An E-Mail Interview with Thalia Field

Abstract

The construction of the flying saucer is not so much a dilemma of hardware as it is a poetic challenge. Terence McKenna, History Ends in Green Doesn't Gabrielle's being made the tool of her mother's murder convince you of the necessity--at least the poetic necessity--of the curse? Dashiell Hammett, The Dain Curse This conversation took place over a period of four months via electronic mail. The centerpiece of the conversation is Field's recent book, Point and Line (New Directions, 2000), but hovering around the event were side conversations--about Freud, Tibetan Buddhism, the profession of poetry, science, and other subjects--which informed both questions and answers. The medium of electronic mail allows for time and space not afforded by the more "intimate" setting of a table, two cups, and a tape recorder. Which is very much to the point of Field's work; she keeps the fields of literature open (which can be seen in the way she treats the textual page) in order to keep the written up to date with the world and its vicissitudes. The characters in Field's book are treated by the world as they try to treat each other, and Field attempts to capture what interferes with forming a life, a character, a setting, a space in which to play at being. This sense of discomfort is a key to the work and the conversation; it is both a poetic necessity and poetic challenge. What do you trust? I think "trust" and the mind keeps slipping over into "belief": I make believe, but should I have trust? Believing is gravity's constants, the furniture, the house, the street, culture, people. Isn't trust the belief that these things will be there when I sit on them, test them, return to them? Maybe I think I have my house, my life, the gist of a story... But I trust these things precisely because they're not to be believed. Sometimes slowly, sometimes catastrophically, houses are always on the go, the mind is always lost, history just ahead of "me." That bat trusts only that it must listen carefully; if it flew on "trust" alone, would it crash? It's the noun which fails, the verb which might work out. Fundamentally, writing creates itself as it loves, names, maps the world which is destroyed in its arriving; there's nothing to sit on for long, so I guess I trust that a chair is a landfill or fire wood, that I'm on a constant stage of timing, that belief is the middle of a conversation whose voices change. How much was Point and Line thought of as a book? Did you feel restricted by that form in any way? As I worked on the stories in Point and Line, I began to become interested in the determining elements of what now seems to be called the "book format" in a world of publishing in which the book is one choice among many. The decadent state of affairs of the book opens up a lot of possibility with using its structures to talk about "bookness" in general--so I began to think of ways in which the reader's movement through the book might become part of the pacing and kinetic experience of the work. Then when the collection started coming together more, I added the "bookend" pieces--so that narrative would push through even those most highly bureaucratic forms. I don't think anything in PL frontlines of competing metaphor tearing up the subject's territory. In "A therefore I," the supposed silence of the character is her (melodramatic?) challenge to the explanatory psychological telos being offered as a way toward narrative salvation (and implied knowledge, wholeness, awareness. …