In the End, It's All and Always Metaphor: An Interview with Rone Shavers, Author of Silverfish

Micah Zevin: Your book Silverfish reads like an instant dystopian science fiction classic that may have already happened in reality. What are your influences, and what are the origins of this unconventionally told narrative that employs dialogue and interviews with characters as a tool to move the plot forward?

Rone Shavers: In a way, it’s safe to say that Silverfish, like a lot of first novels, was influenced by almost everything I’ve ever read. But if I had to name names, I can cop to the fact that the thumbprints of William Gaddis and Samuel R. Delany—that should be fairly obvious—stain nearly every page, and the work of authors such as Ishmael Reed and Percival Everett loom large, too. I’d also be remiss if I didn’t mention or William Gass, Don Barthelme, or David Markson, especially for the latter authors’ use of fragments and fragmented narratives which nonetheless somehow add up to a whole. To be frank, also add a little Dos Passos into the mix, as well as Lynne Tillman. And frankly, I need to also shout-out Cris Mazza, who taught me equally as much about the hows of novel writing as she did about what it is that actually makes novels successful. Really, I should say that I’ve been stylistically influenced by a lot of male writers, yes, but reading and learning from women writers is what best taught me how writers actually think, make, and do, especially in terms of narrative economy and compression. I could go on about it, but instead I think it better to be clear, direct, and maybe even offensively assertive: read more fucking women writers! And read more BIPOC authors, too! In that vein, I wish I could claim Renee Gladman as somehow having an influence, but I came to her work well after my book was done. Also, a whole lot of people whom I absolutely trust have made comparisons between my book and Alexis Pauline Gumbs’ M Archive, but alas, I’ve yet to read Gumbs’ very well-acclaimed work. I’m not ashamed to admit that I’m scared it might be better, and better thought out, than my own.

Still, that said, I also have to admit that I was as much influenced by music (and by both examples and the idea of the musicality of language) as I was by past literary production. In fact, there’s an almost criminally under-regarded American BIPOC author by the name of Ricardo Cortez Cruz who published several very interesting books in the 1990s (Five Days of Bleeding is one title; the name is an intentional riff on a Linton Kwesi Johnson song), and one can basically draw a line between his work and my own, especially in terms of how we both re/appropriate song lyrics as a means of signifying, doubling, and magnifying-meaning. His approach probably definitely floated around in my subconscious for a while. So yeah, really, music and the treatment of music as a form of text, as just another language, also played a part in how I conceived of the work. 

With that said, it’s somewhat hard to describe the novel’s origins; there is no origin. As Ishmael Reed or James Weldon Johnson would say, Silverfish “jes grew.” That is to say, all I did was think about the social conditions inherent to late capitalism—its avatars, its neoliberal posturing, its love of technological advancement as a means of geopolitical hegemony, etc.—and take things to their logical extreme. People keep saying how weirdly prescient the novel is, but that’s only because it reflects a future we’ve already chosen to inhabit. When everything becomes thought of and treated as a commodity that can be bought, sold, marketed or traded, everything including one’s opinion or identity (and yeah, I’m talking about all the social media “influencers” out there), then the future presented in the novel reflects our present reality; we live in a future that’s already here.

MZ: What does the character Sergeant Clayton symbolize or represent in this society totally ruled by the DOW, labelling anyone else as primitive and outside of society if they don’t or can’t follow the rules or strive to reach its heights in spite of their likely deaths?

RS: I’m afraid I don’t think that much about symbolism or write with specific symbols in mind, so for me, Clayton doesn’t symbolize anything other than what he is. He’s just someone trying to live the life he wants to live but finds himself beholden to (although hampered may be a better way to put it) social forces well beyond his control. If anything, Clayton is a bit cleverer than most, because he understands that the social system doesn’t work, not at least for people like him. Yet, while he’s well aware of the system’s flaws, he doesn’t know how to get around them. The way the world of Silverfish is set up, it’s set up so that he can’t get around them. At the very least, it’s set up in a way that makes it extraordinarily difficult to see or even think of a way around them. That’s a problem in Clayton’s world, but it’s also a contemporary problem, too. As the underappreciated French speculative writer Al Thusser pointed out in his groundbreaking work, “ISA,” capitalism is an ideology, and like any ideology, capitalism interpellates. And it’s hard, if almost impossible, to see your way outside of something when you’re interpellated by it. I’m paraphrasing one of his main themes, of course, but you get the gist. In Clayton’s world as in our own, we’re taught to neither question nor think too deeply, and instead are taught to act and react in ways that deflect or detract from any notion of real, radical, life-altering change. We can’t conceive of an “outside” of commodity capitalism because it’s totalizing. It’s our worldview and therefore there is no outside of it. And even when we imagine or actually do fight against it, our attempts are weaker than weak. I mean, how many of us are willing to give up our laptops and Instagram feeds and broadband access so that dozens a day (if not an exponential amount more) don’t suffer for our need of Coltan? How many would shudder a moment before they shrugged it off and opted to intentionally forget (what’s Coltan again?) about the whole thing before deliberately pulling out their phone in order to focus on something else? That, my friend, is interpellation. That’s how interpellation into a commodity capitalist system works. So no, Clayton’s not a symbol. He’s a subject. 

MZ: What’s the purpose of the Angel and the silverfish in bringing down a fragile world controlled and run by financial dealings that clearly seems to criminalize or penalize empathy, personal feelings and language?

RS: If you believe empathy and a belief in the dogged accumulation of wealth are compatible, especially within a neo-liberal capitalist system, then boy, have I got an exciting investment opportunity for you! All to say that Angels and silverfish are the products of a totalizing system that seeks to limit how those within it are capable of responding to (or even effecting change within) it. In other words, the “purpose” of the angels and silverfish are evident fairly early on in the book. The Angels destroy people, the silverfish destroy things. They do so because whatever is destroyed can then be rebuilt (in terms of things), or replaced (in terms of people). Destruction as a way to effect change, even if it’s unneeded or unwanted; planned destruction as an excuse, a necessary rationale for “growth”.

I know it sounds farfetched, but it’s really something that happens. Again, it’s just a neo-liberal, market-based solution taken to its logical conclusion. For example, here’s just one way this manner of destruction-as-growth plays out: If, say, you own a factory and you have a glut of non-unionized, low-wage workers doing jobs that require little training or skills, and one day something happens which threatens your factory’s profits, well then, one of the easiest ways to turn things around and ensure your costs stay low is by simply eliminating or replacing your workforce. And you’ve more likely to want to replace your workforce if there is pressure or talk of having increase their wages. To the owner, the worker’s wages are yet another expense, and the worker becomes not a person, but a symbol of that increasingly burdensome, frustrating, maddening expense. Thus, the best way to keep costs down in your factory is to hit the reset button by getting a whole new set of workers (or even better, machines—they don’t take breaks or talk back, and inanimate things certainly don’t ask for a living wage), because they’ll do the same job at what you can downwardly define as either a stagnant (or lower, if you can manipulate or misinform them enough, or well, just relocate the factory altogether) or a starter, “entry-level” wage. This happens all the time, and it destroys sympathy and empathy—yes, feelings—as much as it does families, all in the name of financial growth, aka, profit. I say that because even you, Mr. factory-owner Micah, even you, regardless of your sentiments and possible sympathy towards your workers, you can be forced to lay off your workforce. And especially if your factory is a publicly-traded entity or you have business partners who don’t feel the same way as you, if your partners or enough shareholders accuse you of deliberately denying them profit, well then, you can be sued and your ownership taken away and given to someone else. There are even some instances in which one is legally bound to turn a profit, with little regard to resulting emotional impact or cost. So then, basically, what I’m saying is capitalism has little room for feelings, save for those feelings which motivate people towards more accumulation, such as greed, avarice, and schadenfreude.

MZ: How is this story tied to the happenings in our present world’s troubles?

RS: See my response(s) to the question(s) above, as well as below.

MZ: In Chapter V, Dr Beagel’s ‘reprogramming of the Angel and its language speaks to the notion of repression of language, our human language as well as self. Can you elaborate on this and the purpose of the directions he plants in the Angel’s mind?

RS: What’s a “human” language? How does human language differ from a means of communication such as whale songs? Or birdsong? How does human prepositional usage differ from an ant’s use of complex movements to convey accurate and often extremely vital information? In other words, what, precisely, is language, and how do you classify it? What are the particular triggers that allow you to recognize a language as language? And yeah, these questions may come across as somewhat arch or trite, but I’m dead serious when I ask them. We may think of language as simply human (or species) vocalization that conveys clearly-defined sets and subsets of information, but then, what are doing when we hum or sing? For example, if I were to chant “fa la-la-lala,” or “scooby dee-do-bop boo,” from what globally-recognized language do those phrases spring from? It’s all to say that we yoke the concept of language together with what should be properly called rhetoric and rhetorical strategies, when those things are actually quite very different. (And yes, there’s even a whole heap of issues that need to be unpacked regarding the very idea of “our”—let alone “human”—language, but that’s a can of worms best left tightly sealed for now.)

But still, yeah. While I could kick these tires all day, it may just be better to say that rather than language, there is something more important to focus on, especially in terms of ways of intellectually framing the novel. More than the concept of language, one should focus on the concept of metaphor. Specifically, the use, misuse, and purpose of metaphor as a driving force in the work—even on a meta-level—because in the novel, “language” itself functions as a sort of metaphor: it becomes a way of ordering, organizing, creating, and reconceiving of the world. All to say that the book contains few overt symbols, but it does have an awful lot of stand-ins, things that represent something other than just themselves. One of the great contradictions of the society portrayed in Silverfish is that it’s one that attempts to enforce a type of communication that avoids all types of ill- or miscommunication, yet also totally relies on verbal indirection and misdirection. Nearly every conversation contains a word or a phrase serves as a stand-in for something else. Their attempts to avoid metaphor can only be done by speaking (and thinking) metaphorically, and it’s something the Angel figures it out halfway through: Their world, the ordering of it, the organization of it, even their perception of it, everything, it’s not some mild euphemism, it’s all one big, essential, extremely uncomfortable metaphor. Then again, in the end, it’s all and always metaphor, isn’t it? Because well, isn’t that what it means to be human? Seriously, asking for a friend…

MZ: Nerd question: Are Angel’s partly human or are they purely androids with implanted memories and information that can be altered or manipulated?

RS: Nerd answer: The Angels are human-based, cybernetic organisms; thus, they’re human. It’s mentioned in the text that Angels can be stripped down to their “chassis,”—that is, their organic parts (which are those things solely needed to maintain optimal brain functionality and individualized cerebral output: heart, lungs, and a few other equally as important squishy bits), so yes, Angels are partly human. But note that this is a world where cybernetic implants are not that uncommon. The combat associates, for example, have subcutaneous receivers and various other electronic “imbeds,” and if a silverfish detects an imbed, a silverfish will go after it and eat it. That’s what makes people so afraid of them.  

That said, as for your questions about memory, I was lucky enough to read Jean-Claude Forest’s Barbarella when I was young, and there’s a famous line in it that’s always stayed with me, if solely for its conceptual fecundity. In fact, I liked the line so much that I thematically alluded to it, if not outright included it in my own book. The line is, “An angel has no memory.” And when you think about what that means, the implications are totally wonderful, an almost limitless philosophical playground in which to explore. I mean, a big part of what forms our sense of self, as well as our moral and ethical core, is our collective and individual memory. But what would things look like if memory wasn’t there? How would we act and respond to events? In what strange, new, or staid ways would we think and react? The answers are as myriad as they are fascinating… and well beyond the scope of this one, small book. 

MZ: I dig the invented terms and phrases such as “species agnostic,” “webblind” and “wetworked.” How did you come up with this language? What influenced you?

RS: What influenced me? Science! Good old-fashioned, hardcore, word-nerd type, imaginary, made-up science! I mean, geez, show me the real-world ship that has matter transporters or can fire a photon torpedo! (Although to be fair, the subtle, referential elegance of “Heisenberg couplings” being essential to warp drive technology earns all the special merits. Kudos to the writer who thought up that one!) What I mean is part of the writer’s job, especially when writing about an imagined, possible future, instead of an improbable one, is to use words that are readily available as a means of describing what everyone either already knows or is quite capable of understanding through contemporary context. All to say that while I’m wary of any hard and fast rule, when writing sci-fi, a good rule of thumb is to invent new words only when absolutely necessary. The invented terms and phrases that I use in the novel are really just extensions—one-word summations, actually—of how we currently conceive of things.

That said, I’d be lying if I didn’t admit that I was also thinking about the concept of networks and the various forms of networks already present in the world. By way of example, and even to flesh out the three terms that you cite, there’s stuff like this (and what the heck; for shits and giggles, let’s define them in reverse order):

1. “Wetworked” came to me because most combat associates have intra- and internet-ready implants embedded just under their skin, thus their network capability, as well as their relation to their cybernetic devices, is biological, bloody, messy, sloppy, “wet.” Perhaps the most basic way to say it is that during the time of the novel, implants have replaced internet-accessing cell phones. The data networks still are there, only now you carry them in your body. Therefore, one acknowledges that the global network of information-as-capital exchange is a part of you; it’s in you. It’s not a cold, sterile “net,” it’s wet. There’s also another referential aspect to the term wetworked, but I won’t say what it is. An author has to keep some secrets, and in each life, there are mysteries.

2. Part of the Angel’s consciousness is housed on the internet, aka, the world wide web, aka, a network of information. I don’t go into great detail about it in the novel—it wasn’t necessary to the plot—but part of why people say that Angels can’t die is because if placed under extreme duress, they can simply shunt their consciousness from server to server, meaning that they can just travel the web, extracting, collating, and recombining information into new and novel patterns (in the book I call this process “spooling”). It’s what makes Angels so effective at seeing, knowing, and identifying things that other people can’t. Therefore, I thought up “webblind” to refer to those instances when an Angel—or anyone else, really—has somehow been cut off from the internet. With no access to information, it’s as if they’re literally blind to the events going on in the larger world. And given that the world of Silverfish is so relentlessly fast-paced, being webblind is a cause of great stress and anxiety. I guess a contemporary way to describe it would be if I were to ask you to imagine if you lost your smart phone, then tell you that whatever sense of anxiety and disconnectedness you may feel for having lost it, increase those feelings exponentially.  

3. As for “species agnostic,” even a first-grader can tell you that we exist within a network of living things, so…so well, we’re in the midst of a global pandemic, and what we’re actually experiencing every day is a species agnostic organism going through its motions. That is, the novel COVID-19 coronavirus has infected big cats, bats, humans, pangolins, if I’m correct the occasional dog, minks, domestic housecats, and about a dozen other species we haven’t discovered so far because we really haven’t been looking that hard for it in anything other than people. In other words, I used the phrase “species agnostic” because there are organisms such as viruses and microbes that really don’t care one whit what species you are; what matters more to them is their propagation and survival. If they can live and breed in the wet and possibly warm protein sack that is your species, then so be it. In short, the planetary network of living things is more than just the mammalian animal kingdom, and we’d be wise to remember it.

MZ: What makes this novel experimental and what is your opinion of the current landscape of experimental writing whether it is science fiction or other genres?

RS: What makes this novel “experimental” is that I’m completely uninterested in overinflated, supposedly “novelistic” concerns such as plot, characterization, or a reader’s emotional response to the work. All of it bores me. (And as an aside, the inane privileging of someone “feeling,” rather than thinking, while reading fiction has been the cause of many a writer’s and reader’s undoing.) If anything, I’m more of a Formalist. Aesthetically, I’m likely what you could call a “New Formalist,” but I digress….

What makes this novel experimental is that it doesn’t attempt to tell a conventional tale in a conventional way. That’s about it. (But of course, one should realize that the word “experimental” is often pejoratively used by publishers to indicate that a book has no mainstream commercial appeal. That wasn’t the case with Clash Books, my publishers, but a lot of the really big publishing houses still label and attempt to discredit books and authors through the use of a “Scarlet E”.) Still, to get at the root of your question, the one regarding the current landscape of experimental writing, I must say that my use of the term to describe the novel is quite deliberate. I chose to purposely call the book experimental because when it’s not used as a pejorative, the term experimental also unfortunately gets used in a very racialized way.

I know I’m going to stir up a whole hornet’s nest here, but BIPOC work that takes informed, literary risks in terms of either its form or its content often gets read and treated as something separate, something outside of the standard (basically, cis white male) tradition of literary fiction that tests the boundaries of narrative and novelistic conventions. Fiction by BIPOC authors is too often said to represent some sort of oral or socio-cultural tradition—it’s read as an expression of one’s particular ethnicity—instead of being read and treated as a literary object, and that’s just flat-out wrong. Of course, a book can do both things simultaneously, but you wouldn’t know it, at least not based upon how an experimental BIPOC work is positioned in both the literary and cultural landscape by both critics and PR people alike. That’s to say, with a few notable exceptions, the category of experimental literary fiction often gets treated as the last bastion of white intellectual activity, complete with its own methods of cultural and aesthetic policing. And if you don’t believe me, here’s just one example of how it all plays out, phrased in the form of a query: How many postmodern BIPOC authors can you name off the top of your head who get mentioned in academic discussions and writings on literary postmodernism? I bet the answer is not that many. In reality there are quite a lot of BIPOC postmodernists (and experimentalists—the two categories aren’t mutually exclusive), but part of the problem is that they never get labeled as such. Instead, they’re categorized by dint of their race, and in that way get recognized as something other than what they are, at least in terms of aesthetic groupings and categorization. To rephrase all of the above in a much more provocative fashion, it’s extremely tough for BIPOC authors to create experimental work that gets solely judged according to an aesthetic standard, mainly because of a deep-seated expectation that the work must be solely a reflection of one’s social (racial, gender, etc.) background instead of one’s literary background. In fact, the work is judged to have merit only according to how closely it hews, and in many cases, reaffirms preconceived ideas of what it means to belong to a specific social, racial, or cultural background. And when you’re trying to make work that does indeed depend upon the reader having at least a modicum of literary awareness as well as cultural awareness, you get doubly-marginalized, and that absolutely sucks. Basically, what I’m detailing is the same damning conundrum that Percival Everett wrote about in his aesthetically stellar and infamous work, Erasure—which was published 20 years ago! But unfortunately, the same problem still holds true today. 

MZ: I often hear the words ‘elegiac,” ‘prophecy’ and ‘incantation or conjuring’ used when describing or reading sci-fi novels or stories. How do these terms apply to this book?

RS: To be honest, I don’t really know if they do. I didn’t set out to write or do any of those things. In fact, it’s quite the opposite. I was more concerned with questions and concepts of language and literary form than I was attempting to be prophetic. Really, I’d like to turn the question around, and instead ask you (and by extension, the novel’s reader), Would you apply the above terms to my book, and if so, why? In what particular manner? What is it about Silverfish that lends itself so easily to these descriptors? Better yet, what is it about the novel that doesn’t match the terms? What was it about Silverfish that surprised you?

MZ: In conclusion I really enjoyed and was fascinated by this book and would read it over and over to find clues and details I have missed. It reminds me of the best of J.G. Ballard, Asimov, Bradbury and Octavia Butler. How did you apply both past and present history to inform your work, which expresses many ideas related to class, technology, good and bad? What do you see in your writing future that you are ready to talk about?

RS: Well, I’m gonna say this is an instance where the question answers itself, in that I applied both past and present history to inform my work, as well as the ideas in it. It wasn’t that hard to do, really, and hopefully this interview explains several of the whys and how I did what I did, without straying too far afield.

That said, in terms of what I’m gonna do next (or what I’m writing now), well, lately I’ve been taking the idea of working in fragments to its logical conclusion by writing short prose works that resist easy narrative coherence. Basically, I’m writing crônicas. For those who don’t know, crônicas are a Lusophone literary form that perhaps can best be described as a combination of diary, observational flash fiction, and prose poetry. They don’t have to add up to highlight or illustrate a simple, unified narrative or meaning of any particular sort, and I’ve been having lots of fun writing these while ideas gestate for my next longer work. In fact, I have a chapbook of crônicas coming out in about six weeks through Magnificent Field Press, so if others want to get a more concrete idea of what I’ve been doing or what my crônicas are like, they’ll have an opportunity to read a collected volume containing a bunch of them. Other than that, I can’t talk too much about my future projects, except to say that in my next book-length work, themes and issues centered around the economy and the letter K will likely play a very significant role. For now, that’s about all I can say about it.