THE PARIS RE-INTERVIEW: J. Boyett

J. Boyett, The Art of Fiction No. 2

Re-Interviewed by Brian Hurley

J. Boyett is an Arkansas native, a New York City playwright, and the author of Brothel, a novel about college students who open a whorehouse. Brothel will be published by Fiction Advocate (that’s us!) this spring. Here is Chapter One.

For the second-ever Paris Re-Interview, we asked Boyett a series of questions stolen from past interviews in The Paris Review. These questions were originally answered by Dennis Cooper, Michel Houellebecq, William T. Vollmann, and Barry Hannah.

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INTERVIEWER

What did you read when you were a kid?

BOYETT

Willingly: science fiction, Carl Barks’s and Floyd Gottfredson’s Disney comics, shitty movie tie-ins, etc. My father made me read Dostoevsky, Bellow, Hardy, Conrad, Kafka, Golding, and so on.

INTERVIEWER

There’s a suspension of, let’s call it modesty, that you ask of your readers.

BOYETT

Modesty is part of a whole package of social behaviors and attitudes that aren’t really applicable to art, I don’t think. At least not under the current cultural divisions of labor. That’s a behavioral package that you deploy when you want to get a job, or make a dinner party run smoothly, or get close enough to a person to where s/he may allow you to have sex with him/her.

INTERVIEWER

Kathy Acker once did an experiment where she wrote with a vibrator because she felt that if she could be in a state of arousal, if not climax, it would bring her closer to being able to write about sex.

BOYETT

If I’ve got my vibrator out I’m probably not writing.

How did she write with it? Did she dip it in ink like a quill? Except there’s no channel to suck up the ink like with a quill—or, I don’t know, maybe some vibrators do have such a channel. She must have had to write big. It must have produced a shaky, nervous line, like blown-up latter-day Charles Schulz drawings. Maybe it was very beautiful.

I’ve noticed that often when my characters have sex they’re not necessarily particularly aroused, but rather are fucking each other as a substitute for being aroused or excited, or because they feel like they’re supposed to be aroused or excited and so try to act as if they are. So I don’t think Acker’s notion applies well to me. Certainly, when I reach for a masturbatory aid, I avoid my own work, and I would recommend the same to your readers if I weren’t hoping to sell a bunch of books.

INTERVIEWER

Is porn something that influenced you artistically?

BOYETT

Seems to be.

INTERVIEWER

The women in your fiction are often hilarious. Do you think they know something your male characters don’t?

BOYETT

Yup.

INTERVIEWER

Like the comedian, you compulsively take the politically sensitive subjects of the moment and then are irreverent to the point of insult. And it’s funny. It makes you laugh out of shock.

BOYETT

“Political sensitivity” is one of those great euphemisms that signifies its opposite. “Politically sensitive” books, movies, theater, and whatever tend to be designed to reassure their audiences that they are good people and that the status quo needs only painless, cosmetic changes. Like, recycling your copy of the “New York Times” is “politically sensitive.” Acknowledging every February that American slavery was bad is “politically sensitive.” Going to parties and talking at length about current slavery, child slavery, sexual slavery, etc., as if it were actually something that we upper-class people should be concerned about, is outré and rude and not a good way to get laid. I don’t always succeed (since I am a coward), but I do try to maintain an attitude of healthy contempt towards political sensitivity.

INTERVIEWER

I’ve heard that you bought a ten-year-old prostitute out of servitude.

BOYETT

It was more of a bartering-type situation.

INTERVIEWER

Do you think you can still say there is a Southern literature? That people aren’t just hanging onto something that no longer really exists?

BOYETT

There probably are some vestiges of it, I don’t keep up. I imagine that, culturally speaking, most important regional distinctions in the US will soon be transformed out of all recognition, to the point where Southern literature will become just another artificial style. Sort of like pastoral poetry, except that instead of Virgil it’ll have John Grisham and Anne Rice.

INTERVIEWER

Can you picture yourself ever actually shooting someone?

BOYETT

Of course! Is this a trick question? Why would I not be able to picture that? Naturally I can! Look, I’m doing it now.

INTERVIEWER

Is any part of your life not available as a subject for your work?

BOYETT

Nope.

INTERVIEWER

Do you feel like you have any public image or that you are going to end up with one?

BOYETT

It is my dream to be so famous and successful that when I die they’ll make fun of me on TV in front of my loved ones, instead of just under their breath behind closed doors.

- Fiction Advocate