Jai Clare: An Interview
by Rusty Barnes
Jai Clare's short stories have appeared in The London Magazine, Agni, The Barcelona Review, Absinthe New European Writing, Fiction International and various international anthologies, including the first issue of Night Train. She lives in London. She has taught creative writing and English literature at University College Falmouth and many other places. Her areas of interest are the short story, European fiction, and the non-realist poetic novel. She writes to surprise herself with words and find out things unknown to her, putting words together to form new ideas and emotions. Once she even tried to sing in a goth band! Her novel, "Paradox Junkie", is represented by John Jarrold of the John Jarrold Agency. Her website is at www.jaiclare.com.
Many of these stories are placed in locales other than your native country. What makes the appeal of the foreign so powerful for you? Is it related to your characters' sense of being outsiders, or is it something else?
I think you must be right. I just get stimulated by landscapes. Cultures. Especially the wrong people in the wrong culture or landscape.
Certainly there's sex in these stories, but nothing I would venture is intended to be outright erotic. What prompted Elastic Press to list this book as erotica? How do you feel about it?
I suppose it's easier to classify and therefore sell a book if you give it a genre. It becomes a commodity whereas something unclassified is unknowable in marketing terms. How do you sell something that's not like something else? There is one story, More Moments of Sheer Joy, that I sold to an erotica anthology, but one with an emphasis on quality of writing. That's the trouble with genre fiction in my eyes—it's often an excuse for pedestrian at best and lame at worst writing. The plot is paramount—let's forget the quality of words. So to answer your question—I believe there are erotic elements to my stories but no they are not erotica per se.
From 'More Moments of Sheer Joy':
Lost in the moment, eyes closed breathing hard, lost in the moment the island purple mosaics flashing tunnels inside outside going through hands gripping feel your breath. The blue sea the sheer blue sea, islands that kiss like crabs, the swaying boat-deck, the sound of gulls. Wet wood beneath my feet. He touched my breasts his lips, his hands, his pinching fingers his fingers inside me naked now his mouth and tongue between my legs, he holds my back, holding me`with the palm of his hand, stopping me from swaying from falling-I can feel his concern for my body with every touch. This exultation of touch is what I needed. The caress of his cock, the feel of it.
I want to pay attention to your commas or lack thereof here. I love a long sentence, particularly if it's broken well as these are, the way you pile phrases on top of each other and intercut with a four or five-word sentence. I know you work hard word-to-word (we all do), but what is your conscious process when writing a scene like this, which has to convey emotion without becoming porn-y?
Initially, I am not conscious at all. However, saying that, I am conscious of trying not to write porn. So easy in anything to lapse into clichés. To genre writing. Finding the write word is hard, but if I find the right rhythm, words come easily (trying not to pun there). Juxtapositions within rhythm always makes for interesting reading. For me, one word leads to the other. The idea is sparked but the words on the page that progress that idea lead it, even. I follow the beauty of the rhythm, or the ugliness— deliberate ugliness. In stories like Saft I wanted something short, sharp, shocking. In Mad Angels, which you and others have noted for its uniqueness in the collection, works on rhythm—read aloud it is a different piece. By the way, I question it being that unique; it is but a culmination of the promise inherent in other stories.
There's a violent undercurrent in many of these stories, but it come out full force in Mad Angels, which is very different in tone from the rest of the book, where characters are on the edge, but more or less in control of themselves on the outside. This story loses control in many ways and moves forward on violence and ends—without giving much away—in fighting and voyeuristic fucking. Can you talk a bit about the difference between this story and the rest of your work?
I don't actually think of this story as at all different from the others—it's just a variant thereof. You'll see the same ideas or variants of in Saft, Delaney Wears a Hat. Other stories that contain violence—Cusp of Something, Man of Shapes, Vanitas, A Song of Need, etc. I think Mad Angels is just a culmination of certain elements that are in my stories to a smaller degree. Or maybe the epitome—the crescendo! I think almost all my stories have violence to some degree in them. Stylistically, the story employs stream of consciousness which was deliberate in this case and subject-matter dependent. Not all stories need or demand such a style. Delaney isn't quite SoC but was deliberately run-on but contained and extremely internal. So while Mad Angels appears on the surface to be quite different, I contend whether it is in actuality. Is the control on the outside that much of a difference from the other stories? Again I wonder. . .
In reading 'Hand of Fatima,' which originally appeared in Agni, the sense of the narrator as outsider overwhelms the story, and in 'The Lightest Blue' as well, and this sense casts a long shadow over the remainder of the book. To what extent does this book depend on these various narrators seeing themselves as separate from the rest of the world?
I think it's probably an important aspect to it which I hadn't really realized until I put it together whole. The narrators aren't what you classically call sympathetic! I'm way too interested in the idea if not fitting in, not the outsider as in much lit fiction but outsiders even to outsiders cos they seem to fit in and yet there's something odd, weird twisted in their thinking that makes them stand out. But then I wonder is everyone really like that and the only difference is how malleable they allow themselves to be, and the survivors are the one who suppress their oddness and fit in with common currency of the day. In Delaney Wears a Hat which to me is rather Beckettian in the sense it occupies a small stage and is like Mad Angels in the sense that it's about violence, but, thesis time: the repudiation of it or rather the taking of it as an act of repudiation—both of sexual desire or sexual expectations. Violence as an answer. She wants to rip them to shreds. She wants to repel all invaders and sees the act of sex with certain people as not life-changing. She expects and wants sex to be a life-changing force or there's no point. Violence becomes a better solution. In Hand of Fatima she is an outsider only to the culture and the man who uses her. In The Lightest Blue, the main character has been abandoned by his lover. I seem to have a lot of that! And I guess his love makes him an outsider to those desires of his lover.
The lyrical touch you exhibit in these stories seems as if it would lend itself well to publication: besides that touch, they're unusual in their settings and intriguing in their various concerns. And you've published many of them. I know, though, that you've soured on the process of publication a bit recently. Is there something that's changed recently that makes your work less fit for the publishing world?
Well, fashions in fiction have always been for the transparent prose mainstream—almost always, with the odd exception, the flowering of Modernism for instance. Literary fiction, i.e. short stories, has no profitable outlets in the UK. To write short fiction as a no one you are courting the serrated edge of madness here! So having had some minor publishing successes, it no longer motivates me. You have to put so much in to get so little back. I'd rather just write.
How do you place yourself in the literary landscape? It seems to me that as opposed to realism, you're interested in exploring the age-old questions of man-woman-world through a different, lyrical lens. It's not exactly avant-garde, but it doesn't bear much relation to the dominant paradigm of 'realistic' fiction, either.
No, I don't think of myself as avant-garde at all. But certainly out of the current mainstream. The mainstream, much like warmth in Britain, depends where the Gulf Stream is! I.e. how far south is the mainstream these days? It's certainly narrowed in my view in the last twenty years, so me and an amazing writer like Deborah Levy are definitely out of it. I am not a realist writer either, though I do like to play with realist expectations. I am not interested in portraying the world as it is, but as it could appear if only we could actually see it this way. And using words to do that—that is, wallowing, luxuriating in the beauty and power of words rather than trying for the realists' dream of transparent prose, which to me is a fallacy. Of course this runs the danger of the story being hidden within the words for the reader. I can live with that. A niche. Find me in a niche. Waiting.
What's next for you? What are you working on? How is the promotion going for Cusp of Something?
Promotion/ cough. I am bad at that. Ask a countryman of mine how to promote. I haven't time, sadly. As for me, well, I have a novel germinating, something even more experimental and out of the mainstream. I need to find time and routine to work on it, Meanwhile, my agent still tries to sell the most commercial piece of mine. Ho hum.