“A Complicated Kind of Pleasure:” A Conversation with Garth Greenwell

Garth Greenwell is the author of What Belongs to You, which won the British Book Award for Debut of the Year. His new book of fiction, Cleanness (2020), was published in January 2020. A finalist for the Lambda Literary Award, it has been longlisted for the Gordon Burn Prize, the Joyce Carol Oates Prize, and France’s Prix Sade. Cleanness was also named a New York Times Notable Book of 2020, a New York Times Critics Top 10 book of the year, and a Best Book of the year by the New Yorker, TIME, NPR, the BBC, and over thirty other publications. His fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, A Public Space, and VICE, and he has written criticism for The New Yorker, the London Review of Books, and the New York Times Book Review, among others. A 2020 Guggenheim Fellow, he lives in Iowa City with his partner, the poet Luis Muñoz.

Greenwell spoke with Advocate President Owen Torrey ’21 by phone in early January. This interview has been condensed and edited for brevity and clarity.

OT: You’ve said that Cleanness—in its ideal or platonic version—is neither a short story collection nor a novel, but rather a kind of song cycle. Could you speak a bit to how this structure came to be, and the relationship between musical and literary form in your work?

GG: My first education in art was in music. In high school, a music teacher heard something in my voice, and introduced me to opera and art songs. At that time, I was in Louisville, Kentucky, living in a house in which high-culture wasn’t really available. So, it was through singing song cycles that I learned about art, and learned how pieces with autonomous independent existences could be joined together to make greater wholes.

When I was writing Cleanness, I didn’t actively pattern it on any existing song cycle. But as I was writing, I wanted to put these chapters—what I thought of as nodes of intensity—in a meaningful relation that was not a standard one of chronology, cause, or consequence. That was when the analogy of a song cycle was helpful. The affinities that I felt between chapters, the ways that I hoped one movement would echo another: those seemed closer to me to something like Wintereisse [Schubert’s song cycle for voice and piano] than it did to literary novels that were available to me.

OT: In between each of chapters’ nodes of intensity, as you put it, there’s a lot of blank space where events pass outside of the reader’s gaze. How did you think about those kinds of narrative omissions, and their relation to the stories themselves?

GG: I have an artistic sensibility that’s drawn towards intensities. Probably that has something to do with those years I studied opera, and also the decades I studied lyric poetry. As I’m writing, I’m always turning towards the moments of greatest heat. If one composes that way, then a lot of narrative texture is allowed to remain in the background. When I was writing What Belongs to You [Greenwell’s first book], too, it genuinely did not occur to me to sort of fill in what seemed, to other people, like gaps. It’s an interesting problem to me: how do you write a novel and leave the prose-y bits out?

OT: There’s one moment in Cleanness when the narrator stumbles into the confession that “we can never be sure of what we want, I mean of the authenticity of it, of its purity in relation to ourselves.” This seems like a pretty crucial part of the collection’s heat-map. Could you speak about how these questions of individual pureness and transformation through desire emerge in your work?

GG: I think there’s a lot of anxiety around desire right now. These very pernicious and unavoidable questions of: How can we know what we want? To what extent is what we want fixed? Is desire the consequence of something that’s been done to us? How could it not be? To what extent can we own our desires?

All of these questions are really urgent and—also—feel impossibly flawed in their very formulation. The idea of a kind of virginal self that precedes desire, or that could originate its own desire, is just fundamentally false. Desire is always about commerce in the broadest sense: an exchange between the self and the world, the self and others. The desire to kind of trace an ideology of what we want just seems bottomless and maybe not the right question at all. What is more interesting to me—or what seems more promising to me as a way to live with ourselves and each other—is not looking back and asking, how can I diagnose or fix my desire?, but instead looking forward and saying, what can I do with my desire?

OT: Does fiction always feel like the best medium to sort through those questions?

GG: I don’t think that argument gets us far in thinking about these things—or it doesn’t get me very far. There’s something about the pressure of seeing, the pressure of language. When we put a frame around something and call it art, that changes its relationship to reality in a way that helps me think. Thinking—not abstractly or logically or via argument—but instead through the texture of existence. That is what fiction and narrative allows me to do.

OT: There’s a moment in The Frog King, when the narrator and R. are in Bologna. After a day of looking at immense, religious artworks, the two go into a museum, where the narrator is most struck by small images of household objects — plates and bowls against a plain background. “There was a kind of presence in the painting,” he says. “I could sense it humming at a frequency I wanted to tune myself to catch.” Is the everyday, however described, what captures your attention most? How do you think about investing it with the kind of frequency the narrator describes?

GG: I am certainly interested in the texture of everyday life, and believe that the texture of everyday life is accomodating of revelation. I think success in art means producing a frequency that allows for revelation. But, as the narrator says in that scene, that frequency of the art object itself has to be met by the viewer or by the reader, as well. There is a kind of work involved in receiving a work of art—something that catches your interest and makes you want to engage in the labour of tuning yourself to it, so that you can see its greatness. That is a process that I really cherish.

OT: When writing, do you ever think about that reader who might be tuning in, trying to catch your frequencies?

GG: I believe that art is fundamentally communicative, and I believe that we feel compelled to make things because we want them to be received by someone. Those things are definitely true. Yet it is also true that I do not think about a reader when I’m writing. I’m trying hard to sense the pitch of the work that I’m making. I’m trying to satisfy the most complicated kind of pleasure I can have, which I think is pretty much the only knowledge an artist can have about what they make—this question of pleasure, this utterly absurd faith that, if I make something that has integrity, if I make something that resonates at its own particular frequency, it will find an audience that will be able to receive it.

OT: It makes me think of this moment in “Mentor,” the first story in the collection, when one of the narrator’s students recounts his love for another boy in the class. As the narrator listens, he say:s “the experience [the student] had was my own, I felt, I recognized it exactly, and as he spoke I felt myself falling also, into the story and his feeling both, I was trapped in what he told.” I feel like usually we think of the experience of “seeing oneself,” or receiving the frequencies of a narrative, as being liberating or affirming in some sense, but here it seems more complicated. How do you think about the experience of recognition in literature, particularly as it relates to queer representation?

GG: I think there’s an easy answer that is not untrue, and then there’s the actually true answer. The easy answer is that it really does matter that diverse experiences are represented in literature. It does matter that queer kids can read books in which queer people are represented by queer people. That is not a complicated thing for me to say.

It also feels clear to me that the art that has been useful to my life is not art that simply reflects to me a celebratory sense of my own identity. Something that I resist very much in our current capital-D discourse is the resistance to art that feels problematic, the resistance to art that makes us feel uncomfortable. I want art to make me feel uncomfortable. I want art that puts me in situations that utterly defeat any sense of my own righteousness. I want art that radically complicates my sense of what my identity might be, or the extent to which anything like an identity can actually exist. I want art that is difficult. I want art that is hard.

I do worry that so much of our discourse seems invested in not wanting to call into question our loyalties, or our sense of virtue. That is a debased sense of what art can do. I think it radically compromises the potential art has to be transformative.

OT: I’m interested in that idea of literature as transformative. There are a lot of moments in Cleanness where the narrator borrows from received formulations of common language—what he calls “hackeneyed phrases” or “scripts,” which, he claims, both do and do not reflect his desires—that seem to gain new meanings once they appear on the page. Do you think these kinds of preconfigured phrases can be containers of true emotion? How do you think about using them within the frame of your work?

GG: Those questions are really at the centre of what I think about. I would say that just as there is no authentically pure desire, there is no authentically pure language. All of our language is always already compromised. It is external to us, and also forms our interiors. Yet the fact that none of my language originates with me, that all of it is endlessly recycled, does not mean that sincerity—sincerity of affect, sincerity of experience, sincerity of representation—is not available to me in that language. I’m really interested in the relationship between language and affect, and the ways worn out formulas can become electric. It seems obviously true that the phrase I love you is sometimes dull and empty and impossibly inauthentic, and at other times is an absolute livewire crackling with electricity, the truest words we can say.

OT: How does that transformation happen?

GG: I guess that’s what interests me. What are the conditions that constitute the difference? When someone does something with a piece of experience, a piece of language, that allows it to light up with energy, that fascinates me. I want to know why that happens.