Daniel Davis Wood interviews Jared Pappas-Kelley.
Jared Pappas-Kelley’s Stalking America is one of those rare beasts, a truly unclassifiable novel: a text of a kind so mercurial that it seems to want to shrug off even that label. On its simplest, most rudimentary level, it follows the doings of a reasonably nondescript young man—and yet even in saying as little as that, the word “follows” becomes conspicuous, overloaded with meaning. That’s because the protagonist develops an interest in a reality TV series called Stalking America, which itself follows a woman who in turn follows, and films, other people. But then, just as you’re maybe thinking that the novel sets itself up to make something of the reverberations between these two characters, it does something different. It splits itself apart, cordoning off various sections of its narrative, slicing viewpoints into pieces, creating boundaries around and gaps between different ways of looking at (following?) events as they unfold. The result is something restless, a little insidious, equal parts frustrating and compelling, and made up of many more fascinating elements than a summary can capture. Following the publication of Stalking America last summer, Jared Pappas-Kelley spoke to 3:AM’s Daniel Davis Wood about the stuff that Stalking America is made of, and the stuff it tries to unmake.
3:AM: I’d like to begin by thinking a bit about your vision for Stalking America, particularly in terms of its breadth and scale. I’m not quite sure how to classify the book. While it often feels like a work of fiction, there are parts that hew closer to autofiction and the text itself flirts with the label “memoir”—so let’s just say that it operates on a very personal level. At the same time, though, the prologue announces an intention to grapple with “this moment we currently inhabit,” and the text is also shot through with shards and fragments of what sound like fleeting contributions to “the discourse.”
So, to me, the vision of the book is one that pulls in two directions simultaneously: it both concentrates on a singular experience and broadens out to something more panoramic. I’d love to know more about how it came to be that way. Did you know, early on, that the book would be working towards this, or did it come about by trial-and-error and experimentation?
JPK: When talking with my editor, that was something we were trying to figure out—this slippage or blurring that was the structure—and he put forward an idea that for him Stalking America was what he’d classify a “thinking novel.” What I took that to mean was that it was primarily about a process of thinking or thought. For me, it became more about layering these impulses and drawing out parallels in the material, to let the threads pool together so that certain bits would click and others sort of drift back into the background in a mundane sense. And it was about blurring these approaches between fiction, or “discourse,” and playing with conventions that might cause someone to read it as perhaps memoir or biography or artist writings as a way of tracing a thought within this slippage.
I was interested in putting something forward that at the same time undermines or questions itself, that parallels the movement from the singular to the more panoramic, as you put it. Is this something that fiction can support? Or is it collapsing under its own weight when it plays out in this manner? There’s the idea of tricking a truth into revealing itself, but instead it might be a sidestepping, and as an approach it is maybe like with an eclipse—not something to be viewed directly. Building these overly-complex and clunky apparatuses or structures—like a hole poked in construction paper inside a cardboard box with a paper towel tube: an eclipse viewing box, to make the indirectly viewable visible—might allow us to approach this idea of truth, to catch it unaware or startle it into view like a woodland creature. And perhaps that’s tied to a notion of the post-truth, whatever that means, how to navigate and perceive or cut through.
3:AM: I love the shambolic nature of those “clunky apparatuses” and I think the book absolutely pieces itself together in that way. Alongside narratorial discourse, you’ve got some typographic play (sporadic sans serif fonts, dialogue inset like a blockquote, a dream sequence rendered in double columns on a single page) as well as snippets of cultural ephemera. I’m thinking of text messages, magazine cover headlines (“Somali Gangs in the Midwest”, “It’s Time to Break Up with Your Boss”), and the detritus of digital life: “We would like to keep you up to date with news and events from our affiliates. To unsubscribe from this, please click here.” If Stalking America is a “thinking novel,” what are these bits and pieces contributing to the thought process?
JPK: The different bits sift together into something hybrid, or that’s what I was playing with, and in my head I approached it like threads or a feed aggregating in a way. How things have shifted or are shifting. How these elements coincide without always being attributed. That’s what I was interested in with the dialogue and those other elements, and it became more about texture and building an affinity or magnetism between parts. With the typographic and formatting elements, I was exploring this anatomy, ways to signal elements approaching from different sources, and flattening out, but also giving cues that they shift registers. How to map this experience on the page?—that’s sort of how I conceived it. I also wanted to flirt with a sort of call and response between what was accruing, these elements or ephemera, and a narrative that was developing. We have perhaps become so hardwired to read these cues or bracket them out, ignore them, so I was also looking not so much at what’s right there on the surface but what wanders behind it.
3:AM: Which brings us to the subject of structure, the arrangement of disparate parts. What’s striking to me about the structure of Stalking America is the way it looks a bit haphazard but actually, on reflection, is working within a tight design. Can we talk about that design a little? The book more or less opens with some notes on the real-life installation artist Gordon Matta-Clark, who made his name by “cutting up buildings”—by literally taking slices out of enclosed spaces in the built environment. Matta-Clark’s work is important to the substance of the book, but also to the structure. How did his spirit inform the way Stalking America demarcates and arranges its various components?
JPK: Matta-Clark allowed me to work with someone else as a proxy or stand-in, to frame the book as a biography around his ideas and how he approached structures. Kind of in the way his houses and interventions served as a proxy for revealing something more through their cuts and there was a freedom in that. I tend to see myself most keenly in contrast to other people. His approach gave me permission to examine that contradiction, with lived or abandoned spaces dissected and put on display as biography or narrative, but beginning with somebody else—a significant artist—and his story and the way it is constructed. Without representing, it begins to resemble. Cutting into these narratives reveals something more within the material; into vacated spaces, a stairway that led somewhere once, an impulse.
So one thing I was playing with was this idea of over-identifying with something, and how that thing begins to blend into the original or take the lead. The main character in Stalking America is perhaps over identifying with the character Claire on the TV show. Sure, there may be some connection between them, and perhaps they grew up down the street from each other, but even in this it’s a bit tenuous or overstated, so it becomes more about self-construction through over-identification. I was also inviting myself to over identify with Matta-Clark in a way as a writer, his construction and process, framing something a bit tenuous or skewed but also something that traces a resemblance.
3:AM: Yes, and you’ve even just alluded to one of the lines in the book that touches on these ideas: “It somehow seems fitting for my memoir of sorts (who the hell said it was a memoir) to begin with somebody else, a significant artist, his story, as I have always seen myself most keenly in contrast to other people, through an affinity but also where they are not like me, their experiences.” But there’s also, to me, another sense in which Matta-Clark is moving through Stalking America—or, if we prefer to think of Stalking America as a “thinking book,” then there’s a sense in which Matta-Clark is driving its mode of thought.
I mean something like this… There are the autofictional parts of the book, and then there are the reality TV parts, and then there are the “Lapso mori” sections. These intercut the other two parts with fragments of text that sometimes seem like non sequiturs in relation to the action, sometimes attempts at establishing thematic resonances with it—and I emphasise the “cut” in “intercut.” So the way I came to see these sections was essentially as prosaic versions of Matta-Clark’s cuts: as if Stalking America were a structure unto itself, with its enclosed spaces cut apart (and cut into) by the “Lapso mori” sections. But maybe that’s just me over-identifying with your narrator over-identifying with Matta-Clark! How do you see the “Lapso mori” sections informing the broader vision?
JPK: There’s this impulse of cutting to see what lies behind: carving windows as an excavation, exposing what remains or bleeds through, but not in a static way—seeking a sustained act of cutting-through in order to construct. Without that constructive aspect, it’s more of an autopsy of something gutted, or just a cluster of holes—that’s something else. So with the more autofiction bits of Stalking America, or the reality show or the “Lapso Mori” sections, perhaps an architecture reveals itself like a push notification—cutting through a proximity, reordering and observing previously obstructed vantages or lines of sight or thought, interjecting between these instances as when a wall is removed.
3:AM: Well, then, after Matta-Clark, there’s another artist who could be called the second of the book’s presiding spirits: the photographer Sophie Calle. In fact, of the two artists, she is the one I was more familiar with before I came to Stalking America. Her work is evoked in the title of the book, given that she made her name in the 1980s with a series of surreptitious pictures of a man she stalked on a journey from Paris to Venice; and the reality show within the book (also called Stalking America) basically follows a woman who stalks others, albeit in a more mundane way. But my sense is that it’s the creative aspect of Calle’s work, rather than the documentary aspect, that resonates with the book: the framing, the selection, and what goes on between the gaps. Am I on the right track? How would you say Calle speaks to Stalking America?
JPK: Sophie Calle was definitely in the material and in the initial ideas of the reality show Stalking America. When Calle was secretly following and documenting her subject around Venice, in a sense he became a bit displaced and that was kind of the point. He’s a moving target but he’s actually pretty secondary to her project, because her approach it inverts the dynamic a bit. Calle said he wasn’t especially interesting to her, but that she did it simply for the pleasure of it, and that was the jumping-off point. There is something about the act of watching, and through her attention and focus it accumulates, it becomes about this process of looking and stalking an idea through its everyday or mundane habitat to sort of put something else on display.
In a sense we are stalked by our individual histories or experiences, or where we come from, and the show takes cues from that as well. There is a scene later in the book where another character kind of cool-shames or almost dismisses the kid’s own experiences, like: oh you like this cringey TV show, but the real version is this artist Sophie Calle. It’s as if the pop culture version is somehow less than, or less true. I was intrigued by how there’s something about authenticity, about the question of which is the real version (or is there one at all?), but there was also something a bit endearing about it as well.
3:AM: That discussion about Calle marks the only time in Stalking America that she is named, despite the extent to which she haunts the book. But what intrigued me the most about the discussion was the part in-between the description of her project and the claim that she’s “the real thing.” We’re told that Calle, in addition to taking photographs of the man she stalks, “ makes diary entries about the time of day, about the weather, about the man’s coat, which he wears with a camera on his shoulder, on the bridge, maps of the routes he traveled, pigeons in the square, how she changes endlessly over time through the act of observing him” (emphasis mine).
JPK: In a sense, that describes what has been going on with the show all this time. And that’s the thing: the kid is observing this person, Claire, on TV; and Claire is observing this man she follows, who we don’t really know much about—just gathering detritus-level observations about his coat on a rack in his home, the objects in his refrigerator, the shampoo he uses. So there’s this sort of this echo chamber of watching. And the documentation and objects are all rather secondary, perhaps not very interesting or forgettable, so what I was intrigued by was how Claire sees all this and the kid perceives what she sees, and—as Calle says—they are changing endlessly through the act of observing. At the same time, the main character is trying on ideas, determining which fit, connecting some, discarding some, and constructing his story from what he finds.
3:AM: Yes—so even though, as you say, we might be stalked by our experiences, something else happens to us when we record those experiences for posterity: the product constitutes a separate, perhaps more malleable version of oneself. And this dovetails with something else the narrator says in Stalking America:
Sometimes I kind of step back from what’s being said and I feel like the words are separate things from us that just exist. I picture them as brittle glass that comes out of all of our mouths to make this big shell that’s made up of all the conversations that anyone has ever had or ever will. When it’s warm, I think of it being more fluid, but when it’s cold it’s extra brittle, like something you can actually touch.
Ultimately, then, there’s a sense in which the words of Stalking America, frozen on the page, are as brittle as the narrator feels spoken words can be. And, in the same sense, so too are Calle’s photographs. Which suggests that inasmuch as Calle’s photographs are a self-constitutive project, Stalking America is a project of a similar kind, working in a way that starts off as autofiction but goes far beyond it into speculative terrain. But what, then, is the self that is constituted by the book as a whole—not only the narrator and Matta-Clark and the reality show, but also the cultural flotsam and jetsam, the Lapso Mori, and all the rest?
JPK: We kind of live in the shadow of all this stuff and then we step away. I am definitely intrigued by the idea of the malleable self, and in a way I think this is foregrounded in how people operate now. I read something a while back about how truth, when it is of the more universal variety, is wisdom. I don’t know if I believe that; it’s a weird hierarchy to think about. But I am interested in these specific bits of truth that might get lost in the shuffle, that don’t necessarily scale up to “wisdom,” or that when they are expanded become exaggerated or flawed or undone in that jump to the universal. So perhaps my approach to this is more like Mario collecting coins—gathering up all these bits of truth, attempting to hew together these fragments into this object that is a book, as self-constitutive, some bits discarded or chronicled and on display.
When writing my first book, I proposed it as a series of bombs in the shape of a book for understanding something. Maybe my approach in Stalking America still involves gathering absences, but now it’s less about gathering a series of undoings and rather about the act of gathering and letting the material congeal.
