GOWP Meets... Rob Doyle
GOWP Meets… Rob Doyle (Originally published in GOWP Two 22/1/15)
The “Proteus” chapter of Ulysses has long been one of my favourite scenes in literature. It’s June 16th 1904 and a broody young Stephen Dedalus, back from his miserable stint in Paris and now teaching in a school in Dalkey, stands on Sandymount Strand, pondering the protean nature of reality and the apparent meaninglessness of existence. Fast forward almost one hundred years to June 2003 — this is where Doyle’s Here Are The Young Men begins. Two young lads — Matthew and Cocker — sit, having just finished their final Leaving Certificate exam, on a beach in Dublin looking out at ‘the fuckin Poolbeg Towers,’ downing cans, smoking spliffs, and reflecting on the futility of it all.
‘Poppers would be good… It’d be good if we had some poppers,’ Cocker notes.
‘But we don’t,’ comes the reply.
While we can’t imagine Stephen asking Buck Mulligan for poppers, it’s clear that some themes in fiction don’t change. Here Are The Young Men, published last year by Lilliput Press, tells the story of four young men, and their dealings with teenage angst, atrocity porn, video games, cans, yokes, spliffs, snuff films, and an over-whelming sense of anomie that seemed specific to Celtic-Tiger Ireland — told through hilarious and often profoundly disturbing prose. It is, in short, a fantastic read.
We loved it so much, that we made it our business to seek out the man himself for an interview. We arranged to meet him in Mulligans in Stoneybatter for a few pints on a rainy Friday afternoon.We got a small booth up at the back, ordered three pints of stout, and talked for hours. Magic mushrooms; E.M. Cioran; the benefits of antinatalism; Nietzsche’s On The Genealogy of Morality — these were just some of the things we’d spoken of before we’d thought of turning the recorder on. As the afternoon progressed, Rob spoke to us about his travels, his love-hate relationship with Michel Houllebecq, the writing process, and the growing diversity of independent literary publications in Ireland, amongst other things. You can read the entire interview below.
Interview
GOWP: We thought we might start by asking about your early reading and literary influences.
Rob Doyle: When I was a kid I was a huge reader. As a child I would devour everything — all that Stephen King sort of stuff. Then I started reading all the adult, serial killer sort of stuff. This was when I was really a kid. All my Dad’s books — I devoured them. He was into pulpy sort of novels — airport paperback thrillers full of obscene violence. I don’t know how I was allowed read all of those books. And then I stopped reading for a few years. A few years later, when I was a teenager, I got violently into reading again. I started reading anything I could get my hands on. I was reading a lot of the obvious big ones, then — a lot of European literature, The Beats — the sort of books you should read at that age, Burroughs, Kerouac and what not. Then a lot of drug writers: Hunter S. Thompson and all those people. Some of them I’ve gone back to in recent years and some of them are still good. Also a lot of European writing — philosophical fiction like Camus’s. I had sort of extreme tastes as a teenager. I was listening to a lot of punk music and reading Primo Levi. Holocaust stuff; Existentialist philosophy. I was mucking about with Nietzsche, who later became a massive influence for me. Just a lot of angry literature. I remember reading Eldridge Cleaver’s book Soul On Ice. He was a Black Panther radical who went to prison and was, by his own admission, a very disturbed man. It’s a furious, lyrical, brilliant book which I suggest reading. So yeah, I was reading everything — I was a very open-minded reader as a teenager. I hope I still am today. Later on I got into philosophy and didn’t really read any fiction at all. I was reading people like Sartre, Baudrillard, Camus — all the French guys. Nietzsche, Kierkegaard…
G: You’ve mentioned Schopenhauer before?
RD: Yeah, Schopenhauer. A really beautiful writer. All those guys, and psychoanalytical writing as well — R.D Laing, Freud. For a long while I just wasn’t that into fiction. I just wanted ideas — I liked getting straight to the point.
G: All the philosophers you’ve mentioned are also renowned for their highly literary style.
RD: Yeah, the very best writers — like the very best philosophers — defy strict classification. It’s unfair to just call them a philosopher or a writer — they’re not one or the other, they’re neither. My latest obsession has been E.M Cioran, the Romanian philosopher. Have you heard of him? The other day I was demanding that my flat mate read him. Maybe I was a bit heavy handed, but there you go. Beckett rejected him as being too pessimistic, which might tell you something. He is sensational as both a writer and a thinker. His style is so great that you don’t really think you’re reading philosophy at all — it feels like reading great literature. He takes everything to such an extreme that it becomes amusing. His writing is an experiment in extreme thinking. He’s kind of the last philosopher — the bloody end of the western tradition. He’s a huge influence these days.
G: Does the psychoanalytical stuff you’ve mentioned still hold weight for you?
RD: I haven’t read Freud in years. But he’s a great writer, a great stylist. I went deep into him for a year or two. But it’s been years since I’ve felt inspired to read him. Psychoanalytical theory in general is a sort of useful lens to pick up temporarily to look at the world through. But I tend not to dwell in psychoanalytical lens all the time.
G: It’s a tough place to be.
RD: It is. And I did dwell in it for a few years, but it started to make me feel sickly — not quite healthy.
G: Kind of like Rez?
RD: Yeah, he’s kind of a victim of his own self analysis. I think Psychoanalytical theory is interesting, but I don’t think it’s the last word.
G: A lot of people have mentioned your MA in Psychoanalysis. Do you feel that it had a big influence on the writing of the novel?
RD: I think it would be a drastically bad way to write a novel. I think any good writing should be a direct wellspring of your own intuition, insight, passion, feeling and experience. And if you filter that through someone else’s theory then you’re going to lose something — it just wouldn’t work for me. Maybe it’s there in the background, fuelling your insight into human nature, but if it becomes a theoretical filter through which you funnel all this stuff… nah, not for me. I still have respect for psychoanalytical theory and its contribution to the 20th century. I binged on it for a while, as I tend to do with things. Then I sated myself on it and backed off a bit. I was going to become a psychoanalyst — that’s what I wanted to do. But then I went away travelling and the more I thought about it and the more life experience I had I started to think about writing instead.
G: You’ve taken on a role as editor for the Colony literary journal. How are you finding the work?
RD: For the most part I found it satisfying and fulfilling — and also challenging, but in a good way. It was when I was still living abroad that Dave Lorgan — who was a guest editor at The Stinging Fly a few years back and actually published my first piece — told me he was starting a new journal and asked me if I’d like to edit. I got really into it, but I didn’t want to edit the fiction. So I did the non-fiction. With that I’ve had a great time because it means finding people who interest me and commissioning them to write articles for us. We’ve only had two issues and the third one is about to come out. I’ve had great fun finding excellent stuff.
G: There’s seems to have been something of a resurgence in small, literary magazines and journals in Ireland in the last few years. Have you experienced much of this?
RD: It’s very hard for me to know [about it]. You have to keep in mind I only moved back to Ireland a year and a half ago. Before that I had been living abroad for years, totally removed from any sniff of any literary world. I didn’t know anything about what was going on in Ireland. I suppose I always had a fairly begrudging attitude towards Ireland — there was nothing here. It was basically an ignorant prejudice, but I felt like I didn’t have any outlet here. Now I’ve come back and in the last year it just seems that — on a personal, subjective level — the game has changed so much. There’s all these new journals and the more established ones like The Stinging Fly and The Dublin Review — which I love. I really don’t know what it was like before. I know the likes of Gorse and Colony are really new — and I love it, I fucking love it.
G: It’s exciting.
RD: It is. Everyone knows that Ireland is full of writers, that it’s a literary country and always has been. But what has been lacking here is maybe an openness to the wider world. An openness to those experimental outcroppings.
G: What comes out as an ‘Irish novel’ is filtered through the prejudices of what publishing houses think an ‘Irish novel’ is. Would you agree?
RD: There’s an aesthetic prejudice there, class filters, etc. — there really are. It did seem like there was something missing [in the Irish literary scene]. And now suddenly it’s not a bad place to be. It’s that thing: if you don’t like what’s going on, do it yourself. It’s like the punk rock mentality — make your own world. There’s things like The Penny Dreadful which started off as a zine and now it’s a really cool journal. They [TPD] just brought out a book of poetry by Dylan Brennan (author of Blood Oranges), who is a guy I’ve gotten to know. He’s a poet and a bloody good non-fiction writer. He wrote a few pieces for Colony. You’re going to be hearing about that guy for years to come. He’s very good. It’s exciting that all this stuff is happening because suddenly someone like me needn’t feel so alienated anymore. [Writing] for someone like Gorse or Colony I can follow my impulses and write [what I want to] without having to think that it might never be published. Now there’s outlets for writing stuff of quality that doesn’t fit into the template of the Irish short story or whatever. I use to find this city deathly boring; I used to be bored out of me nuts here. I felt like I was in the armpit of the universe. But now it doesn’t really feel that way.
G: In an interview with Gorse you described Here Are The Young Men as a Trojan horse for the Irish literary world. Do you still view it that way?
RD: In a way. It wasn’t written with that in mind. I think that would be a really bad way of going about writing a novel. When I wrote that book it came from a place of real passion and a desire to express [something]. You’re not thinking about where it fits into this, that or the other. But then when I had finished it I started to see — having written the book as honestly, passionately and viscerally as possible — that maybe I had done things differently. I don’t want to make any irritating, grandiose claims for it, but at the same time, having finished the book, I began to realise that it was in many ways everything the traditional Irish novel was not. This is a bit of a truism, but it’s exactly the kind of book [about Ireland] that a reader like me would have wanted to read.
G: The novel has been received quite warmly by the mainstream press. We were wondering if you had any conflicting feelings about this?
RD: No, absolutely not. Someone had asked me a similar question at a time when the book could have gone either way, and I gave him the same answer: no. Despite all my bravado, I wrote this book and I believe in it. I think it has serious things to say and I want it to be read and discussed and thought about, by as many people as possible. The book has kicked off and that is what I wanted to happen. It couldn’t have more in line with my own desires.
G: The mainstream media seems to have mostly seized on the more sensational aspects of the work: the drugs, sex, violence, etc., perhaps to the detriment of the more philosophical threads that run through the book.
RD: Maybe, but to be honest, I don’t know. I think, like any book, readers are going to bring their own set of ideas to it. I’m not so gloomy about that because I’ve had plenty of evidence of readers who took it very seriously. There was a reviewer in The Sunday Times who went deep into the philosophical implications of it. It was a wonderful review for me. There’s been a couple like that. People will read it and maybe come away thinking that it is a visceral novel about youth, and there’s others who will come away thinking ‘there are actually deeper rumblings going on’. This is a novel about people adrift in an exhausted society and an exhausted culture with no abiding values. There has definitely been sufficient recognition of the deeper themes of the novel for me to feel I haven’t missed the target. Any bastard can write a book about extreme violence and brutality, but that’s only one element of this book.
G: We thought we saw some connection between the ending of the novel and the ideas expressed in your essay ‘Appetite for Depletion’. You talk about the almost suffocating influence of Houllebecq. The ending of the novel could perhaps be seen as overcoming some of the problems you discuss in the essay.
RD: Interesting — possibly. The more I love a writer, the more of a tense and ambivalent relationship I have with them. I find him overwhelmingly terrifying, yet I love him and I love his books — I’ve reread them many times. I find with an author like Houllebecq — and Nietzsche as well — that it gets personal. At some point you have to grapple them down and beat them to death. You can’t be consumed by them — not just in a literary sense, but in an existential, personal sense. You know, the stakes are high — it’s you and the universe, and you only have one shot at it. I feel there are no conclusions. About a year or two ago I got really worried about myself on a fairly deep level. I felt I had reached some sort of impasse where I had cut myself off from all nutrients, all redemptive [forces]. My own addiction to scepticism had taken me towards a sort of spiritual suicide. All of this sounds horribly grandiose, but it’s real — it’s what’s going on for people. A year has passed and a lot has happened in that year, not just outwardly, but inwardly, too. I just don’t feel ready to jump to a conclusion and say ‘the world is utterly deject, abject and entropic’. When hope springs up and the will to resist…
[interrupted by the arrival of another round of pints]
Life is always in flux and whenever I’m worried I’ve reached an impasse, I switch on and I realise it’s maybe dishonest to convince myself, as I have in the past, that the world is just a black hell. I don’t think that’s the truth. It’s a flux. This essay that I’ve been working on for the last few weeks for The Dublin Review is about psychedelics, but it’s also about the urgent questions of human existence. It’s like Cioran, the philosopher I was talking about. He’s brilliant, but people write him off as a nihilist and pessimist — which he is. He has no interest in anything other than the raw, urgent spiritual questions of human life. Here I am hurled into this universe — I have no idea where it came from, what do I do with this, what does it mean? There’s a wonder beneath the darkness.
G: We thought that maybe we detected some influence of Easton Elis in Here Are The Young Men. Clay from Less Than Zero and Kearney from your novel both encounter snuff films. While Clay is somewhat repulsed by the snuff images, Kearney finds inspiration in them. Was Easton Ellis on your mind while writing those sections?
RD: No, not at the time of writing. It did occur to me later on, because I have read the novel.
G: The novel is entrenched in masculinity, which goes against the grain of much contemporary fiction. You definitely ran the risk of being dismissed as a retrograde, angry male novelist. Did this occur to you at the time of writing?
RD: Not at all. When I was writing that novel there was a passion behind it. It’s a novel, so it is fiction, but I think a lot of people will read it and realise that it’s coming from an authentic place. That was the way it was going to be and to hell with any of this ‘white male’ criticism. It didn’t come into it all.
G: Jen comes across as one of the true sources of redemption in the novel. How was it writing her character? Did you find it more difficult than the lads?
RD: No, it wasn’t. It came very naturally actually. That part of the writing came very intuitively and organically. Instantly she was a character I really liked. Despite their [Matthew, Kearney, Rez and Cocker] flaws I kind of liked all of the characters, but she was easy to get along with. I probably fancied her a bit myself. In my interpretation of it, she has more substance, even integrity, than a lot of the lads in the novel. She’s grounded and she’s solid and she’s more mature. Sometimes that’s the case. I don’t want to generalise too much, but I remember when I was growing up there were girls around and they always seemed more solid and mature than the lads in the group. Nothing was calculated about it, but maybe some of that experience seeped into it. I’ll be honest with you — and this isn’t to reduce the novel to a personal, autobiographical level, because I think that’s the wrong way to go: it reduces the fiction of the thing — in my life, easily the most stabilising and positive influences have always been my relationships with women. They’ve stopped me drifting off into my own ruination. In the novel there’s a lot of material that could be called ‘misogynistic,’ so I am relieved that no one has come along and accused me of being ‘that’.
G: Drugs play a huge role in the novel and not a very positive one for the most part. In fact, many of the problems the lads experience — depersonalisation, confusion, angst — can be linked to their excessive consumption of drugs. Rez’s drug use leads him down a path of stoned solipsism; Kearney seems to use drugs as a way of severing his last remaining ties to the quotidian world. Would you be comfortable with the novel being interpreted as something of an ‘anti-drug’ tract?
RD: Frankly, I wouldn’t be comfortable with that. Someone even recently suggested that it was an anti-video game novel, or an anti-pornography novel. And to me, and I say this sincerely, generally I don’t have any moral or ethical issues with drugs, video-games or even pornography. They’re complicated issues, but I think it’s far more interesting than any black and white moral thing. I hate the idea of being perceived as a preacher against any of those things, I really do. I think one of the good things about writing a novel is that you don’t have to accept any sort of moral standpoint at all — you can just describe it. I’ve written this novel which is about a bunch of characters who I can easily imagine from the people I’ve grown up with and observed living in Dublin for 23 years, before I left. All of this was based on observation, introspection, imagination. It was descriptive rather than proscriptive. If people read it and saw it as an intentional anti-drugs tract I’d think they’d have missed the point. If they read it and thought, ’these characters are quite extreme, they take a lot of drugs and drink a lot — what are the ethical, spiritual and existential consequences of this?,’ I’d be on board. It was never intended to be a polemic against drugs or pornography. I tend to be a bit phobic about art that’s preachy about things like that. The moralistic novel? All that be a good citizen stuff? Fuck off. It’s not my vision of what aesthetic practices should be. It’s just descriptive, that’s all.
G:How do you find reading at a time when you are writing? Do you find that the last book you’ve read has a big influence on what you’re writing?
RD:I think they always do have an massive influence, but it never really bothered me at all.
G: Finally, we just wanted to ask you about your general approach to writing.
RD: At the moment writing is my primary thing and — at least at this moment — it’s making a living for me. To be honest, I hate the idea of sitting there and forcing yourself to write. It’s not my approach. Most of the time I have projects that I’m working on, essays and short stories. I’ll get up, have a cup of coffee and sit at the the desk with the laptop. I use to do everything out longhand, but I’ve overcome my superstitions about the difference between the two [different ways of writing things down]. Usually it’s a mess at first, but I write what I can. The first thing that comes out of the fingers or the pen is never very good. Then I generally spend the evening editing, but obviously life intervenes sometimes. A lot of the time there’s other shit going on. But when I’ve got a clear patch and something to work on. I try to spend as much of my time reading as I can. I think there’s something to be said for that, in a way.
Here Are The Young Men can be bought in all good book-stores, and his new collection of short-stories, This Is The Ritual will be published in 2016 by Lilliput Press and Bloomsbury.
Words by Tadhg Hoey and Christian Cooney