Steve Tomasula: IN & OZ

One layer of the book concerns such differences, and how they are invisible to their inhabitants, whether they live in IN or OZ. But of course the borders are permeable; there are characters, like Mechanic, who are from that area, and others, like artists — Composer — who moved there by choice, the way artists were always in our neighborhood for the cheaper studio space.

PF: Could it be read as a sort of a critique of such artists, trying to be hip but obviously being there because they have money?

ST: I think there are different stances here, described by the different characters, with Photographer and Designer at the extremes. But all of them go through some kind of existential crisis. Like characters in some Russian novels — Gogol or Platonov — they’re defined by the systems they live within. Not that we (in America) have the sort of tragedy of a Gogol or Platonov… We’ve never had a Stalin. But we have had the institution of slavery… We have censorship, as well, but it’s all done through the market, not by centralized dictators. The market decides what art, music, writing, should be valued, and therefore what kinds of messages and ideas are worthwhile — in politics, art, really every sphere — and in many ways this censorship is harder to confront because it’s so amorphous. As Photographer might put it, if the poem makes the poet, and the market doesn’t think difficult poetry has value, should the poet start writing greeting card verse? From a certain perspective, not doing so is a form of insanity, like a lawyer giving up his practice to take up the violin. Mechanic has his existential crisis while lying in sludge under a car, repairing a transmission, something he’s done a thousand times before. Designer goes in search of music more meaningful than elevator music, but ultimately rejects what she finds. So what if elevator music is shallow? she asks. It’s fun. And it makes money. Remember she’s telling this to Composer who’s worn down by the grind of being an esoteric artist, i.e., little recognition, less money. He doesn’t just live in a garret, he lives in a hole. In IN, no less. Meanwhile, all he has to do to become both famous and wealthy is dumb down his work to the point where it can be whistled by anyone — even the grill of an automobile. It’s a great temptation. I also hope the absurdity of his situation isn’t lost on anyone.

PF: Sure, but if you look at Mechanic, he immediately reminded me of the long tradition of working-class art — people like Sandburg or the Chicago Imagists. Maybe not even working-class art, but the kind of art firmly grounded in a working-class environment. Mechanic seems to me the most authentic of them…

ST: Yes, and maybe that’s what traps Mechanic? If he stops repairing cars, he turns his back on his background, lineage, and identity. Yet he knows he can’t go on repairing cars, that is, being a cog in the system that wants to maintain the status quo. He understands profoundly what a mechanic is, and yet the deeper his understanding, the fewer people there would be who’d want him to work on their cars. They don’t want philosophy from their mechanic. They want their cars fixed! But without knowing it, he’s become an artist in the manner of Duchamp, destroying the function of objects, making them useless for their intended purpose, but in so doing giving them voice. Making the invisible visible through art.

PF: I know this is a tricky question, but which of the characters is your favorite in terms of what they say about art and where they stand?

ST: For me, the real hero of the novel is Poet/Sculptor. But Mechanic is certainly close. The river that catches fire in the novel comes from the river near my childhood home, which had so many chemicals dumped into it that it actually would catch on fire on hot summer days. Watching a fire department try to put out a burning river makes a person think. So that kind of stuff is easy for me to identify with.

PF: And there is this one passage in IN & OZ about Poet’s book with its visual poems, warranty cards, blueprints, and diagrams. That seems to be VAS ! — your earlier novel.

ST: I was hoping you wouldn’t notice! [Laughs.] Yes, you’re right — in IN & OZ and VAS , and really, in all my novels, I try to blur the line between words and the world outside the words. Words are abstractions, but they also have material form: all the dollar signs in IN & OZ , or the pages of genetic code in VAS , are meant less to be read than to call readers’ attention to the fact that the book they are holding in their hands is a real object, not a dream; I want to write books that are real objects in the world, not a form of escapism from the world. The pen may not be mightier than the sword, but language can certainly kill too. Someone once said that the most lethal weapon in World War II was the typewriter; at the least, words are what all sorts of barriers and glass ceilings are made of. That was the aspect of the novel I was most interested in: how at the core it’s all smoke, mirrors, glass, and air. Mostly air, i.e., speech. That’s funny, isn’t it?

Paweł Frelik teaches American literature at the Maria Curie-Skłodowska University in Lublin, Poland. He coedits the European Journal of American Studies .

Steve Tomasula is the author of the novels VAS: An Opera in Flatland and The Book of Portraiture , as well as TOC: A New-Media Novel , which received the Mary Shelly Award for Excellence in Fiction, and the e-Lit Awards Gold Medal for Best Book of the Year. He has contributed fiction and essays to a wide variety of publications, including Bomb, McSweeney’s , and The Iowa Review , where he received the Iowa Prize for the most distinguished work published in any genre. He lives in Chicago.