With his typically fluid and digressive verve, in American Abductions, his third novel, Mauro Javier Cárdenas explores the impact of family separations on Latin American families, and how familial bonds can endure in a techno-dystopic near future. Over email, he spoke of his process, influences, and the “Search for Unexpected Linkages” that powers his prose.
Concerning the genesis of your novels, can you talk about the connections between them across time — not particularly in terms of chronology, but more in terms of continuity. In American Abductions we have Antonio again, or is it “again”? Is there a particular moment while writing that you realize: this is a novel? Or do you decide in advance: “I want to write about X”, and Antonio is a reliable device ?
To begin a novel or a long sentence I need a human impulse that I’ve described to others as a fireball — the word fireball does not appear in any of my novels — the word moneyball neither — as in were I to throw a fireball, years would go by before its fire is extinguished. I’m exaggerating the passing of time for dramatic effect.
Seven years ago I watched a video of American abductors stopping a father who was driving his daughters to school. The video, filmed by his youngest daughter, who was sobbing the entire time, captured the abduction from beginning to end. During the same week I was watching this video, I was also reading Interstate by Stephen Dixon, in which a father has to contend with a tragedy that unfolds while he’s driving his two daughters.
These two images intermixed in my mind and generated the conditions for the appearance of an impulse that felt to me like the beginning of a novel: take him, Ada wrote, who needs a father anyway?
How Ada became the Ada of Aphasia, my previous novel, had more to do with a different question I ask myself when I start a new novel: what’s missing from my previous novel? In Aphasia, you mostly hear from Antonio and rarely hear from Antonio’s daughters, and because I was tired of hearing from Antonio, and because I wanted to hear from his daughters, in American Abductions Antonio’s mostly dead and his daughters take over.
What else was missing from Aphasia?
Dreams are absent from my first two novels. After years of contemplation — see exaggeration, dramatic effect, etc. — I concluded I had too readily accepted that dreams are more interpretable than fiction. That dreams are too interpretable. I love that comedy skit about a company that promises to listen to how was your boring day for a fee, but they’ll charge you extra to listen to your dreams. Or was it we’re not listening to your goddamn dreams? I tried that skit on an oneiric Romanian writer but he didn’t laugh. I decided to include dreams in American Abductions but with the following conditions: (1) dreams must be short; (2) interpretations of dreams must be long; (3) dreams can’t be interpreted psychologically.
What do dreams have to do with impact of governmental abductions in the imagination of deported Latin Americans, which are at the centre of American Abductions?
While researching the interpretation of dreams, I encountered a book that claimed that one of their studies had found that people who have lived through the same humanitarian crisis often have the same dream. I can’t recall if I read that before or after I had already thought about Doctor Sueño’s dream interpretation show, but it definitely contributed to the idea of a dream interpretation show as a way of linking all the fictional oral histories.
What is the purpose of prohibiting dreams from being interpreted psychologically?
Do you really want your dreams interpreted psychologically after your father or mother or daughter or son has been taken away from you? Hi, yes, your dream means you miss your daughter? Your dream means you don’t want to go in living? The no-psychology approach to the interpretation of dreams allows everyone in the novel to escape the futility of too much sense.
Your prose style plays on notions of continuity (or discontinuity) of thought/expression that resists the more mainstream demands for concision in contemporary prose. Is that there from the beginning, or is there a more self-conscious shaping to achieve an external notion of how good fiction behaves?
I spent twelve years writing my first novel not only because I didn’t know how to write — ha ha — but because I was trying out different types of sentences — it would have been more entertaining to write I was trying out different lexical costumes, and prolong that to different lexical parties, but I am still recovering from a concussion so the lexical costume parties end here — the type of sentences that wouldn’t bore me with their linearity — a sentence is always linear if it doesn’t allow for digressions — and that could accommodate the unexpected linkages (of images, thoughts, imaginary dialogue, references, dreams, songs) that are exciting to me.
I wrote every sentence in American Abductions the same way. I started each sentence with a human impulse that I attempted to exhaust within the same sentence. This attempt to exhaust could be called In Search of Unexpected Linkages, with the caveat that this doesn’t translate to anything goes since the human impulse at the beginning determines the radius of operations. This approach also doesn’t allow for me adding a reference or an image three months later because that would disturb the progression of the sentence, which is based on the linkages previously generated. I typically spend one week on a 1,000-word sentence. Every day during that one week I read the sentence from the beginning so that I can ground myself on the opening impulse and what has already been generated. During that one week I have to read widely and wildly but in the vicinity of the radius of operations, which is as vague as it sounds — more Ouija board than research — though obviously I also do primary research (you would be surprised by how many facts are included in the opening sentence, for instance).
You were tweeting recently about a 2 week, 2200 word sentence … this book — perhaps your oeuvre — seem a celebration of sustained attention, both in what you expect/demand from the reader and in how you compose your texts. What are the implications of that? Why is it so central to your aesthetic? Do you consider it a political — revolutionary? — act or gesture?
I’m glad you asked me about that sentence because that was the last sentence I wrote before my concussion (slippery cable car rails, bicycle, ouchy) sidelined me for weeks. You sent me this question around that time, and because I couldn’t muster a written response, I recorded an audio response, which I will not listen to unless this written response disappoints. While I was writing that 2,200-word sentence about a Chilean filmmaker who’s describing a hopeless art installation about the American interventions in Chile, I was purposely going to the Roxie Theater more than usual, hoping to find threads of interest that I could weave into my 2,200-word sentence. The 3D section of Journey Into Night by Bi Gan had already made it into my 2,200-word sentence. The Roxie Theater was having a Tarkovsky retrospective, and I had already purchased tickets to rewatch Mirror and to watch Andrei Rublev on the big screen for the first time. Unfortunately the symptoms of my concussion worsened and I couldn’t watch movies anymore. Whatever could have happened in my mind after watching Mirror and Andrei Rublev during those two weeks of writing my 2,200-word sentence — whatever could have been generated and included in my 2,200-word sentence after watching Mirror and Andrei Rublev — is gone.
Do I think about my aesthetic as revolutionary or political? I don’t think it’s helpful for me to talk about it in those terms, especially when so many writers talk about their work in those terms because that’s what they think sells them to the Pale American prize committees. Better to think about this in terms of my life experience. I’ve lived long enough to know everyone is always trying to sell me the their products or themselves. Literature remains the one place where I can discover what it’s like to imagine / think / feel like someone other than myself outside the context of commerce. That’s why it’s so upsetting to me to read fiction that mimics the language of the dominant commercial culture or fiction that pretends to be literature but that clearly follows the aesthetic of profit. You’re not telling me what’s it like to imagine / think / feel like you. You’re telling me your imagination’s entirely secondhand.
Can you imagine if I had decided to write about what it’s like for the government to abduct you following the aesthetic of profit? It’s easy, isn’t? The for-profit-novel would open with a moment-by-moment scene of father and daughters having a breezy breakfast in the kitchen, with enough telling details that you feel like you know these characters such that when the father is abducted by Americans dressed as enforcers you’re heartbroken. Why is this so bad? Because I know the breakfast scene is just an efficient setup for heartbreak. Because I have seen that pattern of representation a thousand times before. I will not trust what you have written if you’re still structuring your fiction this way because despite your awe-inspiring similes your fiction’s too familiar for me to feel like I am discovering what it’s like to imagine / think / feel like someone other than me.
Did this written response disappoint? (Don’t) call now!
Going back to sustained attention, I know you count Krasznahorkai and Bernhard among your influences — what does it mean to be so engaged with European literary traditions? Is there anything in your book that you would consider specifically North American?
For a long time I thought I was going to answer this question with an anti-American fiction screed — about how odd that the novelists of a country responsible for destroying the lives of millions of people around the world write mostly about their little lives — about how yes novelists should write about whatever they want but if they live in USA they should at least question why they write about what they write — but I don’t like sounding like a pamphlet and I don’t want fiction to be solely about American destruction.
What about you, Cárdenas? Haven’t you lived more than half of your life in USA? Should we pull up the Spidermen pointing at Spidermen? Yes, my fiction is North American because I live here now and I write about what it’s like to live here now, so the anti-American fiction screed would have included me. Good thing I didn’t write it!
What I did write is that American Abductions does contain North American because it includes three unattributed easter eggs quotes from three American writers: (1) Interstate by Stephen Dixon (when the father talks to his estranged daughter for the first time in years); (2) Magic Kingdom by Stanley Elkin (when the terminally ill kids on the plane start dreaming); and (3) a short story by Jeremy M. Davies (this was more a ruse to see if Mr. Davies, when he was still my editor, actually read the manuscript of American Abductions).
As far as Krasznahorkai and Bernhard, as much as I love them, there isn’t a long sentence in American Abductions that resembles a long sentence in Krasznahorkai or Bernhard. So long, influences, it’s been (psychologically uninterpretable) fun.
American Abductions is out from Dalkey Archive Press on May 7th. You can pre-order a copy here.
Mauro Javier Cárdenas is the author of American Abductions (Dalkey Archive, 2024), Aphasia (FSG, 2020) and The Revolutionaries Try Again (Coffee House Press, 2016). Twitter: @IneluctableQuak
minor literature[s] 