Energy, Entropy, and the Sunsphere: An Interview with Andrew Farkas

Andrew Farkas’ story collection Sunsphere is a funhouse of energy and potential energy revolving around the Sunsphere, a former World’s Fair tower that is now a derelict tourist attraction in Knoxville, Tennessee and to which Farkas brings iconic status. These nine stories engage and circle the mysteries of human relationship, the fine points of entropy, and the classic automotive joys of the Mercury Comet, among many other things. I was motivated to talk with Andrew because he and I share an affinity for story collections with broad scope and ambition.

Ron MacLean: What is the origin story or creation myth of this collection called Sunsphere?

Andy Farkas: In 2002, I was accepted to the University of Tennessee’s M.A. program in English. Beforehand, I’d never been to Knoxville and knew nothing about it. When I arrived, wandering through the city, I ended up seeing the Sunsphere for the first time. Since it’s kind of down in a little valley, this World’s Fair tower isn’t the imposing, awe-inspiring structure that you’d expect (like the Eiffel Tower or the Space Needle). Instead, it’s honestly kind of ugly and dwarfed by the buildings up on top of the hill. At the time, the park surrounding it was a wreck because it was at that stage of remodeling that makes me think it’s all been a lie, we’re not actually trying to fix anything, we’re just having fun breaking things. Looking at this kind of ugly, not particularly awe-inspiring structure, I immediately knew that I liked it more than any other World’s Fair tower because it seemed like a parody of all of them. And so I began doing research on the Sunsphere and the 1982 World’s Fair. Once I learned that the theme for that exposition was energy, I instantly connected that to the way the place looked now (having reached entropy), which led to me researching energy, entropy, and quantum physics (with a big thank you to my friend, Jim Westlake, for helping me out with that research). The stories mostly sprang from there.

MacLean: In Sunsphere, the narrative grounding is very different from story to story — with “Do Kids in California Dream of North Carolina?” or “Everything Under the Sunsphere” at one end of the spectrum, and “I Don’t Know Why” or “No Tomorrow” at another. Others fall in between. What for you is the core of a story? The fulcrum on which it balances, the nucleus that gives it energy? And how do you find/build/grow what surrounds it?

Farkas: Experimental work can be more idea-based, so I normally start with an idea instead of, say, a character or situation. “Do Kids in California Dream of North Carolina?” started with the idea of potential energy. There’s a ton of potential energy all throughout the story. The problem for Trevor is that he thinks there’s no way to access that energy because everything he tried in the past led to ruin. Now, whereas this story is a little more realist, I still started with an idea (potential energy) then expanded the idea (potential energy that can’t be accessed). So, I didn’t decide I wanted to write a more conventional story, I just followed where the idea took me. “I Don’t Know Why” is the same. Entropy is all throughout Sunsphere, but “I Don’t Know Why” is the entropy story. I knew I wanted to pack in as much entropy as possible. That led to the post-apocalyptic city of Knoxville being filled with white noise (for communication entropy) and chaos (the Sunsphere being deconstructed, the city impossible to navigate). Since it seems like everything is truly over, I thought, “Well, it’s the end of the world,” and so I started looking up potential ends to the universe (which is how each section of the story ended up with a subtitle that describes a different end to the universe). From the original idea, then, everything else springs. Since I’m not working in realism, I have no problem creating characters who represent ideas themselves. Though I would say normally these idea-characters of mine are critiques of the ways we turn others into paper cutouts of themselves, or turn ourselves into two dimensional robots.

MacLean: I’m smitten with Kat and Trevor from “Do Kids in California Dream of North Carolina?” What would Kat say about Los Angeles? What’s her take on “No Tomorrow?” What would Trevor say about Knoxville? Did he ever get confused by the many names for a single street?

Farkas: Kat needs to keep moving, so she’d probably kick the driver out of the Mercury Comet in “No Tomorrow” because he’s going too slow. And plus, he’s in Knoxville, and she’d definitely rather be in Los Angeles, weaving in and out of traffic, finding the next power source. When we see her in “Do Kids in California,” though, she’s burned out because she was trying to channel all of the energy of not just L.A., but all of California at once.

Trevor might be attracted to Knoxville because of the Sunsphere, which he could end up seeing as the center of energy he’s looking for. As for a guy like him, he wouldn’t get confused by the street names because he’d convince everyone else to call the streets by the names he uses. Gene, from “Everything Under the Sunsphere,” however, can’t even convince himself what they should be called.

MacLean: What is an example of an uplifting, aphoristic billboard that would describe your best life?

Farkas: When I wrote Sunsphere, I was sitting between two very large pieces of paper, each with a very small sentence printed in the center of them, that came from the Cincinnati Contemporary Arts Center. One said, “Somewhere better than this place,” while the other said, “Nowhere better than this place.” I think that space in between fits me no matter where I am. On the other hand, I also thought of a movie poster for Being John Malkovich (1999) that I had on my wall for a long time. It said, “Ever want to be someone else? Now you can.” I feel like writing, whenever it’s going well, allows me to be someone else.

MacLean: What makes an Andrew Farkas story a story?

Farkas: Since my stories are rarely about plot, I instead look for when the material has reached critical mass (as Michael Martone puts it). This is particularly the case in a piece like, “The Physics of the Bottomless Pit.” There are lots of different sections, most of which don’t connect to each other, except that they take place in a bottomless pit, or are about the bottomless pit. Once I build up all of this material, I look for the moment when it feels like I’ve explored this idea enough. Call it the Goldilocks moment. But even though there’s no real beginning-middle-end, when the story’s over, you have that satisfied sensation you get at the end of a Freytagian piece. The difference is, instead of riding the rollercoaster, you’ve been let loose in the funhouse and experienced all there was to experience there. If I’ve done my job, you look forward to going through the funhouse again.

MacLean: What makes a story an Andrew Farkas story?

Farkas: Definitely the voice. People who know me and who’ve read my work always say that they can hear my voice when they’re reading something I’ve written. People who don’t know me, but have read my writing, when they meet me, they always seem to say I sound like my writing. I think that happens for two reasons: 1) I am not at all a fan of “invisible style,” writing that works hard to make you forget about it so you only focus on the plot or characters. Plot and characters are interesting, but I want people to think about the language and the voice too. 2) When I’m writing, I constantly read my work out-loud. It isn’t done to me until I like the way it sounds from beginning to end. If I trip up at all while reading, I know I need to rewrite a sentence or a section.

MacLean: I am deeply concerned about Mr. Yang from “The City of the Sunsphere.” At this writing, what is Mr. Yang’s condition, and/or his proximity to James Agee, expressed in terms of Knoxville City Hospital room numbers?

Farkas: 42

MacLean: Can we discuss Freytag’s triangle and the obsession with classic story structure? In particular, can we find a way to undermine its dominance?

Farkas: I think the way you undermine Freytag’s dominance is by introducing people to work that doesn’t follow the triangle and hope it clicks with them. That’s what happened to me. When I was an undergrad, I had to read Samuel Beckett’s Endgame (1957). At the time, I hated it. I also watched Jim Jarmusch’s Dead Man (1995). I hated that too. But I’d been exposed to them. And they stuck with me. I found myself thinking about them, telling other people about them (usually how much I couldn’t stand them, though they perhaps were thinking that I, you know, doth protest too much), until finally I just had this compulsion to go back to them. Now, I love both works. And I’m really into work like Dead Man and Endgame (and pieces that fit into this outsider category). I expose my students to this kind of art all the time. One of the best compliments I ever received about my teaching was when one of my students asked if all the movies in the class were going to be weird, and before I could answer another student, who’d had me before, said, “Everything you read or watch in an Andy class is weird. But then you discuss it afterwards and it doesn’t seem so weird anymore.”

MacLean: What is your perihelion?

Farkas: Closer than you think.

MacLean: Given that your stories are structured non-traditionally, on what basis do you revise, and how do you know when a “story” is “finished”?

Farkas: Revision is actually my favorite part of writing. The most difficult thing for me to do is look at a blank page. So, at the beginning, I hate whatever it is that I’m writing because it doesn’t conform to how I see or hear the piece in my head. The worst thing for me to do, then, is to revise along the way. Unfortunately, all too often I do just that. At some point, however, I finally have to pound on my keyboard (I write on a computer mostly, with some handwritten notes on the side) until I have as many of the ideas out on the page as possible. That draft is horrid. I then print that draft out and pound on the keyboard while looking at the horrid draft, rewriting and normally adding more (though sometimes subtracting, but I find it’s mostly adding for me). I keep doing this until I get to the point where all I have to do is think about how to craft the sentences. This is my favorite part because the piece mostly looks the way I want it to look, it just doesn’t sound the way I want it to sound yet. I guess it’s rather like sculpting, if sculptors first had to collect the atoms to make marble, then they made a block of marble, and then they made the statue. I’m only exaggerating a little there. I then know the story is finished when I read through and everything sounds exactly right. Ideas and style/language are more important to me, I suppose, than plot and suspense. It’s probably no surprise that, in a culture full of people saying, “No spoilers,” I say, “Give me all the spoilers now and don’t dally.”

MacLean: “There is a way to battle the torrid world, a way to understand it. But somehow, I’m on the outside.” This line, from “Everything Under the Sunsphere,” is one of the most moving things I’ve read in a while. Why? And what is the way, for us hungry readers?

Farkas: At one point in “Everything Under,” Gene is trying to get into a shindig and he can’t find the way in. Later, when he’s describing this experience, he says he isn’t sure if he wants to be on the inside or stay on the outside. So not only is he alienated throughout the story, he has no idea what he wants. He blames the torrid world for this because as you raise the heat in a system you create more disorder. Gene thinks if the world were completely organized, then he’d know what he wants. This, of course, will never happen. But since Gene is constantly trapped in between, he’s not only alienated from society, he’s alienated from himself. Strangely, this makes it so he can battle the torrid world because the way to battle the torrid world is to be outside of everything. He’s in the ideal position, but can’t see it because he’s bought into the idea that alienation is bad. I think that’s why you find that sentence to be so moving. It’s tragic that Gene can’t see what position he has and use it for something because, in a lot of ways, the outsider is often seen as a loser. With this discussion, I also wonder if Gene might represent the position of narrative art that isn’t quite conventional.

MacLean: What is the most dangerous condition a human can contract through (accidental) contact with the Sunsphere?

Farkas: You might get proselytized by the Cult of the Great Golden Microphone. If you allow yourself to be blessed by the adherents, you will end up covered in glitter.

MacLean: What are you working on next?

Farkas: Right now, I’m working on a collection of essays called The Great Indoorsman. In each piece, I explore some indoors space (since I’m not outdoorsy at all), but I also connect my experience to something in the world. For instance, my essay, “Filk,” that appeared in The Iowa Review, is about old video rental stores, but it’s also about filk music (folk music inspired by the science fiction, fantasy, and/or horror genres) and the cult film Dark Star (1974). Just recently, 3:AM Magazine published “Wait Here?” an essay that’s a metaphysical investigation of waiting rooms.

Strange Ballet On the Page

All show, no tell. That’s the best way I can think to describe Jean-Philippe Toussaint’s work. Terrence Malick adapting Beckett. Extreme minimalism. Delicate maximalism. Strange ballet on the page.

I’m recommending Reticence here, but all show, no tell could easily be said of the Parisian Belgian’s work as a whole. Reticence, published in France in 1991 and just now being issued in English by Dalkey Archive, doesn’t stray greatly from the more recently notable Running Away and The Truth About Marie. Like those works, the prose is more pacing than plot, more action than emotion, more supposition than exposition. Drop a Toussaint novel into a writing workshop and show your students how to crack a table into rational and emotional halves.

The “story” of Reticence is quite simple. Our narrator and his young son (still sleeps in a crib, no language or mother) spend a few nights in a small fishing village, the idea being to visit a writer friend named Biaggi, who keeps a house there. Something holds our hero back, though. An “initial reticence” takes over, so consuming he can’t sleep, and in the midst of this reticence he becomes convinced Biaggi knows he’s in town. In fact, he’s convinced Biaggi is following him, even having him watched by the proprietor of the hotel.

By nights, our hero sneaks about the village, leaving his son to sleep alone. Struggling with misgivings about seeing a friend is apparently a greater motivator than fear of leaving his infant son. In one of his first insomniac outings, our hero spies in the night water a dead cat floating with a piece of fishing line out its mouth:

“The way it was floating it was impossible to see its face, and it was only when the current caused its body to pivot slightly that I saw it had a fish head in its mouth, from which a broken bit of fishing line protruded a couple of inches. And it was precisely this piece of line that made me think later in the evening — at the time I’d just looked at it without giving it too much thought — that the cat had been murdered.”

So much depends upon a murdered cat. With our hero full of questions, the answers he accepts are never quite waterproof enough for us readers to accept. So cycles of crisis-conflict-climax repeat again and again and again, and suspense piles and piles and piles, no dramatic beat ever completely resolved:

“How else to explain the fragment of fishing line in its mouth? How could such a tough and resistant bit of line be cut by the animal itself? And how, supposing it had indeed managed to cut the line, to explain the presence of a trolling line just a few feet from the side of the pier when it should have been out at sea anywhere from thirty to sixty feet underwater? Why, above all, was the end of the line cut so cleanly, as if with a knife, if it’s not because once the cat had been caught in the trap that Biaggi had set the night before — because Biaggi was in the village, I was now sure of it. . . .”

The human mind is only half rational. Why not visit his friend? Because he doesn’t feel like it. Why doesn’t he feel like it? Because he’s reticent. Why is he reticent? I don’t know, but here’s a book about what reticence can drive a man to do. And this makes Reticence, like all of Toussaint’s books, beautifully unsettling, and happily irrational. Running into a friend may as well be a life and death affair. And really, “giving it too much thought” can make anything a matter of life and death. Six degrees of separation from fishing line to murder.

If this were a book of Envy or Sexual Attraction or True Love, no reader would question the rationality or motives behind the narrator (although the better parents in us might judge him for the nighttime walks). What Toussaint shows us in each of his books — showing again and again and again, cinematically — is that nothing need happen for drama still to exist. A literary Malick, Beckett with a bigger prop department. Nothing needs to be told for a reader to want to listen. Great writing does not need a story.

An Elegy for China

This is not an easy novel to pin down, as it strives to push the boundaries of what constitutes a novel.

Part memoir, part metafiction, part travelogue, part ethnographic exploration, part political, part ecological and environmental, part history of the Cultural Revolution, part the realities of post-Mao China, part folklore, part poetry, part mythology, part nightmares and dreams, part songs and revelries, part seduction, part sexual misadventures, part aphorisms, but, mostly, it's a profound meditation on life.

I read it on my Kindle and was highlighting so often that it became almost ridiculous. So many passages that I wish I could keep in my memory forever. I'd love to post them all in here, but there's just too much, so I'll try to pepper in appropriate ones.

The story of four[?] people referred to by using only pronouns. There is I and You, the novel told in first and second person, shifting between these nearly every other chapter, and then there is He and She, who are externals. Within the novel, it's actually stated best, as an entire chapter is, in a way, about the composition of the novel.

"It's just like in the book where you is the reflection of I and he is the back of you, the shadow of a shadow."

And that sentence there sums up the whole of the characters. If you can call it a plot, it is the Quixotic journey of a wanderer, referred to as I, traveling through the mountains of China, talking to the people of small villages, learning their culture, their songs, their dances. The shift into second person recounts a man wandering through the mountains and the women he encounters and the love he feels, even when he doesn't. Eventually these narratives, which are sort of free floated and meandering become indistinguishable as the novel quagmires [in a good way] and all the threads loosen and bleed into one another, somehow making it better, making all of life captured more perfectly, more beautifully, more fully.

There are great passages of love, of what it means, of what it is, of what it wants to be and how it tries to get there. Some beautiful and some heartbreaking and some absurd and some frustrating: it's perfect. It's one of the most true accounts, I think, of what real love is.

"'Don't, don't say anything!' She holds you in her embrace and you silently merge with her body."

That is the summation of sex in the novel. There's no sensationalism, no graphic descriptions of the act, just odd moments of poetry to capture the perfection of the physical manifestations of love.

"'Talk about something,' she urges by your ear. 'What shall I talk about?' 'Anything.'"

And that there, in many ways, is the center of it all, of what love is in this novel. The will to go on, without reason, just to keep talking, to keep holding, to keep being. And much of the novel is just continuing, even after reason's run out.

There is a powerful sense of nature throughout and the narrator often begins with a reflection on the scenery and this reflection collapses inward into his own psychology, where the mountain mist that surrounds him becomes the ghosts of his past and present closing in on him. He begins with a completely external description that gradually just kind of falls and collapses upon him. They're truly beautiful passages and I've highlighted so many that it's too much to sort through at the moment.

Wandering through the mountains alone, there is a great sense of loneliness in the novel and it is in many ways tragic, as it recounts the environmental suicide caused by bad policies since the Cultural Revolution, and then, too, all the displacement and fear caused by it.

It is, in many ways, I think, an elegy for China. The narrator is very frustrated, frustrated to the point of hopelessness, yet he keeps going. He has lost all meaning, and so he searches for it everywhere, endlessly, It is the story of a man who loves his country but has had his country turn its back on him. He is completely alone, in self-exile, partly to save his life from the government, partly because of this loss.

To quote Beckett: "I can't go on, I'll go on."

It is beautiful and it is epic. It is one of those rare novels that tries to capture the totality of life, and, maybe, gets there.

"Everyone has memories they treasure. Not all memories are worth treasuring."