Interview #2: Jen Craig

On language viscosity, generalizing claims, and apparently singular utterances.

In Jen Craig’s Panthers and the Museum of Fire, a woman walks from Glebe to a central Sydney café to return the manuscript of an estranged childhood friend who has recently died. Over the course of the walk, she considers her past and the mysteriously rejuvenating effect the manuscript has had on her own writing.

This description does no justice to the rangy intellectual freedom and aesthetic vitality of Craig’s novel. I read Panthers over the course of two days earlier this year, increasingly bound by its filaments of time, language, and observation. Its form —a series of digressive memory-structures — suggests that the impossibilities of writing and the impossibilities of life sometimes mirror one another, and other times enable their own unexpected reversals.

Craig emailed with me from Sydney, where she teaches.

DI: Panthers shows an interest in or concern with the wholeness of persons, or at least the wholeness we presume in others and often doubt in ourselves. Jen talks about wholeness in relation to her past anorexia (that version of herself being "complete and inviolable"), and elsewhere remembers imagining Sarah's sister, Pamela, as an already-whole person, in a way she (girlish and unfixed or unplaced) could never be.

JC: I’m thinking that the narrator’s preoccupation with the relative wholeness of people in Panthers and the Museum of Fire has a lot to do with the way that I write, and therefore how I think, which as I have learned to accept over the years is rarely straight or to the point (as others see it at least), even though in my own mind it will always be tied fast to that point — a point or sense of wholeness that just needs the right-feeling form for others to get what I’m saying. But the greatest slog of writing for me is the drawn out work of finding that form. Most days that I write I begin at the top of the page, and there is usually only one page of writing — one very long, seemingly endless page (although occasionally there are two). Always beginning at the top of the page — always beginning yet again at the extreme top left of a page on a screen, because the entire piece as I see it has to work from the very first word. And so constantly bringing in new words to the start of a piece, over and over, bringing in the new. Bringing in the new to work against the old — with the new just shoving the old along; the more the new funnels in, the more the old is shoved right along. I never actually care too much about what happens to the old. If the new grows into some of it, all the better. If not, too bad. But when the right note sounds, it all happens very quickly: the end and the middle take care of themselves. And yet it can take a lot of time to make work in this way, because everything — which is to say all the words that I write, yes, but even more than the words — all the inevitable mess of living that brings in those words, such as the not-writing, the not-yet-writing, the trying to write, with each of its accidents and forgettings and avoidances and discoveries that couldn’t have been not discovered if I hadn’t also been not writing — everything I do while I am supposed to be writing a work will always be equally relevant to my actual writing, and I have learned to trust this. Panthers and the Museum of Fire, for instance, emerged out of a long process of mulling over certain images such as the road sign — which, like the narrator, I had driven past on the M4 out of Sydney many many times over a number of years and always felt something particular about it, something nameless and perplexing, which then needed the disorderly experience of living and writing (and avoiding writing) for the book to get to what it was trying to become — all those unexpected moments as well, such as when — like the narrator — I happened to hear a news item about recent sightings of a large black cat, or more importantly, and earlier on in the work — or should I say in the non-working part of the work — when I went to an experimental theater showing and was pissed off to be announced (as part of the performance) by the given name that I no longer use. But also, when I failed to write on one specific day and so failed to produce the words that would have made the piece become something other than it is. All this is to say that what looks, in Panthers, to be the narrator’s preoccupation with the relative wholeness of other people is likely to have come about from this very peculiar way of writing in which a focus on finding the right-feeling form for a sense of wholeness (that I might have been hoarding for a very long time, generally for years) is always and only my main concern. And so focusing on finding the form which will then, eventually, become far more important than the earlier treasured whole — which will also nonetheless stay lurking behind everything I do and think and write, like some sort of permanent shadow that moves wherever I go. In fact, it was sometime towards the end of writing Panthers that I began to notice how often I was using this word “whole” (as in phrases like “the whole time”, “the whole of my attention”, “my whole life”), and tempting as it was to get rid of them — to force them out of the piece (because as soon as I noticed them there, they annoyed me, they annoyed me so much) — tempting as it was, I also knew that if these same words could hold fast to themselves when I tested them (as I usually test what I write) in a marathon of reading aloud, these were the words that wanted to be written: these stupidly annoying generalizing words. And it was even possible, as I could also see, that the entire book had only come into existence to make these sorts of crassly summative generalizing claims, because right from the beginning — once the form was found — the writing does this. The very first sentence is a generalizing claim. The narrator has been hoping for a breakthrough, which for her is a longed-for capacity to write, and she is so close to being able to do this — perhaps she is already doing it — and this sense of its being newly possible runs along in parallel with her changing sense of the people around her — all those people she had earlier viewed as being already complete in themselves, whether wondrously or pathetically — because now they are seeming a whole lot less complete, let alone consistent with themselves from one moment to the next. But how to make any sense of this for a person who is prone to continual generalizations — who, even as she notices this tendency of hers, will generalize nonetheless? In the end, the only constant we have in Panthers is the questionable authority of this person, the narrator, along with the one figure in the book that remains more or less the same: the narrator’s supposedly good friend Raf — this figure whose intimate existence, for all the years she has known him, and all the meals they have shared — all the times that one has rung the other up, all the times they have met at a pub or at one of their places — this figure that, for all their mutually corrosive generalizations about people and life, she hardly knows. And yet it is precisely around this particular “friend” that the whole book turns, since it’s before Raf — and Raf only — that the narrator is compelled to cast every scrap of thought that comes to her mind whenever she sees him — everything that connects to her historical friendship with Sarah and their families, and her earlier evangelical and anorexic selves — in fact everything, as we learn, apart from her own very secret acknowledgement of the worth of Sarah’s manuscript, her fears of emulating her father’s failures and her anxiously excited decisions to move, to write. Of course, this means that the book that is Panthers ends up being both a capitulation to Raf as well as a series of evasions of him, and so becomes a sort of wholeness which — even as it attempts (through its various hedgings and dodgings) to be self-consistent as an apparently complete and singular utterance — will also continually avoid that completeness. Which is why the shaping force of a monologue so important to me in this book — and in fact, in most of my work. A monologue is only an apparently singular utterance — an apparently singular event in time and space. Because even though it will appear to occupy a singular moment, it will also — through its determination to take everything into itself in that moment — be always pushing out to the edge of itself, and past it too — into every sort of otherness that it will never be able to understand or tame — all this otherness, then, that it is doomed to see in fragments only, through the distorted prism of its own fluctuating self. Of course, this means that a monologue has the potential to be so much more dialogic than a conventional dialogue, and the whole of a work so much more multiple than any taxonomic inventory, because nothing approached through the determinedly focused voice of a monologue can ever be seen entirely, nothing can be wholly known. Which is exactly how my life feels. Not so often books, though, as I have to admit — but always life.

DI: In my reading, the novel seems animated by the depth of its withheld information. Jen doesn't tell her best friend, Raf, of her desire to be a novelist, for instance. Meanwhile, Sarah, whom Jen did not expect much from, was secretly possessed of that same passion to write. Incredible ambitions are withheld, circumscribed by modesty or shame. Jen puzzles over the meanings and rationales behind these concealments. Do you think Panthers is in some sense an exploration of our incomprehensibility, both to ourselves and to others? 

JC: While the desire to know — to understand — to give form to a sense of the wholeness of a thing I am chasing is always there for me, I have never yet arrived at a sufficient understanding of anything, anything at all. In fact, I have come to realize that the moment I believe that I know a thing, to really grasp its essence (whether it’s a thing, a situation or even a person, somebody I know) — with this apparent knowledge growing, inevitably, into a desire to tell others — the moment I give into this temptation to utter this knowledge out loud to anybody else, I will generally see, from how it plays out, that what I have just produced for these people is just a fragile, rickety, laughable thing — like I’ve just put a few sticks together and called it a house.

DI: Jen has a stunning monologue about her early life as an anorexic woman. Conversely, Sarah is reported to have been "quite large" by her sister Pamela. These restrictions and excesses of the body seem tied in some mysterious way to the project of the women's writing. The novel and the body as parallel investments of secrecy, power, potential, and control.

JC: I have read somewhere — and I think it was in a book by Maud Ellmann — that there is an inverse relationship, irrespective of gender, between eating and writing: that the less you eat, the more you write. And while it would be utterly crazy to take this as a formula for what actually happens between the two — think of Adalbert Stifter, for example, whose immense dissociated narratives may have been precisely proportionate to his famously well-fed limbs — I do believe that we too often ignore the fact that we rely for our existence on our inter-dependence with a physical universe. Of course, somebody like Freud might try to convince me that what’s going on here is entirely explainable by the individualized pneumatics of desire or control or power (where the energy of desire accumulating in our own tin can system has to go somewhere surely when the lid’s jammed on), but this would be to ignore the fact that, whether we just ate a massive plateful of food (or not), or wrote a whole mornings-worth of words (or not), we actually exist, and cannot not exist, as part of an ever-fluid environment of air and water and many other elements and experiences that keep us alive for long enough for it even to be possible to wonder if we might skip that meal or write that word. I would say then that the body as it is lived and the body as it is visible to others — like the way that writing can be secret and also read by others, in all of its immensity or hopelessness — are all just means of keeping on living in a multi-dimensional physical universe, where nothing that we do here can ever be ultimately removed from it (because even a dead body, like a discarded bit of writing, is still a thing that exists and affects something else). It is blindly utopian, I would say, to believe that we can get rid of our bodies, or even to trim their wobbling extremities (however we do it) without understanding too that, at the very same time, all we will be doing is just shifting a couple of bits and pieces about in the world that we exist in similarly — in a world that responds and keeps hold of it all somehow, whether we front up to any of this or not (such when by not eating on one day, or gorging on another, the odor of our breath changes, and everything around us — even that fly that’s crawling on the surface of the window — will be affected by that change). Writing, similarly, goes beyond the page. Who knows what I will have done to the cat roaming out there on the grass when I change that word? And perhaps this is something that women, who are so used to being told that, as not-men, we are not at the center of the man-made world — and so are already used to this feeling of de-centeredness — perhaps this is something that we have understood in some sort of way for a very long time.

DI: This is a broad and potentially ridiculous question, but how did Panthers and the Museum of Fire come about? What was the process of writing the novel like?

JC: To answer your second question first: it was messily long and frustrating and also very surprising at times too because when the book eventually firmed into the shape that it became, with the rhythms that it had, with its particular ebbs and flows, this was the moment when it most seemed to have arrived as if from somewhere else (that is, when it least felt mine). But I can say that the original road sign on the M4 motorway out of Sydney — this sign whose wording gave the book its name — had long been an obsession. I had driven past it many many times over the years, and each time I had been astounded that the thing was still there — and that although it meant so nebulously much to me (in many of the ways that I write about in the book), it was also just an ordinary street sign that nobody — as I imagined it — cared very much about, because — after all — wasn’t it still there, doing its ordinary thing? Of course, for a long while my sense of the potential of what this sign meant put a great deal of pressure on me, because how to give form to an immensity (as I saw it) in anything less than a massive tome of the length and scope of all those novels that take on big themes, like War and Peace and À la recherche de temps perdu? All of those highly masculine novels that I had neither the desire nor capacity to write. It was only when I decided, and even leaned as strongly as I could into a sort of perverse way of tackling this immensity of image-feeling — that is, it was only when I decided to compress the piece into the shortest and simplest version of what it could ever be — a novel that might have fitted into that first sentence only — that very first sentence and nothing more — it was only then that the work could begin to fill into the shape and length that it became. And so it was necessary for me to do this, to allow it to be the simplest and shortest version of itself. In fact, was deliciously freeing to know that I could do this. Really, I had a strongly not caring attitude about what I was doing because I had already decided that if no one wanted to publish the thing later, when it was finished, I was alright with that — completely alright. The small success — that is, the success on my terms — of my earlier book, Since the Accident, had emboldened me to think in this way. Many years earlier, I had come to understand that I not only did I not naturally write what was readily acceptable as (lyrical) realist (literary) fiction (which, for a long time, I thought I was trying to produce), but I also realized that I did not actually like to read most of that sort of writing, so there was no point at all in pretending that this was what I was wanting to do with my time. There had to be another motivation — a more private motivation. All I wanted, I realized, was to produce a single something in writing that a single reader out there (in my very abstract notion of “out there”) could actually get. That would be enough. And, as there were one or two readers who seemed to get my first book, Since the Accident, I knew that might be possible to do it again.

DI: Your long, spiraling sentences, little eddies of obsession, use of italics, and nested attributions bring to mind the work of Thomas Bernhard. What is it about the Bernhardian monologue that has extended his afterlife so tremendously in contemporary fiction? Do you have a favorite of his works?

JC: While it’s true that Bernhard’s sentences tend to the long and spiraling, and that a single sentence, with all of its numerous knottings, recursive loops and repetitive phrasings, can run the entire length of a book if it wants to (here I am thinking of Yes) — and, as such, do an excellent job of frustrating any readerly hope of hearing the whole thing straight — for me the defining aspect of the Bernhardian sentence, and particularly the Bernhardian monologue (as it is made up of one or many of these sorts of sentences), is the way that its drive to excess (in terms of its excessive knottings, its excessive length) is usually equally matched by a very strong drive to cut itself short. So many of his works start with a seemingly plainly worded and mostly straightforward sentence, and I list them here: Woodcutters, The Loser, Frost, Old Masters, Wittgenstein’s Nephew, Gargoyles, and the three novellas, Amras, Playing Watten and Walking, and even Concrete and Extinction. These are sentences that function as the barest, starkest account of a usually grim event or judgment and then shut themselves up, like the gruffly worded sentiments of those who’ve lived to rue the day — who no longer trust. And yet the voice continues. The sentences continue. And I would say that, in the jolt of silence that follows (for me) every one of these reluctant-seeming sentences, I will also feel the force of the resistance that will eventually press it into keeping on going, and eventually fuelling the rest of the book. And so: the afterlife of these Bernhardian sentences or monologues, or rather of the imagined maker of these sentences and monologues, since it is my fictional version of Bernhard-as-monologue-maker that I hear in these monologues: Bernhard as my imagined writer of that monologuing world. Because who is it but this imaginary Bernhard that turns out books that are nothing but vehicles (as some might put it) for the irascibly reluctant, opinionated voice of an ultimately dominating monologuist that will refuse to stop for anyone — not even for himself? And, who also but a very sadomasochistic version of this monologue-maker would ever dare to encourage in us a belief — as it appears that someone with an umbrella on a bus once believed — that the sickly, peevish and half-mad being of so many of these dominating monologuists is one and the same as Bernhard’s biographical self? Of course, to mistake the monologuists in Bernhard’s fictions for the biographical Bernhard letting loose on the page (and so very “naturally” too, as many of these monologuists might have put it — “naturally” being one of their favorite words) — to make this sort of mistake is also an entirely unsurprising response, because to read a Bernhardian monologue is to feel its bodily effects as it is being read (its pulsings its stoppings its starts its knottings its running-on runs). A Bernhardian monologue is always and supremely a felt experience, which leads “naturally” to the belief that the supposed maker of these monologues had the very same felt experiences as he wrote them down. And so how easy it can be to become — in this way — a responsive reader of the Bernhardian monologue — even a highly susceptible one. Of course, just by allowing ourselves to be drawn along in the pulsing pull of the Bernhardian monologue, and so being pulled further and further into the experience of identifying with the monologues, and particularly with the monologuist — and so into the possibility of being the imagined monologue-maker himself — we open ourselves to being caught like small and pathetic creatures in the spiky grip of these same monologues — caught on their numerously invective spikes — on all those viciously worded dismissals and attacks that are generally turned, like so many bared and sharpened teeth, out towards the very susceptibility of what we might understand, in Flaubertian terms, as the stupid among us — and so perhaps towards the very same susceptibility that had pulled us into these monologues in the first place. But is it only a trap, then? Is the Bernhardian monologue nothing but a particularly cruel and nasty trap? If I were to answer this question from the logic of what these monologues will always seem to be saying, the answer would be: yes. If I’ve allowed myself to be taken in by the Bernhardian monologue — to become a susceptible reader of the Bernhardian monologue — how gullible I am! So easily manipulated! So easily made a fool of! A true deserver of every one of its barbs and taunts. And yet this is not my experience. I have to own here that when I read anything — anything at all — I will always be reading much much more than the words seem to be saying to me (in fact — to my shame — I will often fail to register certain ostensible meanings and certain specifically mentioned words). When I read, I am usually reading the felt experience of my reading, and so it is the experience of my reading that counts, with the words just flying by me sometimes, like so many moths in the night (although in some books, I feel the words to be sticky — and in some: to have the viscosity of a sweet and yellowish syrup). With the Bernhardian monologue, then — in the moment of giving myself over to it — when I can feel the pulse and pull and also the spiky barbs of its invective running along as it scours the inside of my being, as if they were my own — my very own pulsings and pullings and barbs — my internal world doesn’t slow and thicken, or catch in it, but loosens rather. An immensity of space opens up inside me. At last (it seems) I can take in lungfuls of air. It is as if, paradoxically, in the course of allowing myself to be pulled into the ever narrowing channel of its vindictively pulsing voice — into the very real pulmonary constriction, as I imagine it, of the Bernhardian monologue-maker — as if, in the middle of it all, I had actually been thrown off that ever tightening channel — off and out and so further outwards into the space of all that surrounds it, from where I can feel the ground under my feet — from where I can stand and watch it all moving around me: the monologue of the primary, dominating monologuist, as well as all of the other voices as well that have been sucked into but never absorbed by that dominating monologuist — all of it moving, constantly on the move, and I stand and watch and wonder, as if from the center of some giantly proportioned monologuing machine. It’s exhilarating being there inside it, even if only for the shortest of moments. It’s as if the world as I endure it normally, with all of its apparently meaningful words and statements, is newly on the move. And I really believe that it is the very willingness of the Bernhardian monologue to be dismissed or repeatedly beaten by a stout umbrella on account of its supposedly nasty meanings that is so liberating for me, and perhaps for others too. I grew into adulthood at a time when there was so much emphasis on producing fiction that would redeem society, mostly by being inspiringly representative of particular marginalized communities and identities — when it could be headily exciting to be writing and thinking, or at least dreaming about writing and thinking, in these redemptive terms. Of course, in my experience, the works themselves did no such thing. So many works of fiction were concocted then — and are still being concocted — in this wishfully excited utopian state — and I could usually sense this excitement, this very heady and even drunken feeling of excitement, when I read them. But also, most of the time as I read these books, I would feel the life leaching out of me — and all interest in writing too — as if I’d been trapped in a corner of an endless party and forced to listen to someone’s inebriated sister. And so while I still kept on writing, continually writing, my writing was becoming increasingly secret and sullen and miserable. All I understood was that if I were to do what it was that I should be doing, I would also be killing off any possibility of writing anything at all that would ever be alive. But then, bring in the monologue, and particularly the Bernhardian monologue: the narrative machinery of this imagined Thomas Bernhard, this notorious Nestbeschmutzer, or fouler of nests, as he used to be called by people who hated him in Austria. For me, a Nestbeschmutzer evokes an egregiously selfish and destructive being that plumps itself into a nest (and perhaps into any old nest, not necessarily its own), and then turns itself round and around, dirtying the sides of it with its shit-smeared bum — even intentionally dirtying it — so that no other creature will ever get to enjoy it in the way that it is enjoying it — in the act of dirtying it, in the act — as we can imagine it — of ruining that perfectly serviceable nest for any other creature, at least in the eyes of all nesting marshals, whose job it is to keep them clean. And so the afterlife of this Nestbeschmutzer: of all this turning and settling and pissing and shitting and — most importantly — making sure it stays damn well put for as long as it takes to foul the utopian nest that it has nevertheless claimed as its own. All of this is so immensely liberating to those of us who live in a world where, in our most woke imaginings — our most selfless, enlightened, and rational of imaginings — a Nestbeschmutzershould have no place. And so it is the combination of these two forces: the one that pushes out into obscene and vindictive length and the one that also rams it all in, that stops it shut, which makes the Bernhardian monologue what it is for me: that is, a hugely dark but ever-moving machine that offers itself as a wide wide space in which I can move all on my own. There is great freedom here — and for me this is the legacy of the Bernhardian monologue. This freedom. The long and also the short — both the fierce intention to be long — excessively long — and also to be stubbornly short and curt, and to feel the two of them working at the very same time. And yet I am not aware of this precise dynamic in any of the works that are readily identified as Bernhardian. In the writings of W. G. Sebald, for instance, or Rachel Cusk (and I am thinking of her trilogy here) — it is the lengthening that I notice — the leaning into length and dreamy rumination. And then all of those Nordic writers with their ubiquitous commas and onwards intentions, always onwards. All of these onwards versions of the monologue that seem, to my mind, to have been written in the afterwards time of the Nestbeschmutzer — when the fiercely contradictory forces of the Nestbeschmutzer have at last come to a gently sorrowful rest. And there is room for this. There is certainly room for this afterwardsness (and in fact I very much love this afterwardsness). But, to be set free — and rudely free: that is the legacy of the Bernhardian sentence-monologue for me. And my favorite Bernhard? I can’t really answer this question. But I can say that there have only been a handful of times when a work I am reading prompts me to gasp out loud, and sometime into reading the second half of Gargoyles was one of those moments: when I was struck by how the shaping of a work — its music, its force — could suddenly became a whole lot more vivid to me than any of its ostensible content. In this early novel of Bernhard’s, the work begins with the quietly gothic account of a young man’s journey as he accompanies his doctor-father on his rounds through the mountainous Austrian countryside — from one morbidly grotesque patient to another, with variously caged humans and piles of dying birds coloring all the shadows of the story — but then the whole thing shifts. The account is cut in half. One of the patients — Prince Saurau — interrupts the steady narrative of the doctor’s son with the obsessive drive of his own ravings. The prince interrupts the narrative — and he interrupts it forcefully, with no going back. If I were ever to wonder whether there was something shameful in my tendency to prioritize listening to the music of the words in a piece of fiction ahead of any of their supposedly important meanings, here it seemed I could relax — since there is no easy way to read Gargoyles other than to follow along in the wake of its huge and exhilarating soundscape. To do anything else with the words in this book is to become as mad as the prince himself.

DI: The novelist and critic Anthony Macris said of your novel, Since the Accident, "it effectively realizes a formal alternative to the realist tradition." Given the purview of this substack — anti-realism, broadly defined — I wonder what you make of the tradition Macris mentions. Do you think your work is a rebuke of the realist project?

JC: For me, I need to head at things obliquely. Even writing this, I had to be prepared to write utter nonsense — completely stupid stuff — so that something more interesting or at least more lively and more accurate might be discovered as I was doing it. This way of writing for me is very real, in the sense that it rings true to how things feel to me in a day-to-day sense, although it is anything but realist in the way that this word is generally understood — and especially not lyrically realist, as Kundera once called the buffed up version of this supposedly serious literary stance. I still don’t understand why it is, though, that I have such a strong, not to say whole body aversion to this kind of writing. It’s a liability, actually, since I don’t like to think of myself as a combative person and especially not as a pointlessly nasty one. Occasionally I even read this sort of fiction, and some of it by people that I admire and look up to both as individuals and literary practitioners, and yet when I read their works I will often still find myself filling up with what I can only describe as an alien substance that is nonetheless posing as a familiar substance — all the peculiarly false tones that make such an apparently familiar and realistic statement as “she looked out the window” such a very big problem for me. But what is my problem with it? Why does the serenely objective tone of this sort of sentence irritate me no end? Quite a while ago, I started to write in a way that increasingly diverged from this artificially dispassionate version of reality, and — correspondingly — increasingly fewer of my works were published. And so I began to wonder whether the longer I was carrying on with what I was doing, the worse I was becoming at it — worse and worse — and how humiliating it was to be thinking like this. And also: what a sad waste of my time! You need to understand, however, that during most of my childhood and adolescence I had got a lot of satisfaction from my capacity to produce a realistic visual likeness of people. I loved it then, losing myself in the project of giving slow forming shape to my impression of the otherness of another — this almost magical capacity I seemed to have for it. It was a complete mystery to me, too, even at the time, because it didn’t seem to matter how messy or anxiously panicky I would feel in the middle of the process of painting or drawing these portraits, because by the end of it all, something would have been got at. Something would be there — and the more it diverged from what the sitters might have been expecting from it — that is, from the more obvious realism of a likeness of them — the happier and more satisfied I would be. The memory of these sorts of experiences was what kept me sane, at least for a while, in the more demoralizing time of my divergence from the literary project of realism: all this lived experience of making it somehow through a process of messy anxiety to something that might yet work out: to something okay. And so, with this to hold onto, I buried myself in the wonderfully musty, crowded stacks of the closest university library to where I lived, so that I might read anything that I wished to read — anything that called to me from its shelves — whatever it was — and in this way, I continued to waste a lot of time, as it must have looked, while I read through a great many old (and some not overly old) books that would always seem to me a whole lot more contemporary-feeling than any of the “contemporary” realist works that I was supposed to be enjoying and emulating outside of that old library (all those “contemporary” works in which the only believably real element that I found was the one very real-seeming imitation of a certain kind of standardly detached and presumptively literary voice). And so, if what I have produced out of all of this messing around functions as a rebuke to a realist tradition that has never appeared to accept how very artificial it is, I will own that. I will definitely own that, even if no one else hears me or cares.

DI: Jen is walking throughout the novel. There is a real sense of psychogeographic space accumulating, even for one (such as myself) who has never visited Glebe. Were you conscious of the tradition of "walking fiction" while writing Panthers? Do you think the novel absorbs any energies from the flaneur fictions of the recent or more distant past?

JC: Yes, and no. Yes — in the sense that the pace of walking as it matches thinking — and thinking as it enfolds and moves to the pace of walking — which is so clear as I read a book like Teju Cole’s Open City — is something necessary to me on some sort of level. A bit over a decade ago I began to walk to the place where I worked, and this was a fifty-minute journey in one direction. The first time I did it I got blistered feet — I am usually not at all careful about how I prepare myself when I set off on a walk like this. But I was determined to do this walk, however uncomfortable it was to be, because otherwise I am a very lazy person. I am not someone who goes to the gym or who plays sports or swims or anything like that, and I was beginning to realise that unless I forced myself to move a lot lot more than I did, by building this moving into activities that I couldn’t otherwise avoid, I would probably end up not being able to move or think at all. And so: I walked to work and I walked to the supermarket. When I had to go somewhere to do something specific, I would usually make myself walk there, which meant so often walking and carrying heavy bags and feeling tired and cross but doing it anyway. Walking, for me, was and is in no way flâneur-ish in the sense of Baudelaire’s idly sauntering man about town, because it is much more like somebody who is driven to do something — walking as a way of driving myself forwards, and so of thinking and writing in a driving myself forwards sense as well. For me the kind of walking-thinking-writing that I do — and especially then, when I was writing Panthers — has a whole lot more to do with the attempt to do something, and the effort of that attempt. And so, really, while I do enjoy such pieces of “walking fiction” as Open City or W. G. Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn, I do not at all see myself as working (or walking) in their tradition. Like the narrator in Panthers, I more usually have to be somewhere by a certain time, and the simplest, most stingy way is often just to get there on foot. This kind of walking narrative is a much more driven and restless thing. There is the necessity to get somewhere and also all the impediments too. There are the lights that won’t change soon enough, the footpath that is blocked; the bag that’s too heavy, the journey that’s too long. It’s also then starting to rain and a chunk of gravel has just flipped into the back of my shoe and is already working its way around to the side, where it hurts. During these sorts of walks, the need to get somewhere else, and all my resentment at the impediments to getting where I need to be (even if it is only the walk itself, the need to step out of the house so that I don’t rust myself into an unmoving ball), all of this driving force tends to be at the very forefront of what I do. And while I will always be realizing as I walk that it might have been a whole lot better for everyone, myself included, if I had left the house much earlier than I did and sat among parrots in the park halfway there, or paused to chat with a neighbor or drink in the air, or slowed into the kinds of beautifully circling thoughts of immense beauty and sadness that Sebald and Cole manage to weave into their works, I also know that my way of walking and thinking is just how it is, at least for now, and this is what my “walking fiction”, or perhaps my (simply) “moving fiction” is trying to do: to capture that feeling of trying to do and yet also not being able to do (that being the experience of my being in the world). In fact, now that that I am living in a regional town and no longer at the center of a city — and now that, in this pandemic lockdown I am living through here, there is nowhere particular that I have to go — when I go walking these days it is only a very limited kind of walking: a walking within a certain number of kilometers from what it is that is called “home” — a walking that is only for certain acceptable reasons (shopping perhaps, and whatever might be understood as exercise) — where my own privately imposed stricture on walking has now become a state-imposed stricture and I am far less often alone in it, too, because my partner is living with the very same strictures and needs to walk as well, to move. So now, in this new context, I’m finding that standing rather than walking is becoming increasingly important to me. These days, while I still go on walks — I still force myself to walk — I also find that I will be wanting to stand up more and more of the time as I write: standing and swaying a little, and allowing myself to move my hands, to mutter whatever I need to mutter, to move around on the spot. And I really don’t know if there is a tradition of writing in this way of not standing still at a standing desk, but if there is, that’s where I am, at least for now.

DI: Peter Carey, in his interview with The Paris Review, said, "In Australian stories we trust loss and we are very suspicious of success." What do you make of contemporary Australian fiction currently? For those not very familiar with it, who would you recommend reading? (I have to add here that Jack Cox floored me with Dodge Rose.)

JC: I don’t know about all of contemporary Australian fiction (whatever that is since, as I have already said, often the most contemporary-feeling pieces of fiction are those that were written decades or centuries ago), but I am very much familiar with the idea of trusting in loss and the suspicion of success. It’s a very Antipodean, and an often very white person’s mixture of feelings, as it might connect to all the complexity and shame of feeling forgotten by other similarly white people who, in living their busy lives in the more populously upper hemisphere of the world (where, incidentally, Peter Carey still lives and works), will usually forget their underlings’ birthdays. All the same, these sentiments have produced a fascinating mixture of prickly, sensitive, and overly ambitious fiction, beginning with writers like Miles Franklin, Joseph Furphy, Eve Langley, the early works of Christina Stead and Elizabeth Harrower (whose very lack of trust and escalating desire for — and suspicion of — success stopped her from writing any more novels than she did a whole half century before she died). And then Patrick White of course, whose primly curt bristling was legendary — who, on the morning he woke to the news that he’d just won the Nobel Prize for literature, pouted and fumed, as if the journalist — under cover of producing a literary news story — was only ever plotting to steal his house. But as for authors who are still alive and writing right now, there are too too many that I haven’t yet read (and I include here, to my shame, Jack Cox’s Dodge Rose, and Shaun Prescott’s The Town, which are nonetheless waiting for me on my shelf). I’m also very used to the fact that what I like reading is usually not shared by others that I know. And yet, for their specifically non-fictional or hybrid slash memoir slash essayistic works, there are some particularly compelling writers in this country that I could recommend, such as Helen Garner and Fiona Wright, Mireille Juchau, Maria Tumarkin, Gail Jones, Evelyn Araluen, and the relative newcomer Vicki Laveau-Harvie, with her wonderfully thorny memoir The Erratics. In terms of fiction, though, the books whose voices most energize me here — which allow me to keep on going, to do what I do — these books include the later works (particularly) of Gerald Murnane, and Nicholas John Turner’s debut, Hang him when he is not there, as well as Luke Carman’s An Elegant Young Man. In these works, loss and suspicion — especially suspicion — are all used to great (and often comic) effect. Of course, I would be the very first to remark on the peculiarity of what I can only describe as my felt kinship with these sorts of (sometimes young) masculine writers — but that is how it is.

DI: Can you share a bit about what you're working on next?

JC: It’s a secret — always a secret thing. Without the secrecy it will never grow. However, I can say one or two things about it (which could always change — I need that to remain possible to the very last): there is walking in it and also avoidance. I realize this doesn’t really answer your question.