A Writer is Interviewed on the Eve of his Death
"When I was young I hoped to be a war poet. But then there was no war, so I was fucked."
Q: …
A: Writers today live in a melancholic time. Postlapsarian is the word. Nothing is more common now than the writer who believes literature has worsened in recent decades. It has not. Instead literature’s influence on culture has declined. Writers—we are invariably obsessed with power and approval—believe this signifies a decline in their craft’s quality. They wrongly assume the quality of their texts gave them influence. So they fetishise the days of “great” writing that could “change” culture. Really, they yearn for writers to become celebrities akin to “influencers” once more.
Ultimately the problem is not one of quality. Relevant writing is not good. It is useful. Useful things do work: they exercise force across distance. Writers do not understand their irrelevance because they refuse to recognise the nature of their craft: they deny the fact that writing “changes” people and culture only if it does violence to them. Writing—and all other media—must do violence to be relevant. It must deform or destroy its object upon impact. In pursuit of power and status within polite society, writers have disavowed this fact. Their work has become impotent and harmless.
Q: …
A: I am calling for literature to be more violent. That is all.
Q: …
A: A book is a weapon—a slow-release poison, a landmine, a long-range projectile. If it is effective, that is. Good writers maim and harm others through the distancing medium of culture.
Q: …
A: Their theory of culture is wrong. We used to crush peoples’ skulls—that was “culture.” Then we cut down forests and printed black ink on dead wood. Now we tear minerals from the earth and stare at screens that emit light in letter-like patterns. We are no less violent than our ancestors. In fact I imagine our violence would frighten them.
Q: …
A: Literature is a means of deferring violence. Inversely, violence is literature that unfolds too quickly. To write is to slow the club’s swing. Words trace its arc in slow-motion. They spread the impact across space and time. Writing can never escape its origins in violence. When writers desire “influence” they betray their unconscious hope that their work will harm others—preferably en masse.
Q: …
A: All great technologies kill and maim—rockets, pharmaceuticals, engines, computers, robotics, communications tech, satellites, radio, and so on. That is why we so willingly create them. Writers refuse to countenance the fact that their technologies no different. Language, paper, books, ink, the printing press, the internet—they can all kill. This means they do not understand themselves or their work. Literature has lost its influence because writers are dishonest about its nature: they refuse to affirm that it is violence.
Q: …
A: Military espionage—that’s how you become an original writer. Find out how we will kill each other in ten years and you will be avant garde.
Q: …
A: Literature evolves as we contrive new modes of violence. Each technology creates its own dreams. To fantasise about shooting someone with a gun is very different from using, say, a neutron bomb, a drone strike, a hypersonic missile, or the internet.
Q: …
A: We must not underestimate the effect of digital warfare on today’s literature. Using internet technologies, states wage war against their people—the world population at large, really. Every living thing is now at war with technology companies and governments.
Q: …
A: When I was young I hoped to be a war poet. But then there was no war, so I was fucked. On some level I still wish to be a poet, so I have great hopes for conflict.
Q: …
A: Ever since I was a boy I have imagined myself dead or dying in the trenches, the earth dirtying my journal containing words whose hard edges cut like shrapnel. This is a sublime image. In the absence of war, we contrive ways to feel as if we are dying and being bombed in the dirt. The modern epidemic of depression and anxiety, I contend with no justification but absolute force, is an intrapsychic analogue of carpet bombing.
Q: …
A: I identify, deep down, with the human scorch marks in Hiroshima. That is who I always have been, always will be.
Q: …
A: I don’t own guns; I own pens. I do envy the rifleman though. His range of weaponry and violent effects is so much broader than those condemned to use pens. The soldier has more tools to make his dreams real. So he has more and better dreams than us. Frustrated writers would not exist were there a literary-military-industrial complex. Imagine their joy—writers with billion-dollar research grants, testing the violent efficacy of language and narrative. Writer’s block would vanish. The way forward for literature in this age is to demonstrate its capacity for destruction in warfare. Write books that excite the CIA.
Q: …
A: Start a literary arms race. Write a lethal book. Something that causes as much devastation as fentanyl. Now that would be a “vital” and “necessary” work, if perhaps less life-affirming than Penguin’s latest. Here’s a call for submissions I could respect: write a story that will kill me if I read it. Award a residency at the Pentagon to the writer whose entry wipes out the editorial staff at a prominent journal.
Q: …
A: People endlessly assert that books “improve” readers. As if they were medicine. Really books are more like cosmetic surgery. Whatever beauty they possess comes from brutal, savage force applied to a human body. Writers pretend their work is an antidote to the banality and dehumanisation of contemporary culture. But culture’s function is to do nothing except dehumanise and denigrate life—like a weapon or disease. All I call for is the recognition of this knowledge, and for honesty on behalf of writers.
Q: …
A: How could I publish another book if I hold these beliefs? Well, I have to do something with myself.
Q: …
A: Violent Delights, Violent Ends releases tomorrow. Unfortunately the publisher is not financed by the CIA.
Q: …
A: No, I do not expect to survive the launch event.