Hypertext Magazine asked Thomas Kendall, author of The Autodidacts, “Fictions (notebooks, stories, myth-information) proliferate throughout The Autodidacts but there is also something uncanny in the voice of the novel that seems to complicate its relation to the characters and suggests a need for the reader to recalibrate their perception of the story. Could you talk a little about the role of structure, indeterminacy and to what extent you consider The Autodidacts a work of meta-fiction?”
By Thomas Kendall
Indeterminacy is written into the narrative structure of The Autodidacts not so much to resist interpretation but rather to maintain possibility. To maintain possibility up until the point that possibility collapses into existence. Sort of like a wave function? So, there is a way of reading the narrative and voice of The Autodidacts that complicates the identity of the text, and the text’s relationship to the world, but that reading is a choice that I wanted the structure of the text to allow rather than some final clue as to its meaning. I’m interested in simultaneity, it strikes me as a way to imagine non-hierarchical difference, and I hoped to consciously maintain certain possibilities of interpretation in such a way that the tension would open up portals between them, so that each reading would haunt and transgress upon the position of other interpretations just as they would haunt them in turn.
Put another way, a reader conducts a seance. A book serves as a psychic medium with finite connections to the unknown. The identity of a specific medium is what both allows and delimits the connection to the unknown. To channel something is to avoid being destroyed by its totality, by the force of the beyond. I wanted the book to be psychically losing control under the stress of what it had to communicate about the past(s), present(s), and future(s) of its characters’ reality.
So, the meta-fictional element is important not as a reveal but as another situation. I’ve always loved a certain tradition of transgressive novels, not because of the invocation of a taboo but because they can’t help but operate at the limit (all limits constitute a meeting) between the physical and the imaginary. Transgressive texts often have a kind of material force to them that centres fantasy and their existence within the actual, thereby avoiding the impotent pitfall of traditional ‘meta-fiction,’ by intending to do something to reality, to enact something real, to elaborate a possibility for thought within the body of the reader. And so the fact of the transgressive book’s existence, that it exists at all, is radioactive to reality in a really intentioned way. It’s an object that retrogressively warps the conditions of its possibility. A lot of novels, for me, seem to make an implicit claim that they know what reality is but this can separate them from the raw movement of thought or emotion. Consequently, they lack an urgency and rely on the evocation of recognition for their power and so their books have a security of relation to the world. There’s a stability there that I don’t often feel in real life or particularly want to feel in fiction.
Thought of one way language can be seen as always taking the form of a spell (or a curse, depending on your disposition.) This thought is not metaphorical. At a base level language is a group of symbols collected together and charged with ritualistic significance that can alter reality at an individual and collective level. I don’t consider The Autodidacts to be transgressive fiction but I wanted it to possess certain similar powers. For it to be able to speak to fiction as something that acts upon the world, to be something incantatory and enclosed. For the book to be a strange object waiting to be encountered.
Related Feature: Excerpt: Thomas Kendall’s THE AUTODIDACTS
Thomas Kendall is the author of The Autodidacts, released May 2022. Dennis Cooper called The Autodidacts ‘a brilliant novel — inviting like a secret passage, infallible in its somehow orderly but whirligig construction, spine-tingling to unpack, and as haunted as any fiction in recent memory.’ His work has appeared in the anthologies Abyss (Orchards Lantern) and Userlands (Akashic Books) and online at Entropy.
