SOURCE: Cooper, Dennis, and Kasia Boddy. “Conversation with Dennis Cooper.” Critical Quarterly 37, no. 3 (autumn 1995): 103-15.

[In the following interview, Cooper discusses the development of his thematic concerns and stylistic approach, his literary influences, the significance of representative characters in his fiction, and his interest in studying the notion of bliss in future works.]

[Boddy]: I'd like to start by asking you about what seems like a dominant concern of your work—both thematically and stylistically—the relationship between inside and out, the exterior and the interior of things.

[Cooper]: I'm always trying to construct that dichotomy.

But sometimes it's not clear which is more desirable—the surface or the interior. Sometimes it's one, sometimes the other.

Well, confusion is central to the work—lured by the surface, then horrified by the interior, or disappointed. It's a battle within the work over which has the more information in it, whether what the surface suggests to your imagination is the truth, or whether there's some hidden meaning.

It often seems that surfaces are beautiful but not meaningful, or that there's a very easy meaning in the surface, while the truth is inside. This suggests that beauty and truth are not compatible—you can have only one or the other.

But then truth is always a projection of the writer or the characters. There is never an actual truth.

A word that comes up a lot is ‘perfect’ or ‘perfection’.

I was really influenced by the film-maker Robert Bresson. His films are so … well, they're perfect. They're so tight, they're perfect. I'm always trying to create something so tight that it becomes perfect, thinking that some truth might then emanate from it. That's one of the reasons I write the way I do, why the process is as labour-intensive as it is. To get the work absolutely …

Perfect! Is the tension you describe similar to that tension within the stories that, while you enjoy the skin, you can't have what's underneath? The idea that an airtight skin doesn't let anything out or in?

It's the idea that, if you organise something well enough, somehow it will have within it that thing. Organising something really carefully or elaborately is all you can do. Then it's up to whoever to decode it, and that's where it gets vague, the part you can't control.

There are moments in different stories when characters want to talk about what's important—about love or death—and language fails them. They resort to ‘blah, blah’ or ‘etc.’ You talk about film, but as a writer you depend on language. You've worked in dance, and in Jerk you combined your words with Nayland Blake's pictures, while the central character supplemented his words with a puppet show. Do you sometimes feel that language is not enough? That you'd rather be using some other medium? What about film?

I don't feel frustrated with writing. I feel frustrated that you can't articulate or you can't understand … it's not that language is too limited, but that it's impossible to really pinpoint things or understand things completely because you're constantly reassessing everything. So it's a matter of trying to get to some point. And making the characters inarticulate, that's just an acknowledgment … it's a kind of respect for them—that their uncertainty is what's important.

You don't really use the first person very much.

Well, very carefully. I also switch tenses all the time—I have a sense of how each of them work, so it's a kind of distancing, having someone more immediate, having someone less so. Actually characters who use the first person are usually less enterable than those that are in the third person, because that's just the way fiction works. But in Try the character who uses the first person acts as sort of a red herring. You enter through him, and then you realise that that's not where you are, that's not where you're supposed to be. I'm interested in throwing people off, in disorienting them. In Frisk, for instance, I had the ‘I’ in there because I wanted to take responsibility for the material, because it would have been too easy otherwise to write a horror novel.

In part two of Frisk, ‘Tense’, you use quite a straightforward first person, while in ‘Wilder’, at the end, the first person is really weird in comparison. It seems to challenge the easy first person of ‘Tense’.

I don't want it to be easy. I don't want people to attach it too much to me, to locate the ‘I’ too much. In all the books there's the ‘I’, and then there's the third person perspective on the ‘I’ as well, so it doesn't locate them in one sensibility.

You also explore how characters construct themselves through other sources—if you see yourself as a TV character or in terms of the lyrics of a song you are seeing yourself in the third person, on the level of a character in a fiction which makes it easier to deal with unruly emotions, etc.

Right, yeah. It depends on the situation. In Frisk I wanted there to be a character who threw his identity around, who treated himself in the same way that he treated other characters, suddenly entering a character who wasn't the ‘I’ to get an objective view of himself, which of course is impossible and psychotic. That book especially was trying to disorient, to create a puzzle of fictional and nonfictional elements.

It's very theatrical.

Yeah, well it seemed like the only way to do it. I wanted to try to mimic horror films, some kind of genre thing, to keep people on the subject.

The tone seems to shift all the time, which also confuses the reader. One minute you're encouraged to feel compassion, the next it's very satirical. Critical responses to your work don't seem to pay much attention to the comedy.

Yeah, I know. You can imagine why that's true. Comedy is a great sedative, it's a great relaxer, it's a great way for people to enter something, for you to catch them off guard.

It must be frustrating then when people don't pick up on the comedy.

It's only frustrating when people say ‘Is this supposed to be funny?’

Roger's first person narration is one of the most openly satirical parts of Try.

He's a super aesthete.

He reminded me of Humbert Humbert.

Yeah, maybe subconsciously. I used this really over-aestheticised voice all the time in my early work, and I wanted to turn it to candy. I wanted to get away from that way of thinking about things. At one time it seemed like a good way to look at things, and now it seems like a very faulty and simplistic way of looking at things. So I wanted to kill that perspective off because it becomes so ridiculous and boring and repellent and all these things. I sense that one gets kind of tired of Roger after a while, you know ‘oh here's one of these sections again, can I skip it?’

He's also interesting, with Brice, in terms of ideas of parents and how a family operates. Compared with the parent characters in your other books, they are the most visible. In the other books the parents are always in other rooms, they don't seem to notice their kids coming and going. Do you want to write more about parents and families?

Maybe I'll write more about adults. It's sort of one of my goals to accept that I am an adult and write about it. I don't feel very comfortably an adult, I don't relate to it very much. So they're still villains, they have been villains, hopefully they won't be villains any more.

In Try they're certainly more fleshed out than in your previous work.

Well I'm trying to enter them. I still think that they're a bit too much cartoons. But in Try, I wanted to place my sympathies within the work. There had been a lot of misunderstanding of Frisk, and I wanted my sympathies to be clear. So I wanted the adult characters to be understandable, and in a way sympathetic, but, in contrast to Ziggy and Calhoun and some of the other characters who are more thoughtful or inherently kind or respectful of one another, there's a loss of humanity, a loss of perspective that ultimately is troubling.

How much are the parents just cartoon baddies and how much are they really responsible for what happens to their children in your work?

In Try they are responsible. I was kind of exploring stuff that therapy tells you, seeing what I like or don't like about it.

Ziggy quotes his therapist all the time, but at one point he realises that the reason he doesn't kill Brice is because what his therapist calls abuse he actually thinks of as love.

He seems willing to listen to his therapist, and he checks with what the therapist has said all the time, but one doesn't have a sense that he's absorbed it yet. I don't think his therapist would say he should be friends with Calhoun either! Therapy is a very limited thing … I mean I'm in therapy so I'm trying to figure out what I like about it or don't like about it, what's useful about it or not.

Does it interfere with your writing?

No it doesn't interfere at all. It's true that there's a limit. Therapists see you in a certain way, and they do perpetually pinpoint your parents. You can't say anything without them saying, ‘well don't you think that's because … your parents’. Every time you talk about someone you know, it's like ‘oh he or she is like your father or your mother’ and stuff like that. I mean that's too simple, things aren't that simple.

Is writing a kind of therapy?

Well, it has been, it has been. I grew weirdly and my parents were really horrible and all that stuff, but I've sort of changed lately. I often feel sort of alienated and isolated and on my own, and I've gone through periods of being very remote and blank—like things I write about. Writing helped me in my real life to be a bit more sensible. With Try, while I was writing it a close friend got addicted to heroin and I sort of devoted my life to helping him get off—almost twenty-four hours a day for around a year. I was writing at the same time. I wrote that book partially to figure out what was going on. Like Calhoun, my friend wasn't able to do anything, but there was a kind of inherent, understood gratitude that I was actually still staying with him even though he was totally fucked up. He and Try helped me understand that love is important.

Does your control over the language and structure—that perfect airtight quality—help?

Yeah, sure. You're examining, editing, rewriting your thoughts.

Do the formal demands of the writing interfere with your sense of what really happened?

Well, writing Try was really peaceful. My friend would be like convulsing, and I'd be watching over him and writing. It was something I could completely control. In most situations you shouldn't want to control your relationships with other people, they should just happen, but in that situation my friend was really sick and in pain and I couldn't really do anything—all I could do was just be there—and keep myself well because he needed me to be really clear. He needed me to be absolutely stable every second. Writing kept me from losing it.

What you say about spending a year with your friend in his room comes across in Try. In many ways it's a very claustrophobic novel. You're either in Ziggy's room or Calhoun's room. There is a tension between these rooms being oppressive and being safe. But nobody goes outside very much.

Yeah. The writing's like that.

Your work seems to be drawing on a French tradition rather than an American one.

Almost exclusively French.

How does that mesh or adapt to an American context?

Almost all the things that I was influenced by when I was young were French—writing, art, film. But I don't know. I'm obviously a really American writer. I love how American English is so messed up and fluid.

Do you see links between your work and that of other contemporary American writers? Your stories appear in anthologies like Between C & D or High Risk, so people make connections. Is that just a publishing thing?

Well, some of the people in those books I feel close to. Both those anthologies were kind of like ‘bad boy’ stuff, and I don't really … we were lumped together because we write about drugs or young people or violence, basically. There was a time when I really liked Kathy Acker's work. She was important to me when I was first writing, seeing her out there. But there aren't many … I mean I like a lot of people's work, but in terms of relating to it, there aren't many writers whose work I feel is on a similar track. I guess I feel more and more as if I'm on my own track. And the writing's changing now. I'm trying to get away from some of the subject matter that I've used before. I don't think it interests me as much. I think I'm on to other things.

When did you finish writing Try?

Let's see. When did it come out? It came out last year. So I think around spring of ninety-two.

Quite a while. So you've been writing other stuff?

Well, I'm working on a couple of things. I'm co-writing a nonfiction book with my friend, Joel Westendorf. We're writing a book about the history of sensory overload in the arts. That's one thing I'm doing, and then I'm working on a book, a novel, but it's too early. It's kind of mulchy, it's going to be kind of different though, I think. Hopefully more blissful. I want to write about bliss, I'm interested in bliss now.

Bliss in the sense … ?

Well, I'm not sure yet. I'm just figuring out … I'm trying to step somewhere.

Your work seems to be becoming more openly romantic.

Yeah, I guess, but to me it's all really romantic.

The romance is nearer to the surface in Try.

To me Try was about friendship. That was what really interested me. Now I want to talk about … I used to do a lot of LSD, like a lot, and I had some weird experiences. I want to talk about where they took me, and somehow represent them in language—somewhere I was, and somehow use that in the language—how when you're high on psychedelics, you're isolated but you feel peace, you feel a kind of benign interest in things. And my books are always for specific people, and this one will be about a friend of mine, and what he inspires in me, which is a lot more happiness or something. So at this point I have all these different senses of things and I'm just writing all this stuff and then I'll kind of edit, edit, edit and work, work, work and then it'll become something. That's the way it always is.

Parts of Closer appeared in journals before the book came out. Did you write the sections separately and then they developed into a book, or did you originally start with the idea of the book?

There's a piece in Wrong called ‘Wrong’—which has the George character in it. I'd written that, and originally I thought that I'd do something with that, because I didn't think it was quite right yet. So originally that was going to be the ending or conclusion of Closer. But once I started working on Closer, it was very much of a piece.

To come back to what you were saying about the new work. There is almost a religious sense in it, in some ways, with some characters who talk about God quite a lot. Do you think that you are describing, in some way, religious experiences?

Well, that's one of the things that interest me—I mean, not God—but maybe I'm beginning to sense where one finds spiritual comfort or spiritual information, and maybe it's in some place I never thought it would be. I think in a way my work has always been about that kind of locating … The guy in Frisk is, in a way, trying to reach a transcendent state, and so is George in Closer—all that LSD and Disneyland stuff is all an attempt to go somewhere else, to completely disorder himself, to leave the world.

You often cut down those escapes, you don't allow them to last too long!

Well, I don't know. In Try, Ziggy and Calhoun still have a lot of things to figure out—Calhoun is still a heroin addict. But I think, with all sincerity, you know, when the last line of the book is ‘Fuck everything else’, that's not just a joke. I mean it's stupid to say and it's a kind of … I don't know. But the love that Ziggy and Calhoun have for each other … it may not be an escape exactly, but …

But at the end of Try it's starting?

Yeah, it's starting. I think I have a better sense now that there is a kind of serenity or something, and I don't know why, or how it works, or what, but that there is a way that you can live with a kind of peace. It's not something … I've not lived in a peaceful state for most of my life, so it's interesting. It's too early to tell, but I'd like to write about peace. I'd really like to get away from the things that people call nihilistic in the work.

I don't really find it nihilistic because whatever happens there's always a striving for something else.

Yeah, well, they want the sublime, they just have their own way … the direction they've chosen to do it … I mean it's possible to understand why someone would want to reach the sublime through murdering someone, I mean it's a powerful thing to do. It's not a good choice, necessarily! But it's understandable why someone would think murder was the most amazing thing you could do. I don't think that's the most amazing thing you could do … any more! I don't know if I ever did, but I was interested in the idea for a long time.

There's a moment in Wrong where a character says that, since AIDS, this kind of romantic idea of death can't work any more.

‘AIDS ruined death.’ Yeah, I don't know. I may have thought so when I wrote that piece but actually it turns out that AIDS makes death more interesting. If you have friends dying all the time, you start to wonder what death is, and where they are.

It's changed it.

Yeah, it's changed it, it hasn't ruined it. I don't remember why I was thinking that, but everybody always quotes that line. AIDS did ruin a particular kind of romantic notion of death, a notion of death that a lot of my early work perpetuates, I guess.

Death in your work is very controlled—whether you're the killer or being killed in a very controlled environment—and disease isn't like that.

Giving up control is more interesting than trying to have absolute control. I mean in the work, I'll always want absolute control in terms of the text, but I think it's important to acknowledge that everyone is autonomous, and that everyone has control, and that everything you do is part of a combination of controls. I'd like to make my work less psychotic.

Another kind of tension that I find in your work is one between realism and what might be called anti-realism. On the one hand, there is abundance of realistic detail and dialogue; on the other hand, you and your characters are always pointing out how mediated our experience of all that is. So you find yourself seduced into the realism and then jolted out of it.

Yeah, hopefully. In Frisk, where I guess I was using that tactic most elaborately, there's so much set up for everything to be false. Perspectives shift. There's so much hearsay. A character is killed by an actor in an old set from the Twilight Zone TV show.

Although you're also encouraging readers to think it's real.

Yeah, yeah—of course I want that too! So I can't have it both ways—if you make your strategy too obvious on the surface, the work will become artsy, and I really don't want that. I mean, I like the nouveau roman and that sort of stuff, but I wouldn't want to just work from an objective standpoint, however complexly.

Because?

Because I think that truth comes from other people and not from books or art, ultimately I do, and that's why I make a decision to prioritise emotion. Even if the characters are fake the work's always about trying to get to another human, with all these things in the way, I want to communicate. I have problems with a certain kind of avant-garde writing where style becomes too much of an interference. I don't have much to say. I mean I have things that I'm interested in, things I want to study, but I don't have any statement. I have nothing to say about any of it. It's all confused and I'm just trying to instigate a thought, or to create a relationship with the people reading me.

Lynne Tillman too has talked about wanting to write in a way that was experimental but didn't announce itself as experimental; that work which announces itself is ultimately not that experimental because you can easily dismiss it.

Yeah, it's a fine line though. For instance, Kathy Acker—her earlier work is extremely experimental but actually I think you can transgress all those strategies very quickly and get in to what she's talking about.

You talk about how your work is changing, and how Try has a more conventional structure. Is your new work like that too?

No, the next one's going to be much more complicated. It will be very accessible in the sense that it will have a certain narrative sensibility and characters you're supposed to think about, but I want it to be much more disruptive. I want it to be much more psychedelic. I think it will be a much more difficult book, in that sense. I'm not getting interested in conventional writing. I resist it. Even in Try, I think it's my favourite thing I've done, but I can see that there are things I had to do to have it cover forty-eight hours where something is happening every minute. There are parts that just function as filler. And I'm terrified of flab, so I certainly don't want to go more in that direction. I went as far in that direction as I could go and now I feel I want to pull away! But I learned some things about how to move a narrative along, which is not something I really knew how to do before. I didn't grow up reading novels, I grew up reading poetry. My first books were all poetry. I always wrote prose but it was very poetic, and I don't know how to do plot and character development and all that stuff—I don't want to know! I'm not interested in work that does that very much. It seems like I'm being lied to all the time.

In terms of prose, the short story seems closer to poetry than the novel.

Yeah, but there's so much more room to move in the novel.

Your novels are often like short story montages or collages.

Yeah, they're always broken up.

Do you still write poetry?

No, I hadn't written poetry since around 1985 and then somebody asked me to write some poetry for an anthology. So I wrote ten new poems, some were old ones I polished up though! I wanted to write about River Phoenix who'd just died. His death really affected me, and those feelings seemed more suited to poetry than to fiction.

Is it because you're writing prose now that you don't write poetry?

Yeah, I'd been writing both and then I got sick of writing stanzas and I didn't think I had much to say, I was so tired of playing around in tiny little spaces. I just started making paragraphs. My first novella, Safe, was very much like a prose poem. It was interesting to write these new poems, but I don't think I'll be doing more. I never think, ‘I'll write a poem’ like I used to.

Because poetry is more … ?

I mean I admire John Ashbery and people like that but I don't think I'm a skilful enough poet to be able to do what I want to do in the form. My poems of the early eighties were very elaborate and very complicated but they just seemed so … self-involved.

But when you wanted to write about River Phoenix you thought that poetry was right?

Yeah, well they're like love poems, in a really loose sense.

What's the anthology that they're in?

It's called Uncontrollable Bodies: Testimonies of Identity and Culture. It's a Bay Press anthology. Lynne's in it, some other people. It came out in the States a few months ago. It's no big deal.

A character in Wrong says, ‘He wanted one fresh perception.’ Do you think one can have a fresh perception within the language of the genres that you draw on such as horror or pornography, or do you have a sense of there being some kind of pure language?

Pure perception. I suppose I feel that one should aspire to that, I don't know if it's possible. There's definitely a lot of language pollution I'd like to avoid. But it would also be too utopian to think I could eliminate all of literature's tropes. Still, that's the idea, the Rimbaud thing.

Most contemporary writers seem not to try to strip language down in the modernist way, but simply to play different languages off against each other.

Yeah, me too. But I'm not interested in all that standard postmodernist interconstructing of texts. I don't have much interest in that sort of thing.

Ziggy's prayer at the end of Try collapses.

Because he doesn't have a language. Well, that's it. That prayer's about love, or I don't know if it was about love, but it was about wanting to be loved, and how you ask for love, and how you can't ask—either it exists or it doesn't. You can't say anything that would make someone love you. It just has to happen. I don't know how it happens. That's like a prayer, when you're asking for something and you don't know how to ask for it, and you don't know what to ask for. You're asking for an abstraction, for something that you can't even see or understand, for something that you don't know if you deserve. Wanting love from someone is like asking for divine intervention.

Bliss is always silent, without language.

Exactly. So I've just got to figure out how to write about bliss! It will be a challenge.

I'm glad you're moving toward bliss.

I don't want to be unhappy any more. You can easily decide that everybody's horrible, you're alone, and hate that you need other people—and I've done that. I thought happiness was ridiculous, a lie. I went through many years thinking that love and all that stuff just meant you were weak, and that happiness was a sedative, just something that Christianity constructed to keep you from pursuing the truth. I'm struggling against that belief now. I'm thinking that maybe there is a kind of pure happiness, maybe there's a kind of peace or something that's not a compromise. The other option is to just go crazy! So we'll see. The great treasure hunt.