Interview with Dennis Cooper

Excerpts:

I’m as interested by what sex can’t give you as by what it can. I don’t see lust as a dumbing-down process. Most people fear confusion, but I think confusion is the truth and I seek it out.

The truth I’m talking about is the stuff that gets distorted and compromised every time you write something down or open your mouth to speak, ​because your priority when communicating isn’t to represent your thoughts or feelings exactly but to make sense, to appear sane and comprehensible and ​- appealing. I like working within that impossibility.

The fact that teenagers were routinely disrespected, objectified, exploited, and disempowered was a huge issue to me then and one that has remained very important to me as I’ve become an adult.

I developed the form and structure and style and strategies very gradually. I had decided that I wanted to write some kind of big literary work of fiction when I was fifteen, but I didn’t actually start writing the cycle until I was in my early thirties. I experimented constantly along the way, both to find an overall architecture for the sequence, which involved trying to translate the principles of everything from labyrinths to magic tricks to structural experiments undertaken by artists in non-text-based art into a page- and language- based form, and to devise a unique voice for my writing via all kinds of tests, from imitating writing I admired and then trying to erode the qualities that felt unnatural in my own voice or weren’t useful, to cut- ups to writing in all kinds of preexisting forms or as incomprehensibly as I could.

With The Marbled Swarm, I was trying to write a novel the way a sound technician mixes a song or piece of music into its final form. I’ve been studying recorded music and trying to transpose its principles into my fiction ​going all the way back to my first novel, Closer, where one thing I did was try to simulate the sonic effect of the Jesus and Mary Chain’s Psychocandy album with my prose. In The Marbled Swarm I found a voice that let me do that. I thought about each element of the novel, whether it was a narrative thread or character or reference point or an ongoing motif or tone or rhythm. The idea was that they would all always be there, but they would be emphasized or de-emphasized at different points, mixed into the foreground, middle ground, or background, being moved around constantly so the reader’s attention would be directed all over the place. My idea was that it would give the writing a three-dimensional quality, as the reader is carried along by the musical surface of the novel, but he or she would also be chasing different story lines and recurring ideas as they waver and scamper about and hide inside the prose.

Read it at the Paris Review