Fantastic Metropolis

Jeff VanderMeer: In writing “The Einstein-Jung Connection,” included in the new collection, were there any special considerations to keep in mind when using famous people as characters?

Daniel Pearlman: There were several considerations. First, the two geniuses actually were good friends in pre-WWI Zurich, as I discovered many years ago when reading around in Jung. Jung was, of course, influenced in his philosophy of time by Einstein—though in ways Einstein would not have sanctioned—and I had to know these men’s contributions to physical or psychological science sufficiently well to pit their world views against each other in a dramatic setting. Secondly, I had to see these geniuses as more than talking heads; I had to take note of their dark sides, as I’ve said above, that troubling element that did not accord so easily with their powerful intellects—and that led me to focus on the wives, especially Emma Jung, who became the point-of-view character. It was only when I saw her as the lens that a story, that a drama, suddenly became possible. The third consideration, technically, was not to violate any known fact of my characters’ biographies, and, indeed, to incorporate as much as possible of their known natures and backgrounds into the tale.

Jeff VanderMeer: Which of your short stories or novels most perfectly captures, to your mind, those qualities you most strive for in your fiction?

Daniel Pearlman: Well, I think “The Drang of Speaking Forth” is the story that most amazes me even now. It arose out of a dream about a mechanical marlin. Through secondary elaboration when I was awake it came to involve, of course, Hemingway—and then involved Borges, and then became raucously funny, and then became a linguistic tour de force. The story that most approaches that one in sheer magicality—for me, the author—is “The Circus Hand’s Desertion,” first published in The Silver Web, and now, like “Drang,” in my new collection.

Jeff VanderMeer: Your stories are adult in the best sense of the word—they do not shy away from issues of sexuality or sensuality when the story demands it, but you’re never prurient. “Death in the Des(s)ert” comes to mind, and the aforementioned “Circus Hand’s Desertion”. How do you think most authors fail in this regard? How do such explorations fit into your fiction as a whole?

Daniel Pearlman: Sex plays a role, either minor or major, in every story in my new volume except for “The Colonel’s Jeep.” The fact is, of course, that sex plays such an immense role in life that the writer must confront it in fiction or run the risk of falsification of what it means to be human. Apart from the obvious, however, sexuality to my mind is the great healing force, a force of enormous power, and all of human history has been a struggle of society after society to harness this wild horse or hobble it. The sex drive is the ultimate in creative subversiveness, the ultimate destabilizer of rigid social forms. In my mind all great art, but especially the literary arts, are in fundamental cahoots with the universal sex-spirit to undermine every social habit or convention that ossifies into dogma. In my fiction I always look, in my characters, for the dark side of their psyches, whose eruption must eventually upset my characters’ (and my readers’) expectations, and this dark, subversive side is often tinged with anarchic sexuality. A story of mine like “The Vatican’s Secret Cabinet,” for example, is an obvious instance in which sex and society stand in uneasy relationship. My recently completed novel Weeds in Franco’s Garden explores to the hilt the interrelations between sex, love, marriage, and a repressive political environment (the twilight of the Franco era in Spain). On your Whimsy site you’ve posted an early draft of Chapter Two of that novel, which introduces a sexual theme in a magic-realist context.

When you ask how authors fail in their attempts to incorporate sex into their fiction, I can answer you best by saying that such authors are uncomfortable with sex, don’t understand its profound social and spiritual importance, and therefore trivialize it via lasciviousness or else a wispy delicacy of handling that equally misses the mark. The integration of sexuality into the totality of our human behavior is the ongoing challenge of every culture, of every civilization. We have only to look at the Taliban to witness the total failure of a fringe culture to deal with half of its own constituency, and I believe that male-dominated cultures that fail to draw on the enormous healing and life-giving powers of the Female are doomed to self-destruction.

Jeff VanderMeer: When an author “gets” to you, what, typically, is the reason?

Daniel Pearlman: A combination of imaginative inventiveness and profundity. This combination I demand of myself, whether or not I am able always to achieve it.