David Vann is the author of the award-winning collection
Legend of a Suicide and recently
published
Caribou Island. The two
works, both in set in a raw Alaskan wilderness, tear apart what family is and what it is supposed to be. The following is an excerpt from
Madison Review fiction reviewer
Kia Namin’s interview
with the author.
Alaska is a character
in itself in both Legend of a Suicide
and Caribou Island, could you have
written these stories with out it?
Landscape was central to all of it. The reason it’s central
is that for me, writing is mostly unconscious. I don’t know what the characters
are going to do or say each day, and I don’t know what the whole thing will be
about. And the way I find out is I just keep describing place. I also focus on
character and the conflict between characters. But I really don’t know where it’s
going to go. And to me that is what’s wonderful about landscape, as a writer is
that it’s a kind of blank space for the unconscious to fill, it’s a way for the
unconscious to be able to write itself on to the page. Because landscape by
itself doesn’t mean anything. It only gains meaning in relation to how the
characters view it. And so as I describe the place I find out who the
characters are and what their vision is. And the landscape does these crazy transformations,
which is my favorite part.
Continuing in this
vein, what kind of function did you want Alaska to have in Caribou Island, what effect did you want it to have on
your characters?
So at the end of Caribou
Island for instance, Irene is running in the forest and she feels like the
earth is tilting underneath her, and that the whole island is top heavy with
the rock and trees and its going to turn over and the underside is going to be
exposed to the sky, and that’s that moment of transformation where the
unconscious is performing this act that provides some insight into the character’s
interior life, and to me, those are the surprising moments that are really why
I write, like that’s when I find out what the whole book is about. I guess
Alaska is that kind of important landscape for me because I spent my childhood
there, and so my first couple years of memories are from the rainforest from
South East Alaska. And it’s a landscape that is still mythic for me. Alaska
always felt animated, it was always alive. It’s because of these childhood
experiences that landscape ends up transforming and becoming something in the
fiction.
The way I view landscape is that it’s basically like a bare
stage and when I’m writing a novel, I’m basically writing a play just told
through the landscape. The reason landscape works well as a bare stage is that
it doesn’t have any meaning on its own, it just reflects the characters back to
the characters what’s going on inside of them. And that reflection it also
magnifies so its like a stage with mirrors all around.
Your description of
the landscape, characters’ trains of thought, and dialogue are all so muscular
and vivid. The transgressions in both Legend of a Suicide and Caribou Island are grim by any standard. All of this leading reviewers to compare
your writing to Cormac McCarthy’s. Do you enjoy this comparison? Are you a fan
of McCarthy or has he influenced you?
Well, yea. Of course he’s my favorite writer. Blood Meridian
was a huge influence for me because of the way he extends literal landscapes
into figurative landscapes. So the example that I always give that seems the
clearest, he describes a mountain range whose true geology was not stone but
fear, and it’s that move from stone to fear. Literal landscape to the figurative.
That’s how he gets to theme and meaning in his books. I love how he does that
and I think he takes it from Faulkner but he is better than Faulkner. I’m
really a different writer than him in a lot of ways, what I’m writing is a
drama. It’s like a play and all the threat comes from within the characters
where as he writes from a tradition of horror where the threat comes from
without. I’d kill to be able to write his sentences. His writing is so
beautiful that even if he’s describing something violent it is.
In many interviews,
you explain how massively therapeutic and redemptive writing Legend of a
Suicide was, did Caribou Island have any similar effects on you? What was Caribou
Island to you, why did you write it?
Writing can be redemptive, therapeutic, cathartic. But, it
can’t stop there because writing has to be about the beautiful, so therefore it
must be about a transformation.
Right to my next
question, though Legend of a Suicide
is outwardly dark, you have mentioned that it is essentially a love story for
your father? How so?
It takes me a couple of years and a lot of conversations to
find out what it is that I’ve written. The reason that it’s a love story is
that what I’m trying to do in that book is not forget him and loose him a
second time. You lose some once when they die, and you lose them again if you
lose all the memories of them. So I was trying to preserve those, and also in
some more fundamental way trying to bring him back to life like trying to
understand him and preserve something about him, and at the end, of Sukkwan
Island with in Legend of a Suicide there’s the thought it should have been
enough that his son loved him and he just didn’t understand that in time. And
that’s how it’s a love story, in that I always have felt like it should’ve been
enough that I loved him, that should have been enough reason for him to stay.
And so that to me has always been the biggest problem, the reason I was so
angry at him for thirty years, why was that not enough that made him want to
stay that I loved him? So that’s really what the book is exploring, that more
than anything else.
Is there a similar
dynamic at work in Caribou Island?
Caribou Island has a couple true family stories in the
background also with the death of my mother’s grandmother by suicide and the
murder-suicide of my stepmother’s parents is just something that I’ve always
wanted to understand. And so the books are similar in that they both have these
family stories in the background that bothered me for decades that I’m trying
to understand but they’ve both been completely transformed.
To me the fiction does this wonderful kind of transformation
that different characters, different places, different events but they all
speak to that true story in the background to help me to understand it.
I guess I feel like I need those true stories because
writing is mostly unconscious and nothing is going to happen if there is not
anything that the unconscious has been chewing on for decades, like there has
to be some fuel there, some material otherwise the unconscious doesn’t kick in,
it doesn’t do anything, it doesn’t provide any transformation
How do you like to
write? With a pen and paper? On a laptop? In long bursts or little by little?
When I was writing “Sukkwan island,” I was sailing from
California to Hawaii, it was the first time I started writing on a laptop,
before that the short stories had all been by hand because I had a class with
Grace Paley and she was really emphasizing that and I thought it was great, but
offshore the paper would get wet, so I would sit with my laptop velcroed across
my knees and I’ve never gone back and its great.
Now, I type so fast that I’m not aware of it, basically able
to put down words as quickly as I think them. So I love it, I write two or
three hours every morning, 7 days a week, and for me it's all about momentum
being there everyday and that’s how the unconscious can be cohesive, how you can have everything fit together.
Momentum was something I discovered in the writing, what I
realized is that Caribou Island is
mostly about momentum. Gary and Irene went to Alaska and it was just supposed to
be a summer, but they stayed thirty years and that became their lives and that
became their marriage even though it wasn’t right for either of them and I
think that’s true for a lot of people that their lives become something other
than what they had imagined or what they had wanted, and as the years go by
there’s a kind of force to all of it which is very difficult to fight. So, I think
momentum is the best word for people’s lives becoming something other than what
they had wanted, and that therefore can be a great source of regret and anger
and all those sorts of things.
