Skin Elegies, by Lance Olsen
Skin Elegies - ready for release
Skin Elegies is an adventure, a puzzle, and a delight. It's a constellation of orbiting texts. In addition to the novel, Olsen published a series of short stories that echo, distort, and amplify the novel's themes. Like "letting go." As a character in the short story, Skin Elegies comments, "there is nothing in the universe, nothing whatsoever, that brings you into the present quite like letting go of someone else's hand."
I list the stories below so you can check them out either before or after you read the novel.
The book's cover suggests a simple narrative: An American couple flees the increasingly authoritarian United States by transferring their minds to a quantum computer housed in North Africa. But this constellation of narratives is anything but simple. Nine key events flicker on and off in the subtle architecture of the book, which delivers intimate and meticulously researched details of the day the Internet turned on, the Challenger explosion, the last days of the Nazi regime in Berlin, and six others. Each "narraticule" (as Olsen calls it) changes the valence of the rest. As he explains, this mirrors the operation of neurons in the brain.
Olsen's prose never ceases to astonish me. Skin Elegies is no exception. Consider a man speaking of his wife, who says, "Until we met, I was merely a series of misconceptions." The same man watching someone fall dead, "It was as if he had leapt headlong into an unmoving truth." Or, in the words of a girl who murdered her mother "The Mother busied herself eating her own entrails." (Based on a true story, see the interview below.) Or a frail woman's final word: "Oh."
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Author Interview
Lance Olsen
Amanda: Skin Elegies reminds me in some ways of 88 Constellations for Wittgenstein. Have you ever thought of presenting this novel in digital form?
Lance: That’s a great comparison. In fact, I think of Skin Elegies as a constellation novel, a term coined by Olga Tokarczuk to describe her astonishing one—Flights. That is, it’s built out of many narrative fragments that don’t easily narrativize the world, don’t move from beginning to end in a smooth arc, refuse to reinvent previous narrative strategies. I’m drawn to reading as nomadic activity rather than touristic bucket list.
Nonetheless, right now I’m not interested in presenting Skin Elegies in digital form. That’s because over the last ten years or so I’ve become increasingly engaged with bookish qualities of the book, and in the page as an event. As the book increasingly becomes zeroes and ones on iPads and Kindles and so on, I’m increasingly curious about what it can do that other media can’t.
I’m dedicated, you could say, to making the act of reading strange and wondrous again, capturing that feeling we all had as little kids: that running our eyes over a bunch of weird little black squiggles could give life to universes.
Amanda: This novel offers puzzles within puzzles. I found myself searching for associations and finding them and then wondering whether they were part of the puzzle or just some random convergence. Here’s an example. You dedicated Every Punch in the Heart, “For Michele Neurauter.” The story, with its marvelous new language, is clearly told from her perspective. That’s one deliberate (and excellent) clue. The result, for me, of following that clue (which is absent from Skin Elegies – interesting) is a sense that this text reaches far and wide into what I think of as the “real” world and creates its own neuronal universe. I guess this is more observation than question – any thoughts?
Lance: With respect to that specific story: Michele was a student of mine back in the Nineties. We stayed in touch long after she took my creative writing course up at the University of Idaho, where I was teaching at the time, ultimately moved with her husband and daughters to upstate New York. When I gave readings in the area, she would attend and we’d find a chance to catch up over a coffee. Not long ago I went over to her Facebook page to see what she was up to, only to discover her husband had murdered her with the help of their daughter. (It’s the daughter’s point of view I adopt for this sequence in Skin Elegies.) I had no idea this had been her life behind her life. I couldn’t not write about that. I couldn't not use writing as a way to say I'm sorry.
With respect to the larger, associative structure: Humans are pattern recognition machines. We seem built, in other words, to connect the dots (in a sense, we’re back to David Clark’s 88 Constellations for Wittgenstein, aren’t we?). Give us a chaos of stars in the sky, and we will invent systems and stories. I wanted to provide possibilities for doing so through image, leitmotif, repeated phrases, and the like in Skin Elegies, to invite the reader to connect the dots as he or she finds most interesting.
Amanda: How did you choose these nine events?
Lance: They were simply stories that both spoke to me and struck me as capturing pivotal moments in our postwar cultural consciousness, moments that made us all a little bit more who we are in 2021.
At the same time, I was reading a good deal about mind-upload technologies—the attempt now underway both in Russia and here at life extension by housing our thoughts, our personalities, sans bodies, in some sort of supercomputer. Skin Elegies is therefore in my mind a story about refugeeism in its largest sense. What are the implications of this for our concept of self, the body, place, even death? What does such longing on the part of some teach us about what we really think being human is all about at the end of the day?
I set out to construct a narrative architecture that suggests neurons firing, the ephemeral sparks that are brain function—in other words, what thought looks like from the inside out, as it were, which brings us back to that notion of constellation novel: each narraticule blips in and out of existence, can be attached to others in multifold ways forms, I hope, a novel neuro-novel.
Amanda: I’m aware of sixn short stories that are in conversation with this novel: Skin Elegy (Sulfur Surrealist Jungle), Every Punch in the Heart (Conjunctions), A Thousand White Ibises (Colorado Review), Oh (Narrative), and Skin Elegies (The MacGuffin).
I’d love to talk with you about the relationships between these texts. Did you write the little ones first? Or did they provide mid-drafting breaks? Were they trial balloons or scouting vessels or balance beams?
Lance: I wrote all nine narratives as you see them in Skin Elegies, interrupting each other, harmonizing with each other, contradicting each other, growing like barnacles on a rock or wreck. Then, for each paratext, I collected the bits and reshaped them into a stand-alone whole. That helped me see them in a new light that also sent me back into the work-in-progress.
I’ve always adored texts that work more like music than like normative fiction. Here I’m thinking of novels as different as Beckett’s Unnamable and Anne Carson’s Nox—texts that gain their resonance, poignancy, forward momentum, not through plot twist, movement from A to B, but rather through an accumulation of thematic and thought and feeling melodies that modulate and complicate like a fugue or, maybe better, a jazz composition. Such texts keep asking us to re-view what narrative is, how and why we feel the need to use and abuse it.
Amanda: Where did 180 billion come from? Is there a website that tells how many people will have lived by 2072? Or did you develop an elaborate algorithm?
Lance: Ah, I wish there were something so elaborate in my approach. I just looked up on Google the estimate for how many humans have died since our species appeared, then guesstimated into the future. I was somehow shocked to learn how relatively few of us have changed tense so far.
Amanda: Did you choose Oct. 29 because it’s the anniversary of John Glenn’s return to space?
Lance: That’s a great connection. For me the 29 October 2072 sequence echoes the 29 October 1969 one … the day the internet was turned on by a grad student, Charley Kline, who was essentially doing a homework assignment at UCLA in collaboration with a young computer programmer, Bill Duvall, up at the Stanford Research Institute. They connected their computers over the phoneline and began to communicate. What blows me away is that neither understood what they had just done. No one else in the world had a clue our consensual hallucination had begun. Kline and Duvall’s flick of the switch in 1969 will someday (I chose 2072 because that’s when some approximate this might actually happen) lead to a mind uploaded. A strange and terrible and fascinating idea to me.
More, I wanted to mine a single metaphor to see how it opened up: human hands touching, which is to say human beings connecting, however fleetingly, however fragilely. Kline and Duvall’s connection is a digital iteration of that, but that image appears in one way or another in each of the nine narratives that form the novel.
Amanda: I love the novel within the novel and the reference to yet another novel called Skin Elegies. Where did the title come from?
Lance: I made it up as a way into thinking and feeling about one of my own obsessions: how, as Ben Marcus once said, in the end breathing doesn’t work.
Amanda: Can you tell me about the research you did for this book? Where did you go? How long did it take? How did you proceed?
Lance: I guess I’m wired to be a researcher. You know how they say you should write about what you know? I’ve discovered more enjoyment in writing about what I don’t know and want to learn. One’s first novel is often thinly veiled autobiography—mine, Live from Earth, certainly was—but after that one often feels freed up to enter new possibility spaces. Well, freed up or anxious, depending upon what sort of writer you are. In my case that translated into an excuse to probe more deeply stuff I didn’t know much about but was drawn to—here the intersection of history, neurology, and computing. The novel, which I began writing while I was doing that research, took about two years to write.
Much of the time my research impulse resolves into an interest in historical events that we all know superficially. I’m taken by how one might situate those events in particular people rather than foggy generalities, situate them in particular subjectivities, who—like most of us—weren’t central to the event described. History experienced through the senses, through the emotions, is a different category (and a fraught one) compared to academic or journalistic renderings.
I’ve also been absorbed for years in pastness as problem: who tells yesterday, from what vantage point, to what ends? History is an intricate, troubled subset of fiction, in the sense that one controls it through various narrative choices and conventions. The question for a fiction writer approaching that terrain is: How can we re-write and re-right history by employing modes that illuminate our biases and blindnesses, which always-already suffuse our understanding.
Amanda: My readers are interested in learning about your writing practice. Where do you write? Do you have a certain time of day? To music?
Lance: I can only write in the morning—till roughly one o’clock, maybe an hour later—and only in a space devoid of noise and external stimuli. So I always keep the shades in my home office pulled. If not writing there, I try nonetheless to duplicate that space as best I can. If I’m writing in a place where I can’t duplicate that, I polish rather than generate material because I feel too distracted by the whirl-a-gig world. All of which is to say I can’t imagine writing to music, though I did when I was three thousand years younger. If I did, I wouldn’t be able to hear the rhythms and harmonics of my own sentences, which I often read aloud as I’m constructing them, but would rather ride those of somebody else, which doesn’t strike me anymore as a tenable mode of creation.
Amanda: What’s next?
Lance: I’m working on a novel about David Bowie called Always Crashing in the Same Car. It’s another sort of constellation novel fusing and confusing fact and imagination that seeks to be a prismatic exploration of Bowie through multiple voices and perspectives—the protean musician himself (with whom I first fell in love as a teen), an academic trying to compose a critical monograph about him, friends, lovers, musicologists, and so on.
At its core beat questions that have fascinated me forever: how we read others, how we are read by them, how (if at all) we can tell the biographical past with something even close to accuracy, what it feels like being the opposite of young and still committed to innovation.
Set during Bowie’s last months—those when he was working on his final album, Black Star, while battling liver cancer and the consequences of a sixth heart attack—yet washing back and forth across his kaleidoscopically costumed life, Always Crashing hopes to enact a poetics of unfinalizability—of art, of love, of truth, even of death, that apparently most finalizable of conditions.
Skin Elegies Paratexts (all by Lance Olsen):
Oh – Narrative Magazine (https://www.narrativemagazine.com/issues/winter-2021/fiction/oh-lance-olsen)
Skin Elegy - Sulfur Surrealist Jungle (https://sulfursurrealistjungle.com/2020/09/25/skin-elegy-by-lance-olsen/)
A Thousand White Ibises – Colorado Review, Summer 2021
Every Punch in the Heart – Conjunctions 76: Fortieth Anniversary Issue
Skin Elegies The MacGuffin, Winter, 2021
Absolute Away – Socrates on the Beach
