Greg Jackson on the Dialogue Between Myth and Reality

Your story in this week’s issue, “Poetry,” begins with a young couple hiking up a volcano on a Caribbean island. There’s something almost mythical about the trials they endure to scale this mountain in the rain—or at least the man, James, seems to feel there is, and later he invents his own myth of the volcano. Did you have any specific mythology resonating in your mind when you were writing this?

You know, I once overheard a student talking to a professor about a story she had written, and the professor was elaborating on a specific myth in great detail, explaining the resonances he saw between that myth and the student’s story. When he finished, he said, “Was this what you were thinking of when you wrote your story?” And the student said, “Honestly, I was just trying to think about nothing at all.”

Well, I thought, that’s not what you tell your teacher! But now I find myself in a similar position, forced to make a similar confession, because, while there was always going to be a mythic element in this story—the setting and the inevitable parallels to the story of Eden dictated as much—the idea of having the narrator invent a mythology of the volcano came to me rather late. It solved certain issues in the story. But as for the myth itself, whether I was “trying” to or not, honestly, I wasn’t thinking about anything at all.

And still, at least to my way of thinking, it is a story partly about myth—or Myth—in the same sense that it is about Poetry. It looks at the hazy transmogrification through which our experiences become our anecdotes, our stories, our fiction, our poetry, and, ultimately, our myths: how, over time, as the stories we tell about our lives shed their idiosyncratic baggage and establish themselves as myths, they become more concentrated and saturated than the original experiences, than life as it was lived; and how, then, a two-way longing emerges, with literature yearning for the immediacy of life, and life yearning for the poetic or mythic grandeur of literature. In “Poetry,” I wanted (partly, let’s not overstate things) to confront this process of mythmaking with the mundanity of the life that precedes it. There’s something uncomfortable in this encounter, a juxtaposition of registers and of temporalities—myth (timeless), life (chronological, historical)—that jars slightly. But it also reminds us, I hope, that we can still make myths—that is, make meaning—out of lives that feel hopelessly prefigured, clichéd, trivial, or mired in the present tense.

The couple’s landlady, Jacqueline, declares herself a poet and texts lines from “Les Fleurs du Mal.” Why is James, who is obsessed with words and their relationship to reality, so dismayed by the confession?

This is a good question, but I wonder whether it isn’t really a question about us rather than about James. Am I alone in feeling a hopeless, sinking feeling when someone tells me that he likes literature or painting or film, and I suspect that he means to lionize those whose very insipidity is one of the few stable truths in my life—because, on the one hand, this person and I share a locus of essential value, and yet, on the other, what we find valuable in this realm could not be more different? Naturally, each person has his or her own opinion about what, exactly, is insipid, but I have to believe we all have moments like this, when our taste and someone else’s feel just horribly misaligned. And I think the vogue today is to write this off as élitism—to say that there is no better or worse art, that “taste” is effectively “arbitrary preference”—but this just can’t be the whole story, or else what’s the point of culture at all? What are we striving after?

James may be unfair to Jacqueline, whose poetry he has never read. But, on some level, it is the profundity of his desire to connect with people earnestly, across the chasms that separate them—and his understanding that to attempt this connection would end up only charting those chasms’ depths—that dismays him. Irony, sarcasm, and snark are not entirely inappropriate responses to the pain of our separation from one another, or to the suffocating quality of too much earnestness. Up to a point. Beyond that point, you may need poetry or the equivalent to map a territory so ambivalent and contradictory and full of longing.

Is it wrong to see something somewhat Biblical in your use of the fruit, nicknamed “the death apple,” to potentially bring about the downfall of this young couple in their island paradise?

Not wrong at all! One of the biggest hurdles to writing this piece—since I sat with the idea for a long time—was figuring out what relation it should have to the story in Genesis. I knew this connection would be there, intended or otherwise, so I had to decide whether to move toward or away from the allusion. Ultimately, I decided to lean in to the Biblical story, but obliquely. Here, I think, it’s not fundamentally the apple that’s the problem; it’s paradise itself. It’s the peril of straining for a more exalted (and possibly unattainable) state of being that puts the characters in harm’s way. The desire to recover a retrospective ideal—or to achieve a platonic ideal—is dangerous, even toxic, but also, paradoxically, at the root of the literary impulse, and, therefore, the very thing that offers the possibility of commerce with the miraculous.

I don’t know where this leaves us; I certainly wanted the tension to endure in the piece. Hence the several nested paradises—the caldera, the island, something unseen out at sea, romantic relationships, the ideal of poetry, the immortal whispers of myth—that destabilize neat allegorical mappings. Ultimately, it was seeing the connection between the elusive promise of poetry and the promise of these other ideals that enabled me to start writing—a sense that we are condemned to long for what we remember (but never was) and what we prefigure (but never will be), and yet that there are better and worse ways of dealing with this longing.

You allow Celeste and James to survive their manchineel intake with a little burning sensation and vomiting—nothing too serious. Why don’t they suffer the full effect of the death apple?

Well, it would be a very different story if they died or wound up in comas! I guess that wasn’t the story I wanted to write. When I was researching the manchineel online, I found some pretty terrifying message boards and read about people who had eaten several whole fruits, even one young woman who had to have a pacemaker installed after eating the apple. The idea of shifting the story to a hospital setting just didn’t seem right. Plus, I liked how the story worked when it kept turning away from the reader’s expectations.

Of course, Celeste does throw up the death apple (and only had a tiny bite), so she was probably always going to be fine. But by leaving the poison inside James, I wanted to encourage more complex readings than simply the most literal. If you write a story about characters who consume poison and then die—I don’t know, you’ve written a P.S.A. But the mythic potency of a symbol like the serpent, say, derives from its real-life (poisonous, treacherous) relationship to humans, and yet becomes, in myth, a more ambivalent representative of poison, treachery, seduction, and even, perhaps, some part of our humanity. I like stories that keep this dialogue—between myth and substrate, figurative and literal—open and follow the two as they interact.

James believes that he can “rewrite the reality of the situation through an act of will, a refusal to accept the facts.” Is he right?

Yes and no. His beliefs can’t rewrite reality, but “the facts”—in this case, information on the Internet—do not represent the full scope of reality, either. There are many realities: the reality of lived experience, the reality of the body, the reality of what we call knowledge, the reality of medicine and epidemiology. If a person gets a terminal diagnosis but doesn’t die, what was the “reality” of the situation? If a candidate has a five-per-cent chance of winning an election and wins, was the model wrong or was the five per cent, in effect, right? Is the future foretold or isn’t it? What happens when the different modalities of access to “reality”—scientific understanding (health as an abstracted quantity), subjectivity (health as a felt property of living), experience (health as a manifest outcome over time)—disagree?

I don’t mean to sound sophistical. I’m not an anti-vaxxer or anything! I’m just interested in the discrepancy between the virtual reality of everything we know secondhand—from reading and watching and listening, from trusting our culture to explain to us how vast, abstract systems work—and the naïve, or practical, reality of our own experiences. Presumably, Schrödinger’s cat has a meaningful experience inside its box that quantum physics doesn’t fully describe for us. In a sense, we all experience life as Schrödinger’s cat does—from within the experience. James may be foolish about the death apple, but I don’t think his intuition—that life is stranger and more complex and mystical and subject to the vagaries of perspective than we tend to allow—is entirely wrong.

James does a lot of pontificating and removing himself from the physical world of the present through language—much to Celeste’s irritation. Do you think this trip marks the beginning of a long and happy relationship for these two, or the death throes of a flawed one?

A long and happy relationship, definitely—insofar as any long relationship is happy, and any state of happiness is long. Celeste eats the apple, despite her misgivings. James doesn’t tell her to look at the meteors while she’s vomiting, although he wants her to. Celeste also doesn’t hold the death apple against him, which is pretty understanding. They’re a good match.

What prompted you to write “Poetry”? You’ve been working on your first novel. Does the story relate to the book in some way?

No, it really couldn’t be further afield from my novel. The story came about partly as a break from novel writing and partly as the distillation of several trips I made, over several years, to tropical locations. The landscapes, the vegetation, the fruits, the climate, the beaches, the volcanoes—all of it formed a composite experience that I wanted to write about. But such experiences are not that uncommon as vacations go, so it wasn’t until I discovered the prune de Cythère and its strange kinship with the manchineel that I saw the rough outlines of a story.

That’s the practical side of things. There must also be a spiritual dimension behind my impulse to write this story, but I hope that I have included that implicitly in the story itself this time. Why does anyone write poetry?


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