In this month’s fiction feature, S. P. Tenhoff does to a border what Wallace Stevens did to a blackbird—he lets it write him. Tenhoff’s “Ten Views of the Border” outlines the bewilderment of a newly divided populace by detailing a scandalous cross-border birth, two intricately mirrored origin stories, and the troubling circumstances of a woman whose very existence seems the hinge on which the border depends. And yet even as Tenhoff deftly lays down the absurd workings of this people divided, it’s hard not to feel another division making itself known. Less a line on a map than some unplaceable crease in the mind, this chronicle of a border seems ultimately about a division in our own selves, the very one whose resolving might be the longed-for goal of all storytelling. We asked Tenhoff to share some of his views on storytelling and related matters with us.
PB: Hardly Ciudad Juarez and El Paso, and yet not quite Dallas and Fort Worth, you’ve given us a twin-city geography whose contours in your ten views have only begun to be sketched. I think it’s safe to say then that the story’s doing something more than telling us to go look for possible parallels on our maps. That said, I’m curious to know of any real-world spur—a news article, conversation, a concrete thought or observation—you recall as being the genesis for the story.
SPT: Yes, I definitely wasn’t interested in having the town act as a stand-in for any real place on the globe. If you’re looking for divided cities, there’s no shortage. In fact, I would say that cities that aren’t in some way divided are the exception, even if the borderlines are usually invisible. But the story did start after hearing someone talk about a real place, his hometown, which I think may have been in Vermont. And he was talking about how his home, which was right on the Canadian border, half in Canada and half in the U.S., was changed after the increased border security following 9/11. Essentially the town was destroyed by the new priorities of “Homeland Security,” or at least that’s how the person describing his town saw it. Something about that story, or anecdote really, stayed with me, although it was a while before I even began writing, and when I did, it didn’t end up having anything to do with Vermont or Canada or post-9/11 geopolitics. What I found myself imagining first was how people’s lives would be affected, in a concrete way, by the sudden and more or less arbitrary imposition of a border. I don’t know why that interested me. There’s no way to know what will pass through you without leaving a trace and what will end up stuck somewhere inside, gumming up the system. You write about the things that won’t let go. If you can forget about it, you should. Forget about it and move on. For some reason, this story wouldn’t let go. When that happens the best you can do is to get out of the way of the writing, which already knows what it wants, apparently.
PB: Your ten views are very much about a world that is learning to deal with its origins. You write that the border has brought “something akin to relief” to the populations of these now separate jurisdictions, though it’s done so at the cost of “seeing their familiar world dismantled before their eyes.” In what way is beginning to write a story like this—or any story—similarly vexed by conflicting sensations of relief and dismantlement? How much of writing this story was about figuring out what the story was about in the first place? How did you know when you’d finished it?
SPT: In a sense the entire act of writing is about dismantlement and reconstruction. The writer takes apart the world in order to reassemble it in a fresh way. Although you could argue that our modern (or postmodern) world has already dismantled itself, is being newly dismantled for us every minute of every day, which makes the artist the person with the thankless task of trying to put Humpty Dumpty together again. Personally, I suspect this isn’t just a modern problem, or one that only concerns the artist. The world has always been essentially unknowable, and the way the brain works, we’re always taking in fragments and imagining a whole. Constructing a narrative. The artist is only doing an extreme and concentrated form – a willed form – of what we all do every day. Relief I’m not sure about. There’s the relief that comes when you realize you’ve actually done it, you’ve put the broken pieces of the world together in some new combination, some new shape. You feel relieved and you feel grateful, to the muse or whatever you want to call that process you’re not in control of. But the feeling doesn’t last long because there’s always another story to be written, and you can never be sure where it’s going to take you. I think that when you’ve finally figured out the story it’s already finished, or should be. If you’re halfway through a piece and find yourself stopping to reflect or get your bearings, you’re in trouble. That’s when there’s the greatest risk of destroying the story by trying to save it. Ideally, the story is sustained by whatever brought it into being in the first place, and when that momentum is gone the story should be too. Not that it always works out that way. Sometimes a story gives up part of itself and then gets shy on you. You end up in the horrible position of impersonating yourself, trying to imagine what you could possibly have had in mind. Fortunately, this story stayed with me to the end and told me when it was done, so there was no need for second-guessing.
PB: This feels like writing being done from the edge of reflection. I say this in the sense that the image of the border that accumulates is one whose stability disintegrates as we try to pin it down. You call the border an idea, a symbol, then it’s not an idea, not a symbol. Contradictoriness is at the story’s heart. The narrator of the first paragraph, for instance, is rhetorically writing what sounds like history, but then suddenly the objective distance collapses and s/he seems surprised by the topic itself—”strange to hear ourselves defined this way!”—as though the material were overtaking him/her in the act of sorting it out. It’s like the border becomes an allegory of the uncanny. Is this a mode you’ve written in before? What authors would you say influenced the sort of writing you’re doing here?
SPT: This is a mode that arose out of the story, out of what it needed, so in that sense it’s unique. I’m sure, though, that if someone compared my stories they would find certain preoccupations – I guess I’m avoiding the word “obsessions” – that are in all of my work, “Ten Views of the Border” included. Regarding influence, I don’t know; I can think of a few writers who might be lurking there somewhere, although I wasn’t thinking of any of them when I wrote it. But I guess that’s the way influence works: something finds its way into your subconscious and then finds its way out again, after having turned into something else. If you can identify an influence in your work, it’s probably not a genuine influence. The process, I think, is more mysterious than that. And I’m probably the worst person to ask. I know what I’ve read and loved, but I can’t really say how it’s ended up shaping my own writing. For instance, there are no writers I admire more than James Joyce or Flannery O’Connor, but I’m not sure whether that admiration has ever translated into influence. Certainly reading them has inspired me to write. Reading great writers does that: it either makes you want to write yourself or to give up writing altogether. But in terms of content, Joyce and O’Connor very much had their own thematic concerns – in the case of O’Connor, a single concern, really – and I don’t think I could graft any of that onto my own writing if I wanted to. We don’t necessarily end up being influenced by the things we’d choose for ourselves. I think our literary heroes are more like distant beacons than actual guides through the wilderness of the writing. It’s reassuring to know that you can look up and see them there, but when it comes to hacking your way through the story, you’re on your own.
PB: You give us a pleasing jolt in view eight, in our second encounter with Willetta Clum-Edbril, when we learn that she has a fondness for hinges, and yet nothing could’ve prepared us for the sentence in the final view describing what the paraders find upon arriving at her house: “Her hinges, a diverse collection dangling from eaves, windowsills, and shutters, creak in the breeze, the free flaps glinting and trembling like the wings of butterflies half pinned to a board.” The Creaking Songs of Butterlies—Ms. Clum-Edbril’s tell-all from the border? What are you at work at now? Anything to tell us about your 2014 reading list?
SPT: I’ve never actually known anyone with a fondness for hinges, but I’ve known people with stranger interests. Once I discovered her hobby, the scene you quoted came about naturally. Her house had to have those hinges. As far as what I’m working on now, I’ve just finished a novel, and going back to your question about relief in writing, the feeling I’m experiencing here at the end is probably a perfect example of it. But I’ve already found myself starting a new project. I have no idea yet what it will become. My 2014 reading list? I always have a backlog, a stack of books that I’d planned to read, so this year’s list is made up of things from previous years that I haven’t gotten to yet. On top of that stack is Stefan Tobler’s translation of Clarice Lispector’s Agua Viva. Then Denton Welch’s In Youth is Pleasure, followed by Jan Kjoerstad’s The Seducer, Steve Stern’s The Book of Mischief, Harry Mathews’ The Human Country, the recent Rayfield translation of Gogol’s Dead Souls, Stefan Themerson’s Hobson’s Island, Kevin Vennemann’s Close to Jedenew, Gilbert Sorrentino’s The Abyss of Human Illusion, and finally the collection The Clouds Should Know: Buddhist Poet Monks of China, edited by Red Pine and Mike O’Connor. These are the books I’ll be reading this year if some other books don’t come along to distract me first.
Philip Baker is an assistant editor for ASF.