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Is there a certain kind of literature that doesn't get recognized in this country?
Well I'll tell you. I've been working in a very vague way over the last years on trying
to make a theory about different categories of literature. And I have come up with one
category that I think exists and it's what I call boy literature, boy writers. Edgar
Allan Poe is a boy writer. In the same way that Thomas Pynchon is a boy's writer. In
the same way that Borges was a boy writer. In the same way that the writer that everyone discovered
a few years ago and loved, Roberto Bolano, is a boy writer. And by boy writer I mean
this: someone who is so excited, takes such a sense of glee and delight in being clever,
in puzzles and games. You can feel these boys cackling in their rooms when they write a
good sentence. Just enjoying the whole adventure of it. And boy writers are the ones you read
and you understand why you love literature so much. They're at the very bottom of this
impulse, but there a lot of other kinds of writers, grown up writers, Tolstoy is
a grown up writer. Hawthorne is a grown up writer and we need those writers as well,
but without these cackling boys that remind us of how great it is to be alive, how great
it is to be invent things and make things up. There is no literature. So Poe is to me
is in that group.
Part of the game playing is in acknowledging that the writer is writing. And this goes
back to the whole realist or non realist conundrum. How do you depict what's actually going on
in life and in your own consciousness? Do you try to depict a reality with verisimilitude
or do you say forget it all like Poe did and one can find a good deal in your novels
as well. No quotation marks for who's saying what, it's all happening in your head. So
you get that in Poe as well. That we be as fantastic as possible. I draw attention to
the fact that the tale is impossible, the characters are impossible, they're laughably
so, but I'm dead serious when I'm talking about the issues of these great existential
questions. You know to play doesn't mean not to be serious.
Oh I agree with you completely, but you see the thing about Poe's imagination and what
makes it so complex is that yes there is the gothic side of him, but then there is the
arabesque and that is all about order, logic and pattern, and so we have the first
detective stories ever written were composed by Poe. And he invented the detective, the Frenchman,
August Dupin and think of the reverberation of those four stories in literature since
then- in the past 175 years. We're overwhelmed by crime stories and he made it up.
I mean it's astonishing in how much Doyle took from him. The whole attitude which arguably
is what makes Holmes an attractive character. That type of supersciliousness, and
"Oh it's so elementary," if only you could have a brilliant mind like my own. That all comes
from Dupin.
It comes from Dupin. It's directly. Well it's not plagiarism, it's just so heavily influenced
that it couldn't have existed without the Poe. Impossible. No Sherlock Holmes without Poe
I don't know. Poe might have said it's plagiarism.
No one ever talks about Poe and Thoreau in the same breath. They stand at opposite ends
of American thought, but that's the beauty of it. A drunk from the south, reactionary
in his politics, aristocratic in his bearings, spectral in his imagination. And a teetotaler
from the north, radical in his views, puritanical in his behavior, clear sighted in his work.
Poe was artifice in the gloom of midnight chambers. Thoreau was simplicity in the radiance
of the outdoors. In spite of their differences, they were born just 8 years apart which made
them almost exactly contemporaries. And they both died young, at 40 and 45. Together they
barely managed to live the life of a single old man and neither one left behind any children.
In all probability, Thoreau went to his grave a ***. Poe married his teenage cousin,
but whether that marriage was consummated before Virginia Clemm's death is still open
to question. Call them parallels. Call them coincidences, but these external factors are
less important than the inner truth of each man's life. In their own wildly idiosyncratic
ways, each took it upon themselves to reinvent America.