Interviews

CHANCE: An Existential Horse Opera

A conversation with Robert Banghart of Seattle’s Richard Hugo House Writers’ Center 12/16/02

(This interview was reprinted in The Raven Chronicles Vol. 13, No. 1, 2007)

RB:    Your novel Chance is subtitled “An Existential Horse Opera.” So let’s start there: What on earth is an existential horse opera?

JK:    Hmmm… What indeed? In her review in the Seattle Times Mary Ann Gwinn said, “Horse operas aren’t, nor should they be, existential.” In other words, you can’t have an existential horse opera, because those are two different things. But she kind of missed the point. Of course you can have an existential horse opera; we have one here.

Let’s start with “horse opera.” A lot of readers don’t know what that means any more. Originally it meant a low-budget cowboy movie, but came in the forties and fifties to mean pretty much any Western, though still with a certain fond disdain, I think. In Chance I expand the definition to mean any romance of the Old West, and that is what we have here: a Western adventure romance, a cowboy story.

RB:    Those are not typically thought of as existentialist literature, though, are they?

JK:    Not till now. And maybe not even now; no one would mistake Chance for something by Sartre or Camus. But a lot of readers may not be quite sure what “existential” really means either, so let’s look at that.

RB:    Okay.

JK:    I think the reason the word is somewhat confusing is that existentialism is not a formal philosophy or philosophical system so much as it is an attitude or mindset or even a world-view, a way of looking at life. Part of the confusion probably comes from the fact that it has been used as the basis for philosophical systems, for example by Heidegger and Jaspers, and has also been used as the foundation for a certain kind of literature, as by Sartre and Camus, Beckett and the so-called “theater of the absurd,” and so on.

But as a point-of-view, existentialism has also been used by psychiatry and psychology as a way of breaking away from Freud’s interest in the past and focusing on the present, and has been used by theology as well, to shift the focus of faith from both the future and the past to the present.

When I use the word “existential,” I use it in its broad sense, that is, as a focus on the present and on the exercise of choice and decision in creating the present and the future. And even the past.

RB:    Many people think of existentialism as a philosophy or world-view full of meaninglessness and despair. Is Chance a novel of despair?

JK:    No, though despair is always one of our choices, is it not? Classic atheistic existentialism holds that since there is no God, there is no inherent meaning in life or in the universe itself. That doesn’t mean there is no meaning, only that there is no meaning but whatever meaning we create. So we become responsible for creating our own meaning, and we do that in large part by exercising our power to choose and decide.

Christian and Jewish existentialism and others maintain that even though there is a God, we still have responsibility for ourselves and toward others and are responsible for creating our own places in life. So it is a focus on the present and on the responsibility of the individual to create his place in life through the power of choice.

And so existentialism becomes in many ways a philosophy of ethics. Existentialism is the belief that who we are depends in great measure on how we behave—on how we treat each other.

RB:    The cover-blurb for Chance describes it as “a journey to discovery of the self.” Is that part of what you mean?

JK:    Yes, exactly. I see Chance as an exploration of the relationship between identity and ethics. That sounds a little heavy, but it really is the existential underpinning of what is otherwise a cowboy adventure romance. Let me quote the whole line: “a yarn that is at once an adventure, a mystery, and a journey to discovery of the self.”

RB:    That doesn’t sound so heavy.

JK:    And it’s not. It’s a quest story, an adventure. And a good read, I think. That’s what I’m hearing, anyway…

RB:    Now, the cover blurb also calls Chance a “literary Western.” Can you shed a little light on that? What is a literary Western?

JK:    The cowboy novel as a type, the genre Western, is often thought of as a pulp adventure romance or a formula story of good against evil in the Old West. But some writers of the genre Western have been quite good – I include Louis L’Amour among these, and other good ones. Zane Grey wasn’t the best of writers, in my humble view, but he could spin a terrific yarn. Max Brand was the best of the Western novelists on whom I cut my teeth as a kid.

But we have a whole literature of western adventure novels by writers whose work deals more directly with the complexity of human experience and with issues of meaning and value in more than the two-dimensional view of the genre Western. I would call A.B. Guthrie (The Big Sky) one of these. Walter Van Tilburg Clark (The Ox Bow Incident). And many others. Larry McMurtry, perhaps. Cormac McCarthy for sure, a favorite of mine. I like to think Chance stands in the tradition of novels like theirs.

RB:    Now, there is also a tie-in between Chance and the legend of Dido and Aeneus from Virgil’s Aeneid. What is that all about?

JK:    Two things, really. One is that I felt the Dido and Aeneus story needed to be retold for the sake of the modern sensibility. It works fine as an explanation for the founding of Rome but is an offense to the modern Judeo-Christian existentialist view of the world. It made me mad—so I decided to retell it. Don’t hold me too close to the original, though—it’s a loose retelling.

The other is this: the Old West is more than a romantic landscape for the spinning of yarns; it is in many ways the mythic and legendary fabric of American culture, just as the adventures of Aeneus were for Rome. There’s a lot of potential for exploration of the American psyche and American values and what you might call the American identity in the history and legends of the American frontier. So it’s no accident that my story of self-discovery is a retelling of part of the founding legend of Rome. We have a different view of the world than the Romans did. We should, anyway. I hope we do.

RB:    Let me shift gears now. Chance is your first novel, right?

JK:    My first published novel, right.

RB:    How long did it take you?

JK:    If memory serves, it took me a couple of years to draft it, then a lot longer (a lot, lot longer) to revise it and get it right.

RB:    What do you mean, get it right?

JK:    Chance was really my second novel, but the earlier one was more a unified collection of short stories about a central character, so Chance was my first experience with the long narrative. When I was done drafting the thing, I was faced with the fact that the style of the writing was much different from what I had been doing, much flatter and … well … duller, and was quite different from what I had intended (stylistically, I mean). And I found peculiarities in my writing I hadn’t been aware of and didn’t like.

RB:    Like what, for example?

JK:    Oh, for example, I found a tendency to begin sentences with participial phrases, and I found myself uncomfortable with that, but I didn’t know why. So I had to learn why in order to deal with that (and stop doing it). And I found a tendency to repeat words and phrases that didn’t warrant much repetition, or to use certain stock phrases in a way that was boring. So I began the revision process with a great deal to learn about writing and an urgent need to create a long-narrative style of my own that I could be comfortable with and that would also be consistent with what I was trying to do in the narrative and might be more compelling for the reader.

RB:    How did you go about doing that?

JK:    Partly through sheer laborious effort, partly by looking at what writers I liked were doing, and partly by running the manuscript past fellow writers and every other literate person I knew, getting their feedback and discovering what others liked and didn’t like in my writing. I also hired a coach to help me with some of that, and eventually wound up working with two different coaches, Robert Gordon and Priscilla Long, so I could take advantage of their different perspectives.

RB:    Did you find having so many people critique it for you confusing or frustrating or dangerous, in the sense that you got conflicting advice or advice that ran counter to your own sensibilities?

JK:    Oh, yes. I had to learn to use what I found helpful—to use the criticism that resonated—and to put the rest on the back burner. I got criticism from a wide variety of sources telling me I couldn’t do some of the things I was trying to do, and that forced me to look at why I was doing them, and how to make them work if I was going to persist in taking those chances. And I did persist with some of them. I took some risks with this book, and I think they paid off, though there will undoubtedly still be some disagreement (as with Mary Ann Gwinn of the Times).

RB:    Can you tell us what some of those risks were?

JK:    I can, but I won’t. I’ll let you figure that out for yourself. But the process was a long one, a process of learning to write all over again in the transition from the short story to the long one.

RB:    Which brings me back to my original question: how long did it take you?

JK:    All together, from the time I started writing the first draft to the time it came off the press, it took, on-and-off, fifteen years.

RB:    Wow. Fifteen years? Did you find it hard to stick with it all that time?

JK:    I didn’t spend that whole time working on Chance. I would work on it for several months, then run it past everyone I could get to read it, then work on it some more, then let it rest for several months, maybe a year or two, while I worked on other things and got on with my life. Giving it a rest was an important part of the process, because after a year or two I could come back to it with a fresh eye. And of course during all that time I continued reading. Then I’d come back to Chance and see things I really didn’t like, awkward things in my writing, embarrassing things, and I’d be able to fix them. But every fix created new problems (new word redundancies, conflicting details and so on) that required more fixing, so at times it felt like a never-ending process. Much of it was flat-out laborious.

RB:    It reads well. It seems to flow naturally and read easily and engages the reader very well. Are you saying it didn’t always do that?

JK:    Ha! Yes, I reckon I’d have to say that. But a lot of people had a hand in helping me get it to where it is—friends, relatives, writers’ groups, teachers, coaches … and my publisher, who helped me clean up the rough places and loose ends that were still there. That was a stroke of luck for me. My publisher, Merilyn Wakefield of Mwynhad Books, spent most of a year poring over the manuscript with me to make sure we got it right. Not many publishers will do that with a new writer, but she did, and this is a much better book because of her input.

RB:    So it wasn’t just a matter of your own genius for writing, but was more of a collaborative effort?

JK:    All the writing in this book—except for the quotations, of course—is mine, and all the help I got was filtered through my own critical processes and measured against my own vision and my own sensibilities, so I’d have to say it was not a collaborative effort at all, but an effort in which I was able to get the help I needed as I learned how to pull this off. As for genius, it is certainly true that writing is more perspiration than inspiration. I perspired over this thing—on and off—for 15 years! But the end result is much better than if it had been left to mere genius.