![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/09\/squarewave-750x1125-1.jpg\")
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/09\/thelogos-1600x2500-1-1.jpg\")
<\/p>\nMark de Silva interviewed by Daniel Davis Wood.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Daniel Davis Wood:<\/strong> Square Wave<\/em> is a novel with a few different narrative strands to it — the mystery of the attacks on prostitutes, the historical material, the cloud manipulation, and more — so I’m curious as to how it came to take this form. What are the origins of these intersecting parts, as individual units of narrative? And then how did it occur to you that they belonged together, until you could see a shape for the novel as a whole?<\/p>\n Mark de Silva:<\/strong> The original idea was to juxtapose, without too much forethought, a pair of social conflicts separated by oceans and centuries: European colonialism in South Asia, beginning around 1500, and the disordered United States of the present and very near future. Weather modification and physics emerged pretty naturally in dilating on some of our current ideas about controlling nature and prosecuting wars. Much of my writing, really, considers violence and defiance; and so another kind of violence that came to mind while filling out the contemporary portion of the book was the crime spree against streetwalkers. As for the musical thread, in which I consider radical alternatives to classical (diatonic) harmony, that was mostly fallout from my making a couple of the characters, for no particular reason (other than my general interests), musicians.<\/p>\n DW: <\/strong>This sounds like a more intuitive process than I expected, as if you began with a series of preconditions out of which the novel resolved itself, like a photograph in a darkroom. Can you take me a little deeper into the creative mindset that advances a process like this? I mean, there must be moments when you\u2019re just riding along on sheer faith: collecting sporadic notes, maybe, and just having a feeling<\/em> that something you\u2019ve encountered in the world belongs in the novel you\u2019re writing. And there must be other times when you have to knuckle down and intellectualise the things you\u2019ve collated, putting pressure on disparate pieces, maybe (uncomfortably?) forcing cohesion or making a certain idea yield up more than it is willing to. Tell me about those challenges. Moving from notes and ideas to pecking out paragraphs on a keyboard, how do you know\u2014or sense<\/em>\u2014when something won\u2019t quite fly, and what you might do to get it off the ground?<\/p>\n MS:<\/strong> There are first novels that owe their existence to humble apprenticeship, and there are those that come to be through unabashed presumption. Square Wave<\/em> is of the latter sort. A book with so many ingredients could have easily failed to gel, and I suppose if that had happened, I might have abandoned it and begun a more modest manuscript. Luckily, I found it not only possible but pleasurable\u2014profoundly so\u2014to seek, in the free improvisation of novel writing, the sameness beneath difference and vice-versa.<\/p>\n Granted, as I moved through the manuscript, my imaginative freedom ran up all those details of character and scene and plot I\u2019d already set down. So integrating further materials required more and more creative pressure. But I enjoyed applying that pressure, even watching material crumble away under it, not to mention seeing things you thought had little chance of hanging around end up sticking. The key was creating opportunities for my mind to bind the materials together, which just meant mulling over, between writing sessions, the many things I was reading. I think it was in this mulling that much of the large-scale synthetic work occurred.<\/p>\n DW: <\/strong>One of the most interesting features of Square Wave<\/em> is the way it (seemingly) shifts between various genres of writing, or intermingles them, or occupies several concurrently\u2014in any event, the way it appears simultaneously to disregard genre boundaries and to revel in the elements of different genres. One moment it\u2019s noir, then it\u2019s dystopian, then it’s theoretical or essayistic, a campus novel, pornography\u2014and your language adapts accordingly. Speaking personally, when I look at \u201cgenre,\u201d I tend to see mostly conventions and delimitations, an array of conceptual constraints. But you seem to see creative possibilities, because \u201cgenre\u201d seems to mean something quite different to you. Can you take me into the mindset that gave you the urge to make of Square Wave<\/em> a genre collage?<\/p>\n MS:<\/strong> That\u2019s interesting\u2014the difference between genre conventions narrowing things down, creatively, and opening them up. I don\u2019t know if I\u2019ve considered it quite like that up to now, but yes, I think that\u2019s right, I do see the deployment of genre tropes as broadening our imaginative territory, and not just in the usual parodic sense. I\u2019m not keen, in Square Wave<\/em>, anyway, on the metafictional satirization or critique of literary genres, as modernists were; nor am I mobilizing genres primarily as a matter of aesthetic play, as the pastiche artists (\u201cblank\u201d parodists) of later eras did. Rather, I am venturing\u2014non-parodically\u2014into imaginative and cognitive spaces that seem to me only accessible via an organically catholic mode of storytelling.<\/p>\n DW:<\/strong> Would it be fair to say that part of your purpose is cultural critique, that your critique comes from accessing these imaginative and cognitive spaces, and that the remixing of genres opens up these spaces because it first involves a broad sampling of narratives and forms from across the culture? Or would you rather shy from taking on a purpose like this?<\/p>\n MS:<\/strong> I think a kind of critique can issue from that process, depending on the ingredients that go into the mix and the mind that cooks them up. But it\u2019s not the directed or sharply defined sort of critique that a philosopher or essayist might undertake. Which is quite interesting, I think. You might say novels can serve<\/em> critical functions without being<\/em> critiques. And I\u2019m sure both of my novels are like this.<\/p>\n DW: <\/strong>When Square Wave<\/em> came out in the United States a few years ago, a good number of reviews categorised it as a \u201cphilosophical novel.\u201d But they didn\u2019t necessarily mean this to suggest that it uses narrative to dramatise philosophical ideas, so much as that you adopt the form of the novel as a way of \u201cdoing\u201d philosophy. What does this term, \u201cthe philosophical novel,\u201d mean to you? And how comfortably do you think that term applies to Square Wave<\/em>?<\/p>\n MS:<\/strong> Everything hangs on the meaning of \u201cphilosophy.\u201d If philosophy\u2019s a practice that consists in the adjudication, tacit or otherwise, of quite general propositions about reality\u2019s nature, then Square Wave<\/em> isn\u2019t really a philosophical novel. But if philosophy needn\u2019t involve authorial assertion, and can instead consist simply in the prolonged dwelling<\/em> within the realm of such propositions\u2014that is, within the conceptual (and not just sensory) imagination\u2014then yes, the book is, among other things, a philosophical novel. And that matters, since there aren\u2019t so many novels that offer readers that.<\/p>\n DW: <\/strong>I like that notion and turn of phrase: philosophy as \u201cthe prolonged dwelling within the realm of\u201d propositions about the nature of reality\u2014a \u201cdwelling within\u201d that is alternative or even antithetical to an appraisal of those propositions. I assume you\u2019d consider The Logos<\/em> to be a philosophical novel along these lines, too, so let\u2019s shift focus to your latest work. Can you take me back to its origins? And then how you moved from the novel-as-idea into the writing of these thousand pages\u2014orchestrating, narratively, a contest of propositions within which the reader might be left to dwell?<\/p>\n MS:<\/strong> I started submitting Square Wave<\/em> to agents in the fall of 2013. That manuscript had been my primary cognitive engagement for the previous four years, so I found myself, after a long time, suddenly free to explore matters not addressed there. I keep a running list of books that catch my eye, and at that time I noticed on that list a significant number about visual culture: graphic design, architecture, advertising, fine art, and more generally, books about what is left of contemporary public space\u2014physical space, I mean, not cyberspace\u2014along with the activities and social exchanges occurring therein. (Urban space in particular.) So I set about reading those books in no especially structured way, and I carried on like that for about two years before beginning to think about character, scene, plot, and the rest\u2014and even then not too concretely.<\/p>\n DW: <\/strong>Similar origins to Square Wave<\/em>, then, but resolving from a very different set of preconditions.<\/p>\n MS:<\/strong> Yes, although I did make some early formal decisions that only came at a later stage with Square Wave<\/em>. This time around, for instance, I was keen from the start to write in the first-person; and second, I wanted to compose something seamless and flowing, free of obvious ruptures or discontinuities. Both of those were significant new directions for me. As with Square Wave<\/em>, though, the basic narrative substance<\/em> of the new novel seemed to issue forth organically from those years of reading, with most of the significant creative work occurring in the drafting itself. So there wasn\u2019t very much early orchestration: no schemas outlined, no questions self-consciously confronted. And really there wasn\u2019t much of these things later on. I wrote the first draft based on a clutch of notes about possibilities, and then I redrafted from the beginning several times over the years, using each new draft as a chance to think and feel and see again. You could say that each time I was looking through<\/em> the book to the world it conjured, rather than looking at the text as a formal object and considering tone and structure and dramatic arc.<\/p>\n DW: <\/strong>I certainly would<\/em> say something like that, because one of the things I like most about The Logos<\/em> is how warped the structure is, and the dramatic arc, in part because of how the narrator indulges in full submersion in non-narrative matters. (I don\u2019t think \u201cindulges\u201d is an inappropriate word here, nor a pejorative one.) I\u2019m particularly struck by the disorientating effect of the timeflow: out of the thousand pages of The Logos<\/em>, the first several hundred all take place on one day, then the next couple hundred take place on one day a little later on, and the timeflow sort of telescopes in the second half of the book until weeks and months are flying by in the final pages. I see this as an intentional effect on your part, though one that\u2019s perhaps a result of an intentional neglect or deprioritisation of proportionality between narrative events. Have I got it right or am I misreading it here?<\/p>\n MS:<\/strong> I think that\u2019s right. On the one hand, time is treated quite unobstrusively in the book, in that it flows in one direction, without dislocations or the sorts of swirls and eddies apparent in most modernist fiction; on the other, time here is entirely the narrator\u2019s, so that the relative weights of his concerns largely determine the depth or nuance in which matters are presented. As events periodically force him out of a state of solitary meditation\u2014a state that seems natural to him\u2014time and perception cannot help but accelerate, for him and for us. Something is gained through this\u2014variety, excitation\u2014and yet something is lost: the grain of attention coarsens.<\/p>\n DW: <\/strong>Did you have models in mind for all this? The earliest readers of The Logos<\/em> have compared it to some of the usual suspects of maximalist postmodernism\u2014Gaddis, Pynchon, et al<\/em>\u2014because of its size, setting, and subject matter. But aside from those sorts of writers, were there one or two others that readers mightn\u2019t pick up on so quickly?<\/p>\n MS:<\/strong> To give two, Gregor von Rezzori\u2019s Memoirs of an Anti-Semite<\/em> and Celine\u2019s Journey to the End of the Night<\/em>. There are so many ways in which these books differ from The Logos<\/em>, but what they share is a narrator whose curiosity refuses natural limits. The result is work that is often bracing and occasionally menacing. Naipaul\u2019s whole oeuvre has this quality, and he\u2019s been no small influence on my own novels, despite chasmic differences in approach and effect. A House for Mr. Biswas<\/em> and The Enigma of Arrival<\/em> are especially relevant to The Logos<\/em>.<\/p>\n DW:<\/strong> I was surprised by something you mentioned recently in conversation on the Beyond the Zero<\/em> podcast. You made a remark about the way The Logos<\/em> owes a debt to the nineteenth century novel\u2014in that it emphasizes in-depth characterisation, it resolves its narrative fairly conventionally, and so on. I can see it, now that you\u2019ve pointed it out, but until then I wouldn\u2019t have made the comparison myself because I don\u2019t think The Logos<\/em> has the \u201cshapeliness\u201d (if you like) of a nineteenth century novel. Can you elaborate on its resonance with the literature of that period? Did you have a particular novel or novelist in mind as a touchstone?<\/p>\n MS:<\/strong> There\u2019s a kind of narrative regularity to the novels of Balzac, Austen, and Dickens that is absent from The Logos<\/em>. But that\u2019s less true of late-nineteenth century novels. I\u2019m thinking especially of Dostoevsky, where the pacing can be odd, even jarring, as it\u2019s frequently disrupted by the psychic irruptions of his characters; and then James as well, who was a pioneer in representing subjective dilations\u2014distortions, from the older perspective\u2014in the novel. War and Peace<\/em>, too, is hardly a tidy, balanced novel. Its greatness is partly a matter of its lack of proportion, I think.<\/p>\n DW: <\/strong>I suppose that one way The Logos<\/em> converses with the nineteenth century novel is in its treatment of values. Who values what, and how highly; who has the capacity to evaluate in the first place, and with what rigor; and who has the power to delineate and facilitate the transmission of certain values\u2014these are all questions that arise in the course of The Logos<\/em>, as in many older novels that weren\u2019t afraid to address abstractions of such scale.<\/p>\n MS:<\/strong> I think there is a certain socio-intellectual compass to The Logos<\/em> that links it to works like Middlemarch<\/em>, The Brothers Karamazov,<\/em> and War and Peace<\/em>. The difference\u2014and this also sets my novel apart from twentieth century expressions of the form like The Recognitions <\/em>and Infinite Jest<\/em>\u2014is that there isn\u2019t much authorial adjudication going along with it, which might well seem odd to some: what\u2019s the point of ideas if you don\u2019t use them to discover truths, or frame urgent questions, or inform one\u2019s decision-making?<\/p>\n DW: <\/strong>It\u2019s true that earlier novelists were generally more eager to pass judgment on the hierarchy of values, to moralise, whereas\u2014and this is what I find most rewarding about the novel, which is to say aesthetically and ethically challenging\u2014The Logos<\/em> seems to be determined to resist: to construct and preserve an amorality, if one can purge that term of its negative connotations.<\/p>\n MS:<\/strong> Scrutiny itself, if it\u2019s carried off imaginatively enough, and surprisingly enough, can be its own end. Not all cognitive activity has to be a means to knowledge, or concept extension, or even (with Kant) the experience of freedom or the embodiment of beauty. The imagination, in both its sensory and conceptual aspects, needn\u2019t serve any of these purposes. Instead, one\u2019s mental energies, in writing a novel, can be turned toward the fabrication of a distinct sort of habitat, a psychic space, with its own geography and terrain. Reading a novel situates you in just such a space, and one may ultimately spend a significant portion of one\u2019s biological existence, one\u2019s \u201creal life,\u201d inhabiting these spaces. And this needn\u2019t be a matter of escape or pleasurable diversion; depending on the novel, one can court real trouble just as easily as buffering oneself from it. Yet there is such a thing as good trouble. The Logos<\/em>, I hope, can offer that. In any case, it doesn\u2019t lend itself to easy<\/em> instrumentalization, which is all to the good.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n ABOUT THE AUTHORS<\/strong> Mark de Silva<\/strong> is 3:AM<\/em>‘s fiction editor. This interview also appears on Splice<\/em>‘s website. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Everything hangs on the meaning of \u201cphilosophy.\u201d If philosophy\u2019s a practice that consists in the adjudication, tacit or otherwise, of quite general propositions about reality\u2019s nature, then Square Wave<\/em> isn\u2019t really a philosophical novel. But if philosophy needn\u2019t involve authorial assertion, and can instead consist simply in the prolonged dwelling<\/em> within the realm of such propositions\u2014that is, within the conceptual (and not just sensory) imagination\u2014then yes, the book is, among other things, a philosophical novel. <\/p>\n Daniel Davis Wood<\/b> interviews Mark de Silva<\/b> about his novels, The Logos<\/em> and Square Wave<\/em>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":119,"featured_media":112179,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-112169","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-interviews"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/112169","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/119"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=112169"}],"version-history":[{"count":16,"href":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/112169\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":112202,"href":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/112169\/revisions\/112202"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/112179"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=112169"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=112169"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=112169"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\nDaniel Davis Wood<\/strong> is a novelist and the publisher of Splice<\/em>, which recently released the UK editions of Square Wave<\/a> and <\/em>The Logos<\/a>. <\/em><\/p>\n