Fantastic Metropolis

L. Timmel Duchamp has published something like 350,000 words of short fiction since her first sale, “O’s Story,” appeared in 1989. She has been a finalist for the Nebula and Sturgeon awards and short-listed three times by Tiptree Award juries. In a recent letter to the New York Review of Science Fiction in which he took note of the diversity of the contributors to The Thackery T. Lambshead Pocket Guide to Eccentric & Discredited Diseases, Jeff VanderMeer noted in passing that Duchamp’s work “is somewhat unclassifiable.” A good chunk of her short fiction has been published in Asimov’s and can be characterized as dramatically exploring ideas; but she has also worked in more experimental styles, as with, for instance, the stories she has published in the Ministry of Whimsy’s Leviathan anthology series. She herself has described her fiction as feminist and “anti-heteronormative.” Her first collection, Love’s Body, Dancing in Time (sample story), was published in April by Aqueduct Press. She has also written numerous essays and criticism that have appeared in the New York Review of Science Fiction, Extrapolation, Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet and other places. An ample selection of her essays and criticism as well as a complete list of her published fiction can be found at her website.

Josh Lukin, who has read most of Duchamp’s published work and at least two of her unpublished novels, conducted the following interview with her via email in April, 2004.

Josh B. Lukin: A professor at the University of Maryland once remarked to me that when she explained hegemony to her students, they turned out by and large in favor of it, saying “But if you criticize the system all the time, how can you be happy?” You don’t seem to share their opinion. How did you get there? To put it in comic-book terms, what events gave you your Counterhegemonic Powers?

L. Timmel Duchamp: I don’t see happiness as some permanent state of mind that is achieved under favorable material circumstances through simply ignoring all that is painful, discordant, and ugly, but as a quality that infuses one’s being in the world in bursts that range in intensity from moments of serenity to ecstasy. In my experience, love lies at the root of all moments of happiness. And I have believed that this is so since early childhood.

Children begin life wanting, needing, and demanding love from their caretakers. As the child develops—especially the female child, which statistically speaking is nursed for a much shorter period than the male child, and is touched less, and is taught from the beginning to expect less—she develops a desire for approval, because approval offers the assurance of love. The child becomes socialized and develops a moral sense as a means of securing approval. Which process, of course, is desirable and necessary. But the truly fortunate child learns to do more than seek and inspire others’ love. The fortunate child learns to engage others—the world—with love, that is, to actively love above and beyond the powerful desire to be loved.

Full engagement with the world—with others—is nothing short of rebellion, what Gilles Deleuze calls “total critique.” Full engagement refuses merely amiable subservience aimed at fulfilling the status quo, ordinary expectations, and pleasing others in the simplest way and leaps, by way of rebellion, to a positive, joyful making of the world. To engage fully (and thus critically) with someone else’s words, vision, or experiences is to accord them love and respect. When I engage fully in my own creative work I engage myself with the world with the deepest love and respect I can possibly offer: which is to say, I go beyond acquiescence, I enter an extreme zone in which my entire being comes alive. Although many of the adults I dealt with in my childhood reacted negatively to my wish to so engage with them, my most important mentors recognized and encouraged this higher form of love and respect. It is they whom I have to thank collectively for whatever “Counterhegemonic Powers” I now have.

And so for me, moments of happiness burst forth when I am most fully engaged. In the mountains, hiking, when every cell of my body is there, in the physical world, mixing with it and taking it in; when I’m sharing a meal, or good sex, or a walk along the shore of Lake Washington. What makes such moments “happy” is not their simple material pleasure, but the extent of my engagement. I have many memories of feeling profoundly unhappy and miserable while eating good food, receiving excellent service, confronting beautiful scenery, meeting rich or important people: when an experience is passive, it is, for me, always tedious, regardless of the circumstances.