Mystical Cancelation: Or, Vivienne
Mystical Cancelation: Or, Vivienne
in which my husband asks me questions
Hi! Today is Vivienne’s release date. Order here or here or wherever you get books. To mark the occasion, I’m unlocking this formerly paywalled chat from the spring. My husband and I had a long and juicy conversation about getting canceled, writing Vivienne, calling people out online, poets writing novels, Woody Allen movies, and more——
MICHAEL: I remember so clearly getting your phone call. I was driving home from work in May of last year. You read me an email you’d just received from the publishers of your forthcoming book of poetry, which had just gone live on their website a few days prior, in which they demanded explanations for your associations with certain people and publications. You composed a response that was, to my mind, polite and professional, yet you declined to denounce the figures. Your main point: neither artwork nor people should be judged by such associations. It seemed reasonable to me, yet I had a gnawing feeling that it wasn't over, as those in small press publishing so often decline to take the reasonable course of action…
The next day brought their next email, in which they stated they were pulling your book. Part of the problem that the publishers had with you was that you had published a few pieces in Compact Magazine, which publishes all kinds of viewpoints, and provokes a lot of criticism. After your book was pulled, you published an essay there about the experience entitled “Purity Policing Is Poison To Poetry.” In it, you write,
it wasn't my words specifically that bothered the editors, but the words of others I had associated with, spoken to, published alongside. The implication was that I had been contaminated, so my book would contaminate their press, harming their authors and readers[...]I told the editors that I believe we can talk to people, even work with people, with whom we disagree. The drive to keep clean[...]is antithetical to poetry[...]I published with small poetry presses that value experimental work in part because I want relationships based[...]on a shared commitment to the strangeness of verse. But in the areas of the arts least taken up with economic imperatives, a moral economy has taken hold, in which the work itself can feel secondary to its author's alignment, or lack thereof, with the causes of a given moment.
Your essay makes being contaminated seem thrilling. Is there something ecstatic about it?
EMMALEA: Ecstatic, maybe. Or, erotic? Dangerous? I summoned Georges Bataille in that essay, a self-described saint and madman, and the reading Benjamin Noys does of him, which has to do with a kind of necessary contamination, a willingness to sit with figures, times, or beliefs that are different from yours which maybe provoke or offend, without making clean, clear breaks from them. These breaks themselves can be filled with what Noys calls fascist logic, or a kind of purity policing. Afterwards, I received a lot of support and vitriol. Some hysterical reactions, too. Some people didn’t want to work with me unless I denounced specific articles written by others (in places I’ve published) or certain people I’ve published alongside or have had pubic conversations with. So now, we are living in a time when we must have the ‘correct’ opinion on certain issues, even if the work itself has nothing to do with those issues, or else!
MICHAEL: You and I disagree politically sometimes, yet we still managed to get married. I’ve been reading a lot of Patricia Highsmith novels lately, and she is a genius poet of guilt. So many of her books focus on characters who are contaminated, having committed crimes that can’t be proven, or been accused of crimes they can never totally disprove. Guilt emerges as this fascinating substance, an external force that reorders the social, and an internal force that destabilizes the sense of self. Highsmith really makes you feel how dangerous exposure to guilt can be, like grabbing a live wire.
EMMALEA: Yeah, Highsmith is all over the house. I like guilt as a ‘fascinating substance.’ We’re all guilty. I did a kind of…moral inventory last year when this happened. What if we had to think about our own wrongs and capacities for badness before publicly condemning others?
MICHAEL: Highsmith’s characters often start at a lofty social position and then lose their reputations. So it’s not new, but still it’s really something to see it play out in life. Your situation was the first time it happened to someone I know personally. It’s strange how little it takes to trigger. You weren’t even accused of doing anything yourself, but of talking to the wrong people in public. The people who labeled you guilty or didn’t stick up for you accepted this logic so easily. I could never get over that. The flip side of that coin is that they are a bit hysterical about crafting images of themselves as good people.
What is happening to courtesy?
EMMALEA: The moral economy erodes courtesy, art, relation, ambiguity. It makes people distrust play, silence, politeness, beauty, fun. But without these things, we go nuts. What did Nietzsche say? Without art, we’d kill ourselves from too much truth or whatever. Instead of saying, hey nice to meet you, how are you? It’s like, hey how do you identify and what is your stance on this issue? It’s isolating and tends to X out both fun and art—what do we miss when we are frantically sorting the good from the bad? I guess the novel deals with these themes.
MICHAEL: You're talking of course about your new novel, Vivienne, which is forthcoming from Arcade in September. What was it like working on a new project while being canceled?
EMMALEA: Maybe I became more fearless? I found Vivienne, the title character of the new novel, or she found me, in Magenta, the canceled book of poetry that now lives as a free PDF on my website. Magenta mentions a lot of mystics and artists and heretics, including Hans Bellmer, the dissident surrealist famous for his doll sculpture and photographs. Vivienne seemed to have been there all along, a fictional artist who lived with Bellmer at the end of his strange life in the 1970s and then disappeared from the scene before resurfacing many years later and finding herself in the midst of a controversy. During her re-emergence, she becomes a kind of basin for rumor, contention, transformation. So my own experience and Vivienne sort of mirrored or presaged each other, even as they’re quite different.
MICHAEL: How was writing a novel different from writing your books of poetry (Confetti, Wave Archive, G, and Magenta), which all sort of blend archival research, the work of other artists and philosophers, poetry, and prose?
EMMALEA: The creation of SCENES. Plot. Vivienne has a plot, right? But there is poetry in the novel. Vivienne’s poetry, which I wrote, and a populist poetry of internet comments sections—holy and blasphemous. The novel is crammed with YouTube comments and online choirs. I read a lot of comments, especially on videos of so-called controversial or canceled figures.
MICHAEL: Vivienne is very beautiful to me for several reasons, but one of them is that it contains some strange and daring formal elements—ruptures of the avant-garde into the prose block—but they are all ‘motivated’ and contained by the content of the book. There is weird poetry, but it’s presented as the work of a character. There is the Greek chorus, different viewpoints all together, but it’s framed as comments. Those parts are very funny btw.
Viktor Shklovsky, the Russian Formalist critic, once wrote that Tolstoy’s diaries would not help a person understand War and Peace.
EMMALEA: I love this. It’s actually a bold notion now, when identity rules. Personal experience reigns supreme and only certain people are allowed to write about certain things. Boring. I have epilepsy, for instance. But, I don't assume that I’d know how to write about a fictional character with epilepsy better than a writer who has never had a seizure. In fact, there might be something about my personal experience that blocks my ability to portray it. Who knows.
MICHAEL: What do you think of this trend of people calling out alleged abusers on social media?
EMMALEA: I am instinctively opposed to it, though I understand it’s complicated and I get the impulse. I’ve had the impulse, too. My opposition maybe comes from the fact that I hail from a family of public defenders. What about reasonable doubt? Due process? Anyone can get called out. For anything. Who decides who is a criminal? I’d rather try to think for myself than swallow an accusation whole. When a neighbor gossips to me about another neighbor, someone I don't know, I accept their experience but I don’t make presumptions about the accused neighbor without first meeting them and deciding for myself. What I'm saying, I guess, flies in the face of ‘believe all women,’ a totally patronizing slogan. Women lie, too. How do you feel about online call-out culture?
MICHAEL: I mostly agree with you. I don't like it, but I can understand the impulse. But this implies a Rousseauian version of humanity in which every person has a glorious, just soul. And I don't believe that is the case. My job has made me very distrustful of stories. It requires that I say, yes, but can I get some corroboration? Due Process is the most beautiful concept in American society and we should not treat it lightly. But of course, if I had been sexually assaulted I might want to unmask my ex online, too. Isn’t it interesting that so many people inadvertently adopt a prosecutorial mindset? Is there any artist whose views or alleged deeds are so repugnant that you can no longer interact with their work?
EMMALEA: No. But I do feel repelled when I’m being told what to watch, avoid, or think. I’ve gotten dirty looks for loving Woody Allen movies.
MICHAEL: Oh, I know it. Which makes giving suggestions on movie night very difficult. The older I get, the more I appreciate his work. What is your favorite one?
EMMALEA: I love Interiors cause it’s a pretty and bonkers Bergman tribute. And the one where he goes blind: Hollywood Ending. Everyone seemed to hate it but I thought it was hilarious. And Stardust Memories, which was filmed at the beach in Jersey near us. He donated a cross to that town after filming, which I would walk by everyday. I love Husbands and Wives, too. You?
MICHAEL: I’ve been in a phase of watching some of the 90s ones, and I think they’re totally underrated. Deconstructing Harry is a masterpiece. I even think Celebrity is wonderful, and people talk about that like it’s his worst film.
If culture today is a highway with two sides and nothing in the middle but roadkill, what does that make those figures who dart out into traffic? Are they holy, are they fools, or both?
EMMALEA: Holy fools. I like thinking about the mysticism of cancelation.
MICHAEL: That reminds me of Willem Dafoe. Do you remember in Platoon, when his character, Sgt Elias, dies? It’s a famous shot. Definitely a mystical cancelation.
THANK YOU for reading. Get Vivienne here.