorb everything you can think of and use it to its own purposes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Ligon<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

What forces were driving the avant-garde?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Baxter<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

In the early part of the century it had everything to do with the freeing of words from sequence structures and what we took to be their obligations to meaning, in the same way that figurative painting gave way to non-figurative painting ideas of what the picture plane is. It also had to do with freeing narratives from actions and events.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The last section of Tender Buttons<\/em> begins, \u201cAct so that there is no use in a center.\u201d And then it goes off into this giant coda. Stein concludes that with \u201call of this makes a magnificent asparagus, and also a fountain.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cTo know to know to love her so. Four saints prepare for saints. It makes it well fish. Four saints, it makes it well fish. Four saints prepare for saints it makes it well well fish it makes it well fish prepare for saints. In narrative prepare for saints. Prepare for saints.\u201d Which is from Four Saints in Three Acts<\/em>. It\u2019s great. It\u2019s music, and it has nothing to do with
fish. Well, maybe it does.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Ligon<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

And it has nothing to do with rational meaning?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Baxter<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

No, it comes to you in some other way. The last time I taught Four Saints in Three Acts<\/em>, I had two kids in the class who were in a relationship, and they were painting the apartment they lived in. Over the weekend, he would sit on the floor reading Four Saints in Three Acts<\/em> to her while she was painting, and then she got tired and she would sit on the floor and read Four Saints<\/em> to him. It\u2019s like the radio going in the background. It\u2019s really nice to have words used like that. It\u2019s a release from \u201cJohn came into the room pointing a gun at Maria.\u201d You get tired of shit like that. You want to hear something like Gertrude Stein. \u201cFor a long time being one being living, he was trying to be certain whether he had been wrong in doing what he was doing. And when he couldn\u2019t\u201d\u2014this is Matisse, \u201cThe Portrait of Matisse\u201d\u2014\u201cand when he could not come to be certain that he was wrong in doing what he was doing, when he could not absolutely come to be certain that he was wrong in doing what he was doing, then he knew he was a great one. And he certainly was a great one.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I love it. I just love it. But she did it. She did it and it\u2019s kind of unreproduceable.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Ligon<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Is she saying to release yourself from the rational coating of the language?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Baxter<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Yes. Yes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Ligon<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

And one can still do that\u2026.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Baxter<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

But it\u2019s not an experiment anymore. We\u2019ve got it. It\u2019s ours. You can do anything with it that you want to. Gertrude Stein has started to be incorporated the way that all the other great writers of the past have been incorporated. I used a lot of Stein in The Soul Thief<\/em>, and I used her in that story called \u201cWinter Journey.\u201d The ending is right out of Stein. I couldn\u2019t go on my whole life writing like that. But I\u2019m so glad she happened. She\u2019s like this crazy aunt who gives you things.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Rutter<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

How do your teaching and writing inform each other?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Baxter<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

I think they feed into each other. I don\u2019t think that I would teach books in the way that I do if I hadn\u2019t also written them and thought about how they\u2019re put together. I don\u2019t think I would be able to go into a workshop and help my students critique each other\u2019s manuscripts if I hadn\u2019t also written and thought about the problems they\u2019re up against. I don\u2019t know that I could become a full-time writer anymore. I once thought that was all I wanted to do, but I like going into classes. I like talking about books. I like teaching workshops because I think they\u2019re worthwhile. I know there\u2019s a line of thought that says we\u2019ve all crippled ourselves by doing all this teaching, that we should have written many more books than we have. But I don\u2019t think productivity is a value in and of itself. I just don\u2019t. In America, in capitalism, you often think, the more the better. I don\u2019t think so. I never did.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Rutter<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

So, is this approach to the writing life an act of dissent? A response to the capitalist culture?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Baxter<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

It can be. But it\u2019s not the solution.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It\u2019s not a solution, but I\u2019m not sure art can ever be a solution. It\u2019s a place where you go for what you can\u2019t get elsewhere. But I don\u2019t think art will save us. Art will not save us from capitalism, or, really, from anything. I\u2019m sorry, but it\u2019s true.<\/p>\n\n

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There is a kind of consensus among professional and amateur reviewers that Charles Baxter is a writer\u2019s writer. Everyone says so. Baxter, who has called himself a \u201cformer poet,\u201d is the author of five novels and four collections, including Believers, which he described to us as probably his best work. His novel The Feast of Love was a finalist … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":9086,"featured_media":2327,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"wpo365_audiences":[],"wpo365_private":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-36083","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-interviews"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/test-inside.ewu.edu\/willowspringsmagazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36083"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/test-inside.ewu.edu\/willowspringsmagazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/test-inside.ewu.edu\/willowspringsmagazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/test-inside.ewu.edu\/willowspringsmagazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/9086"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/test-inside.ewu.edu\/willowspringsmagazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=36083"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/test-inside.ewu.edu\/willowspringsmagazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36083\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":36744,"href":"https:\/\/test-inside.ewu.edu\/willowspringsmagazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36083\/revisions\/36744"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/test-inside.ewu.edu\/willowspringsmagazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2327"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/test-inside.ewu.edu\/willowspringsmagazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=36083"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/test-inside.ewu.edu\/willowspringsmagazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=36083"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/test-inside.ewu.edu\/willowspringsmagazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=36083"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}