Description

The other voice on the tape is that of interviewer Takayuki Tatsumi. Music from a previous recording is still audible on this tape. Erickson says that there was always something unresolved about each book that led to the next, beginning with Arc d'X. In answer to a question from Tatsumi, Erickson says he destroyed earlier manuscripts, explaining that once his book Days Between Stations was published he could not “go back.” Along with rock and roll music, movies were “the two great American art forms of the 20th century” following World War II, Erickson says. Tatsumi asks about a theme of “slavery” in Erickson’s novels, and Erickson speaks of “issues of submission and domination.” Erickson says Americans have “come to find freedom to be more of a burden,” and have “profound disillusionment” with “the illusion of American innocence” as shown in “Forrest Gump” the movie. Tatsumi and McCaffery ask about the Vietnam War. McCaffery asks the definition of “nuclear imagination." They talk about his book Leap Year, Sally Hemings, the book and movie “Wizard of Oz,” the rest of the Oz books, and how cartoons affect writers’ narrative sensibility. Erickson is talking about Leap Year as side 2 begins. Tatsumi and Erickson discuss Thomas Jefferson, slavery, and Erickson’s native American roots. McCaffery steers the conversation back to Arc d’X. Tatsumi mentions “narrative drive,” and Erickson says he thinks his writing is about all the old themes, including memory, the theme of his work in progress, Amnesiascope. Erickson feels that his books might not be popular because they cannot be put into a particular niche,. McCaffery asks about the use of computers and they discuss contemporary writers, including Thomas Pynchon, then Erickson’s book Tours of the Black Clock. and the films of Alfred Hitchcock. The first side of tape 3 begins with Erickson and Tatsumi discussing experimental writing and film, particularly “Woman in the Dunes.” An edited transcript of this interview was published in Contemporary Literature, Volume 38, issue 3 (Fall 1997), pages 394-421.