Photo by Oriette D’Angelo
Interview by Sara Mang
I first encountered the generosity and brilliance of Garth Greenwell during the Disquiet Literary Program in Lisbon, where he encouraged his students to feel the sentences in our bodies. Greenwell’s innovative new book of fictional companion stories, Cleanness, explores fear, longing, and solitude within the realm of queer suffering and survival.
Sara Mang: In Cleanness, a number of unforgettable scenes describe a tender love between human and animal. These animal cameos follow moments of intense shame felt by the narrator. What does this texture of animal love mean to you, and how does it connect to the concepts of shame and filth in Cleanness?
Garth Greenwell: It was kind of a surprise to me, putting the book together, to see how large a role animals play in it, and to what an extent they are ideal messengers of a kind. The appearance of Mama Dog at the end of “An Evening Out” was such a surprise: just as she comes to the narrator out of the dark, so she came to the story. And the minute she did I knew I had found the ending—for that chapter, but also for the book. She leads the narrator out of what feels like an irresolvable dilemma; she’s really something like an angel. Part of this is that I think the narrator projects onto animals freedom from the categories he’s trying to negotiate and problematize and collapse, [which] continue having a great deal of force over him. And part of it is that animals so often seem so unproblematic in their love: in their ability to give it and to receive it.
SM: An emotion that is deeply felt by your narrator is bewilderment in the face of prescribed ideals. For example, when the narrator meditates on a painting that is at first unremarkable to him: There was a kind of presence in the painting, I felt, I could sense it humming at a frequency I wanted to tune myself to catch. Can you expand on how a devotion to bewilderment, specifically in the realm of queer suffering and survival, might transform into artistic practice and a radical new sense of sociality?
GG: This is such a beautiful question, and I’m not sure I have a good answer for it. I guess I would say that certainty seldom seems to me an adequate response to the world, to the other humans or to myself. I often feel that there is such pressure to be certain, and to be certain quickly—maybe this is a consequence of living in an age of Twitter and the “hot take,” or maybe it’s just part of the human equipment, a need to avoid the pain of ambivalence or doubt and lay claim to comfort of feeling oneself in the right. It’s difficult—it’s impossible—to take in too much reality. Art draws a frame around a bit of reality; it creates a kind of magic circle in which we can exercise our faculties to the fullest, allowing ourselves to live in bewilderment. Certainty is the attribute of victors. I guess I’m interested in the second-guessing and hesitation of losers. I guess that feels to me like a truer perspective on the world. And certainly I’m interested in the kinds of sociality that losing and loss can allow; the sociality of conventional triumph has always been abhorrent to me.
SM: You have stated that one of your goals was to write a scene that was, at once, one hundred percent pornographic and one hundred percent high art. In “Gospodar,” the second story, the narrator enters an S&M sexual encounter that disintegrates into a place of terror that no longer feels safe. Yet, the individuals in this encounter sustain a sense of personhood and embodiment. Can you speak to the potential role of literature in representing explicit sex, and how it can reclaim the sexual body as a site of consciousness?
GG: What excites me is the combination of explicitness about bodies with the inwardness-producing technology that is a particular kind of sentence. The kind of sentence I’m attracted to has a history: it runs through the devotional writers of the 16th and 17th centuries through Proust and James and Baldwin and Woolf; it’s a sentence the goal of which is a kind of mapping of what consciousness feels like. Writing about sex explicitly in that kind of sentence felt like a way to explore sex as the complex phenomenon it is, one that at once puts us intensely in our own sensations, our own consciousnesses, and into very complex, dense communication with another.
SM: Your answer reminds me of how you have described the sentence as a place to inhabit a moment. Can you say more about this urgency to create beauty and meaning with the technology of the sentence?
GG: I’ve talked a lot about the way that I experience sentences not as containers of thought but as tools for thinking, and that really does feel true to me. The way that the syntax I’m attracted to plunges forward but also obsessively circles back, the way that propulsiveness can serve as a way of tuning consciousness, as a kind of launchpad to a state of being that feels sharpened, heightened: that all feels like part of the equipment of thinking. And I also think that high-functioning sentence can function like the orchestral accompaniment in an aria: it can be psychology.
SM: Please can we talk about music and form?! You have described the order of things within Cleanness to represent a kind of constellation: companion stories which are not linear, but charged centres of intensity. Might you share a glimpse of your intriguing history as an opera singer, and how the deep structure of Cleanness is informed by the lieder cycle of Schubert?
GG: Opera was my introduction to art. When I was fourteen my father found out I was gay and kicked me out of the house, and as a result I failed the first semester of freshman English which led to my enrolling in choir for the second semester. The choir director heard something in my voice and started giving me voice lessons after school. It was transformative for a few reasons. Maybe most importantly, he was the first adult ever to treat me as though my life had value. Second, he taught me to sing with my full voice, with my full body, and the size of the sound I could produce shocked me—it was bigger than anything I thought I might contain. And third, he introduced me to opera, and opera radically reoriented my sense of where I might find value.
Opera gave me my first real encounters with literary texts, and song cycles were my first experience of how pieces could be made into wholes in art. When I conceived of the structure of Cleanness, which only arrived after I had written a few of the chapters, I knew that I wanted it to offer the immersive experience of a novel but didn’t want it to feel like a traditional novel structure, and the structure that immediately presented itself to me as an alternative was the lieder cycle, like Schubert’s “Winterreise.” I don’t mean to suggest that the book is modelled on “Winterreise,” but rather that each chapter feels like a node of intensity, like a song, and that they are placed in a relationship that is not one of chronology or plot-based cause and effect, but instead consists of things like affect, key, texture, motif.
SM: You often urge your students to study other languages in order to better appreciate literature. The Bulgarian language and culture is part of the DNA of both What Belongs to You and Cleanness. Can you elaborate on your views of how language leads to a more expansive experience of literature and art?
GG: I think if you just look at the history of literature in English, the great moments of innovation have come when languages, cultures, nations have cross-pollinated: Wyatt translating Petrarch; Coleridge and George Eliot reading German philosophy; T.S. Eliot and Pound reading French poets. English is a global language in a way that is utterly unprecedented, but it remains the case that if you are only reading literature in a single language you are reading in a parochial way. Other languages have other resources; they organize reality differently. That is an important, thrilling thing for a writer to experience. Learning another language is also a very powerful way of experiencing the materiality of language; of learning to treat it as a medium one manipulates and builds with. I think it’s one of the most powerful things a writer can do to deepen and enrich their style.
SM: In the title story, “Cleanness,” the wind plays a supporting role in the narrative, while at the same time, acts as a kind of signature of place: both in the detritus it carried, papers and leaves and the little plastic cups coffee comes in here, and in the resistance of everything fastened down. Can you speak to your commitment to being true to place, and how such authenticity impacts the density of your stories?
GG: I’m not sure how to understand this fixation I have on the reality of place as a basis for my fiction. I can invent so much in a story, but I can’t invent details of place. I think it’s that everything I’ve written to this point has started and ended with place. The impetus to writing a book of fiction so far has been a kind of chemical reaction to a city, the kind of reaction you sometimes have when you meet a person. That happened to me with Sofia, [the city in which the novel is set,] and I needed two books to think about why.
SM: For your next project, your fiction will take us to your hometown of Louisville, Kentucky. Queer people, you have said, are geniuses of transformation. Queer people take stigma and shame and transform it into style and art. Might you share some insight as to how the setting of your hometown has become a transformational space for you?
GG: When I left Kentucky at 16, I felt like I was fleeing—like if I stayed there I would die. I think that’s true. Certainly the shape of my life would have been radically different. Before I found music, I was not on a college-bound track. I was working cleaning bathrooms in the last gas station in a wet county on the border of a dry county, which is an experience you have to live through to understand. I was having sometimes wonderful but also radically unsafe sex in parks and bathrooms, at the height of the AIDS crisis. When I left, I felt like I knew everything I could ever want to know about the place, and I went back as seldom as possible for the next twenty years. When I went back on a book tour, I hadn’t spent a night in Louisville for well more than a decade. I ended up spending two weeks there, and I was amazed to discover that in fact—of course—I didn’t know anything about the place, which seemed hugely mysterious and interesting, the kind of place I need a book to think about. If you had told sixteen-year-old me that decades later I would be writing a novel about Kentucky, I would have laughed. But here we are.
Garth Greenwell is the author of What Belongs to You, which won the British Book Award for Debut of the Year, was longlisted for the National Book Award, and was a finalist for six other awards, including the PEN/Faulkner Award, the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. A New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice, it was named a Best Book of 2016 by over 50 publications in nine countries, and is being translated into a dozen languages. His new book of fiction, Cleanness, was published in January 2020, and was named an IndieNext Selection and a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice. His fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, A Public Space, and VICE, and he has written criticism for The New Yorker, the London Review of Books, and the New York Times Book Review, among others. A 2020 Guggenheim Fellow, he lives in Iowa City with his partner, the poet Luis Muñoz.
Sara Mang‘s work has appeared in The New Quarterly, Room, The Minola Review, The Dalhousie Review, Arc, Prairie Fire, and other journals.