{"id":110629,"date":"2017-05-09T10:30:07","date_gmt":"2017-05-09T14:30:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=110629"},"modified":"2017-05-09T12:31:32","modified_gmt":"2017-05-09T16:31:32","slug":"misplaced-logic-interview-joanna-ruocco","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2017\/05\/09\/misplaced-logic-interview-joanna-ruocco\/","title":{"rendered":"Misplaced Logic: An Interview with Joanna Ruocco"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Hilarious, possibly impervious, Joanna Ruocco is, of all the writers I know, the one who writes most purely\u00a0<\/em>in order to write\u2014or so I\u2019ve always imagined. I\u2019ve long wanted to ask her about the impetus behind her wonderfully weird assortment of prose, so when I learned she has\u00a0<\/em>five\u00a0books coming out this year\u2014two last month alone\u2014each utterly different from the others, it seemed the perfect opportunity.<\/em><\/p>\n

The Week<\/a>\u00a0is a collection of stories that could be the offspring of Padgett Powell\u2019s and Thomas Bernhard\u2019s comic shorter works. From \u201cPaparazzi\u201d: \u201cIt is best to be a mediocre person, a person that can be easily replaced. In the succession of generations, there will be many people who think and do what you think and do, and who inspire the same kinds of feelings in other people that you yourself inspire in other people, and you know that it works the other way too, that before you were born there were people who thought and did what you think and do, with adjustments made for available technologies and prevailing opinions.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

The Whitmire Case<\/a>, a novella-length chapbook, is a comic\/surrealist detective story about a young woman who \u201cresembles, in form, in spirit, nothing so much as a sourdough starter,\u201d whom one day everyone suddenly fails to recognize. Another chapbook,\u00a0<\/em>The Lune<\/a>\u00a0no.\u00a012, extracts \u201cThe Boghole & the Beldame,\u201d a lyrical account of a witch (I think?) that reads more like an immersive poem.<\/em><\/p>\n

The novel\u00a0<\/em>Field Glass<\/a>, written in collaboration with Joanna Howard, is a grim fragmentary series of what seem to be radio transmissions concerning the inhabitants of a postapocalyptic hostelry. It is fiction in close conversation with theory, starting with an epigraph from Paul Virilio and ending, in the acknowledgements, with the opening of Deleuze and\u00a0Guattari\u2019s\u00a0<\/em>A Thousand Plateaus\u00a0(\u201cThe two of us wrote\u00a0<\/em>Field Glass\u00a0together. Since each of us were several, there was already quite a crowd.\u201d)<\/em><\/p>\n

Last\u2014not least!\u2014<\/em>Dark Season<\/a>, written under the pseudonym Joanna Lowell, is a 327-page historical romance novel about an epileptic young woman and a brooding nobleman; it is the fourth romance novel Ruocco has written, under three different names.<\/em><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

Can we start with the romance novel?\u00a0Dark Season<\/em>\u00a0is the first I\u2019ve read, but in dipping into some others for comparison, I was delighted by how good you are at it, how seriously you take it. Why do you write romance novels?<\/p>\n

\u202c\u202c\u202c\u202c\u202c\u202cRUOCCO<\/p>\n

I\u2019m glad you think I\u2019m good at it. One of the rejections I got from an agent who read\u00a0Dark Season<\/em>\u00a0said it was \u201cfourteen times too literary,\u201d which was very funny and specific. It did make me think about literariness\u2014what constitutes literariness as an appealing or off-putting quality in a text\u2014and I realized that I tend to create metaphorical linkages when I write. A metaphor can provide narrative continuity, but it didn\u2019t work in the romance novel. It needed to feel more literal, or maybe more literal, less literary. Anyway, I write romance novels for the money! Or at least, theoretically\u2014I haven\u2019t actually made any money. But I told myself I was writing them for the money. And I like to write them. I like how formally constrained they are. I spend so much time tending to language when I write that it\u2019s fun to be forced by a form to focus on macro-level plot arcs instead\u2014the overcoming of the central antagonism, the libidinal slide from antipathy into desire, all the preposterous barriers to delay the inevitable.<\/p>\n

In nonromance writing projects, I never want to repeat myself stylistically. I always want to find some new way into sentence making\/arranging\u2014that\u2019s part of the project\u2014but this is also why I find romance so pleasing. I get to repeat with variations the same form again and again.<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

You\u2019ve written other romance novels under other pseudonyms\u2014Toni Jones\u2019s\u00a0No Secrets in Spandex<\/em>\u00a0is my favorite of your titles\u2014and I wonder why you don\u2019t stick to a single pseudonym. Don\u2019t romance writers build up an audience, book to book?<\/p>\n

RUOCCO<\/p>\n

I think they do, and I am always in the process of utterly failing to market myself through those kinds of choices. But the pseudonym is part of the feel of each book for me. Toni Jones couldn\u2019t have written\u00a0Ghazal in the Moonlight<\/em>. She\u2019s way too sporty. Joanna Lowell is a good pseudonym for Victorian romance, so I\u2019m going to stick with her.<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

In some ways, I think every one of your books should have a pseudonym, or heteronyms, like Pessoa\u2014where part of the point of fake names is to allow you to be an entirely different writer each time.<\/p>\n

RUOCCO<\/p>\n

I want that! A new name for every book. I published this steampunk kind of story in Lady Churchill\u2019s Rosebud Wristlet<\/em> last year, and I really wanted to publish it as Jo Ruocco instead of Joanna Ruocco because it was much more of a Jo Ruocco story, but then I couldn\u2019t figure out how to ask for a name emendation without feeling crazy. Maybe I\u2019ll publish something as Hildebrand von Schlange.\u00a0<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

You mentioned \u201cthe project,\u201d which I take to mean your aesthetic project in general. What else is part of the project?<\/p>\n

RUOCCO<\/p>\n

Trying to be more awake, generally, to the world. Keeping open the question of what a world might be at all.\u202c\u202c<\/p>\n

\u202cINTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

And the newness of each book is a kind of awakeness?\u202c<\/p>\n

RUOCCO<\/p>\n

Yeah, when you\u2019re still off-balance in a project and wandering in it and need to pay attention to where you\u2019re stepping and can\u2019t take the ground for granted. I hate that feeling because you feel you\u2019ll never find any kind of way, but it\u2019s also exciting to look for ways instead of relying on a route you\u2019ve already charted out. On the charted route, you usually miss all the cool funguses. In my daily life, I\u2019m a creature of habit. I walk the same paths around the neighborhood and sit in the same chair in my house eating seeds and grapes. So there\u2019s a tension between stability and disruption. The writing is, I guess, where the pushing happens.<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

On the other hand, there\u2019s the Joanna Ruocco-ness of each book, the qualities that recur. The Week<\/em>, for example, seems to me in a lineage with your second book,\u00a0Man\u2019s Companions<\/em>\u2014both high comedy, playing in similar ways with language and logic, though these new pieces are on the whole less slapstick and not quite as clearly stories. \u202c\u202c\u202c\u202c\u202c<\/p>\n

RUOCCO<\/p>\n

I do think\u00a0The Week<\/em>\u00a0is in a lineage with\u00a0Man\u2019s Companions<\/em>. The compositional mode is similar, in the way I thought of each little piece as part of something larger, a book, because of the constraints I established\u202c.\u202c With\u00a0Man\u2019s Companions<\/em>,<\/em>\u00a0I was writing \u201canimal\u201d stories, each story treated some idea of the animal, at least that\u2019s how I went about writing them. When I wrote\u00a0The Week<\/em>,<\/em>\u00a0I was living in Denver and my mother got me a subscription to that magazine\u00a0The Week<\/em>\u202c<\/em>.<\/em>\u00a0It\u2019s a weekly news digest in which all the reporting from the past week is made even more summary and bite-size, and the abridged articles juxtapose wars and innovations in lingerie. I started to write stories that take bits of language from those abridged news articles and to use some of that language of abridgment.\u00a0The Week<\/em>\u00a0was originally fifty-two stories, a year of weeks, but then I cut and combined pieces. The number of stories wasn\u2019t so important in the end\u202c.\u202c\u202c\u202c\u202c\u202c\u202c\u202c\u202c\u202c\u202c\u202c<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

Each of your books has its own lexicon, often with playful attention to particular words. I imagine it involves a sort of linguistic research, into archaic diction and syntax for \u201cThe Boghole & the Beldame,\u201d for instance\u2014\u201cRacemes of flowers, white flowers, are visible across the tarn.\u201d<\/p>\n

RUOCCO<\/p>\n

I love linguistic research, combing through old botany books, for example, for words that feel both occult and resonant\u2014you know what they mean because of how they sound. I was reading Norse sagas when I was writing \u201cThe Boghole & The Beldame\u201d and playing lots of first-edition Dungeons and\u00a0Dragons, in which there\u2019s a delirious focus on itemization, your gear, your spells, your characteristics. I was the only woman adventurer, and I was writing \u201cThe Boghole & The Beldame\u201d in part as a response to the triumphalist boyishness of the adventures. I wanted to write something in the high register of saga but without getting anywhere or gaining experience points, something more like fragments of the dreams the women are always having in the sagas. My items were all the words I\u2019d gathered, but they kept sinking in the bog.<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

D&D words?<\/p>\n

RUOCCO<\/p>\n

Not necessarily. No gnolls<\/em>, but in the same vein. You can do outside research for D&D, and our magic user was always claiming he\u2019d found certain kinds of herbs and funguses. I made my own herbarium.<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

A different comic work is The Whitmire Case<\/em>, a detective story in the Beckett style, where the material circumstances of the \u201ccase\u201d are shrouded in doubt and an odd digressive logic abounds. What is it about misplaced logic and pseudo theories that make them such fruitful subject matter?<\/p>\n

RUOCCO<\/p>\n

I don\u2019t know, I love misplaced logic so much. Maybe the mind spinning on a point, trying to reduce and contain, has the paradoxical effect of exposing an impasse and the dizzying outside of the problem? You think you understand the parameters, that you can set the parameters and police them, and then suddenly you realize there\u2019s a massive disconnect, that not only what you know but the knowledge system we rely on is completely inadequate. It\u2019s funny and giddy making and sort of liberating.<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

It is giddy and funny, but in your writing it often opens onto a space of chaos, darker and less containable than the space we thought we were in.<\/p>\n

RUOCCO<\/p>\n

It\u2019s frightful, trying to think and move within larger systems undergirded by murderous logics and illogic and having even your imaginative lines of flight short-circuited. There\u2019s never only mental chaos or order. There\u2019s the world, the mind is in the world. In\u00a0The Whitmire Case<\/em>, the narrator wants to control his reality, but this notion of control is premised on his understanding of the totalizing social and economic structures that control him. So, he has a series of fantasies about either escape or domination, meaning dominating others. Those seem to be the two options. But escape and domination are both fake ways out of the impasse and expose another set of problems.<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

Field Glass<\/em> brings up an aspect of your work we haven\u2019t talked about yet, at the far end of the spectrum from romance novels\u2014actual, non-pseudo theory. What place does theory have, in\u00a0Field Glass<\/em>\u00a0and in your work overall?\u00a0\u00a0\u202c\u202c\u202c\u202c\u202c\u202c\u202c<\/p>\n

RUOCCO<\/p>\n

Joanna Howard and I wrote that book together, mostly long distance, and it\u2019s a record of our correspondence with each other and also our interactions with certain works of poetry and theory, by Ren\u00e9 Char and Virilio, for example. We used the texts to invent a story-world, a boarding house between hedges within the unlivable space of perpetual war. We imagined we were sending out \u201cdispatches,\u201d and our series of dispatches became the emotional core of the book. I always write with\u00a0or alongside other books. Some theory I find really difficult, so reading it feels like active study, in a good way, and some theory I find I connect with more intuitively and it feels more like reading poetry. I\u2019m always looking for models that help me see the world from different angles, and theory can lend fresh descriptive and constructive powers.<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

Earlier I half seriously suggested that heteronyms might offer the freedom to be multiple. Now I\u2019m wondering what sort of freedom you find collaboration offers.<\/p>\n

\u00a0RUOCCO<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve had some spectacular failed collaborations\u2014could insert lengthy anecdotes that involve copious amounts of blood and chutney\u2014and spectacularly awesome collaborations\u2014everything with editing and making\u00a0Birkensnake<\/em>.<\/em> This new collaboration, with Joanna, has transformed my relationship to writing because we really are multiple, two Joannas, producing language and responding to language simultaneously. We didn\u2019t cowrite particular pieces, we each wrote discrete passages. But we sometimes wrote toward each other in ways that meant I was writing as her and she was writing as me, and when we edited the book, we couldn\u2019t tell from the syntax or the content who\u2019d written what part. Sometimes a particular word would give it away, but even then, we couldn\u2019t be sure if I\u2019d used French to respond to her French or she\u2019d described a weed to respond to one of my pastoral images. It was such an exciting process. You have to be more accountable when you\u2019re collaborating. You\u2019re responsible not only for the writing but for the person you\u2019re writing with, but you also feel a stronger sense of possibility and play because you\u2019ve found a friend who\u2019s real and imaginary, a friend in writing. It helps if you share a name. I met a woman the other day who said she used to write letters as a child to an imaginary friend named Joanna. Dear Joanna <\/em>began each letter. Collaborating with Joanna Howard has been like having the day start, Dear Joanna … We\u2019re going to write more books together\u2014maybe under a pseudonym!<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

Your enthusiasm, the spirit with which you proceed, is, maybe more than anything else, what draws all of these projects together. Your books aren\u2019t always particularly joyful, but whether comic or dystopic or rated \u201cSensuality Level: Sensual,\u201d it seems to me they are written with joy.<\/p>\n

RUOCCO<\/p>\n

I don\u2019t know about joy, but I often feel like a merry maniac writing. I eat fruit constantly, so it may be the mania produced by simple sugars. I am fueled by simple sugars, from fruits into fructification. Maybe it\u2019s not joy I feel exactly, but a sense of play? Play is a kind of open-focus, magical absorption. It\u2019s what made all our childhood games of make-believe and invention so vital and important. If I\u2019m lucky, I\u2019m playful in that way when I write. It doesn\u2019t mean all the projects have to be silly\u2014some of them are silly, silliness is good. They can be dystopic or nightmarish or \u201cSensuality Level: Sensual.\u201d The products of play produce any number of effects. Maybe because play takes you out of yourself and there\u2019s that element of openness, you\u2019re more likely to produce different kinds of writing or painting or casserole or whatever you make? It\u2019s funny, I love play because it\u2019s so open, and I love constraint because it\u2019s so closed. I love to change my relationship to language by finding new ways into book projects, and I love to repeat the romance-novel form again and again with slight variations. The through line is love? It\u2019s all pretty fun? It\u2019s the new moon tonight! I think we get to make a wish.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Martin Riker\u2019s fiction and criticism have appeared in the <\/em>New York Times, <\/em>Wall Street Journal, <\/em>London Review of Books, <\/em>Conjunctions, and <\/em>The Baffler. His novel <\/em>Samuel Johnson\u2019s Eternal Return will be published next year.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

  Hilarious, possibly impervious, Joanna Ruocco is, of all the writers I know, the one who writes most purely\u00a0in order to write\u2014or so I\u2019ve always imagined. I\u2019ve long wanted to ask her about the impetus behind her wonderfully weird assortment of prose, so when I learned she has\u00a0five\u00a0books coming out this year\u2014two last month alone\u2014each […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":910,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[907],"tags":[28703,28709,17423,28699,28436,12804,17967,22769,71,17968,28707,28700,28704,28701,1277,18317,28702,7578,28708,10030,24759,28706,7515,28705],"class_list":["post-110629","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-at-work","tag-a-thousand-plateaus","tag-birkensnake","tag-botany","tag-chapbook","tag-detective-story","tag-dungeons-and-dragons","tag-felix-guattari","tag-fernando-pessoa","tag-fiction","tag-gilles-deleuze","tag-herbarium","tag-joanna-howard","tag-joanna-lowell","tag-joanna-ruocco","tag-linguistics","tag-padgett-powell","tag-paul-virilio","tag-pseudonyms","tag-rene-char","tag-romance-novels","tag-saga","tag-the-week","tag-thomas-bernhard","tag-toni-jones"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nMisplaced Logic: An Interview with 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