6. Joe Christmas, the Ultimate American Character
Koshikawa: Let's talk about American Nomad. Because the book has not come out yet, I've just read excerpts of it you wrote for Rolling Stone. Would you explain the meaning of its title? You mentioned the name of Joe Christmas somewhere in one of the Rolling Stone pieces.
Erickson: Joe Christmas in the novel Light in August is a man who literally does not know if he is a white or black man. And it makes him literally crazy. I've always thought that, along with Huckleberry Finn, Joe Christmas is in some ways the ultimate American character, because of that madness having to do with his racial identity, and because the identity of America was born out of the moral confusion and moral bankruptcy of slavery. "American Nomad" refers to the way in which it seems to me the country is fragmenting, the way the people are becoming disenfranchised from the common idea of America. The irony is that in some ways that was what America always intended. In some ways, America was always intended to be a country where everybody was a country unto him- or herself--a sort of "anti-country," in which there is not one America but 250 million Americas. Each American is America, but now I think that's begun to catch up with the country today, because people have become disenfranchised from the idea of America. And it has made them nomads. They're not physical nomads. They are spiritual nomads. They are wandering this huge collective American psyche, looking for where they belong, because the country seems to be breaking up.
As we were saying at lunch yesterday, we've got little fascistic enclaves of these right-wing militia groups out in the hinterlands of Montana or Utah. And you've got these guys blowing up government buildings in Oklahoma City, and there's some insidious crisis, I think, going on in America right now, where Americans are exhausted by the effort of being Americans. They are exhausted by how much work it takes to make America work, to make the American idea work, because without the American idea there is no America. America is not a country of common traditions or common heritage or common language. It's a very young country, and it's a country that was born out of the idea that it could break loose from history and memory--it could break loose from the past, it could break loose from all of those thousands of years of history that exist in Europe or the Old World. And whereas other countries were born out of common borders and common language and common tradition and common history, America was not born out of that. America was born out of this very elusive idea. And once the idea is gone, the country is gone. There may still be a United States, but there is not an America. And that's where the title American Nomad came from.
Koshikawa: Incidentally, this year is the hundredth anniversary of William Faulkner, who created what you would call the ultimate nomadic character of the US.
Erickson: Really? When was he born?
Koshikawa: September 26, 1897.
Erickson: I think Faulkner is the great American novelist of the 20th century, and most Americans still find Faulkner a difficult and inaccessible writer. His books are very hard for most Americans. His influence has probably exceeded his actually readership. And I don't know how the literary establishment regards him now, because certain writers sort of come in and out of vogue. In the early part of the 20th century, Hemingway was considered the great American novelist. Then I think in the second half of the 20th century, Hemingway was sort of displaced by Faulkner in terms of his status in the hierarchy. I don't know how Americans feel about his now. You talk about the internal landscapes and the external landscapes--Faulkner, in the same way James Joyce did in European literature, knocked down the walls between the internal and the external and made a big impact in terms of the way time ticks not to the clock on the wall but to the clock of the psyche. And even though I didn't completely understand him when I first read him as a student, he changed me completely.
Koshikawa: As I mentioned earlier in this interview, your writing in American Nomad is clearly that of a novelist. You use metaphors and allusions to describe politicians not only as participants in political events but as characters in mass cultural events. This kind of writing is very challenging to readers of conventional nonfiction because they have to read between the lines, just as when they are reading fiction. These fictional strategies are much more pronounced in American Nomad than in Leap Year. So, I hope the readers don't get confused.
Erickson: I hope so, too. And I especially hope it is not confusing for the Japanese readers, for whom I am going to read part of American Nomad. And especially in America. My impression is that the Japanese readers are more creative readers--they are willing to make the associations, and they are not confused when something does not stay inside its little niche. In America, when something does not stay inside its niche, Americans get confused. It has become a culture of specialization, and it has become a culture of specificity. I anticipate that some readers are going to wonder why I am talking about Bill Clinton and Bruce Springsteen in the same book, whereas, to me, it seems completely natural, especially because I think popular culture really says more about America right now that the political culture does. The book is more about the political culture, just because that's what the book is about. I couldn't imagine writing a book about the political culture and not talking about the popular culture. And so I hope that all of these allusions or these momentary diversions in American Nomad about Bruce Springsteen and Oliver Stone and Frank Sinatra and F. Scott Fitzgerald will be reference points that illuminate the political discussion rather than confuse it--if the readers are just open-minded enough not to become panic-stricken when the book suddenly takes a turn that he or she is not expecting.
Koshikawa: As you said earlier, American Nomad is the twin sister of Amnesiascope. Both books are very unconventional. We have a lot of conventional works of fiction or nonfiction, but "fiction" and "nonfiction" are just labels after all.
Erickson: That's the way I look at it. And when I was originally hired by Rolling Stone to write about the presidential piece I did, Rolling Stone said to me, "We want a novelist who will write about the campaign like it's a novel." Those were their exact words. It turned out that was not what they wanted. They thought that was what they wanted. And it sounded good to me. But when they got that, they become very confused and anxious about it. It seemed to me to be a natural way to write about the country--kind of a novelized, narrative-driven story about what is going on in America.
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7. The novel as an Interior Journey
Edited by Syuichi OTOMORI