2. Apocalyptic Vision of America
Koshikawa: Does Amnesiascope contain some personal, non-fictional elements, though it is called fiction?
Erickson: Yes.
Koshikawa: On the other hand, American Nomad could be called "fictional nonfiction," though it is labeled as nonfiction. So, these two works are very close to each other.
Erickson: Yes, these are kind of a yin and yang of the same book. And it's true that American Nomad has an almost novelistic quality to it, and as you will see when you have a chance to take a look at it, it even picks up where Amnesiascope leaves off. The character of Viv in Amnesiascope is in American Nomad, too. So the book starts where the novel of Amnesiascope leaves off and then moves gradually into literal nonfiction history and some examination of the political and cultural Zeitgeist of America right now.
Koshikawa: The last time I interviewed you, you told me that you revised this novel so many times it became shorter and shorter. Was it that difficult to finish the book?
Erickson: Yes. It's my shortest book, and it took the longest to write. And at one point, when I started it, I assumed it was going to be my longest book. The more I worked on it, the shorter it got instead of getting longer.
Koshikawa: Did you use some of the delections for American Nomad ?
Erickson: No. When I say, "I picked up where Amnesiascope leaves off in American Nomad" I mean that at the outset of American Nomad the narrator is clearly the same narrator as the one telling the story of Amnesiascope at some point later on. So, there is a clear transition from Amnesiascope into American Nomad. Getting back to the question you asked, the lines between the fiction and the nonfiction are deliberately blurred and difficult to distinguish.
Koshikawa: I've read Amnesiascope as a story of the unconscious confusion of a literary persona named Steve Erickson, even though you didn't give hime that name. I've also read the novel as the narrator's surreal vision of a monster he is living with, called Los Angeles. You are obsessed with the apocalyptic image of the monster city that is now decaying. In the first scene of Amnesiascope, L.A. airport and the city's major highways are destroyed, and people lose their homes and wander about starting fires in the streets. This ruin reminds me of the key image of the Armageddon, the end of the world which can also be found in Pychon's Gravity's Rainbow.
Erickson: The Los Angeles of Amnesiascope is a ghost city. It's a landscape that approximates the emotional apocalypse that the character has lived with; that is, it is the appropriate landscape for what the character is feeling emotionally and psychologically.
Koshikawa: So he was affected by emotion?
Erickson: It's what is inside the character expressing itself in an urban apocalyptic metaphor. And so for that reason, I always wanted the L.A. landscape to be secondary in Amnesiascope. I didn't want to call too much attention to it. I wanted to fix the character in that landscape and then look at the character, and sort of forget about the landscape. The comparison with Gravity's Rainbow is something I would have to think about, because Gravity's Rainbow is conceptually a much more outward book. You start at the center and move out. In my book, you kind of start with the landscape and move in toward the character. It's a smaller book. Amnesiascope could be a mere chapter in Gravity's Rainbow.
Koshikawa: I was just observing that the nightmarish vision of the city was very similar to that in Gravity's Rainbow.
Erickson Yes.
Koshikawa: Not the size, of course. You have presented a nightmarish image of metropolis in your fiction. Los Angeles, Paris and Venice have all gone wild in Days Between Stations--
Erickson: Vienna in Tours of the Black Clock, and Berlin in Arc d'X.
Koshikawa: All of these become a ruin, a desert, or a frozen landscape.
Erickson: It's a motif that comes naturally to me for some reason. I suppose at least unconsciously it must be part of my view of life, because I seem to keep returning to it. But the appalling thing is that there are ways in which the desolation is also liberating. The character in Amnesiascope feels liberated in his ghost city. He feels alive in it. He even says at one point, "The thing about a dead city like Los Angeles is that it can make you feel more alive than you have even been." I think that's very fleeting, because by the time you get to the end of Amnesiascope, that life force that the character has been feeling, when he has been emotionally and psychologically exhausted, he has defined himself by his sensuality, that has become displaced by a certain amount of nervous breakdown. At the end of the book, he has left Los Angeles, he has lost everything he had, his car was stolen, his woman has left, he has quit his job, his dreams as a novelist are gone, and he gets in a car and he gets out on the American highway and he kind of cracks up. And he has a sort of catharsis out in the hinterlands of America and pulls back from madness at the very end, for we don't know how long. And it's not enough to live by his sensuality anymore. He's just going to have to find another reason for being alive. He's going to have to rediscover the courage to embarrass himself, as the old filmmaker advises him to do at the end of the novel.
Koshikawa: Adolph Sarre says that.
Erickson: Yes.
Koshikawa: I like that last scene. The narrator is driving on the highway so fast he's out of control.
Erickson: He keeps piling up one speeding ticket after another. He can't slow down.
Koshikawa: You mentioned his epiphany "at the margin of insanity." That's the point. You are doing this, compelled not by your mind, but by your emotions. That moves the reader. And the nightmarish cities in all of your fiction seems like wild nature, which you can't control at all.
Erickson: Right. Nature keeps swallowing these cities up, whether it is the desert outside Los Angeles or the winters in Paris or the animals that have escaped from the zoo in Berlin. All of these forces of wildness, all the primitive forces that cities are constructed to keep at bay come back to take over. The city can't keep that wild nature at bay forever. Sooner or later, the city loses the battle with nature with the passing of time.
Koshikawa: So does it mean you are a primitivist?
Erickson: I don't know. Maybe it does. Or apocalyptic enough to assume that decay and breakdown are inevitable, that the caprices of civilization don't last forever.
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3. L.A as Free-Associative City
Edited by Syuichi OTOMORI