James Tadd Adcox, The Map of the System of Human Knowledge, Tiny Hardcore Press, May 2012.
http://jamestaddadcox.com/
"The Map of the System of Human Knowledge is a short encyclopedia, full of entries that waver between fiction and memoir, poetry and prose, realism and irrealism.Construction workers build Indiana’s first official mountain. The entrails of vacuum cleaners are examined for hints of a dark future. Gift shops are burned down, rebuilt, burned down once again.
New forms of fathers appear. A man builds his wife a womb to protect her from the cold while she bakes their daughter.
Entries end, almost inevitably, not on what we know, but on what we cannot know.
The Map of the System of Human Knowledge is about everything, is about the need to put what we know in order, is about how orders break down. Is about how any encyclopedia must be incomplete.
The map of the system of human knowledge is, by necessity, incomplete."
"James Tadd Adcox's The Map of the System of Human Knowledge
supplies almost exactly what the title suggests: an assembly of short
fictions, anecdotes, poems, hypertexts and everything in between that
catalog the means we have developed, as a species, to reckon with our
own existence. The contents page is an elaborate diagram, illustrating
how 'human knowledge'—as large an umbrella term as there has ever
been—breaks down into sub-, sub-sub- and sub-sub-sub-categories, each of
which Adcox addresses with a story. (A word of reassurance to those of
you who, like me, are intimidated by anything more complex than a pie
chart: you do not need to understand this diagram to enjoy this book. In
fact, going in blind and letting each piece reveal its own place on
the map seems the natural way to read it.)
Adcox's writing simultaneously
cultivates distance and intimacy. He opens recognizable spaces while
exerting forces on them to make their familiarity strange. We can trace a
recurring fascination with disappearance, reappearance, dissolution and
distortion in these stories—lost possessions are coughed up by kitchen
sinks, rooms shrink and expand arbitrarily, unknown animals uncurl in
vacuum-cleaner dust. Several of Adcox's characters are defined not by
the milieu he has constructed for them, but the one they have written themselves into. In 'Statics' the narrator's home empties from the inside out until its body, too, starts to disintegrate:
[…] I begin picking up things around the house, testing their weight. Things look solid enough, but as soon as you take them apart…The phone? Gutted. The stereo, likewise. I sit down on the couch and open a bottle of wine. I try to think but my head feels dry and brittle. From the bottle of wine, nothing but dust. And I'm out of cigarettes. On the way to the corner store I wonder if my apartment, too, will be empty by the time I get back.
Adcox's interest in collapsing borders
(physical or philosophical) resolves into an anxiety of modern
convenience. Many of his narratives focus around a disruption of the
domestic idyll. Rather than using this as an avenue into an unexplored
liminal space, Adcox allows these breakdowns to interfere in the
dynamics of his characters' relationships. In this way images of
contemporary life are distorted by the strangeness Adcox has imposed on
them. In 'Practical Architecture' we see another domestic space taken to
pieces as a young couple's home rattles nails and window frames from
their fixtures, directly contributing to the breakdown of the marriage:
"Bill scours the uneven floorboards looking for things to plug up the
holes. His wife calls him every night, but each time she does, less and
less of her makes it through over the line."
Perhaps surprisingly, this is consistent
with the book's logic—to map out human experience Adcox must unpick the
reader's expectations of context. By introducing disturbance into such a
small space he forces us to confront exactly why we are so
disturbed. In these stories change is the only constant—more often than
not these transformations are bizarre and miraculous. A narrator
questions the existence of Minneapolis and checks several maps to find
"[a] city labeled 'Minneapolis' is on each map , but that's where the
similarity ends." Each time a girl name Rose is kissed "something new
[springs] up from the ground. Daisies, violets, poison ivy, kudzu."
Every structure is fluid and 'human knowledge' represents the attempt to
keep them held in cupped hands.
Similarly, Adcox's exhilarating and
unstable narratives prove difficult to sustain—few of these texts
stretch to more than a page. Though it is brevity that compels us into
these collapsing worlds, some of their inhabitants could use a little
more room to develop. This is perhaps most evident in 'Art of
Conjecture, Analysis of Chance', a paragraph-long story in which "[t]he
quantum physicist in love thinks to himself what a shame it is that he's
spent so much of his life devoted to something that he doesn't
understand in the least." The story gives us a tantalizing glimpse into a
mind in doubt, and then moves us on. The result is punchy, but vaguely
dissatisfying. To Adcox's credit, it isn't closure we're left craving
but more time with his quantum physicist, who even in 78 words is
intriguing enough to warrant our continued attention. A talent for
characterization persists in these texts even when they read like
memoir, but Adcox's tendency to rush to the point before exiting
headfirst through the window gives the reader small opportunity to see
this talent fully realized. For the most part though, his stories are
incisive and zippy, handing the reader snapshots of humanity caught in
vital moments small enough to pass others by unnoticed.
The Map of the System of Human Knowledge
approaches our understanding of the world (and the inevitable holes
therein) with imagination and unexpected humor. James Tadd Adcox
describes a series of worlds in microcosm, where the limit of experience
manifests as a destabilizing, sometimes threatening, sometimes
invigorating presence. These worlds, populated by genuflecting pianos
and quantum physicists in love, offer us shelter from that terrifying
unknown. Here we are invited to follow Adcox's example and build
ourselves a mountain, an artificial womb, a landscape of impossible
architecture." - Chris Emslie
James Tadd Adcox’s debut collection, The Map of the System of Human Knowledge
is a structured series of encyclopedic entries, its table of contents a
squid of carated subdivisions. Atop each of the four content page
headings is a constant reminder that the forthcoming sections fall under
a weighty umbrella: UNDERSTANDING.Understanding, of course, is and will necessarily always be incomplete. And so it makes sense that this be a tiny book, written in shards (The history of animals, to give an example, can not be mapped. But once we’ve made this admission, we can ask for a demonstrative story about the mice that were or were not ever in your walls).
The entries are further split into three sections: MEMORY (bracketed at the side as HISTORY), REASON (PHILOSOPHY), and IMAGINATION (POETRY). There’s a sort of tangential way in which the best flash collections function as exploded novels or dissertations, their shards scraping and embedding themselves in you, until you take one to a lonely lunch and shed a tear onto your neon-relished Polish, and you’re not sure you can really point to all the connective tendrils constricting so tightly around your tiny heart, but you’re sure that something bigger is happening. There’s a definite temporal arc at work in the sectioning: Memory representing the past. Reason our dealings with the present. Imagination our attempt at constructing our future. But this most obvious organizing principle, chronology, is continuously subverted by the imposition of each category onto each other: The collection begins and ends with entries titled “Sacred,” portions of philosophy are devoted to the “Art of Remembering,” HISTORY has one section entitled “Literary History,” another called “Memoir,” and the book’s final image, under the category of “Sacred Poetry,” is a memory. Adcox writes in sacred geometry, the sections a sort of shape-shifting currency in which he adds and adds and divides and deciphers formulae in form and in non-form.
We see, in Adcox’s images most deftly, shades of the classical storytellers—Marquez in the gossamer wings of Iranian homosexuals—but actually it becomes clear that Borges is probably the more apt Latin fantasist comparison. The world of Map has its own separate mythology, -as in Borges’s best, and Adcox is building an entirely new ecosystem, his rules clarifying themselves, as in our own world, empirically. But the rules, and here is something we either want to or must (depending on who you ask) believe of our own universe, are not fixed—sometimes devolving into irrational calamity, where the geese become the kings, nails unplug themselves from the walls, characters’ pants balloon and contract—the system itself a pulsating thing.
As well, there are Kafka’s desperate dealings with bureacracy, Calvino’s false starts in “Narrative,” Tolstoy’s asceticism in “Natural Theology,” but these stories are concerned less with copying and more with contemplating the preoccupations of its forebears. This is a universe whose most humane knowledge we recognize—the arm-twisting expression of love when a father begins to fear the abuse of his daughter, teenagers still nervously groping at each other. In Adcox’s, as well as our world, we still don’t fully know what we are, and we all harbor a similar suspicious notion. As he writes it: “[h]ow wonderful we once must have been.”
The HISTORY section is the largest and most full of the three. I’ve seen Adcox read all frantic and strained from his novel-in-progress, but the vignettes of HISTORY are not those. The characters here are the quiet, glazed-eyed malcontents of Carver, constantly asking for miracles. Nearly every one of these stories is about someone being technically wrong in the strictly rational sense, with such a pure heart that we do not pity or patronize them—because it is not naivety, but something better. No, we don’t pity them. We envy them.
In “Working and Uses of Skin,” we recognize the religious urge toward an authority figure. Robert Bly’s “naive man” is the one who sees no value in constraints. A major component of Nietzsche’s Superman is the ability to impose them on oneself. The Libertarian believes that we’re supermen. Alcoholics know we’re naïve.
And here’s the thing: all those people who are wrong? They’re not wrong. If you’re a logic (wo)man—a tendency I’m pulling recently out of—there’s a way in which you pine for it. Not because it’s more innocent and you hate being right. Because it taps something true that you’ll wish you could still tap, yourself. The secret we so often keep from ourselves is that the rational is neither the only, nor always the best, navigation system. The daughter knows more about the monsters than we do—and not merely because of a wild imagination. We rip apart vacuums. We show her. And still she knows. The daughter is not wrong. She’s only tuned to a different frequency. “See,” the story ends. “[I]n the dust: something begins to stir.”
As HISTORY moves on, we begin to notice a destruction myth: something nihilistic in the woman who births furniture—a negation of commerce (and sure enough, when times get tough, the soldiers arrive to ruin everyone’s armoire party). Toward the section’s end, the irrational, which in the first stories pops through the narratives in tiny bursts, becomes a vehicle for the more outlandishly avant. These, for me, are the moments where the most beautiful capacity of public remembering—the sculpting of empathy—is perhaps sacrificed a little. But it seems clear that the dissolution of the historical section is intentional: it morphs from the unmiraculous first entry, through a world of tiny miracles and misconceptions, into full-blown chaos. You can palpably envision the dam of Human Knowledge bursting in the background, Wagner blaring, as a shadowy couple argues through their teeth in the glitchy gift shop of the museum of irregularities.
The history section of human knowledge seems to have a death impulse.
While Adcox is at his best, to my mind, when he focuses not on the big chaoses or the wholly grounded, but on the small miracles—the home intruder candidly deciding against a robbery, the tiny 6-year-old born from the loins of some new saint—the PHILOSOPHY section continues into more rhetorical territory. The characters advance theories and, in doing so, show us to an extent where their hearts lie. Readers will hear an inkling of the existential optimism from the I ♥ Huckabees “tiny connections” speech in the “Metaphysics of Bodies…” entry. “It’s weird…” says a gray-visaged lover. “[B]oth of us getting turned on with him trying to figure out where I end.”
We learn, as in “Mechanics,” that some of what we see has unexpected innards, and that some—as in “Statics”—is unexpectedly empty. In “Acoustics” Adcox discusses mysticism, the tenuous arguments we allow ourselves, mindfully, to buy into; the attempts to inject science, and the simple fact that it’s just. not. all. to be found there. The section ends with a lie: “Praise Jesus,” a son hears his father’s mistress say. “Everything’s been put right.”
Where the HISTORY section of human knowledge encompasses our anecdotal dealings with the world, and where PHILOSOPHY is the theorizing, it is POETRY where the two come together, sometimes favoring the former, sometimes the latter, sometimes the two balanced equivalently.
HISTORY is a narrative but it’s a narrative that at the least claims to be motiveless. In POETRY, Adcox brings in the possible vs. the actual, and we begin to see humanity infused with philosophy. And isn’t that what art is? These are the entries where Adcox gives himself space to roam but always returns to the ground at the end. They’re a little weird, a little out there, but they resolve, as in “Music” (both the entry and the entity writ large), there are tiny theses advanced. And though we know we do not have complete conscious access to the what and why of it all, we can be sure that we understand when “[s]ome huge weight crawls from our hearts.” - Joshua Kleinberg
Is the beauty of the human brain the fact that we don’t know everything? Or is it the potential for us to know it all? James Tadd Adcox tackles those questions and many more that consider the processes of the human mind in The Map of the System of Human Knowledge. Within his pages, we get a chart of what is contained inside the brain, and how all of these subjects–from memory to philosophy and nature–combine to form a complete, functioning system. But the thing is, the map still does not lead anywhere, nor should it. Rather, Adcox provides the reader with a new way to view the life that surrounds us, as well as the life that lives inside him as well.
We open in memory. Why do we forget? Why do we remember? Why do we remember the horrible pain that comes from dropping something heavy on our foot but not where we last placed our car keys? In “History/Civil/Memoir,” we get a panorama of past, present, and future. The protagonist’s father calls him on the phone and he wonders why. Could he be drunk? He remembers his mother making treasure maps for he and his brother when they were younger, turning their neighborhood into an entirely new world. The future comes hurtling in when this man’s father has died, when his mother is in an assisted-care facility, when he is married. And then we are swept back into the past, back to when this young, college-age man would drunkenly call his father but never actually speak to him. These flashes and lapses in memory are striking in their beauty and in their realism. It feels like actual memory, like the reader, too, falls into the pattern of forgetting, remembering, drunkenly forcing certain things to be or not to be. Adcox works these maneuvers of the mind into striking vignettes that stick long after the pages of the book fade away.
We pass from memory into reason. Philosopher David Hume returns from
the dead and brags about it; a religious man makes soup while pondering
the larger theological meaning of making soup in the world; a man
comforts his daughter, who believes a monster lives in the vacuum
cleaner; and a father fears his daughter’s imaginary friend may actually
be a predator living in their neighborhood. While these vignettes have
less circuitous beauty than the memory section, they are nevertheless
strikingly real. Especially in the imaginary friend story,
“Philosophy/Science Of Man/Logic/Art Of Thinking/Apprehension,” the fear
of one man becomes crystal clear. It is easy to see why he cannot
believe in pure imagination, but immediately moves into fear and
violence.
Finally, we arrive at imagination. In this final section, Adcox
combines the beauty of memory and the logic of reason into the magic of
the imagination. The author’s imagination proves to be something quite
extraordinary, giving the reader pause into how much reality goes into
something perhaps not quite real. In “Poetry/Profane/Theatrical/Opera,” a
soprano begins singing on street corners to spread opera into her
community. In “Poetry/Profane/Theatrical/Pastoral,” a Cyclops goes
blind. And in “Poetry/Profane/Painting,” a man’s wife only paints
miniature portraits. All of these surreal, tiny little stories are like
those miniature paintings: an artist’s view of reality transferred to a
canvas. In Adcox’s case, that canvas is the page, yes, but it is also
the minds of his characters and of his readers. Everything is
transformed into something new. Even though a map of sorts is created,
the mystery is deepened, rather than solved. The treasure remains
buried. - Joellyn Powers
Sitting at a brief 140 pages, Adcox’s book is structured much like an encyclopedia. Comprised mostly of vignettes, the book is divided into three sections, “Memory,” “Reason,” and “Imagination”—with multiple other subsections and divisions that follow. Adcox’s narrative oscillates between memoir and fiction, the real and surreal, and the logical and the absurd. It is a meditation on the way humans, as a race, feel the need to structure and categorize the systems of information we’ve come to accept as truths.
As the reader delves further into this system of human knowledge, the more murky said system becomes, and it is nearly impossible to see the already thin line that separates fiction from non-fiction. In, “Philosophy / Science of Man / Logic / Art of Communicating / Science of the Instrument of Discourse / Grammar / Philology” the author/narrator says:
“The last two speakers of Ayapan Zoque
have decided to stop speaking to each other, I tell my wife, looking up
from the paper. My wife is washing dishes. Each plate she washes, she
slams into its place in the cabinet. She doesn’t bother drying them.
No big argument, I tell her, no explosion. They just, you know,
stopped. Talking.” (78.)
And still, it’s clear that the blurring of the two genres is in no
way a symptom of the author’s lack in ability to write or tell a
story—rather, it’s just the opposite. Everything in this book is
deliberate, and Adcox guides you along the system of human knowledge
with precision and care. It is, at times, funny and tragic, raw and
whimsical. It is a book that I was genuinely excited to read, and even
more excited to recommend to friends. And still the most exciting thing
about this book? Adcox shows us that, no matter how rich and deep the
literary history from which we come, it is still possible to tell a
completely original story. - Joey Pizzolato
The Map of the System of Human Knowledge
[Back]
-->buy The Map of the System of Human Knowledge at Tiny Hardcore Press
/ History / sacred
/ History / sacred / history of the prophets
/ History / civil [print source]
/ History / civil / memoir
/ History / civil / literary history
/ History / natural / uniformity of nature
/ History / natural / uniformity of nature / history of land & sea
/ History / natural / uniformity of nature / history of animals [print source]
/ History / natural / irregularities of nature
/ History / natural / irregularities of nature / monstrous animals
/ History / natural / uses of nature / arts, crafts, manufactures / working and uses of precious stones / diamond cutter [print source]
/ History / natural / uses of nature / arts, crafts, manufactures / working & uses of stone, plaster, slate, etc / practical architecture [print source]
/ History / natural / uses of nature / arts, crafts, manufactures / working & uses of wool / hosiery
/ Philosophy / science of God
/ Philosophy / science of God / science of good and evil spirits / divination [print source]
/ Philosophy / science of man / pneumatology or science of the soul [print source]
/ Philosophy / science of man / logic / art of thinking / apprehension
/ Philosophy / science of man / logic / art of remembering / supplement to memory / writing / cipher [print source]
/ Philosophy / science of man / ethics / general / general science of good and evil. of duties in general. of virtue. of the necessity of being virtuous, etc. [print source]
/ Philosophy / science of man / ethics / particular / science of the laws of jurisprudence [print source]
/ Philosophy / science of man / ethics / particular / science of the laws of jurisprudence / economics [print source]
/ Philosophy / science of nature / metaphysics of bodies, or, general physics. of extent. of impenetrability. of movement. of void. etc.
/ Philosophy / science of nature / mathematics / mixed / acoustics
/ Philosophy / science of nature / particular physics / mineralogy
/ Philosophy / science of nature / particular physics / alchemy [print source]
/ Poetry / profane / theatrical / opera
/ Poetry / profane / music / theory [print source]
/ Poetry / profane / civil architecture
Robert and Viola
[Back]/ The First Thing That Viola Stole from Robert Was His Monogrammed Pen
/ Viola and Robert Are Attempting to See Other People [print source]
/ Viola Is Sitting on the Examination Table
DISEASES DISORDERS BREAKS
[Back]
/ DISEASES DISORDERS BREAKS ("There are of course girls and girls...")
/ DISEASES DISORDERS BREAKS ("The Reverend Dr. BH Shadduck is on the television...")
/ DISEASES DISORDERS BREAKS ("Abnormal habits prohibitive...") [video]
Fun with Taxonomy: An Interview with James Tadd Adcox
Author James Tadd Adcox
Tadd, a Ph.D student in English at the University of Illinois-Chicago, recently took some time out of his busy schedule to talk to Gina Myers over e-mail about his new book and his editorial project Artifice Magazine, and wound up talking about taxonomy and knowledge, plagiarism and postmodernism, the connection between weird music and weird literature, and communicating with readers over Skype.
The title The Map of the System of Human Knowledge seemingly sets a lofty aim to your collection of stories. Can you discuss where the idea for the title, along with all the obsessive cataloging/mapping of titles within, comes from?
The original “Map of the System of Human Knowledge” was a system of taxonomy created by Diderot and d’Alembert for the 18th-century Encyclopédie. It aimed to be a categorization of all human knowledge. I’ve always been interested in systems that attempt, in some way, to be universal–other structures I considered for this collection include the Dewey Decimal System and the Library of Congress taxonomy. But I feel like the Encyclopédie’s map belongs to a certain moment of Western history, when the idea that you could contain all human knowledge in a single book didn’t seem totally insane. And there’s something about the crazy ambition of that that really appeals to me. Also, around the time I was putting this collection together, I was working as a taxonomist for an internet search-engine based here in Chicago. Being a taxonomist is not, as it turns out, as glamorous a thing as it sounds like, but it wasn’t a bad job for a couple of months.
Speaking of classification, how would you label your own work: surrealist, magic realist, something else altogether?
Indeterminate? Undecided? One of the most interesting things about classifications is how much falls between the categories. I tend to think of my work as based more on tones or influences: a Barthelme tone, a sentence that slightly or entirely rips off Russell Edson, a realist tone swerving into something that doesn’t quite fit within realism. More recently I’ve been working some with cut-ups and plagiarism, and even though there’s not quite any of that in this book, there’s still that tendency, I think: wanting to play with different voices and see how they go together. So maybe “assemblages”?
I noticed the range in your book–some pieces reminded me of Borges, and other seemed to be about real people suddenly dealing with something absurd, like Edson. How did you start doing cut-ups, and what do you mean by working with plagiarism?
“Repurposing found text” is probably a better way of putting it, but I like “plagiarism”: taking someone else’s words and rearranging them or otherwise doing something new with them. Like cut-ups, but with slightly less faith in randomness. What I like about using previously-existing text in general is that writing becomes less like painting, and more like sculpture. Like, you have all the pieces, you just have to put them together in the right way. So maybe you try this piece over here, look at it for a bit, decide that actually it should go over there. It’s just a very different relationship to words.
It’s not all of what I do. Sometimes I’d rather take the painter route, and just make things up. Sometimes it’s a combination of the two. I particularly like it when I’ve gone over a piece so many times that I’m not sure what language was originally there and what language I added or replaced.
But Map of the System is kind of a proto-found-text book. I’m pretty deliberately taking voices and mixing them up, but it doesn’t include any found-text language. Or I don’t think it does. Not much, anyway.
Do you have a specific process for selecting which texts you’re going to work with, or do you leave it up to chance?
I don’t know that I have a process, usually. It’s kind of whatever I’m interested in, whatever language I find weird or striking. I like Project Gutenberg quite a bit, all those texts from the 1800s or the turn of the century. The various forms of utopianism that people were excited about in the 19th century are really interesting to me, so I find myself playing with a lot of texts about Esperanto, “social hygiene,” eugenics, Fourierism, things like that.
This all connects with the focus of Artifice, the literary magazine you launched seeking to publish work “aware of its own artifice.” At the time of its launch, did you feel there was a lack in venues for this type of work?
Not so much that there was a lack, as it didn’t seem like there was any place specifically focused on this sort of work. We were attempting to draw together a thing that we saw happening, aesthetically, a certain return to the concerns of writers and artists in the sixties and seventies, the writers typically called postmodernists. We weren’t looking for work that recreated “postmodernist” writing–we weren’t looking for Barth or Acker knock-offs–but rather, we were looking for work that represented the next move, the work that extended the tradition that we saw writers like Barth and Acker representing.
How has your work as an editor influenced your own writing?
I think that working as an editor is fantastic, both in the way it clarifies what you’re interested in as a writer, and that it helps you get a pretty good overview of what’s going on in the independent literary scene in general. The possibility of burn-out seems pretty high, though, especially if you’re working on a lot of other things at the same time. I’m planning to start looking for someone to take on the head editorship of Artifice Magazine sometime after Issue 5, so I can focus more on my own writing and a couple of other projects.
The Map of the System of Human Knowledge
Strange. Fun. It seemed maybe a little more personal or like, intimate, even, than I’d expected it to be. Various people, some of whom I knew, some of whom I didn’t, were suddenly in my apartment, and I was in theirs (or their office, or wherever), and we were face to face. And I read them a story. The audience-reader relationship is very different, I think, in one-on-one readings. There’s no way to think of the audience in abstract terms–there’s no audience, really, there’s only this one person, and that person either likes what you’re reading, or they don’t.
The internet in my apartment was out for a while on Friday, so I took my laptop to a coffee shop and read to people from there, sitting at one of the tables outside. That was nice.
Do you have any upcoming promotional readings or events?
I’m going to be doing a week-long reading tour of the Midwest from August 10th to the 17th with my friends Russ Woods and Meghan Lamb, who run the journal Red Lightbulbs. Meghan’s book Silk Flowers is coming out from Aqueous fairly shortly, and Artifice is going to be publishing Russ’s debut poetry collection, Wolf Doctors. Russ used to tour as a band called Tiny Folk, and so we’re reading in a lot of venues that he knows from his band-touring days. Probably he’ll play music, too.
And then on August 25th I’m reading in Atlanta for the Solar Anus reading series, and then sometime after that I’m reading in Tuscaloosa. I’m hoping to maybe set up another couple of far-flung readings in the next few months, as well.
And you just had a table at the Pitchfork Music Festival. How did that go?
Pretty fun. I was with a Chicago-based press called Curbside Splendor in the Chirp Radio tent, so we were surrounded by people selling records and crafts and so forth. I talked to a lot of people who weren’t familiar with independent presses, who weren’t familiar with the culture of literary journals, and who seemed excited about it. I feel like there’s a lot of potential for crossover between indie literature and indie music, and explaining literature in music terms can make it a lot more accessible for a lot of people. People aren’t off-put by weird music in the same ways that they can feel off-put by weird literature, and I think that has to do with this expectation that a lot of people have that, in order to enjoy a short story or a poem, they have to understand it, be able to come up with some explanation for it. Whereas no one thinks that they have to know why someone plays a song a certain way in order to like the song. - Interview by Gina Myers
"What is Simultaneously There and Not-There": An Interview with James Tadd Adcox
James Tadd Adcox's work has appeared in TriQuarterly, The Literary Review, PANK, and Another Chicago Magazine, among other places. He lives in Chicago, where he edits Artifice Magazine / Artifice Books. His first book of fiction, The Map of the System of Human Knowledge, is now available for preorder from Tiny Hardcore Press.
Here, James Tadd Adcox talks to interviewer Melissa Goodrich about God, dead babies, and the encyclopedia of everything.
1. In our first paragraph (‘our,’ like just by reading your story it has become part mine) we sail with Viola from the doctor’s examination table clear through the stratosphere towards so far out “she’s not picturing the details too clearly now, past the moon and the earth-like planets, past the un-earth-like planets, out of the solar system.” This is the farthest Viola travels, and she’s not actually traveling, but sitting still, anchored in place by Robert, by the narrative, by the baby about to die in her. Why this choice as an opening moment? It’s so opposite of the ending, where she’s takes her strange blue child back to kiss and hold him again. Are you intending to stretch Viola out, like her head wants to float but her feet feel glued?
I tend to feel very cold and separate from things at moments of violence or tragedy, and I suppose I lent that trait to Viola, here. I don’t write anything autobiographical, but I’m willing to take material from wherever. I also like that it immediately presents a distance between the two of them, between Robert and Viola: they’re holding hands but hugely far away. Or: Robert thinks he’s there for Viola, but Viola’s not there for him to be there for her.
I feel like the primary reason to put a relationship in a story is to exploit this, the tension between what is simultaneously there and not-there.
2. Viola feels cursed, invokes God in a joking non-joking way, has dreams/premonitions, senses she and her husband and her doctor are like ghosts rehearsing their untimely deaths – why does so much superstition, intuition, and/or God’s mysteriousness come to play in this piece? How do you gauge how much God to put into a story?
Whew. Not going for the easy questions here, are you? How do you gauge how much God to put into a story? I like a lot of God in stories, I suppose. Though when God appears in a lot of stories, it seems to be a comforting thing, an “everything will be okay” moment, and that doesn’t quite seem right to me. I’m fascinated by God, and religion more generally. But the idea of God doesn’t work if God makes sense, if God is rational. Then God just becomes like a big daddy figure, or a super-advanced alien being, or whatever. All of which is ultimately boring. The alternative, that God is irrational, or rather arational, is terrifying. It’s the sort of idea that you can get lost in, that can swallow you whole.
3. How do you feel about the ‘dead baby’ rule in fiction? How would you define the ‘dead baby’ rule? And are rules like that asked to be broken, and by whom, under what circumstances?
I wasn’t actually aware of the dead baby rule before this interview. I’ve talked before about my own “cancer and dogs” rule as an editor (that is, if either cancer or a dog appears on the first page, the story gets automatically rejected). It’s a rule that dates from when I was the fiction editor at Sycamore Review, and it was mainly a way of weeding out a certain type of realist story that assumed that CANCER = HIGH STAKES, and DOGS = REGIONALISM + SYMPATHETIC CHARACTERS. Cancer plus dogs, obviously, equaled the BEST POSSIBLE REALIST STORY.
When I told my buddy Jon Sealy (a damn fine realist writer himself) about this rule, he went and wrote a story with a dog on the first page. The dog got shot dead on the second page. It was a pretty great story. Don’t remember if it had cancer in it or not.
But yes, the dead baby rule. I guess I agree that you probably shouldn’t put dead babies in fiction, and I did that.
4. Tell us the strangest sweetest story you’ve read as of late.
I’m not sure how sweet Meghan Lamb’s story “GIRL” in >kill author is, but it’s pretty strange and overwhelming, and her reading of it (there’s an audio version you can listen to) is spot-on.
I’m currently reading Brandi Wells’ Please Don’t Be Upset, and her story “Some Love Stories” is lovely. There is a dog in it, but not on the first page.
5. Tell us what we can hold our hearts out hoping to read, of your work, soon.
I have a book coming out, very soon, from Tiny Hardcore Press, called The Map of the System of Human Knowledge. It’s a very tiny, and hopefully hardcore, fictional encyclopedia of everything. It takes its form (and its name) from a taxonomy of all knowledge developed by Diderot and d’Alembert for the Encyclopédie. Maybe for some of the same reasons that I’m fascinated by religion, I really like these weird and amazing Enlightenment attempts to create universal systems of—for?—everything.
I’ve got a couple more Viola and Robert stories around—one coming out in Redivider soon—and I’m working on a short novel based on the characters and general tone of the stories. Is it weird to say that I’m working on something based on tone as much as characters? Anyhow, I think of these stories as about a certain tone or voice as much as about certain characters. It’s a tone that can be difficult to make work as a novel, and so it presents kind of an interesting aesthetic challenge. The novel involves FBI agents, volunteer human test subjects, infidelity with and without sadomasochism, and the occasional frankly low-rent superhero. - Interview by Melissa Goodrich
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