Forms of Uncertainty: An Interview with Maggie Nelson
Interview conducted by Jasmyn Huff
Later this year, Maggie Nelson’s Bluets, the lyric slash memoir slash essay about the end of love, grief, depression, and everything blue within reach, turns fifteen. Though not her first foray into creative nonfiction, Bluets feels different. Published as poetry by Wave Books in 2009, the book established Nelson as a name in the world of creative nonfiction, leading to The Art of Cruelty (2011), a book of criticism, and The Argonauts (2015), a book many have called “autotheory” but which seems to deny most generic classifications, mixing memoir and theory into personal essay. Her new book Like Love: Essays and Conversations was released on April 2nd from Graywolf Press.
When asked to pick an author to interview about pushing the boundaries of genre in creative writing, Maggie Nelson popped into my mind first. Reader, I cannot tell you what a joy and shock it was to receive her email agreeing to answer a few questions over email, answers which I have shared here.
Jasmyn Huff: In your conversation with Nao Bustamante from Interview Magazine, you mentioned your agent telling you there’s an incoherence in your work. I think there’s a natural incoherence when translating a life to words on a page that is inescapable. Could resistance to genre be a resistance to the contrived coherence we’re told a body of work should have and we’re told a body should have?
Maggie Nelson: Yeah, I think there is probably some kind of general disobedience at play, re: resisting a contrived coherence about a body of work, and resisting a contrived coherence about what a body or life shape should be. This resistance can be oppositional (as in disobedience), but it can also be non-oppositional, more of a practiced openness to how things are or could be rather than trying to match how others (or oneself) feels they ought to be. That said, I guard against venerating the thing that comes naturally to you as the best, or most disobedient, thing. I personally like to work in different forms and genres, but that’s just me.
JH: You were once quoted saying, “I’m more interested in how words work in culture than I am with defining them in isolation,” and you have quoted Eileen Myles multiple times: “I think literary categories are false. They belong to the marketplace and the academy.” Thinking about the distinctions between fiction and nonfiction, culturally, these words have become synonymous with “true” and “false” but as writers of non-fiction we’re probably more attuned to how misleading this binary can be. Does teaching these labels still hold some value? In naming these genres, are we limiting the ways we can write, just as Foucault said naming sexualities makes us less free?
MN: I think it’s important for people in the field to have at least a basic understanding of the expectation of veracity that attends the genre. One phrase for this is the “autobiographical pact,” and it behooves you to know if you made it, a lot of which depends on how the book is marketed (which is Eileen’s point, I think). You can always violate the pact, but it’s good to know what you’re up to.
In my class right now, we just read books by Anna Garréta (Not One Day), Brontez Purnell (100 Boyfriends), and Renee Gladman (Calamities), all of which play with fiction and nonfiction and truth-telling and dreamscape and imagination and confession and anti-confession in different ways. Personally, I’m not as concerned with the binary of true / not true as I am with being alive to what forms of play are at issue for a particular writer in a particular textual adventure. For some writers—& I might be one of them—what’s “true” is often important. For others, it’s just not.
JH: The overarching metaphor of The Argonauts fascinates me in an obsessive kind of way. At one point, you write of John Cage, “He knew his name was stuck to him, or he was stuck to it. Still he urges out of it. The Argo’s parts may get replaced, but it’s still called the Argo.” I’ve thought a lot about this because one of the more common aspects of the transgender experience is the changing of the name. Do you think changing a name fundamentally changes the thing, or is the name just another part of the Argo we replace? In the context of genre, do we write nonfiction because of something innate to the genre, or because we call it nonfiction?
MN: For everyone I know who’s changed their name—which includes (but is not limited to) a lot of trans and queer folks rebirthing themselves in some way or another, often more than once in a lifetime—the fact and experience of the changed name means differently to different people. So I could never generalize about what changing a name means. Generally, of course, I do think a name is part of the Argo we replace, in that we come into our lives in a body and with a name (well, most of the time we get a name) and then the rest is an adventure of change and metamorphosis and substitution and replacement until we die, which settles it (kind of).
As for genre—I know a lot of folks who write nonfiction, or nonfiction-ish things, then prefer to publish them as “fiction” or “novels,” but I know fewer (if any) who write fiction and call it nonfiction (likely because there are ethical and legal ramifications that come with claiming things as “true,” and also because most writers understand there are imaginative and deeply subjective dimensions to all representations of experience in language, which makes the notion of “truth” forever fraught, so some opt to forego the claim from the get-go).
JH: There’s a quote from The Argonauts I see a lot in interviews, often in the context of how to appear confidant or certain in your writing: “My writing is riddled with such tics of uncertainty. I have no excuse or solution, save to allow myself the tremblings, then go back in later and slash them out.” I wonder, how did we decide tremblings, uncertainties have no place in writing? Are we not losing something important in editing out those tremblings, editing out doubt?
MN: I think most readers of my work would say that I DON’T edit out the tremblings, maybe to a fault! You are of course right that doubt and tremblings and uncertainty have tremendous value. But here’s the thing: there exist many different ways to get such things across. The writing can quiver in the moment, but also: imagine a polemic full of strident, strongly stated opinions that don’t tremble. As you read, however, you realize that polemic tilts ironic, such that we aren’t altogether sure how seriously to take the writer’s pronouncements. That’s a form of uncertainty.
Or take Sontag’s work, wherein she makes strong, clear theses about photography then revisits them years later and revises her thoughts. That’s a trembling. So, you can’t get too literal-minded about it. I think of writing as a performance, and a performance can be very strong without believing in itself too devoutly.
JH: One of the early sections of The Argonauts brings up Mary Oppen’s marriage to George and the hope of troubles between them: “This wasn’t schadenfreude. It was hope. I hoped that such things might have happened, and that Oppen, bobbing in the waves of bewilderment and lucidity that characterize a cruel neurological decline, would still be moved to write: Being with Mary: it has / been almost too wonderful / it is hard to believe.” I read this hope as a kind of queering of human nature. The defiance of love over the inevitable. When you write of hope and care in the face of the cruelty in the world, where do you find such wells of defiance?
MN: I don’t think human nature needs to be queered, whatever that means—I think it all just is. As for hope or care—I don’t think if those are choices per se, or if we’re just each wired up to represent / speak to / express different aspects of human experience. But yeah, I’m wired up for hope and care, and, to some extent, defiance. Which doesn’t blot out cruelty—there’s the cruel world, and there’s also cruelty in ourselves. My work is alive to all that as well. I think my outlook is likely the result of some nature, some nurture, luck and privilege, and to some degree, a choice, one I have to make over and over again. I’ve long been interested in the whole “happiness as a choice” provocation—it’s an idea which excites some people, and really pisses other people off. I think it’s important to let yourself have all your emotions without judgment—to let yourself feel terrible unhappiness, despair, misery, and so on, without disciplining yourself, like, “Choose happiness, goddamn it! Choose happiness now!” That’s just repression, and it doesn’t work. But on the other hand, nor does escalation, deepening the same groove. So, in that gap between repression and escalation, we sometimes glimpse the possibility of making a choice, of moving in a certain direction, of sowing certain seeds to fruit certain things. I’m basically just describing to you my own daily struggle of being alive, in the hopes it sounds familiar.
Jasmyn Huff (she/her) studies creative nonfiction at the PhD level while also working as an IT specialist and co-parenting her son. Her essays can be found in X-R-A-Y, Sweet Literary, Defunct Magazine, and SugarSugarSalt. Door = Jar most recently published her poetry, but also Stone of Madness, Just Femme and Dandy, and En*gendered. In addition to one day publishing her books, she dreams of creating a safe space for queer and trans people like her.