An interview with Greg Jackson

Greg Jackson’s first book, Prodigals, was a short story collection concerned closely with its protagonists and their relationships on a small scale. Reviews praised its intelligence and eye for structure, and in 2017 he was named one of Granta’s Best of Young American Novelists. His debut novel, The Dimensions of a Cave, extrapolated longstanding concerns to a scaled-up narrative, set in and beyond an expansive world, and he talked to Port around its concerns and themes as well as his thinking on the written more broadly.

So how did you start writing?

I guess I had this idea for a little while. I’ve always been a big fan of Conrad, and I had the idea of writing something that was along the lines of Heart of Darkness in some ways, but instead of being kind of this late-19^th-century early-20^th-century version of a trip into what, for the protagonist, was an unknown geography and a mysterious place in the world, I thought maybe a modern take on it would involve a journey into a simulated space, into a technological space – that was the germ of the idea. I’d worked for a while in sort of the mid-late-2000s with an investigative journalist in DC writing books, and a lot of what those books were about, and the work we were doing, was looking at the American so-called war on terror and the response to 9/11 and all of these wars that came out of it: the intelligence efforts, the military adventurism, the scandals and infighting within the government, within the political agencies. I had a background, a bit, in that world and I’d always wanted to figure out something to do with that experience. I guess those ideas kind of came together.

Were you always doing some kind of written work?

Yeah, essentially. When I left – what we call college – when I left university, I spent a year in New York. The magazine n+1 had just started a year or two before, so I worked there and did kind of menial jobs to make money. I wanted to do my own writing, but it’s very hard working multiple jobs, and also when you’re working on a magazine, as you know, you’re spending a lot of time with other people’s work, not as much on your own.

There’s a desire to rush into writing fiction, but when you leave university, you don’t necessarily know that much about the world – apart from inside the walls of academia and educational institutions. So I wanted to spend a little time learning about stuff I didn’t know, working out in the world before just going into fiction. I happened to get this job in DC and I worked there with this investigative journalist for several years and did that, basically, for a while, until I went and got an MFA.

The sense I get reading your fiction is that it’s a tool for understanding questions that you’re generally interested in, from loads of different angles. It often feels like there is some central, not thoroughly looked at question that you’re getting lots of different perspectives on. If you do agree with that characterization, how did you end up there? What is it that appeals to you about it?

I think that’s a very astute observation. Although not one I’ve had myself, so, turning it over in real time thinking about it, I think I’ve always felt a little bit drawn to philosophical thinking, but not quite with the rigidity of academic philosophy, or what we tend to think of as philosophy, and so seeing novels, seeing fiction as a way to get at these deep questions – sometimes more philosophical and abstract, but sometimes also the practical philosophy of how we go about our lives, how we structure them, how we find meaning, I think these are things I think about. I think fiction offers a way to think about them through characters, through dilemmas and contradictions, and opposition between people. In some ways that reflects more of my own sense – not that it’s impossible to come to a conclusion or have your own ideas – but I often feel like I see a lot of value and insight and importance in different ways of looking at things instead of kind of coming to one view and defending that.

I like putting these things in opposition, within the dramatic structure of fictional settings, between characters. I think of novels of ideas in the past, thinking of people like, you know, Dostoevsky or Thomas Mann, or something like this. If you have that kind of open-minded or open-ended view of people and the inherent and timeless tensions and dilemmas between them – it can be more satisfying, I think, to try and map that whole sphere of thought and of contradiction and of opponency rather than trying to argue, as a polemicist might, for one way of seeing things.

That makes sense to me. There are central political questions in the novel, that if you were to spend that amount of time on them in any way that felt definitive, would feel very different and I’m not sure it would do anything that it does in the fiction. How do you feel about the idea of political art – I saw that you were at some point working on a book about this?

I definitely have written a bit about that and thought about that. I think my ideas probably have changed or evolved to some degree. I think maybe all of ours have – I’d actually be interested to know if you feel this way yourself – but I feel like when I was thinking about this initially in around 2014, 2015, that era, so much has changed between then and now, perhaps especially in the American context, at least our political context. It feels like we’ve undergone a very cataclysmic period, not just because of cataclysmic individuals, but because of our entire cultural response and digestion of what’s been happening.

I think the one thing that I’ve always felt, that I still feel now, is that there are different things we mean by political art. The general way that we talk about it now is art that is very personal, that involves aspects of individual life or individual identity, that have a profound connection to what we take to be political questions. I think that that’s a totally fine and reasonable interpretation of political art, and certainly a fine and reasonable and useful thing to do, but I was sort of interested in whether art could actually engage with the substance of politics – what we usually mean when we say politics, which is the ongoing process of governance, of democratic messiness, of how we’re governed, of bureaucracy, of the relationship between the large structures that sit above us as citizens, individuals and the actual life of individuals that both constitute and live within and under those structures. I wanted to see if I could write about politics per se, not about a more traditional individual story that has political valances.

I was thinking a little bit about you know, A novel like All The King’s Men by Robert Penn Warren. It’s very rare that there’s a novel, or at least a very canonically lauded novel, that’s that much about actual politicking, the actual endeavours of politicians – not that my novel is so much like that, but I took that as an interesting challenge, as something that wasn’t done as often. By no means is this to denigrate any other approach, I’m just saying this was my approach to political art.

More of a novel of process than a document, maybe, is the difference between those two approaches?

I think talking about it, this has sort of fallen by the wayside… there was this idea maybe in like the 90s and into the 2000s of the systems novel, which I think is a slightly ambiguous or amorphous term, but I do think what it’s maybe trying to do at its best is trying to unite these different scales on which we live. The scale of our individual daily lives, of course, and then we spend a lot of imaginative time and cognitive time living in the apprehension and comprehension of world events, of things that are happening in politics with politicians, things the government is doing on our behalf, or other governments are doing.

We feel the downstream consequences of this, we feel under the authority of power, and the mistakes and maybe the occasional beneficence of these decisions – but trying to actually do the work, charting how those different scales hang together – that seems to me what the systems novel at its best was trying to do, and that was certainly one of the goals in writing this book. I would emphasize that this is not exactly what I’m planning to devote my life, or all of my fiction to – I’m very interested in smaller scale fiction as well, more daily human life and decisions.

I really loved the story about the storm from your first book, in which I feel like the question is how do you properly convey what you want to convey to someone that’s actually there with you, when you have basically everything at your disposal? It feels like a negotiation of that, and the truest bit to me was the sort of botched joke, where he says ‘You were born in an oil refinery’ and she says ‘Don’t be crude’. Quite a genuine moment out something set up as forced. That made the story click, to me. How does humour help you, as a tool? Because I think that’s also that’s the primary way we attempt to engage with political process questions, through satire, and I’m not necessarily sure that that’s a helpful way of doing it.

I’m so glad you like that story. That’s actually one of the ones I feel most fondly about. Completely In the opposite direction of what we were talking about with the systems novel and large-scale things – there’s part of me that just loves drilling as deep into a single person or two people and these dynamics, just going really deep into that psychological complexity of how we encounter one another, which is probably what we all spend a lot of our time wrapped up in.

I think you’re right that I think satire can go too far, it can be a kind of a balm or a response to a sense of kind of political helplessness or impotence. I love a lot of the satirical representations of politics – I do think in Dimensions of a Cave I channel in this sort of bantering joking, slightly Armando Iannucci, Aaron Sorkin type of thing. I wanted there to be at least that degree of levity, or playfulness or fun because I think that some of the material is kind of weighty and maybe, at points dark. I wanted to balance that. But I certainly didn’t want it to be satire in the sense of – these people are morons everybody’s just completely corrupt or beyond the pale, the lines between heroes and villains are easily drawn. Basically everybody’s a villain unless they’re a kind of bumbling fool – I find that too reductive.

I sort of see humour as a philosophical stance on life. I think it’s the philosophy of doubt and of modesty and of not taking your own convictions So seriously that you can’t entertain other people’s, and give them space to have differences and different opinions.

I think we all have this experience, where we’re in a kind of argument and it gets kind of combative, and ifsomeone can make a joke where you both laugh, you’ve both given permission to let go a little bit, and not be operating in this mode where it’s just you know: I’m right, you’re wrong; I’m the good guy, you’re the bad guy.

I think humour is – maybe this is one of the things we love most about it – kind of a permission to change your mind, and not have to be stuck in or rooted in positions you’ve clung to or you’ve dug yourself in on. It’s a kind of ethos of humility.

I think the one liability with humour is that it can be deflating, by deflating tension it can work against a building seriousness or gravity. I never know exactly what the right proportion is. I think there’s obviously some very effective fiction that really stays deeply in one sort of tenor, and you don’t get much in the way of humour and that can have a lot of power. I feel conflicted, personally and I wonder what you feel.

I think there is a sort of sniff test that sometimes happens – if I find something takes itself too seriously I less inclined to give myself over to it. Even if it’s an inconsequential thing, the idea of fallibility or openness is inviting. There’s a good Lydia Davis essay with the idea that you can endear yourself to readers by asking them to fill gaps.

I think that’s right, I think that Lydia Davis bit is really really on point. If there are ideas in fiction, if there are viewpoints expressed, you want to leave room for the fact that different readers have different ideas and beliefs, and to give people the space to enter the fiction. Something I definitely feel in some fiction, that I rebel against, is when I feel I’m just supposed to agree.

Did you read that Sanctimony Literature essay [by Becca Rothfeld] from a few years ago? It’s a reading of some recent autofiction as basically doing that in a sanctimonious way.

Yeah, that sounds familiar. It’s really hard – different authors have very different degrees of this, even the way in which the book teaches you to understand it as this is what I the author think or this is me looking with some criticality on myself or a version of myself. Maybe that sanctimony, if it crops up, is partly a slightly bad conscience. Maybe that’s not quite the right way to put it. I think there’s a feeling of a lot of angst in auto fiction, about the idealistic impulse to write fiction and to love literature, but also the sort of slightly sordid way in which, when you write literature, you want to be successful and read. There’s something a little bit tawdry or unseemly about that, and I think that that tension – between the pure idealism of art on one side and the inevitable careerism and desire for glory or greatness on the other –produces a lot of this weird conflict in autofiction, but that’s sort of a digression.

I do think so much of this comes down to sensibility. If the sensibility is genuine, humble enough, has enough perspective on itself, has enough generosity to the reader, I think you can succeed with any subject matter or material.

I’ve seen you say that fiction is a way for you to grapple with questions you can’t elsewhere. Where has that taken you in this novel? Has that process changed your thinking in any way?

Of course, if you spend a lot of time doing something it probably has changed you. We were talking before about this idea that so often in public or in external interactions with people, you’re asked or expected to take your point of view, to have a point of view, to have an opinion, to represent that. I think a lot of times I feel: sure, I can express my point of view if I have to. I find that fiction is a way for me to draw out how much I feel there are authentic contradictions, insuperable dilemmas in these different ways of looking at the world. Putting those into a fictional vehicle or vessel and being able to explore them at depth and have them put pressure on one another I think I always find more satisfying than trying to just argue for a simple one sided or one dimensional point of view.

The art that I really admire and I mean art in the broadest sense – literature, but also other sorts of art – really grapples with the complexity and nuance. As artists go about their public lives, I feel like there’s more a tendency to want to affirm what seems to be the right point of view, or the right values, as opposed to dwelling in the nuance or complexity. I think in that sense maybe it’s deepened my commitment to being a little bit iconoclastic.

Is there any fiction that you feel does this, or you find particularly instructive?

What you gleaned about working on a book about political fiction – It started as a very long piece about Grace Paley, a writer I really love. I think she writes very political art, and she certainly writes from a particular political angle, she’s very left wing. I just think that she does such a good job of not falling into this trap of not making space for the reader, the person who might have different points of view to talk about things in t a very open, warm way – to find ways to make somewhat complex political questions or issues, that have kind of gotten calcified in the discourse by particular ways of talking, to make them quite simple and bring them down to a very human level. I find that very inspiring. It’s just a beautiful way of addressing politics and I think again, it’s an element of sensibility that transcends this kind of ideological sphere or spectrum where you feel like you’re really being asked to agree or disagree.

Sticking with somewhat political things. I think writers like Sebald and Bolaño mean a lot to me. They also have very different sensibilities, but their sensibility somehow enables them to talk about, in some ways dark, in some ways often politically freighted material, but there’s something that feels so open and life-giving and generous to the reader about their approaches. There’s tons of film from the 20^th-century that just astounds me with its moral complexity, its humour.

Where do your approach to realism, your approach to generosity, and your approach to authenticity sit? How do those things interact for you as fictional questions?

Sometimes I wish that I had the sort of dogged tenacity to write in a more strictly realist way, just because I feel like there is a kind of discipline to that. There’s a sort of power that emerges. Maybe it’s a kind of modern, attention-fractured aspect of our life; I get a little excited or antsy as I’m writing and I sort of want to go more directly toward what I think are the key ideas or themes, the psychology and the philosophy that underlies things, and I think sometimes that prompts a certain slight shortcut away from the most strictly literal into a slightly hyper-literal, or sometimes more metaphysical. Even in a story like ‘Dynamics in the Storm’, which you brought up, it moves from quite realistic, literal narration to a plane on which you take what’s being dramatised as not 100 per cent literal. I like that because it kind of allows me to keep tacking towards what I find most interesting, or most central or core.

To what you were saying about authenticity – maybe I felt this was even more prevalent in Prodigals, in my previous book – maybe this is getting harder these days, but it felt to me like trying to be as authentic or honest on the page was a a version of that generosity toward the reader. Trying to address readers as a mass of people that you’re trying to come across well to or present yourself in a certain way to, that loses that authenticity. I think readers feel that very deeply and even if some books like that probably are very successful, I think that readers don’t feel that it gives them an internal sense of freedom or liberation from all of the ways in which we live in a public world that asks us to be certain ways as opposed to the true range of experience and of feeling and of belief that actually exists inside of us, in our privacy.

I think because of the type of fiction that seemed to be most popular around the time that I started writing and while I was writing The Dimensions of a Cave – writing from a very personal place, often in a way that creates a blurry line between the author and the protagonist – I wanted to write something that was imaginative in the sense that it wasn’t a world that I knew directly, it was not characters that I had interacted with or that were based on real people. I’ve been trying to do this more, it’s tricky. I didn’t want any of the characters to reflect or represent me – obviously the novel and the characters circle around things that I’m interested in, but I really am trying not to create characters who I feel are kind of versions of myself.

I think there are some novels that totally lose the idea of wanting people to feel real in service of something else – you seem quite hesitant to do that.

Yeah there’s this old maybe you know, EM Forster idea of the round versus the flat character. Obviously the characters that you spend more time with are rounder than the characters who just show up briefly, but because I didn’t want anyone be me, this kind of subjective entity that’s the companion of the reader’s subjectivity, I wanted everybody to be a little bit autonomous and full as characters in their own right and not to fall into too much simplicity about any of the people, to always give them the possibility of surprising you.

I got the sense that a central question for you was and is the presentation of information and how we present things to one another; how things get rendered. Does any sort of internet sensibility figure into your approach?

Just from a personal perspective, I try pretty hard to be very not online. But obviously I live in a world that’s created by all of the technologies that we’re ensconced in and I keep pretty closely abreast of what’s going on.

The novel has at its core an idea of virtual reality or simulation that’s a little bit beyond what we have right now. it is a literal aspect of the story, but it also supposed to be metaphorical in some regard. I think that that this metaphor of virtual reality, operates on a number of different levels – one is going back as far as the beginning of storytelling, of fiction as the first virtual reality.

We live in stories, we put stories, explanations, meaning on top of the external world that we encounter, and that goes back almost, probably, to the beginning of our species. But the question is, despite the inevitability of living within our own subjectivity, can we have access to reality? Can we somehow use our subjectivity to know objectivity, or to approach objective reality in some regard? I think one thing that the novel suggests or proposes is that a lot of this is through our interactions with one another, that we have to build a kind of shared or consensual reality that we all inhabit, and that the necessity of living in a mutually comprehensible reality – where we understand at least some baseline facts, some baseline realities in a communal way – is necessary to our ability to harmonise our lives and to coordinate our actions. To do the things that are, you know, most important and sustaining for us.

The idea in the novel, that you could go into what becomes a bespoke, private world of your own dreaming, where your own past, your own desires, your own projections figure into the reality that you inhabit… it’s obviously a very seductive idea, it may be something that we get to technologically at some point, but I do think it’s also supposed to be somewhat of a metaphor for the world that we’re already in, the world governed by the internet as it currently is constituted and as it currently operates. We have much more ability than we did in the past to choose the realities that we live in, to inhabit bespoke private realities. We can, you know, seek out the people, the voices, the ideas that harmonise with what we want to believe, that present the world as we think it is or should be, that tell us things work in the way that we think they work, that you know this thing we want to have happen is for the best. I think that that’s a very dangerous and scary place to be. It’s very natural to want your vision of reality to line up with reality, to want to be told that you’re right.

People and their nature might not be exactly what you hope it to be – if you don’t confront those things, that might be comforting, but that’s gonna not only completely sever you from other people as they actually are, but in time I think that degrades, perhaps fatally, our ability to live together and make plans together, make communities together; to achieve communal action for the things that are really important.

Mutual comprehensibility seems to be a question that interests you, in whatever way you’re approaching it.

I think it’s one of these things where if something’s really hard for you, you spend so much time focused on it that you become very sensitively attuned to it. I at times have felt almost like it’s impossible to communicate with another person at all, to say anything that I really want to say clearly and make them understand it.

I think this is one of the things that maybe draws a person to writing, that you have this space and this time to really say what you want to say, and say it as well as you can, without the difficulties of speaking in real time.

There’s something so fundamentally satisfying about making yourself understood and being understood. I find that very exciting and beautiful, but I also feel like it’s so difficult. Maybe that’s both why I spend so much time in writing thinking about this, but also why writing appeals to me in general. The idea that you could spend all this time really saying something very well, and it just a little fraction of the time for someone else to read it. It seems almost a generous thing – as opposed to blathering on. Just give me half an hour of your time and I’ll spend weeks trying to say something really carefully.

I like that as a framework. What are you reading the moment?

That’s a good question. I think this was this was a self-protective thing that I did, but I think it’s also a fairly reasonable thing to do – while I was writing this book, I did a lot of research for different parts of it, but I tried pretty hard not to read things that I thought were too close in subject matter, because I didn’t want to see see oh someone else is working on the same thing, has the same ideas; I didn’t want to feel that influence that I had to fight against it.

So now I am letting myself engage with some of the things that are more maybe in line with some of the ideas. One thing I read recently that I like – Megan O. Gieblyn’s book God Human Animal Machine. It’s a really cool philosophical intellectual adventure that looks at all of the modern ideas of study of consciousness, and of neuroscience, computation, AI, philosophy, and tells the story of that but also connects it a lot to her own background growing up as an Evangelical Christian and the theological currents and aspects that she knows so well, and how much they dovetail with a lot of the commentary and the thinking around AI and the brain and what consciousness is. I really loved that.

This is totally different – every few years I spend the better part of a year diving really really deep on one author that I love and I spent most much of this year on all things Joyce. Last year was the Joyce centenary and I got back into it through that, and read Ulysses much more carefully and closely than I’d ever read it before. Then I just read all of Joyce, the rest of Joyce, and a million books about Joyce and then I just wrote a long essay. It’s probably too long to ever be published. I sort of look at it in a few different angles. One is the battles against obscenity and for freedom of artistic expression, but another is AI and large language models and kind of looking at Ulysses as a the most impressive human version of a kind of large language model approach to literature – looking at what Joyce does and how that both gives us insight into this kind of natural language processing AI, but also what human genius and literature still can do, and the current paradigm of AI can’t do.

Is there anything I’ve missed that you’d like to add?

Actually I much more enjoy talking in the way that we’ve been talking – more about the ideas and how literature works and things like that. I much prefer that to delving into the nuts and bolts or plot of the novel.

It feels so reductive somehow, to give elevator summaries of the plot, or the themes. I think that there’s this problem where you’re taken to be the definitive last word – the expert on your own work. Kind of what we were saying before about leaving space for the reader; I really don’t believe that at all.

I try not to have too tight a grip on exactly what I think the book should be saying or what people should take away, because I really don’t even think literature is just a physical book unto itself. I think it is completed by the imagination and mind of the reader. It’s like halfway there, and every reader, what they supply, all those gaps they fill in, that’s where literature resides. It’s as it catalyses the mind of the reader. So in that sense, I just don’t like to purport I have the last word on what things mean, or to put too fine a point on what I want someone to take away from a book. Usually, whenever people tell me, “I had this thought about something you wrote, but, you know, maybe I’m off base, or maybe it’s wrong,” and they spell it out. It just always seems like yes, that’s great. I don’t think I’ve ever been like, no, you didn’t get it.

The Dimensions of a Cave is published by Granta Books, out now.