Harmless Literature with Dennis Cooper
Francis Whorrall-Campbell speaks to cult writer Dennis Cooper about inserting thoughts into your reader’s psyche, confusion as the truth, a preference for queerness, and the representational value of gay literature.
INTERVIEW BY FRANCIS WHORRALL-CAMPBELL
I heard of Dennis Cooper’s work long before I read any. It was the artist who brought him into a performance at the Horse Hospital; a copy of The Sluts in a room I was subletting from a friend; an online article about his GIF novels – Cooper’s various underground approaches to ‘literature’ made their way into my life by stealth. Such an introduction feels appropriate for a writer whose work is usually characterised by its fascination with taboo desires for violence, pornography, and young boys. Yet, what often goes unnoticed at first blush is Cooper’s intricate formalism. The George Myles Cycle, five books published between 1989 and 2000 which cemented Cooper’s place in the canon of transgressive literature, presents a dissection of the novel as vivid as any of the corporeal dismembering within. Cooper’s taste for experimentation has led him to film-making, performance art, and even to produce several .html novels composed entirely of strings of GIFs. Cooper still maintains a blog, the experiential texture of which comes close to describing his entire oeuvre. Browsing, I am both overwhelmed by the huge archive of content and overstimulated by the huge onslaught of visual and textual forms. That the blog is a meeting place for a dedicated community of Cooper’s fans also expresses something of the writer’s ideological commitments to anarchy – we talk about this in the context of his rejection of the rigid responsibilities of ‘gay’ for the open possibilities of queerness. Cooper was generous but also circular in his speech: I left our conversation contemplating how his ideas on authorial power translated to interviews. Was I inserting my own meanings into his thoughts? Or was he resisting me?
FWC: Since this interview will be part of a series on psychoanalysis, I thought we might start in the analytic tradition of free association – I’m curious, how does psychoanalysis land with you?
DC: I've never been in it. I've read about it, it interests me, but I'm not hugely versed in it. I guess I would say that any kind of analysis is always extremely interesting to me. But, it's not a huge thing for me or anything. I mean, it's not something I've dwelled on.
I read criticism of your writing that positions it through Lacanian theory. How do you see that as an interpretive framework for your literature, or for people in general? I’ve heard you describe your work as more influenced by political ideology – particularly anarchism – than psychoanalysis.
I don't know that they're oppositional. Anarchism is just the singular body and mutual respect – and after that, everything, anything goes. Psychoanalysis is all in your brain, right? Anything that happens in your brain is perfectly possible in my work, and fine to me. I’m interested in thinking about everything as complexly as possible. So, when I think about things, even though I don’t consider it as psychoanalysing things, I am trying to figure everything out from as many angles as possible. I like structures, I really like structures, so, psychoanalysis, that's a very interesting kind of structure.
What do you mean by calling psychoanalysis a structure? Do you mean how it models relations, like projection or transference?
Yeah, well, that takes place. But to me, my work is more building a physical structure that allows for that. I mean, I'm really influenced by sculpture – abstract sculpture mostly. I think a lot about it when I am trying to develop my work. It’s not purely formal obviously, but it’s trying to set up a structure that is transparent because I want there to be this really deep connection between the books and the reader. It’s just trying to regulate the space or something between the reader and the writer – cause people to think or feel something that's theirs, but that the work suggests. For whatever reason, I'm trying to find the perfect vehicle to fully access what I want to do and then somehow penetrate or insinuate itself into the reader. All the while, not knowing a reader, because every reader is an entirely unique being.
It seems to me that the problem of insinuating or inserting something into the reader's psyche presents an interesting power dynamic between the reader and the author. This comes up for me most when reading your GIF novels, which I became obsessed with around the same time as I was reading Andrea Long Chu. I don't know if you know her work?
No.
She's most famous for the book Females, which proposes that everyone is female, and everyone hates it. In real terms, this means everyone is subjugated to the desires of another, and that is feminization. She writes about this more specifically in terms of ‘sissy porn’ GIFs, and so I started thinking about reading your novels as also surrendering to a drive. Not a Freudian death drive, but more the force of form. ‘Drive’ is an interesting word, also conjuring a literal vehicle. I wondered if power – particularly sexual power – impacts the construction of your writing?
Yeah, the power dynamic is really key and crucial and central to me. Because it's trying to think exactly about what the power dynamic is between a book and a reader and, well, the author is the constructor of the book. It’s super, super, super important to me. Especially since I try to do things that are pretty invasive. And so again, it goes back to the structure thing. It's like trying to figure out a way to trigger this particular thought that’s not necessarily what the reader wants to think about, but do it in such a way that it becomes – as much as possible – a choice.
One of the things that's great about writing is that, as opposed to visual mediums, the reader inherently has total power.
They create the world, they can stop, but at the same time it has this insinuating thing, I mean, you're building the world in your head. In a way, you take ownership of it. It becomes your responsibility or something. It's very complicated or it seems very complicated to me. Visual media – because I also make films – distances you from what you're experiencing because you can go, well, that guy sucks or the people that made that film are terrible, you can put all the blame on them in a way, but with books it's harder to do that somehow.
When you're watching something, you can kid yourself that it's more passive somehow than reading.
Yeah, just to take the most obvious example, the difference between the book 120 Days of Sodom and the film Salò is huge. I don’t like Salò. I think it’s an interesting thing to try to do, but I don't think it works. That's a good example of what happens when you try to visualise something that's not meant to be visualised. It's meant to be a fantasy. It's not meant to have an illustration or something.
But I feel that there is something visceral about the psychological worlds of your fiction. Many of your books are driven by characters’ attempts to act out private and obscene fantasies – to visualise what is not ‘meant to be’. In The Sluts, and in Guide, these fantasies first emerge via snuff porn; seeing these acts on film inspires the narrators to violently pursue the twinky objects of their obsession.
If my work has a weakness, it's that the perpetrators are a little too cartoony because I can’t enter that state as well. I can go there in my imagination or my fantasy, but I'm always resisting it. In the books, the characters are boys, but they're very androgynous too, and barely described. They're always kind of the same character, slim and have long hair and are pretty. I don't know that they’re twinks really.
They have an amorphous quality that only writing can afford because every individual person's fantasy could be put there. Maybe that's also why I'm saying twink, right? Because that's my thing right now.
I'm interested in that phenomenon.
Same. I'm currently writing about twink death.
Twink death?
It’s the phrase given to the moment when a person ages out of being a twink. Some trans women jokingly say that the way to avoid twink death is to become a woman, and so I’ve been trying to think about this from a trans masculine perspective.
Can there be a trans twink? I mean, does that happen?
There definitely are trans guys whose aim is to become twinks. Which is funny, because it is not something that one usually strives for: one is born, and not made a twink, to bastardise a phrase. In thinking about the desire for twinkdom, I’ve found common ground with cis gay men. The men in your books might want to fuck rather than be a twink, but the attempt to realise a fantasy is shared. I think desire disorganises – I’ve found it hard to gain more clarity on the phenomenon than this.
I think confusion is the truth, so I embrace it. But these things are hard to talk about because they're very instinctual. I always write about the same thing and I always have, and I don't fully understand why I keep going there. Why I write the books is to try to figure it out. And obviously I haven't, since I keep writing about it.
In a weird way, as calculating as I am as a writer, there's a lot of intuitiveness in it, and I'm not sure I fully understand it.
But because I embrace confusion as being the truth, I don’t really know that I should understand it.
If confusion is the truth, then that’s a difficult position to be as a writer. How do you give the reader an entry-point to the book while disorientating them at the same time? It seems like what you're saying is that it's intuitive, but I wonder if you have developed a practice of this over the years through repetition?
I've learned how to do it. I hate to say that, but it is kind of like a trick. You construct a sentence that is clear, then you use inarticulation to weaken and disempower the sentence. Then you twist it. You start with something and then you end the sentence or the paragraph somewhere else. It’s just about these wandering sentences while at the same time keeping the tone very personal, not confessional, but sincere. I’m obsessed with writing these sentences – I'm really a sentence guy. It's very much like poetry or something. There are people who write these unbelievable sentences that I'm in awe of. David Foster Wallace, for instance, wrote these insanely genius sentences that are just… I can't even believe he did that. They go to so many places and I want mine to do that too, but at the same time, it has to come from a personal place. It can't be just an extremely brilliant analysis of something, you know?
It does sound like a very formal approach to writing.
I have to be controlled because I’m very chaotic inside. My concentration is on controlling what I’m feeling, because that’s really rupturous.
I'm not a natural writer. I'm a very constructed writer. All that stuff is just rolling around in me and I have to drive it along whatever path I decide to give it, so I spend most of my time thinking about that and trying to figure out a way to represent it.
Does that process also happen on the level of the plot? Are you thinking about the sentence as a microcosm of the bigger plot or do those two structures deviate from each other?
I don't really like plots. I'm interested in things having a propellant and holding your attention and progressing, but I'm suspicious of plots and all that stuff. I don't understand why everybody always does them. Well, I understand why they do them, but it just feels like an artificiality to me. My work's very experimental, but at the same time it moves like your life moves. You know, it can just do nothing for a while and then suddenly something unexpected will happen. Whereas with plot, it's all like, this has to happen. This character has to develop in a particular way so there's this payoff and you understand the motivations. I don't like motivations. I’m not interested in that stuff. I'm interested in just presenting this vehicle, this configuration, and then have the reader go like, why did you do that? Why did that happen? and think about it.
Instead of the traditional arc, it’s more wandering. I took a writing workshop with Sarah Schulman. She was talking a lot about arcs in nonfiction and fiction – the idea that each chapter has an arc, and then the book has an arc that's made up of all these little arcs. The architecture you end up with is almost like a cathedral somehow, it’s very stable.
She's very good at that. And she does it in a completely different way than I do. It's fascinating how flexible the novel is. The architecture can be wildly all over the place and it'll still stabilise. It's exciting.
What if it is a labyrinth instead of a cathedral?
Or what if it's like a piece of music? I listen to a lot of electronic music. You think, how does that hold your attention? How does it build and how does it become exciting? You make the beat go faster or you bring up the bass. I like thinking about writing that way too. How can I take a track that has one signature that's basically repeating and drifting around and then have it build and build and build and get to this level of excitement.
Music is such a big part of your novels. There’s obviously the character in Guide based on Alex from Blur, but I also clearly remember the rave scene in that book.
Yeah, that was because I had been a total rock guy. I was really into this lo-fi indie rock stuff like Pavement and all those bands. And then this friend of mine was into nothing but rave culture. I loved it. That whole book was about trying to reconcile these polar opposites, like how do I get these to work together? Or how can I like both of them? What do they do?
Reading from an English perspective, I really had no idea how any of those musical cultures translated in America. I associate it so much with Manchester, which is near where I grew up. I mean, my Mum used to go to the Hacienda before I was born. And so, the Americanness of your books really stood out to me. You don’t currently live in the States, but it seems like American culture, and America as a place, has been a central obsession in your work.
Particularly Los Angeles. I don't know if you've been there, but it's a very particular place. It's sprawling, disorganised and full of secrets, and you can never explore it all, it's so chaotic. That’s pretty big to me. Also, the way people out there talk is kind of inarticulate in some ways. I talk like that too. That really influenced me a lot. It was a lazy way of speaking. It infers more than you say. I was obviously really into that.
That makes me think of Polari and queer codes of speech. I’ve read you somewhere on your suspicion of identity politics, so maybe you really don't see your writing as, gay literature, but…
I don't see it as not that. I completely respect that. It just was never personally important to me that I was queer. I mean, I am, since I was very young and very open, but it just doesn't interest me so much for whatever reason. Perhaps because I got to anarchism so young, it seemed like a generalisation and I hate generalisations. I'm interested and I read about it, but I don't feel like I'm a good spokesperson or something.
I have a similar relationship and history with the word ‘queer’, but instead of anarchism, I got to Marxism very young. But it’s similar, I'm thinking about the structural reasons why we have these words – coming at it from a materialist perspective. And then it becomes difficult to hold these labels dearly when you feel them to be arbitrary. But that throws a different light on the position your writing has in a canon of gay literature. Your writing is often situated in that space, perhaps because of the explicit sexuality and the taboo subjects – all of which is coded as gay. How much do you feel that that's other people's projection? Is there any bit of you that's frustrated with that labelling or feels like it's missing the point?
No, it's all there. My work doesn't document gay lifestyle. That’s quite clear. My only thing with ‘gay literature’ was that when I was starting out it was this totally male thing. And pretty much white male, you know, Edmund White and all those guys who were like gods or whatever. I couldn't relate to that, and then this thing called Queer Punk came along in the early 90s, and I got so excited, because in Queer Punk, anybody can be queer; your ethnicity, your gender, it didn't matter. It didn't even really matter whether you actually slept with people of your own gender, it was just like queer. There's a shockingly large number of straight people who like my work and really relate to it, and I'm always like, okay, cool, but I’m also really proud and thrilled that young queer people will take something from it too. I like to offer an alternative to the assimilation thing.
You said that your books aren't an illustration of gay life, but I do think some people might take it that way. Gay sexuality’s transgression of heterosexual society often gets tangled up in the public eye with all sorts of other societal taboos and transgressions. I wondered how you felt about having to rebuff these attitudes and say your work is not a reflection of society, but then perhaps there is something overly polite – or assimilationist – to say that none of it is true?
I used to think about that a lot because when I first was publishing, I got attacked a lot by gay guys. I got a death threat from Queer Nation back in the day. You know, like, ‘you're killing gay people, so we're gonna kill you’. That kind of stuff. Now, I haven't had that ‘your work is dangerous’ thing much anymore. I think: one, because books are so unimportant to current pop culture, mass culture. Two, I'm such a strange little figure in the literary world, people think I'm kind of harmless or something.
You don't need the Far Right to find you and add you to the list of book bans.
I did get that actually. A couple years ago 4chan found me and there was this brief hubbub about it, but then it faded out because it's just like, that guy's just a weirdo, you know?
I can see how QAnon and the Adrenochrome conspiracists would latch onto certain things.
But I'm too small for it. I'm just this little underground cult figure guy. I always have been, so I don't have to deal with that stuff, which is a relief. At this point I only get the positive thing, like young people coming to me and saying, this made me realise I could be who I am, and all that kind of lovely stuff. Maybe I just don't move in the right circles, or maybe people are looking askance at me on the metro and I just don't even notice it. There was a time when I worried about that. I thought I really have to be sure I'm being responsible here because obviously I never thought of my work as being realistic, but
there was a time when gay literature was the only art form bringing gayness into the world. There was no queer film, there was no queer music, books were the only thing doing that.
So there was all this pressure and you were supposed to represent your people. I'm just giving you a rambling answer here, but I'm so confident in my morality that I don't really have to challenge myself. I feel like I know what I'm doing and there are always going to be people who say, ‘why do you have this torture porn in your work?’ And I'm just like, because it's interesting and it's not torture porn.
I think there's something about being underground which means that you're not a target. That’s something I connect to around trans visibility, and how being more visible can lead to more violence.
Is it continuing to be worse for trans people? I have so many friends who are trans now, it feels like it's opening so wide and you can get kind of seduced by that and think everything's great, but I move in a very limited world. I have this blog and there’s always new people coming in. And lately there's been this whole group to come in and almost every single one of them is trans. It's like we're finally having this renaissance, where everybody can be whoever they are and everybody respects and admires it, but at the same time you keep reading about this terrible transphobia. Obviously, it’s real, and here too in France. I guess I'm asking a personal question, but what's happening with you about this?
It's such a paradox because there are more spaces now to find material and emotional support. But I think where the UK differs from the USA and EU is that we have here a bipartisan understanding that trans people should not exist, or we should have very limited existences. It does feel really disorientating because you read that in the news and then you see all of the people that you know in the community and it feels good when we're together. But we know that there's hostility. I’m also aware that I speak as a transmasculine person. I'm not generally harassed on the street, whereas my girl friends are. That's their experience. So, I feel removed in many ways. I can't give an accurate answer. I appreciate your curiosity towards this stuff though.
Zac Farley and I are just finishing our third feature film. The main character is played by a trans boy, there is another character who is a trans woman, and our producer was trans.
That’s great, I’d be really excited to see that. It's not taken for granted that older gay and queer artists would be supportive.
It's just naturally happening, that's the thing, right?
Dennis Cooper is an American novelist, poet, critic, editor and performance artist.
Francis Whorrall-Campbell is an artist, researcher, writer and sometimes art critic from the UK. Working across text, sculpture, and the digital, their work undertakes a materialist investigation of sexual subjectivity. Guided by research into the pasts and presents of gender transition, a relationship between making an artwork and making a (gendered) self emerges as a method of thinking critically about how identities and desires are formed in interaction with the world and narratives around them.
