What are you doing?
Hi, James.
Hi.
What went into the character of Scotty?
How did you come up with his personification?
I always feel like people are trying
to ask, when they ask that question,
whether or not I've done crack.
[LAUGHTER]
Like, how do you know Scotty so well?
But I mean, it wasn't like I started
writing this book with the idea that I would make Scotty
the voice of crack cocaine.
In fact, the character had no name.
I originally thought that that voice
was going to be a lot closer to the character of Darlene,
that she would be a person who was a little more street.
But at a certain point, I decided just
to kind of dramatize her story a little bit,
that she should be a different sort of person.
And it would be--
you could see a little bit more clearly what was at stake.
But I had been writing this voice,
and I was really enjoying writing the voice.
And it allowed me the opportunity
to be nasty, especially, as you know,
to just introduce into a literary setting a lot
of bad words and bad sentiments and just evil, just some evil.
And so one of the things I had to ask myself after--
as in, if I wanted to still keep writing this voice,
I had to ask myself, well, who is it?
And what is their relationship to the story?
And one of the answers that came to me
was, oh, well, it's the drug.
And as I was saying earlier this afternoon,
my first thought after that was, no one's going to like that.
But my second thought was, Victor LaValle
is going to like that, who's a speculative fiction writer,
a Black man, who does even weirder stuff than that.
So that's how that started.
And then it became a way of getting
through what is some really pretty dire, dark material.
Infusing it with a little bit of sick humor
was my way of both reconciling this thing that I've realized
is--
I have these two very strong impulses when I'm making work.
One of them is to get people to deal with subject matter
and things that they either are not looking at
or, for whatever reason, don't want to look at,
that still seem very important to me.
And this story was like--
it seemed really important that the conversation about slavery
would change, potentially, if I could finish this book.
But by the same token, it was horrible.
It's so depressing.
And so the way that I was able to get through it
was through the voice of Scotty.
I mean, which isn't--
I mean, there are a lot of, there are alternating voices,
but Scotty kind of keeps it going.
There's evil, but it also brings a lot of light in.
Well, distance, actually, which is--
I've heard comedy defined as tragedy plus distance.
Right?
Because his objectives-- I mean, I hesitate to gender Scotty
because it doesn't have a body.
And that's actually kind of part of the point that Scotty makes,
is that, I don't have a body, so I don't have the problems
that you people have.
But wait, what was I saying?
I've totally forgotten.
His gender?
All right.
Well, right, but before that.
Comedy?
[INTERPOSING VOICES]
Yeah.
[LAUGHTER]
I'll look at the tape.
Hi.
Oh, there's a mic.
Please take the mic.
Thank you very much for what you read.
There's more?
And then, of course, the question and your comment
made me think that writing of tragedy is very hard.
And one of the ways to make it easier
is that tragedy is also necessarily comic.
Not comical humorous, but comic in the tragic and tragic sense.
Yeah.
Don't you think?
Yeah, I mean, that's pretty much what I was saying a moment ago.
But there's also a character later in the book,
says something along those lines.
Or about memory, anyway, because he
seems to remember a lot of something
else that is somebody else's problems.
And he says, it's no fun remembering
the shit that happened to me.
It makes it easier.
It makes it a story if you can describe somebody else's pain,
because it's so hard to face your own--
one's own, not personal.
So you say that the first chapter used to be a prologue?
No, no, it's now a prologue.
Oh, it's now a prologue?
It used to be the first chapter.
But you can take that up with my editor.
That was one of the battles I lost.
But I still can't mentally--
I'm still holding on to it mentally for no good reason.
And what was the argument to change?
I don't even-- I tried--
I mean, it--
I don't remember, exactly.
But I think he felt--
the book does a lot of crazy moving around in time.
But that first prologue, the thing
that is now the prologue, I think
sets up a lot of what comes after it.
Actually, the thing that I managed to argue against
was the prologue that's in italics.
That, I couldn't do.
I actually have a question about the prologue and about time.
It occurred to me as you were-- as the character was
going to St Cloud and progressing from there,
that there was this ratio of 90%, or even more, maybe,
progressive, narrative action going forward
all the way up to getting a job, getting married, having
a child.
And there's like 10% that's much more weighted about what
happened before and what--
gradually, we're getting little details
of what had happened to his hands, what Delicious
Foods was, who Fremont is.
And I'm wondering if there are writers who operate that way--
I can maybe think of a couple-- but I wondered,
who is important to you in terms of the way time's working
in that opening prologue?
Or even if you could speak more about that ratio,
if that's useful to you?
Well, I always feel put on the spot when people ask me,
what influenced this?
I was saying earlier, I was reading a lot of Faulkner.
And while he doesn't always do that, I mean,
he's sort of famous for having done it.
But I began this book knowing that I
wanted to do something strange with time,
because the original, the story that inspired it,
was something that made me think about time.
It's like, OK, so there's a Black woman in slavery in 1992
in Florida.
What century are we in?
What exactly is time?
And are these impulses to exploit one another,
are these just like human qualities?
I mean, I don't even want to use the word quality when
I say this, but is that just a human flaw,
that this is something as a species that we want and have--
but I'm off topic, sort of, now.
But I knew that I wanted it to be,
that I wanted time to go strangely.
I just can't think of other precedents,
other than The Sound and the Fury.
But that's sort of easy.
Can I get back to you on that?
There's a hand over here, and then we'll wrap it up.
And you'll have to get back to all of us.
OK.
Yes, speaking of time going strangely,
you originally intended for what your editor changed
to a prologue to be the first chapter, which
means you originally intended for the reader
to know that Eddie gets out.
And you've--
[INTERPOSING VOICES]
--created his life.
Why did you let us know immediately
that he was going to be OK?
I think that also makes it a little easier
to handle what comes later.
And one of the other things that the book does
is that it deals with narrative in terms of information
rather than in terms of chronology.
So the chapters move forward in a way that--
and I guess this is talking about,
this is the thing that I was doing that the gentleman over
there was talking about, where it isn't--
I was taking, I was exploiting the idea
that we don't read just to know what happened, but how.
Right?
The process is what we want to know.
I could tell you there was a murder,
and you would be like, because I told you that, it
doesn't really mean anything.
It's like you want to know, well,
what are all these questions?
You'd have a lot of questions about what that--
how it happened, and who did it, and who did what,
and just what the timeline was.
And I felt like there's a lot of symbolic weight in what
happens to him.
This is a story about labor, right?
And it ends up with a guy who has no hands, which
for me are a very powerful--
I mean, it's kind of cheap, actually.
It's a cheap symbol of what someone's labor--
But on top of that, it's the fact that he
is able to recover from that, I thought,
was sort of doubly symbolic of the struggles of African
Americans in the United States who
have had to pretty much do what he
has done in various, small ways for a very long time.
And it's not just African Americans, but--
I don't know if that's--
Does that even vaguely answer?--
I just, I liked him.
I thought that was a good answer.
Yeah, but I mean it was also that idea of the magic Negro
that Susan brought up before, that every time there's
a character who seems to be in a story
merely for the catharsis of white characters,
that's the character that I want to follow.
Because it's often something, they often
have some kind of interesting trauma
that they're dealing with.
But no, we don't get to hear that story.
But that's where I want to go.
And so, who is the one who was always,
[INAUDIBLE] Oh, I guess it's, there's
a chestnut about The Bluest Eye, that Toni Morrison was like,
I want to write the book that I want to read.
Because I don't see it anywhere.
And it's a good rule of thumb.
Thank you so much.
I'm done if you're done.
Come back tomorrow, and we'll hear chapters three and four.