To go back to Derrida, you mention him in the endnotes as the influence for ‘every time you sign an invoice…’, but to me the most Derridean poem in the collection is ‘words (unspoken)’, which seems to echo Derrida’s thoughts on his own mother’s senescence while also drawing on his conceptions of speech and writing and traces. Was this something you were conscious of?
Yes, completely. I think out of everything in Varroa Destructor, ‘words (unspoken)’ is the one that means the most to me on a human level (even though I try to be kind of anti-humanist in my approach). I’ve read Derrida’s accounts of the way he architectured the memory of his mother. They’re very moving accounts. Again, we have the traces and the blurring of memory.
A very poignant thing happened with my mother before she died. She had throat cancer. She had a tracheotomy; her voice box was removed. She could no longer speak, and so from that moment until the day she died she wrote everything down. I kept her notepad, and what haunts me are her very last words: they are indecipherable. She was so weak and out of her mind on morphine that, although the thoughts were there in her mind, the actual act of writing and language failed her. I’ve never been able to decipher what her last words were.
And this ties in with the kind of theoretical symbolism in Varroa Destructor, which concerns this problem of language, how we try to decipher it, but its meaning becomes lost and returns to nothingness. So, yeah, I mean there are other poems in Varroa Destructor that openly ape Derridean thought and practice, but I think ‘words (unspoken)’ is the work in the book that reaches that kind of emotional and humanistic point that I think Derrida tried to address. Not that I’m comparing myself to Derrida, but it’s the same sort of approach.
When did you first read Derrida?
Probably when I was an undergraduate. Like everyone else I was completely bamboozled by it, and so I ran scared of him for a long time. I didn’t read him as a postgraduate. I returned to him later – probably about ten years ago. I started to read him slowly. This was at around the same time I was reading Heidegger. I started to think about language in different way, about how language is used by certain writers. I started to kind of understand him, and then I read people like Simon Critchley, who was able to make more sense explaining the more difficult parts of writers like Derrida and Heidegger.
I’d used that as a kind of inroad into that way of thinking, and then I just got used to it and read him as I would read anyone else. Once you get the joke, it’s okay. It’s a game to be taken seriously, if you know what I mean.
In the 2002 documentary Derrida, he remarks to a student: ‘I take irony very seriously’.
It’s the same kind of thing, yeah. You show your hand a little bit, you keep things close to your chest, but there’s got to be a moment where you just show your hand and give a little wink. And I think that’s what he’s kind of aware of – that kind of collapse. The rug is always being pulled from under us – from under him and from under his readers. If something remains from it, keep it.
Does all good art have philosophy at its core?
I don’t know. All the good art that I like does. Tom McCarthy said that if a novel is a car, then poetry is its engine. A lot of people thought he meant that novels should be poetic, but he didn’t. He was saying that reading poetry will take you to the places you need to go in order to write the things you want in your novels. I think that’s what philosophy and theory do for me as a writer. They take me to junctures and places and questions that I want to explore in within my novels. So, for instance, in The Canal, I was obsessed with boredom and technology, which are each taken from different readings of Heidegger. I liked how they intersected.
Heidegger posits this idea that we are something to be used by technology; that we are standing in reserve for it. And I think that’s why in Varroa Destructor, I write about what are almost theories of mechanical instruction to our daily lives. It’s as if technology says: now you must do this, now you must do that. We are standing in reserve, waiting to be used by it. So, like in the poem ‘omnibus…’, we stand waiting at the bus stop; the hydraulics of the doors open: then we begin, then we are allowed to progress by technology. That’s what I’m trying to express in those sections.
In The Canal, the narrator watches planes in the sky and is fascinated that they “follow the same paths, to greater or lesser degrees, day and night”. He seems to find something almost transcendental about it. Repetition is celebrated again in the narrator’s description of playing Pong as child. He says “it was the happiest I have ever been”. And yet, by the time we get to the poem in Varroa Destructor called ‘identification card’, the speaker is pulled “downwards” by “the unknowing the mapping of your repetitions”. What distinguishes these repetitions and their respective reactions?
The Canal was about stasis and stationary moments. It was about longing and looking. So when the narrator sits on the bench by the canal and sees the Boeing 747 or whatever flying across these same flight paths, he thinks about how they are defying gravity. They seem to him like a perfect photograph, halted in time, defying everything. And yes, it’s kind of transcendental in that way. He was himself aspiring to defy gravity, to defy the death-drive and that ‘pull’ downwards.
In Varroa Destructor, it’s a mechanized world of movement. This isn’t about people who are sitting on the benches stepping out of the mechanism; these are the people who are completely mechanized. So those repetitions are pulling them further and further down in a sense. And I wanted to make that differentiation. You can dislocate yourself from a mechanized society and aspire to transcend it, as in The Canal; otherwise you become caught in the mechanisms of society, the kind of mechanisms that work to draw you down.
