‘If one were to place Jan Švankmajer in a schemata which might signal a point of access to his work, it might be as someone who anticipated the low-rent, anti-technology, quasi-documentary suggestiveness of The Blair Witch Project (1999) and coupled it with the tactility and cinematic bravura of Dario Argento’s more coherent visual ideas. This significantly undervalues the distinctiveness of Švankmajer’s approach, of course, but points up an important tension at the heart of his work between his conception of “fantastic documentary” and the fundamental principles of “militant surrealism.”

‘Animation readily facilitates this co-existence because its intrinsic artifice effectively creates an ontological equivalence in all aspects of the textual apparatus, imbuing it with the simultaneous capacity to both amplify meanings and imperatives in the materials used and images constructed, while also potentially diluting their significance by working as a model of expression which in enunciating its illusionism offers the possibility of “innocence” and “distanciation.” Simply, this is one of the reasons why animated films—from Disney cartoons to Japanese animé—can be both viewed as conservatively “mainstream” and subversively “left-field” depending upon how they are received and interpreted. The issue underpinning this, of course, remains animation’s enduring identity (and burden) as “children’s entertainment.”

‘Švankmajer refuses this ghetto, however, not merely through the ways in which he uses the free, and in some ways, unregulatable language of animation, but in the way he perceives “the child.” He suggests, “I’m not at all sure that any work of art is unsuitable for children. When children are confronted by something they can’t understand, [they engage with it] so that it works by analogy, or they simply reject it and carry on as before. Adults have a very distorted idea of a child’s world; they are crueller, more animalistic, than we like to admit.

‘The principles of desire live on in a child, who still hasn’t been domesticated by the world; its imagination is that much freer.” It is clear here that in suggesting there are no aesthetic boundaries that a child may not cross, Švankmajer is already challenging the socially and legally determined parameters of what is, and what is not suitable for children. In this respect, too, he signals modes of transgression which may be understood as the necessary imperatives of the artist in the facilitation of exploring new ideas, and the rejection of the restrictions of “citizenry” during that process.

‘The “horror” here resides in the recognition that humankind is fundamentally driven by obsessive and compulsive needs and desires, often rooted in childhood anxieties, and played out in dream-states. Švankmajer “frightens” by prompting recognition of transgression, and by physicalising alternative perspectives. Švankmajer contemporises and materialises the documentation of his agit-scares through the “fabrication” of his mise-en-scène, noting that “Animation can bring the imagery of childhood back to life and give it back its credibility,” adding “The animation of objects upholds the truth of our childhood.”‘ — Paul Wells, Kinoeye

 

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Stills

 

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Further

Jan Svankmajer Official Website
Jan Svankmajer Fan Page
The Jan Svankmajer Home Page
Jan Svankmajer page @ Facebook
‘The Decalogue of Jan Švankmajer’
Jan Svankmajer’s ‘Little Otik’ Diary
‘Jan Švankmajer: Animated Self-Portrait’
Jan Svankmajer interviewed @ Electric Sheep
Book: ‘The Cinema of Jan Svankmajer: Dark Alchemy’
Jan Svankmajer DVDs

 

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General

The Brothers Quay ‘The Cabinet of Jan Svankmajer’

Jan Švankmajer – IFFR Big Talk

Jan.Svankmajer – J.S.Bach.Fantasia.in.G.Minor

Darkness Light Darkness (1990) by Jan Svankmajer

Hugh Cornwell Another Kind of Love [dir. Jan Švankmajer, 1988]

 

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Interview
by Wendy Jackson

 

Would it be bold to say that Conspirators of Pleasure is your most Surrealist film to date?

Jan Svankmajer: Conspirators is actually a film about liberation, and about gaining a freedom. It is not art, but a film. Just as, for example, André Breton would not say “Surrealistic painting”, he would say “Surrealism in painting”. In the same way, I speak of Surrealism in film. Surrealism is psychology, it is philosophy, it is a spiritual way, but it is not an aesthetic. Surrealism is not interested in actually creating any kind of aesthetic. It was drawn as an element from various different artists, but it does not exist.

How can something so prevalent in your work be non-existent?

JS: Surrealism does exist, but it is not an art form. To characterize Surrealism, you can say it is the Romantic movement of the 20th century. Each romantic period expresses three elements: love, freedom and poetry. Each generation is seeking their own artistic expressions according to the environment and the time period they live in. The Romanticism of the 21st century will ask the same question. It doesn’t matter whether that Romanticism will be Culturalism, or something else.

You are very versatile in your filmmaking and other art, with the use many different techniques. Can you tell me something about your process for determining which medium should be employed to communicate or express a particular idea?

JS: I always say that I basically make my work “to order”, by which I mean to my “inner order”. It is really inside me, what’s going to come out. The way I see it, each individual accumulates in his or her lifetime. That which accumulates inside him or her needs to find a way out. Basically, everybody can do that, but most people do not find a way of releasing it, they have certain blockage. There is no such thing as talent.

No such thing as talent? That is a bold statement.

JS: It’s very simple. The artist is able to reach their resources, and overcome the block. But a clerk who sits in the office, obviously, has his blockage and cannot. This so-called “professionalism”, is much more a matter of technique, or skill than creativity. You can see that in naive art, or folk art, if an individual wants to express him or herself, they find a way to do it if they really want to.

You grew up in a time of such oppression of creativity and self-expression. How is it that you are so “lucky” as to not have this block, that you are able to realize your potential to express yourself through art?

JS: It’s a difficult question to answer. I believe there is a lot to it, including family influences. Certain children are just very difficult to handle. I was one of these children (laughs). For example, all children can draw. Some of them retain this ability until adult age, while in other children the ability is subsequently killed.

Rightly, you are often referred to as the “alchemist” of film.

JS: Yes, alchemy is about trying to connect things that you cannot connect, that are “un-connectable”. Poetry is a parallel for alchemy, and alchemy is a parallel for poetry.

 

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13 of Jan Švankmajer’s 40 films

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Punch and Judy (1966)
‘Probably the most densely allusive, frenetically charged film ever made about puppets hitting each other, Jan Švankmajer’s Punch and Judy is pretty extraordinary. At their best his short films are as tightly structured as incantations, delivering a sequence of actions and a barrage of images that somehow add up to a perfectly arranged whole. That’s not to say that it’s easy or even possible to draw conclusions about what it means, what the conjuration of that incantation might be, and the lack of easy explanation for all of its imagery is unsettling. If I give a recap of the plot, it might all seem very simple. After a prologue in which a band of automaton monkeys introduce the opening titles before the curtain rises on the stage within the film. Mr Punch is caring for his guinea pig. His neighbour Joey (another stock character from the Punch and Judy stories – note that, despite the title, Judy, along with all the other characters, is nowhere to be seen) envies the guinea pig and tries to buy it. Mr Punch refuses every cash offer, and they settle the dispute with violence, each taking turns to stuff the other into a coffin. It all ends with both characters dead and boxed, while the guinea pig strolls away through a hole in the scenery.’ — Spectacular Attractions

the entirety

 

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Jabberwocky (1971)
‘The spanked arse that opens the film like the clapstick that marks the start of a kabuki performance is not the only similarity to Todd Haynes’ Superstar. Both films use dolls and their mutilation to explore the degradation of the subject in the process of socialisation. That is, dolls in both cases are made into metaphors for the ways people’s bodies are not their own, but the blank objects onto which are carved the pressures and injunctions of families and society. Svankmajer’s dolls start out as the innocent embodiments of childhood, playthings invested with life by the animation process. Quickly, their innocence is polluted, and they are put to work in a series of actions that knock them into submissive shape. Birthed out of the inert body of a larger doll, they are installed in a house that spins them round and spits them out to be ground into food for more dolls. They are ironed flat, boiled and baked to sustain a cannibalistic circle of stunted life and grotesque death.’ — Spectacular Attractions

the entirety

 

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The Fall of the House of Usher (1980)
‘Even without understanding the voiceover (in softly lulling Czech) Svankmajer’s film soaks up the mysterious gloom of Edgar Allen Poe’s gothic story of death, doppelgangers and the claustraphobic weight of history. Like the story, it’s the house, brooding in the dusky light, that is the main character in Svankmajer’s film, dominating the landscape of barren trees and pulsating from foundation to roof with doom. Freed from any pesky humans (or even puppet people) to carry the narrative, it’s also the atmospheric house that Svankmajer uses to tell the tale, in crumbling plaster moulding itself into tormented shapes, words appearing out of dead leaves, blank faces appearing in walls and a coffin silently, clunkily and apparently singlemindedly weaving its own way through the rooms. This short film might be the best unlikely example of Svankmajer’s belief in the memories of materials and objects, and in the power of animation to free those memories.’ — The Spectral Dimension

the entirety

 

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Dimensions of Dialogue (1982)
‘Divided into three separate dialogues entitled ‘Exhaustive Discussion,’ ‘Passionate Discourse’ and ‘Factual Conversation,’ Svankmajer indeed exhausts the subject of social interaction in this unbounded critique of human malfeasance. In the first dialogue, two anthropomorphized assemblages of food-stuffs and kitchen utensils respectively lurch towards one another with the latter devouring the former. In turn, this pattern is repeated when a collection of intellectual markers vies with the kitchen products destroying the returning collage with similarly ease. Next it is the now degraded food objects which sully the books, paints, etc., as though the two were mingling in some fictious trash bin. This process of disintegration continues with the resulting forms appearing closer and closer to the form of man himself.’ — Tativille

the entirety

 

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Alice (1988)
‘After more than two decades as a prolific director of short films, Alice became Švankmajer’s first venture into feature-length filmmaking. The director had been disappointed by other adaptations of Carroll’s book, which interpret it as a fairy tale. His aim was instead to make the story play out like an amoral dream. Alice appears to be in her bedroom when a taxidermically stuffed rabbit comes to life and breaks out of its glass case. Alice follows the rabbit through the drawer of a desk into a cavern. She subsequently falls through a bucket and seemingly down an elevator shaft. Wonderland itself is a mix of drab household-like areas with incongruous relationships of space and size. The Queen’s execution sentences are carried out by the White Rabbit with a pair of scissors. At the film’s end, Alice wakes in her room, discovers that the rabbit is still missing from his glass case, and finds a secret compartment where he keeps scissors. She ponders whether or not she will cut his head off. The film is ambiguous about whether this room is Alice’s real world or “Wonderland.”‘ — Wikipedia

Trailer

the entirety

 

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Meat Love (1989)
‘Meat Love is a short film directed and animated by Jan Švankmajer, released in 1989. It appears as a commercial in Švankmajer’s feature-length film Otesánek. It has also been shown on MTV. It depicts two slices of steak, personified as two individual beings with a consciousness, that become aware of each other and form a romantic relationship, showing the steaks dancing with one another. This soon leads to passionate love, exemplified by the steaks rolling around on a plate of flour, which can be seen to symbolise sexual intercourse. Their passion is killed, however, when the steaks are placed in a frying pan.’ — Marked Animation

the entirety

 

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The Death of Stalinism in Bohemia (1990)
‘In 1990, the year after the “Velvet Revolution” in Czechoslovakia, Jan Svankmajer made The Death of Stalinism in Bohemia and subtitled it “A work of Agitprop.” As these titles plainly demonstrate, it is the most political of all his films, attempting an overview of his country’s history after the Second World War. It is commonly believed that overt political comment within a work can badly affect its artistic value. The complexity and sophistication of artistic language is too often weakened when faced with the simplicity of political vocabulary. Accordingly, from the standpoint of the work of art, the relationship between art and politics is extremely delicate. Despite this, Svankmajer made an explicitly political film. Did he sacrifice the artistic value? If so, to what end? And what significance does the film have to its creator? It is a film that reveals the characteristics of Jan Svankmajer the Militant Surrealist. Svankmajer recognizes that Stalinism in its many guises is just one symptom of contemporary civilization, a civilization he believes that art must attack at its roots. It seems that Svankmajer intends to continue the fight against the absurdities of the human beings by means of his surrealist art.’ — The Slavic Research Center

the entirety

 

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Faust (1994)
‘Svankmajer’s long awaited follow-up to his acclaimed Alice is an equally astounding version of the myth of Dr. Faustus. Merging live action with stop-motion and claymation animation, Svankmajer has created an unsettling universe presided over by diabolic life-sized marionettes and haunted by skulking human messengers from hell. Svankmajer’s Faust (movingly incarnated by one of the Czech Republic’s finest actors, Petr Cepek) is an ordinary, inquisitive everyman who, upon exiting a Prague subway station, is handed a map that draws him to his doom. Led to an abandoned theater he finds a copy of Goethe’s Faust, begins to read aloud, and unwittingly summons up a devil who offers him everything his heart desires in return for his soul. With breathtaking rapidity, Faust’s journey takes him to the tops of mountains, drops him in the middle of lakes, and sends him out onto the unsuspecting streets of Prague. Peopled with shape-changing demons and puppet versions of Goethe’s characters, Svankmajer’s tour-de-force is alternately hilarious and shocking, always unique, and ultimately unforgettable.’ — kino

Trailer

Excerpt

Excerpt

Excerpt

 

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Conspirators of Pleasure (1996)
‘Svankmajer’s newest over-the-brink creation is Conspirators of Pleasure, the absorbing story of an obsessive handful of hardcore sexual fetishists whose lives intersect and dance around one other in serendipitous fashion. Conspirators of Pleasure is an erotic film, although not in the ways that we usually think of eroticism on film. That is, while sexuality is the film’s subject, the titillation factor here is low. For the most part, the characters remain fully clothed throughout. Importantly, there is no sexual intercourse, per se. Nobody talks dirty, because there’s no dialogue at all. Like pornography, communication here is almost completely nonverbal. What’s most gratifying to these motley sensualists — even the married couple, who pursue their own desires separately — is self-gratification. The film itself begins methodically, cross-cutting from story to story and growing ever more complicated as each minute passes. Finally, it achieves its own sort of orgasm, as the stories cross and interconnect, reaching a delirious climax and then a comedown — a disturbing resolution in the best surrealist tradition.’ — deep focus

Trailer

Excerpt

 

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Little Otik (2000)
‘With his latest feature, Little Otik, Svankmajer is poised to move out of the ghetto tag of animator and take his place as a cinema visionary who happens to use animation in his films. Little Otik is based on a Czech fairy tale about a childless couple who adopt a tree stump that looks like a baby. As usual with fairy tales, any deviation from normal behavior triggers disaster — in this case the stump comes to life, grows huge, and starts murdering and eating everybody and everything in its path. Svankmajer, who’s credited with story, screenplay, and direction, uses this narrative as a springboard for a genre-busting masterpiece about the perils of parenthood and what can happen to those who don’t leave well enough alone with the status quo nature has determined.’ — Morphizm

Trailer

Excerpt

Excerpt

 

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Lunacy (2005)
‘The latest provocation from surrealist master Jan Svankmajer is loosely based on two short stories by Edgar Allan Poe and inspired by the works of the Marquis de Sade. In nineteenth-century France (albeit one full of deliberate anachronisms) a young man, Jean Berlot, is plagued by nightmares in which he is dragged off to a madhouse. On the journey back from his mother’s funeral he is invited by a Marquis he meets at lunch to spend the night in his castle. There Berlot witnesses a blasphemous orgy and a ‘therapeutic’ funeral. Berlot tries to flee but the Marquis insists on helping him conquer his fears and takes his guest to a surrealistic lunatic asylum where the patients have complete freedom and the staff are locked up behind bars. Described by Svankmajer himself in a prologue to the film as a ’philosophical horror film,” Lunacy combines live action and stop-motion, sex and violence, grand guignol terror and gallows humor, and a lot of animated meat.’ — zeitgeist films

Trailer

Excerpt

Excerpt

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Surviving Life (Theory and Practice) (2010)
‘Eugene, an aging man, leads a double life: one real – the waking life he spends in the company of his wife of many years, Milana – and the other in his dreams, his sleeping hours being devoted to a recurring evolving dream of a beautiful young woman, Evgenia. Seeking to perpetuate his dream life, he goes to see a psychoanalyst, who attempts to provide an ongoing interpretation of his experiences. On the wall there are portraits of Freud and Jung, which become animated, alternately applauding, disapproving or fighting over her interpretations. The latest film from practising surrealist animator Jan vankmajer is a mix of cut-out animation from photographs and live action segments, combining real actors with their animated photographs, against black and white backdrops of photographed Czech buildings. This stylistic approach which, Svankmajer jokes during the films introduction, was due to lack of funds and saved on catering, provides freedom for imaginative collages, and humorous nods in the direction of some of surrealism’s familiar practitioners (Dalí, Ernst, Buñuel). Drawn directly from Svankmajer’s own dreams, the film is a complex, multilayered story about aging, love, sex, childhood, trauma and dreams, steeped in Freudian and Jungian analysis and injected with a healthy dose of perversity. As Eugene labors in different versions of reality, Svankmajer’s own deeply curious take on reality manifests in all its surrealist splendor.’ — RT

Trailer

Excerpt

 

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Insects (2018)
‘Lesser works by great directors needn’t diminish long-standing reputations, so calling Jan Švankmajer’s “Insect” a disappointment in no way weakens the master’s position as a key proponent of surrealist cinema. However, there’s no getting around the fact that the film is a minor entry in a glorious career, despite having all the raw ingredients for a classic Švankmajer stew. Based on the 1922 satirical play “Pictures From the Insects’ Life” by the Čapek brothers, in which performers dressed as bugs expose the thin line between human and insect behavior, the film takes a meta approach, with the director himself acting as commentator (as in “Surviving Life”) to the story of a provincial amateur production.’ — Jay Weissberg

Trailer

Jan Svankmajer introduces his last feature film.

 

 

*

p.s. Hey. ** David Ehrenstein, Howdy. Everyone, Mr. E celebrated Thanksgiving on his FaBlog via a little ditty called Happy Thanks-Grabbing! ** Bill, Hey. I’m glad the Jesurun and Schutt hit homers. No, I don’t know that film, but will head there. You’re always finding these cool things I don’t know, and I consider myself fairly attentive, but you’re kind of like a Zeus head of stuff I seem to need, which is to say I am retroactively thankful for you on the day of official thankfulness. ** Sypha, Hi. Oh, it’s the holidays over where you are, so I expect some away time from you US guys. Sorry about your car. My LA car is super ancient and has prehistoric mileage levels and looks like something the cat dragged in, and I can’t believe it’s still alive, but it was in October at least. I had no Thanksgiving which was very nice. I hope your Thanksgiving exceeded your expectations. ** _Black_Acrylic, Thanks! Same to you, fellow Thanksgiving non-beset foreigner. I read one David Peace novel. I can’t remember the title. Not the one you’re reading. I liked it. Hm, maybe I’ll eyeball (and more) ‘Patient X’. Thanks for that tip/review too, Ben. ** Nik, Hey, bud! Seriously? That is wild. The Schutt coincidence. Oh, man, I’m so envious of you getting to go to the Gary Lutz shebang. I’d at least semi-kill someone who doesn’t deserve to die to be able to be at that. I can’t wait for the book itself. Everything I’ve read by Schutt is kind of equally really, really good. Oh, Ed Halter. He runs that cool experimental film venue/project in Brooklyn, I think, right? Nice. Hm, you mean Public Access show suggestions? Gosh, I’m blanking. My Public Access watching was pretty random and mostly circa the 80s in NYC. I used to be semi-addicted to Robin Byrd’s show. I was pretty into Peter Ivers’s ‘New Wave Theatre’ in LA, also in the early 80s. And televangelist Gene Scott’s show. There’s that Herzog documentary about him: ‘God’s Angry Man’. Not very exciting suggestions, sorry. I hope the family Thanksgiving was like a homey movie version of Thanksgiving. Mine, as you suggested, was another day. ** Misanthrope, If there’s ever a porn-centered version of … what’s that game show … ‘Jeapordy’ (?), you could become rich. Holidays are for lazy shit and weird sleep patterns and gaining poundage, no? In the US, anyway, no? That’s my memory. ** Steve Erickson, Ah, that’s quite a report on ‘The Irishman’. I really have to see that. I … don’t think it’s here yet. I’m sure it’ll be released in theaters here normal-style because French Netflix is but a shadow of its US version. Interesting. Thanks, Steve! ** Right. If you don’t know the films of the wild animator/filmmaker Jan Švankmajer, then now you do. If you already do, enjoy the familiarity. That’s your story for today. See you tomorrow.

 

‘Christine Schutt’s characters tend to be (or be trying to be) at leisure: on holiday, in the garden, by the pool, at the beach, on a horse. Leisure seeks exclusivity; the you-at-leisure wants to be the only you there is, to rope off everything else (work, relationships, mortality). But reality fights back. Part of Schutt’s immense skill is to show her characters in the process of roping-off, whilst making present and felt that which gets left out. Perspectives are limited, but the world beyond their tight boundaries – an anarchic world of wildness and wild fires, of refuse and decay, of ‘gaudy mayhem’, as one character thinks of the ‘muted news [that] flickers on the flat screen’ in her ‘all-purpose islanded kitchen’ – is always present.

‘One result is that events don’t always register as they should. A hurrying description of Mimi’s husband’s death – ‘the ambulance, the body bag, the funeral home, the furnace’ – leads into a discussion of how much the swimming pool he died in might be worth. Later, as though passing through another story, Mimi mistakenly enters a stranger’s house and witnesses an horrific murder: a woman, Dora Wozack, is shot dead by her son. The narrative passes on without comment and when, later, Mimi tries to describe it, it is language, not event, that she gets hung up on: ‘“Dora Wozack said, ‘My son’s troubled,’ or maybe, ‘My son’s trouble.’ It could have been ‘in trouble.’”’ In ‘A Happy Rural Seat…’, a pattern of unregistered event (an unknown something killed in a drink-driving incident; an unanswered phone call; a disturbing news story switched off) culminates in the glancing half-revelation that Pie has been missing for a long time, presumed dead.

‘Disorientation is the collection’s guiding affect. Schutt’s characters are drunk, lost, amnesiac. The grieving poet muddles the seasons: ‘She thought it was summer still if not spring but the day’s evidence said it was fall. Again!’ After Pie’s disappearance, Nick often ‘found himself standing in front of open broom closets and cabinets, in front of the dishwasher and sinks. Sometimes his hands were wet.’ Homes become unheimliche: Mimi is surprised to find her house full of strangers before remembering that its contents are in the process of being auctioned off.

‘The stories themselves are disoriented. In ‘The Hedges’, a superficial, not-coping couple go on holiday with a sick child who falls off a balcony to his death. In telling us this story, Schutt’s narration seems to be always in the dark, playing catch-up, eavesdropping, struggling to read the signs: ‘Sometime in the night… a cry, followed by another, sounded on the hillside. It might have been a sound of pleasure or pained pleasure or something else; the cry was ambiguous.’ Even the sentences are disoriented; information falls in the wrong order, constructions don’t seem to end up where you expect them to.

‘Schutt’s prose is never less than striking. It has a quality of glancing exactness, as though simultaneously looking and not looking: a modern house is ‘shaped like slung plates’, a pair of nuns are ‘wimpled and sudden’. Occasionally, the prose is striking in its (artful) ugliness: a description of dusk in ‘The Hedges’ reflects the couple’s superficial engagement with the world: ‘By then, the sun had set, and the night sky’s show was blinking on quickly. A greater darkness amid the foliage squeaked notes, very pretty.’ Occasionally, it’s incomprehensible: Dora Wozack stands in her kitchen ‘yukking over a quilted jar of vodka’, whatever that means. But the opacity is important. Schutt writes with a coagulate figurative precision. Her prose is somehow crystal clear and opaque, like the thick surface of an oil painting that both figures a world and arrests your attention with its material texture. It looks at and it looks away from and it knows, in its disorientation, that the two are not always so easy to tell apart. To look at the world isn’t always to know it; to look away from it sometimes is.’ — David Isaacs, The White Review

 

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Further

Christine Schutt
Christine Schutt @ goodreads
A Conversation Between Christine Schutt and Diane Williams
Podcast: Christine Schutt on Bookworm
Correspondence with Christine Schutt
The Crass Class in Christine Schutt’s “Pure Hollywood”
Pure Hollywood – stories to take you out of your comfort zone
ISSUE 4 An Interview with Christine Schutt
Christine Schutt: Learning What You Do Well
Podcast: Between the Covers: Christine Schutt: Pure Hollywood
‘The Blood Jet’, by Christine Schutt
“Remembered Landscapes,” an Interview with Christine Schutt
‘The Dot Sisters’, by Christine Schutt
Uncomfortable Places
Glitz & Infidelity: On Christine Schutt’s ‘Pure Hollywood’
“something else, with it, in the sky”
the garden of earthly delights: christine schutt’s pure hollywood
Atmospheric Disturbances
Hanging Out With Christine Schutt
The Graduate
Matt Bell on Christine Schutt
Buy ‘Pure Hollywood’

 

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Extras

Christine Schutt’s First Time

Christine Schutt Fiction Craft Lecture

Christine Schutt: The Writers Studio Reading Series

 

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Interview

 

Michelle Y. Burke: One of the things I admire most about your writing is how it sounds. Your sentences are so rich and lyrical. To what extent are you thinking about sound when you’re writing?

Christine Schutt: I do think about sound. What I want to do is wed sound to scene. What comes first is a picture. I’m thinking of the way my new book, Prosperous Friends, begins. I had this idea that there would be a couple in their mid-thirties outside of London, maybe in the Fens, near a priory or a church. I was remembering my own experience at that age, being in those sorts of churches, and the stones, and the moss on the stones, and the coldness of it. I thought about that a lot, and I thought about what the couple was doing. They’re alone. He wants to surprise her and be sexually risky. I wanted to get a sound that would call up or be right for those stones and that place.

Burke: Is that how you start a new novel or story—an image catches your attention and you find the sound from there?

Schutt: Sometimes there’s an image, yes, and the language comes so fast on it. I look at something for a long time and roll over words right to the occasion.

Burke: Is that also true when you’re creating a character? Does the character come from an imagined scene or image?

Schutt: When I was creating one of the characters in Prosperous Friends, I looked at a postcard picture of Dante Gabriel Rossetti. I bought it at the National Portrait Gallery. Then there was this quality my younger son had when his hair was long, and then there was someone I was making up: a handsome young man with a side-part. I liked this character so well I gave him some success.

Burke: Your story collections are like catalogues of compelling first sentences. The first sentence of “Teachers” in Nightwork—“She told her daughter as she might a love such things her lover said were best kept secret from a girl”—does amazing work at the syntactical level. What do you expect from a good first sentence, and how do you move forward from there?

Schutt: When I was an MFA student at Columbia, I was in class with people who even then were able to tell a story. I could not. What I could do, and what I was praised for doing, was write a great sentence. It was my only pride. When I tried to write a story, I thought what I was good at had to be put aside in favor of advancing the narrative. I would have a nice, rich opening, and then suddenly, I’d think about how I had to move the character across the room. The character had to say something, do something. Dreaded dialogue. I still have to work hard on it. Now I often take out every other line of dialogue. Then it actually sounds like human speech. Then you get something interesting.

Any success I had early on had to do with the fact that people would say, “Wow, you can really write a sentence.” Gordon Lish taught me how to use what I was good at to tell a story.

Burke: Has your writing changed on the sentence level?

Schutt: Yes. I’m not packing every sentence anymore. I’m not indulging that tendency as much. When I was writing Nightwork, I loaded the sentences because I could; I hyphenated a lot to make adjectives, very self-indulgent. I did that to a lesser degree in the second collection of stories, Day and Night. I have been looking for other sources of interest, along with interest in language and finding different ways of getting drama. So, yes, Prosperous Friends is different. I mean, there are descriptions of houses and barns I am proud of. I love dying barns. I love to look at them, but the characters and their movement take precedence; the exchanges between characters are sharper.

I was very confident about Prosperous Friends for a long time. I went around bragging about it, saying this is it, this is the best thing I’ve done. I surprised myself by saying such things. I’m a little superstitious. I thought I should stop bragging. The first time I turned it in, my agent said the novel was too difficult, too elliptical. Who are these people? How old are they? Where are they? The kinds of questions I’ve always been asked.

Then I had a younger reader weigh in on the sexual dysfunctions the book explores. She said, no, these kinds of dysfunctions don’t exist anymore. They’ve gone away. I was devastated when she said that. I thought, my god, they’ve really advanced, but I decided to keep all of the sexual dysfunction in, because they can’t be all cleared up, right? Not for everyone. It really threw me for a loop. Here I was writing about people in their late 30s and 40s, and I suddenly thought that perhaps I really missed the boat. Perhaps young people today are entirely liberated, at ease with their sexuality, and women are having orgasms left and right. In the end, I decided that can’t be the case, but it really caused me to have a crisis of confidence. A real crisis.

I wrote a new beginning to the book at one point. It was very clunky, but it came very easily, and I thought, all right, maybe this is the way to go, but I ended up throwing it out. When I came back from teaching in California, I got rid of it. But I inserted other things, clarifying things, and the book is finished, but I have not felt that initial certainty of its worth.

Burke: Do you think of your work as challenging? Difficult?

Schutt: No, I don’t. I haven’t. That’s why it unsettled me to have what I’d thought was finished returned with questions. My agent said all of the things that people said when I was doing my MFA: The writing is great, but where are we? How old are these characters? In the last draft of Prosperous Friends I changed the chapter titles to place names and the year.

Overall, I don’t think my work is difficult. I don’t write jolly stories, so maybe that’s hard for some readers.

 

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Book

Christine Schutt Pure Hollywood
Grove Press

‘In one eponymous novella and ten stories, Pure Hollywood brings us into private worlds of corrupt familial love, intimacy, longing, and danger. From an alcoholic widowed actress living in desert seclusion to a young mother whose rejection of her child has terrible consequences, from a newlywed couple who ignore the violent warnings of a painter burned by love to an eerie portrait of erotic obsession, each story is an imagistic snapshot of what it means to live and learn, love and hurt.

‘With Pure Hollywood Christine Schutt gives us sharply suspenseful and masterfully dark interior portraits of ordinary lives, infused with her signature observation and surprise. Timeless, incisive, and precise, these tales are a rush of blood to the head, portals through which we open our eyes and see the world anew.’ — Grove Press

 

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Excerpt

Oh, the Obvious

Mrs Pall-Meyer, short-waisted, stooped, breasts shrunk to teardrops, Mrs Pall-Meyer was a dirty old woman, no matter she was rich. What good had money done her? She was traveling alone. They were both, Arden Fawn and Mrs Pall-Meyer, traveling alone, but Mrs Pall-Meyer had been at the ranch for over a month and would ride on long after Arden went home: Monday, next week, the first of April, home to an airbrushed county Arden once thought harmless.

Arden yanked at her reins and brought Doc into line while the old woman, Mrs Pall-Meyer, held back her horse and put even more space between them. Mrs Pall-Meyer was as friendless as Arden; no one would miss them.

They rode to the dried-out creek bed that devolved to a trail of ashy sand, charred wood, and trash not pictured in the ranch brochure – a strip of fender, a Pringles can – the rubbly blight of modern life, no green in sight but dust. At least for a time the sound of the horses was peaceable, but the hard floor of the desert came on with a clap. A wizened spring, the sickly prickly pear and organ pipe cacti were so riddled with holes they might have been targets. Even the paloverde trees looked leached. They rode along a level path, fording dried-out riverbeds of chalky stones – pale landscape, white sun. She put on her sunglasses and the view, honeyed, was not so hard on the spirit, but her back still hurt; it felt as if she were tightening a belt of barbed wire around her waist – God almighty, it hurt, and the ride had hardly begun. Arden rode apart not so much by choice as that it happened. Terrain had nothing to do with it. Her horse was slow and she was heavy.

Mrs Pall-Meyer, even farther behind, was a stick and rode as she liked. Now she went at a gentle pace and comfortable distance, for which Arden was grateful. In this way, far enough apart from all of the others, Arden could play on in her pioneering dream of self-sufficiency, even though her favorite part of the ride was when she was off the horse and walking to the ranch. Her legs felt used and wide apart then, and her walk was more a straddle.

‘Kick him!’ Mrs Pall-Meyer cried. The old woman threatened to pass. They had fallen too far behind.

Arden’s horse started to lope then lapsed into a rough trot stopped by the earthy rump of the dentist’s enormous horse.

‘Oh, hoh, my,’ Arden moaned. Knocked against the saddle horn, her pubic bone stung and she pressed her hand between her legs: she felt her own heat and heard Mrs Pall-Meyer spit. Mrs Pall-Meyer had paused, as had all the riders, at the incline.

‘How long have you been riding?’ Mrs Pall-Meyer asked.

‘Oh,’ Arden, said, shifting in the saddle, ‘all my life, but not a lot.’

Mrs Pall-Meyer, the name suggesting a hyphenated importance, merely snorted and rode ahead.

The trail turned narrower, rougher, stonier although the redheaded wrangler – Red, for his hair – might have been asleep, so little did the ride’s danger impress him. How many times had he led folks up this route?

‘Over five thousand acres gives a guy a lot of different ways to go,’ he answered. ‘You’d be surprised.’

Mrs Pall-Meyer said, ‘If I had something to ride on.’ In this way, she simply went on talking to herself, making tough, irritated pickax sounds with words like crap, drink, think. For all the advantages she must have had, Mrs Pall-Meyer was a coarse woman. She had made herself known in the morning, talking at the young Asbach boy, Ben, ‘My friends are dead. My sister is demented. I’m the last of my line, but I bet you’ve got a lot of friends.’ Oh, the nuisance of them all was what the old woman meant to say in her supercilious voice.

Arden had looked on at how Mrs Pall-Meyer befuddled the boy and made him blush. Ben Asbach of the Asbachs – ‘There are eight of us here,’ said the matriarch merrily. A granddaughter – slight as straw – called Mrs Asbach Nana.

What names, if any, had others at the ranch assigned her? – Arden, Arden Fawn. Was she the fat lady, the dull lady, the shy lady – hair color as uncertain as her age? Arden had a pretty face, of this much she was certain, which made it all the sadder, the weight. She hoped for her horse’s sake she would soon reach the summit.

There, Red said they could get off their horses and stretch their legs. But Arden had no intention of stretching her legs. If she got off her horse, she would never get on again. Besides, she could see just as well from on top of her horse, and her back wouldn’t hurt if Doc held still. The riding itself, walking, walking especially and however precariously, was easiest on her back. No loping, please! They rode up the mountain, slowly and close, and her thoughts were the same and body-centered until they all stopped at the summit. The sturdy banker loudly huffed off his horse and landed hard; his wife tiptoed lightly – all grace. And Arden?

‘You sure?’ Red asked, ready to help. ‘I’m fine,’ she said. ‘No, I’ll stay on.’

So Red adjusted her saddle, pulled it more to his side, asked after Doc.

‘He’s a good boy,’ Arden said and wondered was Red a good boy or did he fuck sheep? Arden liked to appall herself with her own appalling thoughts. She liked a little fright in the middle of small exchanges – the selfmanufactured fright from thinking she was overheard. The dentist’s wife, who rode near and behind Red, asked him about the drought with an informed interest in its effects on the region’s wildlife.

Arden regarded the dentist’s wife, talking about water tables. Maybe in some states this was called flirting but the pity of it: a late-life romance as brief as a paper match, a piff of heat but no flame really, a glow quickly extinguished.

The dentist himself winked at Arden. ‘Not going to get off and stretch your legs?’ he asked.

‘Never. I couldn’t. How would I get on again?’ The dentist, smiling, said, ‘There’s lots of ways.’

The dentist was a small man darkly outlined by his specialty, a dentist for expensive and serious procedures to do with reconstruction – think of the bright pan with its sharp slender instruments – she did and was afraid of what this dentist would do inside her mouth. His jeans looked new and his shirt was very white, unwrinkled, snap-buttons, western. She watched him move to a higher point and a different perspective.

Oh, hell, strike the match of romance, who cares if it’s short? Why else had she come to the Double-D? Should she say the weather, the birdlife, the desert in bloom? No one had mentioned a drought. Scant birdlife this season, no color, but hovering just behind Arden was Mrs Pall-Meyer. Mrs Pall-Meyer, an imperious crone with a pointy face that jabbed, Mrs Pall-Meyer stood for something, but for what? Oh, the obvious, death or the future.

There, leaning against a rock and eating ranch granola was the little Asbach girl, rapt with her story’s unspooling. Her lips moved and she smiled to herself, frowned, pouted, then smiled again. Arden guessed she was ten or eleven, a cozy year, fifth grade, but what was her story about? What could she be saying?

Movement now. The others in the group were getting on their horses again. Only Mrs Pall-Meyer did not. She was protesting about her horse.

‘Want some help?’ Red asked.

‘What do you think?’ Mrs Pall-Meyer, with one foot in Red’s hands, said, ‘I hate having to ride a dull horse.’ She tipped a little trying to look at Red as she talked, unsteady, so that he lifted her until she swung her crooked body over the beast she dismissed as a plodder. She didn’t say thank you, just tocked in the saddle to make herself comfortable. It occurred to Arden that Mrs Pall-Meyer might be drunk.

Red took the lead and the party stayed together, the horses picked their way, butt-close, along a ledge. Steep, narrow, white, the ledge was dramatic and Arden held her breath. No one spoke; quiet but for the clocking noise of the horses, their gassy sighs and shivers. Stones popped and the trail noise sounded serious – just as in the cowboy movies: after the shoot-out comes the slow descent, hints of danger and exhaustion. The palomino stumbled and some of the ledge fell away.

‘We are going down, aren’t we?’ Arden asked, anxious.

Mrs Pall-Meyer snorted.

Okay, the question was stupid but the riding was more rocking from side to side than moving forward. Lean back had been the instruction for going downhill, and dutifully Arden did – had – even though the small of her back ached and she was afraid of her horse.

The old woman, suddenly seeming close, sneered, ‘He knows what he’s doing.’

‘I hope so.’

‘You’ve really no business on this ride.’

‘I don’t,’ Arden said. ‘I don’t know,’ she began but she didn’t want to turn around to address the old woman, riding last again. She was tearful enough as it was – her back ached – and to see Mrs Pall-Meyer’s disdain would surely make her cry. She said no more and the repetitive sound of striking hooves stupefied her and when she woke the trail had begun to level off to a more inviting path, soft, quiet, broad. She kicked Doc into a bumpy trot that didn’t last long though it put more space between her and Mrs Pall-Meyer, Mrs Pall-Meyer now far behind until Red shouted out: ‘ Mrs Pall-Meyer!’

Why did he?

But Mrs Pall-Meyer didn’t respond.

‘What can I . . .’ from Red, inconclusive, and so through fluff adrift they rode in a meditative quiet. The banker had spread his life around miles ago. And Red wasn’t much of a talker. Now the stables were in sight. There was the pasture where the ranch horses socialized; there, the barn, the tack room, the ring. The ranch, on a hill, Arden couldn’t see any part of, but the corral was miraculously close.

She barely heard Red say ‘Shit!’ before he jerked his horse around and rode full out to where Mrs PallMeyer was turned upside down. Her foot, twisted, was caught in the stirrup; most of her lay on the ground. Her horse stood still, unmoved by crisis. What sound was this that Mrs Pall-Meyer was making, but it was familiar.

A small truck, its trunk down, banged alongside the fence, stopped at the gate, and another wrangler from another direction came out to herd Arden’s group into the corral. The banker frisked home, and the dentist’s wife and the dentist followed. The Asbachs, grandmother and granddaughter, were already dismounting. ‘Don’t look,’ the grandmother was saying. Arden saw the fluid ten-year shape slide off her horse and canter on her own once her boots hit the ground. Turn away, little girl, turn away from the future, and she did.

 

 

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p.s. Hey. ** David Ehrenstein, Hi. Well, as a fan of the markedly un-homoerotic, I’ll definitely check it out, ha ha. ** _Black_Acrylic, Hi, B. Ah, thank you for the backstory which has a nice combo of sweetness and nefariousness. ** Steve Erickson, Hey. Well, obviously you can ask the director about that absence, and no doubt he’ll be fully expecting to answer it. If you’re doing any kind of solo homemade Thanksgiving, may it reign. ** sleepyj, Ah, good. Or happy to know you’re also smitten with that stuff while quibbling with nostalgia. Have a good T-day if you’re doing it. ** Well, that was quick. For those in the US, the blog offers you a fine escape from the Thanksgiving festivities today in the form a book by the supreme prose writer/stylist Christine Schutt. And for those of you elsewhere and not on holiday today like me, same deal without the escapism. See you tomorrow.