Part Two

"I see death as an affront to postmodernism." Ray Nayler
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R.N: I donít believe that two characters in a story should just be talking, without a description of where they are, because where they are informs so much what is going on. I like the idea of disposable space, because I think it is a particularly American phenomenon that we have to deal withówhere you have motels that any two or six people can interact in at any time. Itís still informed by being a motel space, but it has a cookie-cutter sort of repetition, where you can drive from one motel to another, and they become completely interchangeable. They are basically the same all over. Thereís a sequence in *Trentís Last Case* by E.C. Bentley, where Trent talks about the motel room that has followed him everywhereóhereís the ink-stain that he left in Kansas, and the picture-frame he cracked in Toledo. He names all these specific things in the room that have been altered by what he has done. Of course, it is not the same room itís this phantasmic hotel room that will follow him wherever he goes. Many of my stories take place at night, many of them involve highways, motels, gas stations, and other spaces of movement and flexibility. I want a landscape where anything can happen. Anything can happen on a highway at night, and anything can happen in a motel in the middle of nowhere. Itís similar to what Patricia Highsmith does by basing her novels in Europe with American characters. If you take a character out of context and put him in "Another Scene," as Earl Jackson describes it, then that character has no way of distinguishing themselves to others beyond their outward traits. That gives the story much more fluidity. I think that crime stories demand that kind of fluidity. Crime stories are about transgression, and the moment when life shifts completely and rules are broken. There doesnít have to be the breaking of a law for a crime to take place. Crime is much more subtle than that.

C.B: Jameson has an essay on Chandler where he talks about the peculiar American poetry of Chandler, which is precisely about abused and decrepit public space. Jameson talks about the peculiar quality of American space, in that it is interchangeable and degraded, and has no symbolic importance to it, as opposed to the European city.

R.N: We have moveable landmarks. The motel means something, but you see them so often that they become tropes. So much of the space in America has become generic. You can find a two-lane highway and a motel to go to and a McDonaldís to eat at anywhere. It becomes repetitive.

C.B: Itís almost an endless series. It really is the idea of a postmodern landscape versus a modern landscape. In the modern landscape there is still a city center and landmarks. In postmodernism there is just the endless series. What is interesting, both in the E.C. Bentley novel and your own work, what you have is an encounter between an irreducibly distinct subject with a personal history, however mundane or bizarre that history is, and an endlessly repeated series. So it isnít that purely postmodern idea of the death of the subject, itís a distinct subjectivity encountering sheer interchangeableness. That would precisely be the space where transgression could take place, because the subject is taken out of any sort of personalized landscape or context, and instead inserted in a landscape in which the signs become meaningless through repetition. The space becomes a screen upon which to project.

R.N: Exactly. And something that is very important in reference to postmodernism, and is an idea which has to be addressed is how the subject feels about the "Death of the Subject." There are people walking around, and you can argue that they are just a collection of texts and have no "innate" traits, but regardless of whether that is true, they will always be a unique collection of texts and outside influences. Following the postmodern subject to the end simply re-creates the subject. the human being, even as an affect of language, is always going to be a specific and unique affectóas unique as a fingerprint. You just canít create two people in the same way, no matter how homogenous society becomes.

C.B: Itís almost like the outside world becomes a sort of genetic code, and ends up coding the subject distinctly through combination. This might be a good time to segue into a discussion of "The Void Time," because these issues become even more central there. Precisely what eludes the space of the postmodern is, I think, very important in this story. One of the things that struck me in all your stories about the landscape is the way in which it becomes a kind of fantasy space. In "Because I Could Not Stop For Death" itís like youíve pulled some of the Gothic elements that had hardened back into a seemingly concrete world in the Noir story and the detective story. You seem to be re-animating some of the gothic possibilities and principles of landscape in your stories, precisely because of the interchangeability of the landscape. Unlike in the modernist city, where you can name real streets and locales, what you have with this endless series of repetitions is almost a re-emergence of a kind of earlier understanding of landscape as enchanted.

R.N: A lot of people have talked about Raymond Chandlerís mapping of Los Angeles. I am more interested in unmapping America and American spaces to get back to possibility and power as symbolic spaces. The only "real" place in my novel Blue Skies is the neon sign that the book is named after. If you go to the signóand you can see it from the freewayóyou will find a place entirely different from the one I created in the novel.

C.B: And even the sign takes on its own sinister connotations in the novel.

R.N: I am very interested in the Gothic and romantic, and the ways in which they form the subject. In "Because I could Not Stop For Death" I purposely used the Emily Dickinson poem because I think of her as the most perfect Gothic poet everóyou can just imagine this woman, trapped in her house and her own mind. The poem goes on: "Because I could not stop for death/He kindly stopped for me/The carriage held but just us two/And immortality" and thatís the joke. If you know where the title comes from, then you know who death is. Death is not her husband, but Eliot OíRyan, who is literally in the chariot with her. In the story, the woman never makes the connection. She actually refers to her husband as death, mistaking who death really is.

C.B: Because death is only a messenger, really.

R.N: Thatís right. And Eliot OíRyan is the perfect messenger. He has brought death right to her.

C.B: In a way the female character in the story "Because I Could Not Stop For Death" is more powerful that the speaker in the poem, because she does not dieóshe cannot stop for death.

R.N: And she wins her freedom. The end of the story is a reference to The Headless Horseman, from The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, which was a favorite book for me as a childóone of my minor obsessions, actually. The sequence at the end of my story is all about that final pumpkin, that final effort by her husband to destroy the "other." The Legend of Sleepy Hollow is not really a supernatural tale. It exists more in the space of what Toderov would call the uncanny, where events can be explained reasonably. It is about small-town violence and getting rid of anyone who doesnít tow the line.

C.B: And then the story ends with her searching for the head on the ground.

R.N: She wants the final, absolute proof that he is dead. He told her that the last thing she would see would be his face, and she wants to assure herself that that is no longer true. Her moment of catharsis is to see his dead face.

C.B: Rather than simply inverting the traditional and having the woman be the detective, which just inverts the heteronormative structure and fails somewhat to address the problems of that structure, you narrate from her point of view, narrate her not as a victim, and yet not erase the larger world of male power, which doesnít go away just because you flip the narration around.

R.N: The problem I have with the movement in detective fiction today is that there has been no serious critical look at the detective. Instead the tendency is just to slide a minority figure into the slot of observational power. There are stories with black detectives and women detectives and homosexual detectives, and many of them are excellent. Mosley works well with all the issues that would surround a black detective. But some of the other authors forget to do this. They simply replace. I try to narrate differently from inside the traditional space, so that the detectiveís flaws can be seen more clearly, and questions are raised about the validity of that position.

. . . which has incredible consequences which are nowhere in the sign itself. Ray Nayler

R.N: This story is very much a meditation on death, and also on being trapped inside illogical sign systems.

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C.B: The flicking of the lighter is an irrational signóthis sort of arbitrary signifier around which everything rotates.

R.N: And which has incredible consequences which are nowhere in the sign itself.

C.B: I was struck by the meditation on death in this story. That was one of the things I found most profound about it. Freud talks about how one of the things that modern man canít deal with is death. It is not something that you can be conscious of all the time. Outside the realm of the sacred, there is no way of apprehending it. It has to remain unconscious for much of our lives. In this story, death functions as something that canít be reconciled with the sort of cool surface of humming objects and carefully arranged scenery. The function of death in this story seems to be to radically throw all of the other sign systems into a contingency. I think it is precisely because itís one of those postmodern spaces that you write about so well that the specter of death becomes most chilling. Jameson argues that one of the things that commodity culture tries to do is to lull us from the idea of death. There is always a promise of the ever-new that is literalized in plastic surgery.

R.N: And in our strange dreams of immortality: the cryogenics, etc.

C.B: In the modern period there is a Freudian concept of death, where you have to keep it unconscious for most of the time, although it is a known fact. In the postmodern period there seems to be a complete foreclosure around death, so that when it emerges in its full randomness and negation, it is an absolute affrontósomething that canít be explained or justified in any way.

R.N: I see death as an affront to postmodernism. I think it is the unraveling of postmodern theories of subjectivity. What postmodernism wants to do is to take all substance away from the individual, and the only thing that I can find that reconstitutes the individual as unique is the fact that it will be extinguished. For postmodern discourse, death is the Real, and pre-exists the word and semiotic organization. We try to deal with and contain it through language, but it is outside language and discourse.
Part Three

The Interview Ray Nayler and  Christopher Breu	Part One	Part Two	Part Three	The stories By Ray Nayler Ý Site designed and encoded by  Earl Jackson, Jr.
ÝAnother Scene		Suspense Fiction	ÝDetective Fictions	ÝHysteria and Paranoia
ÝFantasy Campus		Contact Earl Jackson, Jr. Tomrip5@aol.com	Ý	ÝLets Deviant!