{"id":85517,"date":"2015-05-07T16:04:54","date_gmt":"2015-05-07T20:04:54","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=85517"},"modified":"2015-05-07T17:32:29","modified_gmt":"2015-05-07T21:32:29","slug":"our-thing-an-interview-with-paul-beatty","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2015\/05\/07\/our-thing-an-interview-with-paul-beatty\/","title":{"rendered":"Our Thing: An Interview with Paul Beatty"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"beatty-paul-c-hannah-assouline\"<\/a>

Photo: Hannah Assouline<\/p><\/div>\n

Paul Beatty\u2019s recurring themes\u2014race and tribalism, human psychology, ambition and failure, and the haunting presence of history\u2014are the heavy ones. But he moves through them with light steps, his precisely choreographed Southern California meander broken by exuberant outbursts of buck dancing and the occasional disemboweling. His early poetry and his first novel, <\/em>The White Boy Shuffle, opened up expansive new territory for writers trying to build an alternative literature, one that found its energy and idiom outside of the traditional American literary complex. But he has always belonged only to himself, unrushed and unburdened by any scene or movement. <\/em><\/p>\n

I first encountered his work through the Nuyorican Poetry scene in the nineties. I remember feeling that wash of recognition and estrangement that certain books conjure\u2014I was surprised by the familiarity of the voice, and thrilled by the weird, reckless shit it was saying. Paul seemed to come from the world I knew, a world filled with outsiders and cultural polymaths but still thick with the strange incense of African American life\u2014where Amiri Baraka was a comedian, Kurt Vonnegut was black, and Ice Cube was an arch satirist. It was life-changing to see that world animated by Paul\u2019s particular offbeat, backtracking, culture-swallowing genius. Beatty writes laceratingly funny books that often turn on the subject of race, but more than that, his novels are flares sent up\u2014for anyone who happens to be looking\u2014that illuminate the persistent and irreducible feelings that rumble in our deepest places. They\u2019re about hope and failure and loss, the absurdity of systems and the loneliness of being our own weird selves. And they\u2019re about the beautiful consolation of seeing it, <\/em>really seeing it, in all its pain and nothingness, and laughing. <\/em><\/p>\n

Paul\u2019s latest novel, <\/em>The Sellout<\/a>, comes at an interesting moment in the eternal\u2014and eternally recycled\u2014American \u201cconversation on race.\u201d The protests that have broken out across the country over police violence have had a powerful undercurrent of black humor. My Twitter feed is illustrated with wild, vivid scenes that would be right at home in a Beatty novel: Newsman Jake Tapper in Ferguson for ABC News with a protestor behind him holding up a sign: IS IT OPEN SEASON ON A NIGGA\u2019S ASS???????<\/small>; CNN reporters getting their microphones jacked midinterview by angry protestors; a (probably doctored) photo of a young black boy riding a hijacked police horse away from the scene of a riot. Years ago, Beatty identified the source of this sort of dark comedy. \u201cAfrican Americans,\u201d he wrote in one of his section introductions for <\/em>Hokum, \u201clike any other Americans, are an angry people with fragile egos. Humor is vengeance. Sometimes you laugh to keep from crying. Sometimes you laugh to keep from shooting \u2026 black folk are mad at everybody, so duck, because you\u2019re bound to be in someone\u2019s line of fire.\u201d <\/em><\/p>\n

Paul and I had a long talk in front of a single cup of coffee at a caf\u00e9 in the East Village. That wide-ranging, candid interview was cursed by the gods of Cupertino and lost forever. Paul, being a mensch, agreed to meet me again at a different East Village caf\u00e9, and just as he started to open up about the path of his career, we were interrupted\u2014our quiet caf\u00e9 hosted a comedy night. We fled to yet another caf\u00e9, where we had this conversation. <\/em><\/p>\n

\"Bv0YTWfIcAAcXJS.jpg_large\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Has your take on the significance of race changed over the years? I\u2019m asking because of a scene that struck me as one of the most powerful moments in the book\u2014the narrator is at a comedy show with a black comedian on stage who berates a white couple in the crowd by saying, \u201cThis shit ain\u2019t for you. Understand? Now get the fuck out! This is our thing!\u201d And the narrator ruefully says, \u201cI wish I\u2019d stood up to the man and asked him a question: \u2018So what exactly is our thing<\/em>?\u2019 \u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n

It\u2019s funny\u2014<\/em>in White Boy Shuffle<\/em> there\u2019s a similar moment. I remember being in London and someone coming to me to talk about White Boy Shuffle <\/em>and he says, I love the scene where Gunnar is getting ready to leave to see some white people and his black friend says, Stay black, nigger, and Gunnar asks, What the fuck does that mean? And his friend says, It means be yourself. That\u2019s not something I agree with, but I understand why someone would take that away from the book. And it\u2019s a very similar construction to that moment in the comedy club in The Sellout<\/em>. There\u2019s still that idea of basic self-examination\u2014Who are you<\/em>? Most people are like, Be yourself, that\u2019s enough\u2014<\/em>but in Slumberland <\/em>there\u2019s a line where the narrator decided he\u2019s not going to tell anyone to \u201cbe themselves,\u201d because most times when people are themselves they act like assholes. Why would I encourage that? It\u2019s an idea I play with and try to reshape from book to book, about our individual responsibility and culpability. There\u2019s something in the shift from White Boy Shuffle <\/em>to Slumberland <\/em>to The Sellout<\/em>\u00a0that shows a progression, but it\u2019s the kind of progression that I completely believe in\u2014things change but remain the same.<\/p>\n

\"51gc1HCCV8L._SY344_BO1,204,203,200_\"<\/a>Has there been a lot of evolution in the psychology of race? In the acknowledgments of The Sellout <\/em>you credit William E. Cross for his essay \u201cThe Negro-to-Black Conversion Experience.\u201d <\/strong><\/p>\n

He first wrote that piece in the seventies, though he\u2019s revised it. This guy\u2019s research was about, for lack of a better term, what a self-actualized black person is, or more specifically a black man<\/em>\u2014not explicitly, it just read very male, but that changes over time. As he updated it over the years, it evolved. It became less tied to gender, less tied to a nationalist sense of black consciousness. It became a little more accepting of other ways of thinking, other ways of seeing the world. It\u2019s really interesting that as the zeitgeist around blackness, around race, changed, his idea of this general racial identity changed, too\u2014the essay became weirdly less<\/em> about race as he adjusted it. It\u2019s really interesting to think about the progress he made in doing this. It probably parallels the way black writers have portrayed themselves and the community over time.<\/p>\n

Do you think white writers write about race in the same way that black writers do? <\/strong><\/p>\n

I think they do. Maybe not explicitly. I\u2019m trying to think of a book\u2014but almost anything will do, really\u2014think of whatever\u2019s number fifteen on the best-seller list now, written by a white writer. It has nothing to do with blackness or Asianness or Latinoness, or whatever. I think that\u2019s as much a comment on race as anything else, whether the writer realizes it or not. And the problem is we don\u2019t<\/em> think about it like that. We just think they\u2019re writing about the common experience, we think it\u2019s just the way the world is.<\/p>\n

And the white writers themselves are not self-aware.<\/strong><\/p>\n

They don\u2019t have to be. It doesn\u2019t matter. I<\/em> realize it. I could be wrong. But this is a lesson I learned a long time ago, in M.F.A. school as a matter of fact. Ginsberg was absent once and Gregory Corso came in. We read our poems\u2014it was me and this poet named Karen, a really good poet, and another poet, Pamela Hughes. And the three of us read our things, and Corso got so mad<\/em>, he just didn\u2019t know how to process what we were doing. Because it wasn\u2019t about shit that he cared about. He kept saying, Where\u2019s your universality? I\u2019d never heard anyone argue that out loud before. I was like, Oh, this motherfucker thinks his is the only way to see the world. And I realized that\u2019s as much about race as anything. I have a terrible habit of listening to sports radio for the half hour I\u2019m in my car. And again, 80\u00a0percent of what they\u2019re talking about is about race in some way\u2014what they talk about, how they talk about it, who they talk about, the language they use when talking about certain players, the words they don\u2019t use. It\u2019s about race, it\u2019s about being white. They don\u2019t know it, and it\u2019s easy to argue that it\u2019s not. But it is.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s so interesting that Corso\u2019s response was anger.<\/strong><\/p>\n

He was so pissed. And we got pissed at him, too. But it was a good thing to learn, about distinctions in how people see things, why people see certain things. I\u2019ve never mapped this out or written a paper about it\u2014but in a strange way it\u2019s similar to how people see plot. I think plot is very subjective. If a book\u2019s about something you care about it, it doesn\u2019t matter what tangents it goes on; as a reader you\u2019re tied into it in a way that feels like plot, that feels like structure. But if the book is about things that are really,\u00a0really<\/em> tangential to how you read, or the things that are in your world, your reaction might be, Oh, there\u2019s no plot here.<\/p>\n

But then there\u2019s another way of looking at it. I remember running into Greg Tate one day, and we were talking about something, just meandering all over the place, and he said, Well, you know niggers can\u2019t stay on the subject anyway. And I was like, Oh, it\u2019s a whole cultural thing now. I don\u2019t necessarily agree with that. But for him, maybe, it\u2019s just how we do.<\/em><\/p>\n

I\u2019ve always loved the sentences in your work, but also the accumulation of sentences\u2014you go through these riffs that feel like they\u2019re very controlled, like the construction of a joke, almost. Do you do a lot of revision to achieve this effect? <\/strong><\/p>\n

All the time. From word to word. It\u2019s all fucking revision. I\u2019m always going back. I\u2019ll start by writing however many pages feel right, say five pages. And then I go back to the top of those five pages and write my way back down. I don\u2019t go forward until I\u2019m really satisfied with that block. It takes a long time. And even after that, I go back and redo the whole block again just to make sure it\u2019s tighter and tighter. So eventually I got to more or less the first draft of the whole thing, which took a while. Then I just thought about it for a long time and didn\u2019t do any work on the page for six months, which is when I met with Colin Dickerman, my editor, and he had some good things to suggest. At that point it was tight enough that I could go back and rip it apart and improve it without losing anything. I could take big-ass chunks out, and still think to myself, Yeah, it\u2019s still working. There were some obvious things I knew he would say.<\/p>\n

Like what?<\/strong><\/p>\n

I knew he was going to say, You need more of these nigger-whispering episodes, like more chances for the reader to see him do it. [In The Sellout, nigger-whispering <\/em>is a kind of improvised talk therapy developed by the narrator\u2019s psychologist father, applied \u201cwhenever some nigger who\u2019d \u2018done lost they motherfucking mind\u2019 needed to be talked down from a tree or freeway overpass precipice.\u201d] And I knew he was going to say, You need more of the father. And I\u2019d think to myself, Nah, it\u2019s not a book about the kid and his father. One thing I did in response to Colin\u2019s prodding was add more to the shooting and the burial and the background. Colin also told me to move all of the book\u2019s action to within the limits of Dickens, which really helped to focus the action. I did try to do more of those little isolated nigger-whispering episodes, but it didn\u2019t make any sense.<\/p>\n

Did Colin say nigger-whispering<\/em>?<\/strong><\/p>\n

That\u2019s a really good question. I don\u2019t know. He probably did, but I couldn\u2019t say that for a fact.<\/p>\n

When you were younger, you read Heller and Vonnegut, and you\u2019ve said they had a strong influence on you. Someone like Vonnegut I always thought was gentle as a satirist and also a humanist\u2014there was something affirming but something also vicious about Vonnegut. Then there\u2019s Chester Himes, whom I loved because he confirmed what I believed, which was that nothing really mattered, just layers of absurdity piled on each other, stacked up. Do you think you write in that tradition at all? <\/strong><\/p>\n

I think you could easily put me there. I\u2019m not attempting to. But you could put me in that lane and I wouldn\u2019t complain that much.<\/p>\n

\"White<\/a>Do you think of yourself as a writer of satire? <\/strong><\/p>\n

No, not at all. In my head it would limit what I could do, how I could write about something. I\u2019m just writing. Some of it\u2019s funny. I\u2019m surprised that everybody keeps calling this a comic novel. I mean, I get it. But it\u2019s an easy way not to talk about anything else. I would better understand it if they talked about it in a hyphenated way, to talk about it as a tragicomic novel, even. There\u2019s comedy in the book, but there\u2019s a bunch of other stuff in there, too. It\u2019s easy just to hide behind the humor, and then you don\u2019t have to talk about anything else. But I definitely don\u2019t think of myself as a satirist. I mean, what is satire? Do you remember that New Yorker <\/em>cover that everyone was saying was satire? Barack and Michelle fist-bumping? That\u2019s not satire to me. It was just a commentary. Just poking fun at somebody doesn\u2019t make something satire. It\u2019s a word everyone throws around a lot. I\u2019m not sure how I define it.<\/p>\n

Do you write with some kind of reader in mind? Do you feel like you\u2019re addressing your reader\u2019s ideas about something, subverting or upending some preconceived idea? <\/strong><\/p>\n

I guess I am. I don\u2019t think about it while I\u2019m writing. I was talking to a friend and she said, Your audience is just a bunch of weirdos. But she meant it in a very positive way. There\u2019s a special kind of weirdo who\u2019s going to appreciate it. At least, I think that\u2019s what she was saying.<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve always felt that\u2014and this is my own narcissism\u2014I am <\/em>actually your target audience. But I don\u2019t feel pandered to. <\/strong><\/p>\n

Because you\u2019re black, the age you are, the world you travel in, the circles you travel in. There was something someone told me a long time ago and it fucked me up for a long time. I was reading a poem, and this woman says, It must be really hard to be you. And I was like, What, why, what are you talking about? And she says, Because everybody, no matter who they are, they only get half of your jokes. And I was like, Oh no, don\u2019t say that! That just messed me up. But I understood exactly what she was saying, and then I just had to let it go.<\/p>\n

In the recent Toni Morrison profile<\/a> in the\u00a0New York Times<\/em>, Morrison commented that she\u2019s interested in writing without the \u201cwhite gaze,\u201d without any outside pressure about what her books should be or how they should feel. Do you ever feel any pressure around your writing? For example, do you ever feel any sense that you need to have a more familiar structure to your novels? <\/strong><\/p>\n

No, no, no. It\u2019s almost like how a black sitcom will have a completely useless white character, or a white sitcom will have a completely useless black character, to ground the audiences in something, to make sure that in that weird panorama, the viewer is like, Oh, here\u2019s where I fit in. I don\u2019t think I do that at all. I never even talk about it. I\u2019ve been having all these conversations about contemporary books, and what\u2019s so weird is that these books are structured for a certain target audience\u2014mostly white liberal intellectuals, who respond really positively to them. But the books are written for them! Which is absolutely okay. No one talks about that. It\u2019s just like, Oh, all right, that\u2019s fine. And those books get a certain kind of attention. I\u2019ll see it and think, That feels like pandering\u2014but that\u2019s just who these people want to talk to, which is absolutely fine. I hope I\u2019m not doing that. I don\u2019t think I\u2019m doing that.<\/p>\n

I don\u2019t know if I consciously think I don\u2019t want that white gaze, although I know what you mean. I hope that in my audience of weirdos, there\u2019s some of those people of all races. As people of color, as black people, we all have to have this ability to speak these different languages and make these different references\u2014we don\u2019t have <\/em>to have it, but it helps. So for me, it\u2019s still all in one big thing, and these cultures overlap more than they ever have. You know, in the 1970s people wanted this \u201cauthentic angry\u201d stuff that was still directed at them but in a weird I-want-to-slit-your-throat way. I\u2019m not saying those people aren\u2019t a part of my audience. I\u2019m just yelling. I know their ears will hear. But I\u2019m hoping there are a ton of ears out there that hear. I\u2019m trying not to yell in one direction, even though I can\u2019t really help but to do that.<\/p>\n

\"51SF4PBn61L\"<\/a>We\u2019ve talked before about how some writers don\u2019t go to a place where they put themselves at risk. Do you put yourself into positions where you feel some kind of fear or true risk as you\u2019re writing? <\/strong><\/p>\n

Yeah, I try to a little bit. Part of that fear just comes from criticizing shit that I really like, that I really respect on some level\u2014like when I criticize the Civil Rights Movement. Not criticizing, but teasing and parsing out certain aspects of it. I mean, how can you not have respect for the Civil Rights Movement? So there\u2019s a risk in that. There\u2019s the risk of exposing shit about myself that I don\u2019t want anybody to know, but at the same time I have to try to do that. Sometimes the humor is a way to mask all that, so the reader won\u2019t know that what I\u2019m writing about is me, or figure out what side of the argument I stand on. Then there\u2019s a risk in\u00a0just trying to say what you mean to say. And not, as we were talking about, to not speak toward this target group that I know, if I want to, I can please on a certain level and tell them the shit they want to hear. I think I could<\/em> do that if I wanted to, but I also know that I can\u2019t<\/em> do that. I\u2019ve learned that I can\u2019t do that. Writing is a risk no matter what. I don\u2019t think there\u2019s the risk that I\u2019ll drive myself crazy\u2014I\u2019m not going to do a Sylvia Plath. But that\u2019s the subtext of a lot that I write about. There\u2019s a lot of suicide in my work, for instance. These are things that are really personal to me in a real way.<\/p>\n

You do talk about death and loss in your work\u2014and for a comic novel, there\u2019s a strong elegiac quality to The Sellout<\/em>. There\u2019s always some kind of utopia that briefly forms in the mind of your characters in some way. Some kind of heroic mission or utopic possibility that disappears, that falls just out of reach. Sometimes I feel like the humor is a way of\u00a0dealing with those things\u2014loss and failure. Even the idea that nothing ever changes is a suggestion of that existential absurdity we talked about. <\/strong><\/p>\n

I feel like I saw some documentary recently where they were talking about exactly this. How people deal with failure. You never have classes about how to deal with this shit. I remember being in college and my friends were talking about the old hard-work trope, you know\u2014you work hard and your dreams will come true. And my friend said, My dad\u2019s a janitor from Nashville, and he\u2019s worked hard his whole fucking life and none of his dreams have come true. The thing I want is just to write. And hard work goes into all of it. But there are no guarantees. I\u2019ve had the good fortune to have come of age when I did. Writing is a way I can go back and think about what came before. Like in the book where I have Martin Luther King saying, Man, if only I\u2019d tasted how nasty the fucking ice tea was at those segregated lunch counters, I never would\u2019ve started this thing. It comes back to this question\u2014is it worth it? Most people think that it\u2019s been worth it\u2014I mean, obviously it has\u2014but we don\u2019t know how to measure that, still. And we can\u2019t measure it in terms of the kind of guilt we have\u2014some kind of survivor\u2019s guilt.<\/p>\n

The same questions and problems continue to manifest themselves. I remember reading some Aristophanes play where the narrator is basically saying that the other<\/em> playwrights who are so popular\u2014the shit that\u2019s getting all the acclaim\u2014is just worthless commercial stuff. So even that idea is old\u2014I\u2019m real, they\u2019re not real. That flipped me out, but it was also really soothing. All this angst, all this stuff we all feel, is just tied to making art. It\u2019s so ancient. These discussions we\u2019re having, people have been having them for a long time. Not that the work hasn\u2019t changed\u2014of course it has\u2014but these fundamental things are the same. We\u2019re still just humans creating.<\/p>\n

Chris Jackson is executive editor at Spiegel & Grau.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Paul Beatty\u2019s recurring themes\u2014race and tribalism, human psychology, ambition and failure, and the haunting presence of history\u2014are the heavy ones. But he moves through them with light steps, his precisely choreographed Southern California meander broken by exuberant outbursts of buck dancing and the occasional disemboweling. His early poetry and his first novel, The White Boy […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":830,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[907],"tags":[7346,12236,15073,7841,18045,17241,17303,17323,3829,18044],"class_list":["post-85517","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-at-work","tag-aristophanes","tag-audience","tag-ferguson","tag-gregory-corso","tag-nigger-whispering","tag-paul-beatty","tag-race","tag-the-sellout","tag-toni-morrison","tag-william-e-cross"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nPaul Beatty on Satire, Race, and Writing for \u201cWeirdos\u201d<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"The author of \u201cThe Sellout\u201d talks to Chris Jackson.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2015\/05\/07\/our-thing-an-interview-with-paul-beatty\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Our Thing: An Interview with Paul Beatty by Chris Jackson\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"May 7, 2015 \u2013 Paul Beatty\u2019s recurring themes\u2014race and tribalism, human psychology, ambition and failure, and the haunting presence of history\u2014are the heavy ones. 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