Vincent Czyz, Sun Eye Moon Eye. Spuyten
Duyvil, 2024
Sun Eye Moon Eye centers around Logan Blackfeather, a musician of mixed Hopi descent, whose faulty sense of direction sends him spiraling through the mid-’80s. The novel opens with Logan crossing a stretch of Arizona desert, his thumb out for a ride and most of what he owns in a bag slung over a shoulder. By this time he has suffered a breakdown and given up music. A knife fight in the parking lot of a roadside bar ends in the death of a trucker, and in short order Logan finds himself in a psychiatric hospital in New York. He makes his way to Manhattan, where he’s as bewildered by the fluorescent-colored spikes of punks as he is by the upturned collars of yuppies. A job as a piano man in a Village bar eases him back into music, and he falls into a turbulent relationship with a successful ad executive. Haunted by a dead father who comes to him in dreams, by the killing of the trucker, and memories of his violent uncle/stepfather, Logan is caught between tradition and modernity, the rural and the urban, his Anglo and Native American ancestries. Myth and dream play key roles in reconstructing Logan’s worldview, and he begins to suspect that empirical reality is as open to interpretation as the dream world.
Czyz is more than a bit mystical; indeed, he searches for rapture … What he’s really after, however, is to find mystery within mystery, to have experiences he cannot live without yet cannot pin down.—Paul West, author of The Place in Flowers Where Pollen Rests
Deeply romantic (in the best sense) and darkly evocative, Czyz’s lush style explores regions well beyond simple narrative, probing the constantly shifting, oblique connections between failure, memory and the forever-incomplete nature of human desire.—Greg Burkman, The Seattle Times
Vincent Czyz’s novel Sun Eye Moon Eye traces the post-genocidal, and by extension post-apocalyptic, journey of Logan Blackfeather, a Hopi “of mixed descent.” On the surface, Logan’s story revolves around coming to terms with his father’s death; the suicide of the abusive uncle who replaced him (as titular father only); the knifing of a racist truck driver for which he is sent to prison and then a psychiatric facility; and his slow reemergence into the world via the therapeutic trinity of love—his relationship with Shawna, a woman he meets on the lam in Manhattan—art—his return to composing the music he’d given up on in the midst of trauma—and ethnic reconciliation—reclaiming his heritage from the legacy of colonialism and settlement. On a deeper level, Logan’s journey is really about his dwelling along the margin of where the waking world—one of broken families, addiction, poverty, deracination, violence—meets an animist dreamscape—southwestern geography fused to a Hopi mythography.
Throughout the novel, Logan’s survival depends on suturing these two distinct worlds, less into a coherent whole—in fact his survival depends on learning to live with incoherence—than into what I think Czyz (for lack of a better term on my part) regards as a redemptive kinetics. This means a worldview of motion over the essentialism that informs the pigeonholing and stereotypes of the colonialism—and its legacies in racism and classism—that Logan contends with throughout. “With no tribal mother around to hold your hand, with no tribe to take you into its bosom, you wind up covering the wound with a sunny myth of your own device, and they send you to Upstate University to relearn the straitjackets you’d spent your last ounce of energy shrugging out of.” Logan’s realization is clear: either he agrees to imprison himself inside the cliché’s he’s been made to inhabit, or he will be literally imprisoned until performing them becomes second nature. Freedom from these institutions will require movement, the “dance” the novel ends with, “a whirling beyond the reach of watches and clocks and calendars,” all the machinery that confines time, and by extension the individual, to units of measure, and which serves as a metaphor for other forms of imprisonment—racial, economic, epistemological—forced upon Logan. His resistance to this, and salvation from it, depends upon him discovering a way of being that is “motion and nothing else.”
Czyz equates this “dance” with a capacity for an openness to transformation, dialogue, difference, that not only serves to liberate Logan but offers us, as readers, an antidote to essentialism and its instrumental use in the genocide upon which the countries of North America were founded. As Logan realizes late in his story, in a moment typical of Czyzian irony, “The Old World is behind you.” The capitalization is not a typo. Czyz’s story conflates Logan’s own “old world,” his personal history, with the legacy of the Old World, white European culture more broadly, to show how it informs not only our understanding of selfhood, but a worldview whose legacy includes the extermination of Native Americans, and also “Buchenwald, Treblinka, Lodz.” The journey the novel takes us on demonstrates that Logan is not learning to run from this Old World; instead his running offers a counter-practice to its instrumental rationality, a rejection of its exploitation of the world—both in terms of peoples and natural resources—for the purposes of profit and power. Running means a recognition (figured in Logan’s own racial and cultural hybridity) of the untenability of the boundaries and distinctions that make Old World cultural practices such as private property, racial segregation, resource “allocation” possible. It means an embrace of the porousness of existence, in which peoples, times, landscapes are mutually-informing and mutually-constitutive: “Others he’d never known swarmed in his veins, flowed out with his blood though no doctor had noticed them in his glass tube.”
The novel dwells in a knowledge not so much alien to that of instrumental systems as sidelined by it. “Neither moon eye nor sun eye should hog the sky,” Logan realizes, accepting the simultaneity—or what the novel calls “double exposures”—of what are oftentimes mutually exclusive ways of perceiving, and thus being: the clinical clarity of ratiocination versus the symbolic obscurity of the unconscious. The contradiction is sustained but not reconciled in art, which, like Logan, finds its life in the kinetic, in the “friction between us and the world” that makes it impossible to “separate dream” from “non-dream . . . the living from the inanimate or the passed-on,” as if the beautiful itself were an attempt to maintain, as long as possible, the wavering between things, their endless combination and recombination. Logan’s kinetic practice is also Czyz’s. And so, in the novel, poetics infuses reason, and lyrical abundance and evanescence inform a perspective in which it’s impossible to segregate people, experience, and things into definitive, never mind opposing, camps. Not surprisingly, then, Logan’s primary quest is a freedom from a history that defines him and his ancestry only in terms of Old World power, reclaiming a worldview prior to, which also means anterior to, colonization. As Czyz writes, “There’s no going forward without going back,” or “The journey isn’t complete without return.”
Logan’s universe is at once static and dynamic, moving toward what it always was. Or, rather, that movement itself is and was and always will be the way of the universe. Luckily for us readers, the novel delivers this intricate commentary by pulling us irresistibly into a story whose characters are sympathetic and vividly drawn, whose writing lyrically evokes Logan’s dreams and nightmares—whether along the abandoned highways and landscapes and habitations of the southwest or the grimy corners of Manhattan—and whose hallucinatory perspective never loses sight of the world as it is. That the novel dwells in this rich cross-current—intersections of spirit, politics, history—without losing sight of Logan’s humanity, and our interest in his fate, is the finest achievement of this visionary novel. - Tamas Dobozy
Rain Mountain Press, 2022
What do the aesthetics of poetry have to do with an Ikea store, ancient ruins, a boxer’s style? Is there a hidden order that surfaces in strange ways—the route we take through a city, Jungian synchronicity, seashell patterns? If Lucifer isn’t Satan, then who was he? Citing the likes of JL Borges, DF Wallace, Paul Valery, William Gass, John Ruskin, and RM Rilke, Vincent Czyz explores these and other questions in a far-ranging and lyrically observed collection. His critical commentary is complemented by several deeply personal essays, including a reckoning with his violence-marred childhood; a search for psychological healing that culminates in an all-night ayahuasca ceremony; and a long-distance friendship with an erudite bookie who dwells in a Kansas basement. Carrying as much intellectual heft as emotional freight, Czyz's writing invites readers to indulge their hearts and minds in equal measure.
Vincent Czyz takes on some giants, including plot, Ikea, Ben Lerner, and A.S. Byatt. In the end, however, he’s less a fighter than a shrewd observer—even an enthusiastic and loyal fan. He champions and celebrates John Berger, Guy Davenport, William Gass, Marilynne Robinson, mom-and-pop businesses, and collage. Even his difficult father and Lucifer get treated fairly. He’s a terrific writer, and no matter where he stands, or where you stand, you will want to hear what he has to say. — James Goodman author of Stories of Scottsboro, a Pulitzer Prize finalist
I love this book. Czyz covers so much terrain; every sentence seems to contain its own universe. So many universes, and they all get along. And the undergirding, the intellectual and emotional depth, the lifetime of learning and experience, make it indestructible. It simply cannot not work. Czyz proves, beginning with his opening essay that poetry and prose not only can co-exist, but that they MUST. The book goes on to prove this in every way. All is exactly as it needs to be in The Secret Adventures of Order—and then some. — Rob Cook, author of Last Window in the Punk Hotel
In a recent essay, Mary Gaitskill expressed anxiety that today’s fiction readers are so preoccupied by plot as a device for political messaging that they are deaf or indifferent to the importance of style. A writer’s style, for Gaitskill, is the lifeblood of serious fiction, the inner force that enables a higher imagination. Without style, why even indulge in narratives that aren’t literally true? Gaitskill fears that perhaps we’ve reached an inflection point, where fiction has become a pale replica of journalism. The culture has moved on.
To which, I suspect, Vincent Czyz would respond: Not so fast! Although he probably shares many of Gaitskill’s concerns, his latest book, The Secret Adventures of Order, offers a spirited defense of the ongoing importance of style, both in his appreciations of other writers and as embodied in his own prose. A collection of literary essays, creative nonfiction, and even biblical exegesis, this volume’s sensibility is made explicit in Czyz’s response to the writing of Guy Davenport:
I gravitate toward work that’s been praised for the strength of its language, for its striking imagery and lyricism, while generally being chided for its weak storyline. But why should poets have exclusive rights to make insight, observation, and beautifully arranged words the strength of their pieces?
Czyz argues in favor of “plotting against plot” and, echoing William Gass, believes that “story is what you do to clean up life and make God into a good burgher who manages the world like a business.” The opening essay, “Prose, Thinly Disguised as an IKEA Superstore . . .” refers variously to Sylvia Plath, ancient Greek pottery, and Mehmet the Conqueror to raise questions about the construction of a big box store in New Rochelle, New York. Czyz shows how the idiosyncrasies of a neighborhood and its inhabitants could be sacrificed for a sleekly efficient commercial center. He asserts, “the poetry lost wouldn’t be worth the prose gained.”
As the above example makes clear, Czyz does not limit his purview to texts. He writes engagingly of growing up in tough neighborhoods in New Jersey, time spent in Turkey, and friendships. Moreover, some of his more astringent observations are actually reserved for literary stylists who lose themselves in preciousness.
In “A Brief Reply to Gary Lutz’s The Sentence is a Lonely Place,” he takes Lutz to task for reductive and imprecise descriptions of prose prosody. For Lutz, the sounds of letters can take precedence over image or even meaning, and he is, according to Czyz, “mistaking a few floral dabs of icing for the cake.” Czyz demonstrates how Lutz’s allusions to Gordon Lish’s “consecution” rely on arbitrary phonetics. The author underlines that “The practice is neither new (it’s not even modern), nor does it have much to do with Lish.”
Czyz remains on guard against prose writers whose search for the poetic slides into squashy self-indulgence, like someone picking up a karaoke microphone with a mistaken confidence that they really can sing. He argues that rigor cannot be replaced by pseudo-intellectual posturing.
Skepticism of a different kind of posturing characterizes his response to Ben Lerner’s Leaving the Atocha Station. Czyz shares David Foster Wallace’s sentiment that irony has been used to the point of exhaustion by fiction writers, expressed in his description of Atocha as “another novel that dodges sincerity as though one bite would begin the zombie apocalypse.” Note the emphasis on sincerity, which for Czyz is akin to “our subjectivity—quaintly dubbed ‘soul’ or ‘heart’ depending on the spin you prefer.” Subjectivity originates in style, and the allusion to “soul” or “heart” makes it clear that style means more than the ability to turn a felicitous phrase.
Czyz praises writers like Basho, John Berger, John Ash, and the Turkish poet Nazim Hikmet. An international perspective is palpable in these essays. He describes a visit to the elderly Ash in his apartment in Istanbul, contrasting the writer’s spare style to his “multiphasic” personality: “Depending on the day, he could be irascible, understanding, condescending, generous, abrasive, compassionate, savagely belittling, surprisingly gentle, pointlessly combative—and I don’t think that exhausts the spectrum.” In “No Bones to Venerate,” he writes of Hikmet’s mistreatment and incarceration in Sinope Prison, which now lugubriously hosts a museum shrine to the poet. Hikmet died at the hands of the state, which now enjoys a “new income stream” from “dark tourism.”
A separate section of The Secret Adventures of Order includes creative nonfiction of an autobiographical nature. These essays offer glimpses of the individual behind the critic. “The Cold War”—perhaps the standout piece of this collection—recounts Czyz’s troubled relationship with his physically abusive father. Highly sensitive subject matter is artfully presented and nuanced. “My father hit all of us,” Czyz writes, while patiently dissecting how his understanding of the experience evolved over time. “Flat out hating him would have been a lot easier. Unfortunately, my father had a lot to admire in him.” One could imagine this story being expanded to a book-length memoir, but here, the conclusion of the short form essay is pitch-perfect and very powerful.
Other autobiographical pieces describe Czyz’s experimentation with ayahuasca to deal with his psychological rages, or in “Paluccaville,” a travel narrative provides a tribute to his literary mentor and friend, Stevie Palucca. Now deceased, Palucca was a man who, by conventional measures, might be considered a lost soul, but in Czyz’s affectionate depiction, he emerges as a great soul.
The collection ends with a section of biblical exegesis. At first glance, it might seem incongruous; it is, in any event, curious, from a writer who describes himself as an atheist. But here, the volume comes full circle by suggesting that stylistic considerations in foundational texts, even for seemingly recondite subjects, such as Hellenistic influence in the Gospel of Mark or misunderstandings of Lucifer, can affect contemporary political interpretations or even public policy. We are not so far from Gaitskill’s concern about contemporary fiction’s dumbed-down political messaging.
For example, Czyz refers to the literalist readings of the Bible that remain commonplace in the United States, where leaders like Reagan and the younger Bush have used millennialist rhetoric. At high levels, it has been respectable discourse to refer to the “end times” preceding Armageddon, or to justify the torture of terrorist suspects because such tactics would be permissible, in the words of Bush’s biographer Jean Edward Smith, against “agents of the Devil.”
I lack the specialist knowledge to say how much Czyz’s readings align with contemporary biblical scholarship. (His allusions to the Victorian speculations of Sir James Frazer in The Golden Bough give me pause.) But he is surely correct to underline the pitfalls of Americans’ attachment to literalist messaging and ahistorical readings of ancient texts, as well as a perversely willful ignorance of questions of translation, intertextuality, and yes, style. A writer’s style is not an ornament or luxury: It matters fundamentally when a very real Armageddon, of the nuclear sort, remains a risk.
Overall, The Secret Adventures of Order is serious work, consistently entertaining, and sometimes very personal. Czyz is opinionated, but he makes actual arguments and does not settle for snark. These pieces, though disparate, reveal a coherent and persuasive sensibility. - Charles Holdefer
“I don’t believe in the supernatural or god, so if we’re going to experience something transcendent, and I do think we have a need for that, then we’re limited to psychedelics, spiritual states of meditation, and art.”
Writer Vincent Czyz — “If we learn to take in more and screen out less, more avenues for exploration open up, and it’s usually worthwhile taking one.”
Long-time Arts Fuse contributor Vincent Czyz and I share literary loves, especially an abiding enthusiasm for what was called, back in the ’90s, maximalism, a belligerent belief among a group of writers and critics that, when it came to fiction, more was more. Meaning more words and more intellect. Novelist Paul West’s essay “In Praise of Purple Prose” reasonably argues that “human beings need pageantry every bit as much as they need austerity.” “As long as originality and lexical precision prevail, ” he insists, “the sentient writer has a right to immerse himself or herself in phenomena and come up with as personal a vision as can be. A writer who can’t do purple prose is missing a trick. A writer who does purple all the time ought to have more tricks. A writer who is afraid of mind, which English-speaking writers tend to be, unlike their European counterparts, is a lion afraid of meat.” Maximalists were dead set against the numbing spread of “philistine funk,” but it has pretty much won the war, except in the world of small magazines.
All manner of tricks and cuts of meat can be found in Czyz’s fiction and non-fiction. His books of fiction include Adrift in a Vanishing City, The Christos Mosaic, and The Three Veils of Ibn Oraybi. He has contributed work to New England Review, Agni, Tin House, Skid Row Penthouse, and other publications. In his new collection, The Secret Adventures of Order: Critical & Personal Essays (Rain Mountain Press, 199 pages, $20), Czyz shows off his various wiles with aplomb. The volume’s pieces range from Czyz’s meditation on the distinctions between poetry and prose (sparked by his disgust at plans to build an IKEA store in New Rochelle, NY) to his memories of grappling with a violent father, including his attempt to heal via an ayahuasca ceremony. Thoughtful huzzahs for writers such as John Berger, William Gass, and Guy Davenport sit alongside incisive critiques of Ben Lerner and A.S. Byatt. And there’s a nifty meditation on why, despite popular confusion, Satan and Lucifer are not one and the same: “In most of the Old Testament, God is the author of good and evil. Beginning with the Chronicles, however, the blame shifts to the Devil.”
I sent Czyz some questions via email about The Secret Adventures of Order. Of course, I had to ask about maximalism, but I also wanted to hear more about how his difficult childhood informed his sensibility as a writer. And why is he so fascinated with the Bible? Responses below.
Arts Fuse: Talk about how you went about deciding what to include in this eclectic collection of critical and personal essays. What impression would you like to leave with the reader?
Vincent Czyz: I gave priority to essays that had a thesis of some sort. I enjoy creative nonfiction, by which I mean personal, often memoirish essays, but editors have used those to push aside the more traditional essay—at least what I consider the more traditional essay. I noticed this trend in The American Scholar. It’s still a good magazine but not nearly as good as it was thirty years ago. If you flip through issues from the ’80s and ’90s, you’ll see meticulously thought-out, elegantly argued essays that are out to prove something, change your perspective, illuminate, maybe even enlighten. (That last word, I know, will get you barred from social gatherings.) Eric Rothstein’s 1997 piece on the sublime is itself sublime. I rarely see that sort of writing in The American Scholar anymore—or anywhere else. It seems harder and harder to find essays with the intellectual depth and lyricism of language and thought you’ll find in, for example, Paul West’s “The Jazz of Consciousness,” Guy Davenport’s “The Symbol of the Archaic,” or William Gass’s “The Soul Inside the Sentence.” They’re still out there, of course, but they’ve been pushed to the sidelines (the sidelines being the small presses and lesser-known literary magazines).
I once taught from an anthology, purportedly of the best essays of the 20th century, and there wasn’t one from Davenport, who to my knowledge never wrote about himself but who is surely one of our country’s greatest essayists. Imagine a comparable 19th-century compilation without a single entry from Emerson. There was one from Gass but not his best. I think it was chosen because he talks about his mother’s alcoholism. When I pick up a Best American Essay anthology, I often come across pieces that aren’t particularly well-written or keenly observed. These tend to be tales of family dysfunction or personal hardship. Subject matter often eclipses literary merit. I’d actually like to see that anthology split into two volumes: one for the critical/argumentative essay, and one for creative nonfiction/the personal essay. Creative nonfiction can be absolutely wonderful. Jo Ann Beard’s “Werner” ranks among the best, but even David Foster Wallace, who chose it for The 2007 Best American Essays anthology, questioned whether or not it qualified as an essay. I’m also a big fan of Poe Ballantine’s autobiographical nonfictions. The point is that there’s no need to privilege one type of nonfiction over another. There’s room for both, which is essentially the case I made when I discussed the differences between prose and poetic language in the collection’s lead essay. I myself am not immune to the attraction of a less formal, more personal approach: several of the critical essays in the collection are first-person narrations. I also felt the collection would be more balanced if I included personal reflections and experiences, which is why about a quarter of the essays, including the longest, are autobiographical.
I hope readers come away with the impression that I was paying attention to the world and some of the things in it. Eratosthenes, a librarian in ancient Alexandria, set a great example for the rest of us. Simply by paying attention to shadows, he realized that the Earth is round. He even calculated its circumference—and came pretty close—almost two millennia before Columbus set sail. It’s such a fabulous historical anecdote, I slipped it into one of my short stories. The problem with paying attention, as Aldous Huxley pointed out, is that our default reflex is to screen out. He famously called the brain “the great reducing valve.” Coincidentally enough, I mention the reducing valve at the end of the second essay in the collection. In any event, if we learn to take in more and screen out less, more avenues for exploration open up, and it’s usually worthwhile taking one. You’ll learn something about the natural world, the human-made one (society, the arts, etc.), yourself—maybe all of the above. And sometimes a bit of new knowledge makes being here—in your head, in society, in the world—a little easier.
AF: You make passionate cases for maximalist/alternative writers like William Gass and Guy Davenport. Why do you feel writers like these are neglected today? Do you see yourself carrying on their stylistic interests, marrying poetry and prose?
Czyz: One reason writers like Gass and Davenport are marginalized is the hegemony of story. When students in MFA workshops come across dense writing or what Jayne Anne Phillips calls heightened prose, there’s a lot of headshaking and complaining that the writing is drawing attention to itself. They’ve been sold the swindle that story is everything (EM Forster pushes back against this idea in Aspects of the Novel). A style is supposed to be neutral, they insist, to get the job done behind a curtain, like a stagehand. Anything that distracts from the story is discouraged. I think there’s a useful parallel here with painting. When Monet introduced the visible brushstroke, he was derided and his work was dismissed. Painting at that time was guided by the principle that the artist had to strive for a perfect illusion of realism or at least conceal the fact that the medium was paint. Now, of course, it’s mostly the reverse: the invisible brushstroke is still practiced, but it’s not very common. There’s another reason, though. Henry James was a maximalist, but he never let go of the idea that a novel should have narrative tension, that the writer had to make the reader want to turn the page to find out what happens next. John Updike, whose sentences often have an aura of almost preternatural beauty, subscribed to this idea. Davenport and Gass did not. They wanted the language itself to drive the story, and that’s bound to be less popular with readers.
As for the marriage of prose and poetry—a Blakean title almost—that’s exactly what I was after in Adrift in a Vanishing City. One reviewer wrote that if I cut the stories down by about a third, they’d be poems. Two of the stories actually began as poems. At the same time a story, in a sense, decides the language in which it should be told. I try to listen to the story—weird or pseudo-mystical as that sounds—to hear the best context for the characters. Some of my work reads fairly conventionally because that seems the best fit. For the most part, though, I believe in Heidegger’s project to re-poeticize the world. Davenport also called for a more primal relationship to the world, which he connected to poetry. As did Rilke, who says to write poetry we have to look at the world like some first human. So poetry, especially the kind that looks to defamiliarize, seems to me the best way to “make new magic in a dusty world” (to pilfer from Thomas Wolf). Or as Coleridge put it, “to give the charm of novelty to a thing of every day.” Why shouldn’t prose do that as well? I don’t believe in the supernatural or god, so if we’re going to experience something transcendent, and I do think we have a need for that, then we’re limited to psychedelics, spiritual states of meditation, and art.
AF: In your personal essays you focus on your adolescence, particularly your troubled relationship with your father. How did that shape you as a writer?
Czyz: My father was heavy-handed, to put it mildly, and my defense against his fits of rage was to withdraw into myself—and books. I became more introspective, more self-reliant psychologically. I loved reading but it also became an escape. Writing followed naturally from all this reading and alone time. Writing allowed me to create my own world and disappear into it. Up until university, I read almost exclusively science fiction and fantasy—again, the escapism I gravitated toward because I had such a difficult home life.
I think my father’s effect on me as a writer is mainly in terms of the themes that interest me and certain plot points. Some of my protagonists, for example, have overbearing fathers. They’re not allowed to be what they want to be (my father made me promise I’d go to law school after I graduated from college). He grew up very poor, so he emphasized the importance of money far more than he would have had he grown up middle class. I rebelled against that materialism without understanding it. Not surprisingly, I have a fondness in my writing for rebels in general—Zirque Granges, a cagey drifter in several stories in my collection, is a sort of rebuke to my father.
AF: One thing I noticed in this collection was the relatively scarce presence of women — the male writers and friends make a much stronger impression. Would you agree?
Czyz: Yes, I would, and there’s a reason for that. My mom has been there for me throughout my life, and she’s still there for me. But there were all kinds of validation issues with my dad. He roundly ignored me as a child. Even as I got older and it was harder for him to do that, he remained closed off. He fought against my being a writer, but more than that, he refused to even try to understand me. He wanted to make me into the image he had in mind for me. And he was open about it. He often said he was “molding” his sons (I have two brothers). He’s quoted saying something along those lines in a newspaper article. I came to believe he didn’t approve of me as a son or even a person. And then, before we could reach some kind of understanding, he died. It was too soon for me to do without fatherly approval, and I spent years looking for surrogate fathers without being consciously aware that’s what I was doing. I mention this in “Palluccaville,” the longest essay. And because none of the men I settled on was actually my father, I’m not sure I ever stopped looking. Kate Jelly, a sculptor, once said something that applies here, “You can never get enough of a substitute.”
AF: James Goodman calls you “less a fighter than a shrewd observer.” I would say your critiques of A.S. Byatt and Ben Lerner throw some substantial punches. How would you characterize your literary sensibility?
Czyz: Well, obviously I’m very taken with writers like Paul West, Guy Davenport, and William Gass. We can add William Gaddis, Jorge Luis Borges, John Keene, Marilynne Robinson, and Jayne Anne Phillips along with the much underappreciated Tamas Dobozy and Stephanie Dickinson. What these writers have in common is attention to language. Their prose, to varying degrees, is lyrical, in some cases even difficult, but well worth the effort. As BR Myers has pointed out, the language you use to write about a world is that world. And that’s one of the most important tasks of any writer—to create a world. These authors tend to take on ideas as well. Their fictions have intellectual heft. They provoke rumination.
I’m also drawn to work that creates a mood—mood, almost in itself, can pull me through a book. Melville for the most part pulls this off in Moby-Dick, particularly his descriptions of the sea. Heart of Darkness is permeated by a dark, intense mood. Samuel R. Delany’s Dhalgren is still more atmospheric. Jayne Anne Phillips and Faulkner are masters of mood. So are Alice Munro, John Keene, Cormac McCarthy, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and Stephanie Dickinson. When voice and mood are just right, the work is haunting, and that, for me, is a pinnacle—a book that sticks with you after you’ve read it, a book you flash back to as if it were something that happened to you, not something you happened to pass by on your way somewhere else.
So, no, it’s not simply a matter of story story story. If your story is forgettable, if it has no afterlife, it hasn’t quite succeeded. It’s a distraction rather than an experience. As I wrote in the second essay, the stories that have stayed with me offered something for body, mind, and heart. They don’t neglect the physical world or fail to describe what their characters look like. They make me think. They make me feel. They have duende, as Lorca called it—what was meant in the ’70s by soul. If you want to see the difference, go to YouTube and watch Little Richard sing “Tutti Frutti” then find Wayne Newton covering it (warning: you can’t unsee the latter). Whatever faults Kerouac and Henry Miller had—and there were serious ones—they had plenty of duende. That’s why their books are still in print.
The mark of the best books is that they can be reread. But if a novel is strictly plot-driven, you won’t because you already know what’s going to happen. I just reread To the Lighthouse, and it was intensely rewarding. I suspected I wasn’t ready for it when I was 23, and I was right. It was always one of my favorite novels, but now it’s in the top 5. I’ve read Samuel R. Delany’s Dhalgren three times—my limit, so far, for rereading a novel—but I’m considering a fourth. Not only because it does everything I want a good book to do, but because I get more out of it every time I read it. I want to spend time in the world Delany constructed, with the characters that inhabit it, with the voice in which it’s written and the mood it creates.
While I tend to like fiction that’s innovative in some way, I often hear conventional writers heaping scorn on avant-garde authors and vice versa. I think that’s a mistake. I read Julio Cortazar’s Hopscotch twice. I enjoyed it and its structural oddities both times, but his experimental short fictions don’t do much for me. I’d much rather read Raymond Carver. I’ll read anything that I feel is brought off well, including science fiction. At the same time, if fiction is going to take a formal risk, it should in some way be necessary. Innovation for the sake of innovation is just a gimmick. Nor do I see the value in an avant-garde novel that’s less interested in conveying some aspect of human experience than in putting the reader through a mental gymnastics routine for reasons that never become clear. One kind of writing isn’t inherently “better” than another. It’s a matter of the proper tool for the proper job. Some forms suit certain themes and stories better than others. I can’t see The Old Man and the Sea being a better novel if only it were an avant-garde experiment. I can’t see Dhalgren being written by Hemingway.
AF: One of my favorite essays is where you explain the opportunistic reasons for the confusion between Lucifer and Satan. Your novel The Christos Mosaic looks at the origins of Christianity. Why does the Bible fascinate you?
Czyz: The Bible fascinates me in part because I was raised with no religious education whatsoever. I grew up in a very Christian community but knew nothing about Christianity. And Judaism was an even more foreign concept. As I got older I came to realize a couple of things. One is that Christianity is one of the pillars of Western civilization. Secondly, the Bible is loaded with contradictions, not just between the Old Testament and the New, but within the testaments. And this is what our civilization was founded on! Muddled theology, fables peddled as historical truths (think Noah’s Ark), ultra-strict religious laws with ruthless punishments (the penalty for breaking most of the commandments is death, usually by stoning, and there are over 600 commandments, not just the well-known ten)—clearly, I needed to know more about this book. So I read it cover to cover, studied it, and found there was a lot to admire as well as criticize.
I have a fascination with mythology and religions in general. My shelves are full of books like Frazer’s The Golden Bough and Robert Graves’s The White Goddess. Myths are our oldest attempts at explaining the universe, and that brings us back to poetry, maybe our oldest way of looking at the universe (symbolically) and the way myths were often recorded. Freud called myths public dreams and dreams private myths. The Talmud says an uninterpreted dream is like an unopened letter. So I think of myths as letters sent to us from thousands of years ago. What infuriates me is when religious myths—biblical in this country—are treated as facts. They contain psychological truths, but that’s why they’re fictions. Fiction is a true story that never happened. The morals of Aesop’s fables are in some sense true, not the race between the rabbit and the tortoise. So the Bible makes it into my fiction and nonfiction partly because I find it fascinating, but also because I’d like people to take it for what it is: a poetic, not a literal, way of looking at the world. And by now we should understand the importance of mistaking the symbolic for the literal—from burning women at the stake as witches to 9/11. - Bill Marx
https://artsfuse.org/261392/author-interview-writer-vincent-czyz-to-create-a-world/
Vincent Czyz, Sun Eye Moon Eye. Spuyten Duyvil
Vincent Czyz’s novel Sun Eye Moon Eye traces the post-genocidal, and by extension post-apocalyptic, journey of Logan Blackfeather, a Hopi “of mixed descent.” On the surface, Logan’s story revolves around coming to terms with his father’s death; the suicide of the abusive uncle who replaced him (as titular father only); the knifing of a racist truck driver for which he is sent to prison and then a psychiatric facility; and his slow reemergence into the world via the therapeutic trinity of love—his relationship with Shawna, a woman he meets on the lam in Manhattan—art—his return to composing the music he’d given up on in the midst of trauma—and ethnic reconciliation—reclaiming his heritage from the legacy of colonialism and settlement. On a deeper level, Logan’s journey is really about his dwelling along the margin of where the waking world—one of broken families, addiction, poverty, deracination, violence—meets an animist dreamscape—southwestern geography fused to a Hopi mythography.
Throughout the novel, Logan’s survival depends on suturing these two distinct worlds, less into a coherent whole—in fact his survival depends on learning to live with incoherence—than into what I think Czyz (for lack of a better term on my part) regards as a redemptive kinetics. This means a worldview of motion over the essentialism that informs the pigeonholing and stereotypes of the colonialism—and its legacies in racism and classism—that Logan contends with throughout. “With no tribal mother around to hold your hand, with no tribe to take you into its bosom, you wind up covering the wound with a sunny myth of your own device, and they send you to Upstate University to relearn the straitjackets you’d spent your last ounce of energy shrugging out of.” Logan’s realization is clear: either he agrees to imprison himself inside the cliché’s he’s been made to inhabit, or he will be literally imprisoned until performing them becomes second nature. Freedom from these institutions will require movement, the “dance” the novel ends with, “a whirling beyond the reach of watches and clocks and calendars,” all the machinery that confines time, and by extension the individual, to units of measure, and which serves as a metaphor for other forms of imprisonment—racial, economic, epistemological—forced upon Logan. His resistance to this, and salvation from it, depends upon him discovering a way of being that is “motion and nothing else.”
Czyz equates this “dance” with a capacity for an openness to transformation, dialogue, difference, that not only serves to liberate Logan but offers us, as readers, an antidote to essentialism and its instrumental use in the genocide upon which the countries of North America were founded. As Logan realizes late in his story, in a moment typical of Czyzian irony, “The Old World is behind you.” The capitalization is not a typo. Czyz’s story conflates Logan’s own “old world,” his personal history, with the legacy of the Old World, white European culture more broadly, to show how it informs not only our understanding of selfhood, but a worldview whose legacy includes the extermination of Native Americans, and also “Buchenwald, Treblinka, Lodz.” The journey the novel takes us on demonstrates that Logan is not learning to run from this Old World; instead his running offers a counter-practice to its instrumental rationality, a rejection of its exploitation of the world—both in terms of peoples and natural resources—for the purposes of profit and power. Running means a recognition (figured in Logan’s own racial and cultural hybridity) of the untenability of the boundaries and distinctions that make Old World cultural practices such as private property, racial segregation, resource “allocation” possible. It means an embrace of the porousness of existence, in which peoples, times, landscapes are mutually-informing and mutually-constitutive: “Others he’d never known swarmed in his veins, flowed out with his blood though no doctor had noticed them in his glass tube.”
The novel dwells in a knowledge not so much alien to that of instrumental systems as sidelined by it. “Neither moon eye nor sun eye should hog the sky,” Logan realizes, accepting the simultaneity—or what the novel calls “double exposures”—of what are oftentimes mutually exclusive ways of perceiving, and thus being: the clinical clarity of ratiocination versus the symbolic obscurity of the unconscious. The contradiction is sustained but not reconciled in art, which, like Logan, finds its life in the kinetic, in the “friction between us and the world” that makes it impossible to “separate dream” from “non-dream . . . the living from the inanimate or the passed-on,” as if the beautiful itself were an attempt to maintain, as long as possible, the wavering between things, their endless combination and recombination. Logan’s kinetic practice is also Czyz’s. And so, in the novel, poetics infuses reason, and lyrical abundance and evanescence inform a perspective in which it’s impossible to segregate people, experience, and things into definitive, never mind opposing, camps. Not surprisingly, then, Logan’s primary quest is a freedom from a history that defines him and his ancestry only in terms of Old World power, reclaiming a worldview prior to, which also means anterior to, colonization. As Czyz writes, “There’s no going forward without going back,” or “The journey isn’t complete without return.”
Logan’s universe is at once static and dynamic, moving toward what it always was. Or, rather, that movement itself is and was and always will be the way of the universe. Luckily for us readers, the novel delivers this intricate commentary by pulling us irresistibly into a story whose characters are sympathetic and vividly drawn, whose writing lyrically evokes Logan’s dreams and nightmares—whether along the abandoned highways and landscapes and habitations of the southwest or the grimy corners of Manhattan—and whose hallucinatory perspective never loses sight of the world as it is. That the novel dwells in this rich cross-current—intersections of spirit, politics, history—without losing sight of Logan’s humanity, and our interest in his fate, is the finest achievement of this visionary novel. - Tamas Dobozy
Vincent Czyz, Adrift in a Vanishing City
, Voyant Publishing, 1998 
novella, Papillon du Père Publishing, 2021
Vincent Czyz, author of the #1 Kindle bestseller The Christos Mosaic and the award-winning Adrift in a Vanishing City, has crafted a tale of regret, revenge, and redemption—set in the fading Ottoman Empire of the nineteenth century.
Accused of heresy by a powerful Ottoman pasha, an aging Turkish alchemist flees his native Constantinople, exiling himself to a small town in the hinterlands of the East. A Muslim and a foreigner, as well as a man of letters, he finds life among a populace of stubbornly pagan peasants difficult. Yet when the pasha tracks him down, Ibn Oraybi realizes that the rural folk he’s settled among are quick witted, resourceful, and fiercely loyal. Suspecting he has more to learn from them than they do from him, he reveals the secret that has haunted him for so much of his life.
The Three Veils of Ibn Oraybi entreats readers to let go of the unalterable past and explore new vistas and alternative worldviews.
“Czyz weaves mystery, history, religious fervor, and social inspection into this story of struggle, which ends with a surprising twist... Its lovely, lyrical language and thought-provoking encounters not only bring the times to life but explore the politics and psychological profiles of cultures that lived side by side, but in very different worlds.”— D. Donovan, Senior Reviewer, Midwest Book Review
“The Three Veils of Ibn Oraybi is an enchantment, that rare fusion of poetry and fiction, intellectual query and sensuous revelation, narrative tension and ease of telling...In the context of a deadly struggle between dogma and reason, it spins a tale of loyalty and betrayal in which powerless women alter the fates of powerful men. Enriched by pagan and Islamic lore, it transports the reader in fresh ways to wise places. Once I started reading it, I couldn't put it down until I finished it.” - Donald Levering
“There are people who can write ripping yarns. And there are people who can write fine, risk-taking prose. Not that many can do both…Vincent Czyz pulls off that daring double-feat with style and verve.”— Peter Blauner
“Czyz is more than a bit mystical; indeed, he searches for rapture…What he’s really after, however, is to find mystery within mystery, to have experiences he cannot live without yet cannot pin down.”— Paul West
Vincent Czyz, The Christos Mosaic: A
Novel, Blank Slate Press, 2015
Ancient scrolls hold the key to the origins of Christianity—but some will stop at nothing to hide the truth
A suspicious death in Istanbul leaves one ancient scroll and clues to finding another in the hands of Drew Korchula, a thirty-two-year-old American expat, a Turkish dwarf named Kadir, and Zafer, a Special Forces washout. Drew is desperate to turn everything over to the academic community, and in the process redeem himself in the eyes of his estranged wife, but Kadir and Zafer are only interested in what they can get for the scrolls on the black market.
Not everyone wants to see the scrolls go public, however, and some will stop at nothing to protect the Church and believers around the world from the revelations embodied in the priceless manuscripts.
An action-packed intellectual thriller unraveling the mystery of a theological cold case more than two thousand years old, The Christos Mosaic is a monumental work of biblical research wrapped in a story of love, faith, human frailty, friendship, and forgiveness. Author Vincent Czyz takes the reader through the backstreets of Istanbul, Antakya (ancient Antioch), and Cairo, to clandestine negotiations with wealthy antiquities smugglers and ruthless soldiers of fortune, to dusty Egyptian monasteries, on a nautical skirmish off the coast of Alexandria, and finally to the ruins of Constantine's palace buried deep beneath the streets of present-day Istanbul.
"Vincent Czyz's THE CHRISTOS MOSAIC is unique: it somehow manages to include genuine, radical biblical scholarship in a beautifully rendered adventure full of unforgettable characters, set in exotic locales vividly and poetically described. There are very many "Lost Gospel" novels in which the biblical background is fudged, and badly. Not this one! Both sides of this author's fertile brain were working full tilt! And the result is superb." — Robert M. Price, author of Deconstructing Jesus
“Often, the best novels are difficult to categorize. Perhaps more often, novels that try to do too many things don’t succeed at doing any of them particularly well. Fortunately, every now and then, a novel comes along that is both hard to define, yet exceptional at juggling multiple genres whose sum is even greater than its individual parts. Such a novel is THE CHRISTOS MOSAIC, which melds historical fiction with contemporary adventure and produces a compelling mystery that is as educational as it is entertaining.” — US Review of Books
“A brilliant, deftly crafted, inherently absorbing novel from beginning to end, THE CHRISTOS MOSAIC by Vincent Czyz is one of those truly extraordinary stories that will linger in the mind and memory long after the book itself has been finished and set back upon the shelf. Very highly recommended and certain to be an enduringly popular addition to community library General Fiction collections.” — Midwest Book Review
“Vincent Czyz’s THE CHRISTOS MOSAIC accomplishes the rare trick of having it both ways, delivering a fast-paced, action-packed storyline that challenges the mind rather than epileptically dazzling it with portentous piffle. This novel turns out to be the rare adventure story that rewards the reader’s attention by being as diverting as it is rigorously encyclopedic." — Matt Hanson, The Arts Fuse
“I can't come up with enough superlatives to express how thoroughly?completely ?hugely?immensely?I enjoyed reading this novel. It's everything I could have wished for and much more. It must be read by as many people worldwide as possible. I have a gut feeling that it could effect a sea-change in the common understanding of Christianity. It's a masterful synthesis of solid scholarship and adventure.” — the late Paul Palmer, former assistant editor, American Atheist magazine
“… Christos puts the reader on Istanbul’s every street corner—the cafés, bars and apartments—awash in the sights, sounds and even the smells of the city, and the colorful language and mannerisms of its inhabitants. […] Ultimately … THE CHRISTOS MOSAIC is more than a novel; it is an impeccably framed thriller that will hopefully spark new discussions and provide insight into the future of Christian thought and study for the new century.” — James Campion, Aquarian Weekly
“THE CHRISTOS MOSAIC is part Orhan Pamuk, part Elaine Pagels, and part Dan Brown. But it is mostly Vincent Czyz, an irrepressible fiction writer who has the good sense to realize that scholarship is the friend of great stories--and the talent to put that friendship to good use. I must confess that I turned to the novel for fun, and it is fun from first page to last. What surprised me was how very much I learned about the past. A wonderful novel.” — James Goodman, Pulitzer Prize finalist & author of But Where is the Lamb?
“[THE CHRISTOS MOSAIC] has all the important benchmarks of a thrilling adventure: global conspiracy, shocking revelations, thrilling shootouts, and multiple betrayals. The story is well written with strong plotting and vivacious characters ... a fascinating read.” — John M. Murray, ForeWord Reviews
“THE CHRISTOS MOSAIC is the most fun I’ve had with an encyclopedic novel since Eco’s Foucault’s Pendulum?and a lot more headlong, colorful, and seat-of-the pants exciting. It careens through Istanbul, Cairo, and Alexandria in pursuit of answers to a historical mystery that turns on the unraveling of a theological conspiracy that is deeply meaningful for us today.” — Samuel R. Delany, author of Dhalgren
“Like Dan Brown’s plot, there is violence, narrow escapes from danger, hidden clues, and exotic locations. Unlike The Da Vinci Code, there are no nearly pure characters ... From Istanbul to Cairo to a gunfight at sea ... Czyz creates an exciting thriller, more eloquently written than most, but one which challenges the traditional religious faith of not only the Catholic church, but all Christian sects.” — D. R. Meredith, New York Journal of Books
“There are people who can write ripping yarns. And there are people who can write fine, risk-taking prose. Not that many can do both. In this exciting novel, Vincent Czyz pulls off that daring double-feat with style and verve. Don't miss it.” — Peter Blauner
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