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I conducted this interview with the late, beloved Cole Heinowitz while she was doing research in Seville in 2001. I had moved to Brooklyn a couple of years earlier, and this interview was intended for Gary Sullivan’s magazine ReadMe. I don’t think it was ever published. I tried to keep my questions simple and anodyne, because I genuinely wanted to know things like her research topic and her genesis and evolution as a writer, but as you will see her trickster brilliance came into play as she made literary works out of her responses. I don’t remember why we stopped the interview when we did, but the date makes me think it was because some buildings were destroyed.
Nada: What, for you, is the value or use of a filtered vocabulary – an ‘armature’? And in what way is it the outward posture of your internal disposition? How would you describe that disposition?
Could you say more about the pact you make with the reader? That is, if you were to put that pact into the form of a direct address, how would it sound? Do you have an ideal reader and if so what are her/his characteristics? What sort of pass would you want that ideal reader to make at your writing?
Describe this urge towards exhibition or confession and how it is made manifest – or encrypted – in your work. What do you think are its motivations?
Cole: I want to get to know the posture of “disclosure to a fault” from the inside in order to expand my emotional repertoire, since even though I sometimes tend to harbor key information in the service of self-protection, I also realize that my attitude is based on a certain lack of belief in the world’s capacities. I have decided to make honesty my temporary new polestar, to see how it goes. If you read it right, this decision says more about what life’s like in Andalucia than I could possibly provide via the gory details of sex and climatology, even were I the world’s most accomplished exhibitionist. As for the risk of my getting too comfortable and slackening the ropes that bind and sustain, not a chance! An organicist honesty as I can best understand it, could only possibly lead to greater and more important discomforts, which I feed on.
Yours in skyrocketing gravity, Cole
Nada: What are you researching in Andalucia?
Cole: In September of 2000, I took myself to the deep south of Spain (Seville, the site where the empire originally launched itself across the Atlantic) under the pretense of conducting dissertation research. My dissertation examines how British and French sentimental literature of the late eighteenth century helped construct the liberal subjectivity we all know (and hate) so well nowadays by borrowing from and perverting Spanish accounts of contact with the “noble savages” of the New World. I’m here studying those original documents (such as the _Cartas relatorias_ of Columbus and Cortés, the _Comentarios reales_ of “el Inca” Garcilaso de la Vega, and the _Brevísima relación de la destruición de las Indias_ by Fray Bartolomé de Las Casas) which the French and British laid hands on in the 1700s. These documents helped fuel the Black Legend of Spanish barbarity toward the peaceful natives which was in turn used to justify the usurpation of power from the flailing Spanish empire in the name of humanity. But the English and the French not only styled themselves the liberators of the poor Indian, in their writings, they posited an a priori identification with Indian civilizations which depicted their commercial takeover as a return to an idealized pre-Columbian state, even going so far as to whiten the color of the Indian’s skin and to modify his social rituals in order to render him more amenable to a European readership.
The late eighteenth century was both the era of Sensibility and of the transformation of the European economy from one based on the possession of land to one based on the possession of markets. My dissertation argues that these two events are fundamentally intertwined, not just historically but ideologically. Sensibility was understood as the nexus of “hidden mechanisms which governed the lives of men,”(1) the understanding and control of which were necessary for the successful operations of the modern state. The idea of the native made possible by increased trans-Atlantic contact helped to develop this notion of the sensible self. Conversely, the global implications of sensibility seemed to hang in the balance of the emerging market imperialism insofar as the latter enterprise was understood either as the violation or the protection of the native man’s natural state. At stake in both the debates over Sensibility and the renovated commercial economics was the relationship between private interest and the larger society: Was the individual essentially amenable to society? Was free trade consistent with the greater good of the state? If not, what changes could be made to bring the two terms into harmony?
With the increasing dissolution of the Spanish colonial empire in South America and the opening of that market to other European influences in the eighteenth century, it became necessary for Britain and France to articulate their difference from their imperial predecessor. Diverging from Las Casas’ pedagogical father-child model of colonial relations, which boded the eventual transfer of power to the “child,” British and French writers found more sensible ways of defining their identity in terms of Spanish America, ranging from Helen Maria Williams’ copenetration of sentiments in which the moral axis of identification outstrips the axis of historical facts (see her romantic epic, _Peru_), to the seemingly enlightened conjugal model whose “promise of ‘eternal love’ stabilizes and veils the actual power relationship among the conjugal partners in Marmontel’s _Les Incas_.”(2) In addition to conducting research, going to classes, and giving lectures, then, I spend a good deal of time reflecting on questions such as: Do these European writings “other” the Latin American or represent him as compatible with—or even part of—the domestic subject? To what extent do these writings define the domestic subject as coterminous with the modern nation, its economy, and its foreign policy? What accounts for these writers’ decision to erase the dominant criollo class of American-born Spaniards from their accounts of contemporary South America and to replace him with a glorified “noble savage,” who was not the American group with whom the contemporary Briton and Frenchman shared cultural contact and commercial interests? Why does the writing of Sensibility borrow from colonial historiography only to reject the traditional definition of colonialism? And finally, what does it mean for post-colonial scholarship that eighteenth-century Europeans rethought their identity by reference to South America, with which their dominant relationship was not colonial but rather one of liberal commerce?
1 Pagden, Anthony, _The Uncertainties of Empire:
Essays in Iberian and Ibero-American Intellectual
History_, Hampshire: Valorium, 1994, p. 4.
2 Zantop, Susan, “Domesticating the Other: European
Colonial Fantasies 1770-1830” in _Encountering the
Other(s):Studies in literature, history, and culture_,
ed. Brinker-Gabler, Gisela, Albany : State University
of New York Press, 1995, p. 279.
Nada: Reading the description of your project made me aware of some cultural images so entrenched in me I should have known to be suspicious of them. One is a sense of old Spain as dark, cruel, and sinister, and of Spaniards as forceful purveyors of ideology, clad in black with high ruffs and severe expressions, full of strategy and often tortuous machinations to increase their power. Little did I know that this notion may well be based on propaganda from French and English sources scrambling to justify their own power grabs!
What I would most like to know is, what drew you to isolate this particular research project out of the welter of possible research projects? I sense that there is some relevant autobiography…
Cole: As to what my life is like here, apart from the dissertation business:
(Background: In the United States, I was worsting ancestral shapnel droppings into bundles, but now I have begun the work of converting these bundles into thongs and bumper stickers. Radio station employees trail the vehicles bearing my bumper stickers in order to give the drivers cash rewards for their patronage; the backs of the drivers’ heads are sweating and cropped in the latitudinal heat. The drivers arrive at the rummage sale where rococo smudge sticks are renegotiated as multi-flavored welfare and the chagrin at the end of life’s noble journey is bartered for a meaningful six-pack. Sarcasm molts, yielding reams of scaly personalities for the natives who, at the end of the sale, are all too predictably melted down for their metal content.)
“The parish acrobats” is perhaps a term too dignified for those going out on the Sevillian street in hopes of finding a glance to substantiate their flaccid antechamber. I am perceived as the opposite of wandering inchoate desires, overvalued, based on a standard of scarcity, and seen to exhume significance from places believed empty. Since there are no other experimental (I use the term with malaise, you know) writers here, they always ask me what I find out there in the uninspiring fray, and when I come back with hands dripping with fresh fish guts and a few hook wounds I vindicate their cultural baggage but still can’t step up to the plate as a valued member because baseball, like big business, only exists here as a negative value. The buying lifestyle of the Sevillano is engineered according to the belief that appearance connotes a known social sphere that can be enjoyed in absentia if one is properly adorned. Valorations of quality lift off from social service, or what the Catholics calls “acts,” and transplant into space, in this way forming a regime, though “mentality” as a term is still surrounded by the half-visible, half-attainable (vislumbrado) halo of education. As you can imagine, laundry occupies a large part of my time.
Immersion in another language directs itself first to the loss of native grammar and sentence order. The words stay with you, excepting an acute blow to the visual cortex and the subsequent loss of all recognizable tenacity. The grammar storage unit keeps the social relations, and is the area most compromised by rhythmic alteration in the manifestation of human character. Vocabulary measures raw intelligence and grammar measures relational intelligence. The people in the living room are not paying any attention to me, and I have been writing this for some time now. But then again, they are not only Andalucians, but scientists, and therefore doubly distinguished by the amount of time they can spend concentrating exclusively on one thing. Eschewing awkwardness credit profiling, they expect that if I don’t want to be on their sofa while they get high I will leave, and they will probably like me more for this.
A bus driver smokes a cigarette in “three,” which means ten, minutes between shifts and no one can fuck with his right to public self assertion. This is the punchline, or cusp, of my rhythmic divergence from this environment: the pointed digression followed by the oblique hit. But trade winds brings us together, and ween me into criolism. There are beaches in Huelva where the literal washes the tone back up. In the American Atlantic, by contrast, decisions smuggle overwhelming tonal concerns into the literal. So the half of my investigations here are into the physical prompts to my renegade tonality. I like to use the phrase “During the age of triumph” as a stance toward my friends, but I have to admit that there is a great generosity in Saint Augustine (who was probably explicating Cervantes) when he says, “but those things which have no significance of their own are interwoven for the sake of things which are significant.” Before such a damned knack for style, even my Judaism pales.
“El que se pica, ajos come”—If you got stung, you must have been eating garlic. If something I said hurt you (since I had no intention of doing so) it must reflect something harsh you think about yourself and which I accidentally triggered. Certitude of the national character of which one partakes at the broad moment of communication can be a serious handicap, though the cultureless envy it. Since I believe this, I have to concede a latter day-cosmopolitan, as opposed to a nationalist or regionalist, vision of expressive functionality. This ideology weds me uncomfortably to the “enlightened” imperialism which stingily imparts liberal humanism to the powerful alone. At Carnavál, which takes place in Cadiz next week I will either go dressed as a joint stock company or the British Navy.
Nada: Tell me about your genesis and evolution as a writer.
Civilization chain gangs triangulate the mountain summit. I am between the abyss and the mountain, on the road. The ambient gentleman is not believable right from the start.
I confirmed this theory with the puffy night nurse as well as the pharmacist: Under very demanding circumstances, inferior genes, those with less concentration on the inside of the cell wall, are ejected by influx from the outside, and left to fend for themselves in the formative body. Once free of their cell, these genes can jump to any other formative body bearing a quorum of characteristics similar to those of the original host body.
This knowledge is useful as a substitute for psychic powers or belief in God when forming a community.
The more advanced/decadent of the inferior genes, however, can jump across bodies using absolutely any line of similitude, from matching sleep cycles to a matching second grade year of broken fibia. My mother is explaining to me how awareness of this intricate matrix renders the fashion focus obsolete, and hence, as I see it then, writing. I accuse her, to no avail, of being a prostelytizer for the lowest common denominator, and yet I win the argument solely because I am a hybrid of inferior and noble genetic material, and this confers, if nothing else, demonstrative power. This winning line: “How did I know then, so well as if it were my very own memory, that you had stolen my diary and hid it away, using it piecemeal to fish in the creek, floating scraps to my sister now and then to raise her IQ score?
I developed a fetish for being disappointed. Sadly, I require a mortal object to penetrate with desire. If it grows, I keep it around and try to shut up long enough for it to get used to the house. Luckily, the offering of food is a petition for solidarity, whether I like it or not, and I am jewish girl. So the soundtrack can’t overwhelm the action.
A tip for screenwriters: It’s ony 25 percent what you say and the rest is your ability to sustain the mood. For those in emotion, the phenomenon of time passing passes final sentence on what’s considered content. Then, at around 15 years old, I started hearing talk of “pluralism in measure.” That’s when I entered my local university and mounted a campaign against the foreign exchange students of the world, who were only alive to add quantity in the absence of quality to the normative youth experience. The campaign was called: “Anticipatory wish-fufillement of the entitled,” with the fine-print call to arms: “New information is being used to cover up the fact that the old information hasn’t been studied properly yet!” Now that I am older, however, I recognize that this operation is a structural business tool (1), to wit, a homing device used in the obstacle training course the executives who will ultimately advance to put into practice the studies on the old information.
I knew a person in the United States who was always in love or—. The Spaniards have one thing up on the Americans: Failure doesn’t cause them to protect themselves. As such, certainly nothing so whimsical as the fear of failure can shut them up. Whereas, the American says: “Everyone I’ve ever dated has made me a better writer. And for that reason, every relationship I’ve ever had has ended.” At the age of 26, I am learning the former tactic by appreciating the dangerous spar coming from inside the opening it has caused. I teach a Spanish person that “cloak and dagger” means “irony” amidst our glancing blows and doggerels of telos. Downside-effect: a loss of appreciation for the arts of protection and self-deployment. Other potential side effects ( applicable to the 0.1% of those surveyed who have always read a tale of worldly doom in the pheonetic progress of vowels): Upon seeing an accent mark, a feeling arises that something potentially revelatory has been omitted from the document.
Okay. I knew a person in the United States who was always in love or capable, oh I don’t—, maybe I was 24. I called it a high-risk value-system. I couldn’t bear to think about that risk, even though I seemed the type of person who was always thinking about it. So I attracted those risk-taking ones. But now the risk comes knocking for me, calling itself familiarity. I did miss it, now that I know what it was. (See what I mean about time passing through the education?) (“:Hello.”) (They spar.)
My life is devoted to the service of making human intercourse more demanding, with a reward system at the end as I see fit; in short, to revamping of the ruined theater. Theatricality is in a shamefully degraded state, serving more to divert and obscure than to clarify and broaden, a pathetically muddy run-off of _Discipline and Punish_. This was perhaps inevitable given theatricality’s foundation upon the intersection of complacent lying and vigorous, nearly sociopathic, hope (2). But I am not interested in the dialectic between degradation and ambition. I only believe that rescuing drama for the nourishment of logic is the surest prenatal footing. In the noblest incarnation of theatricality, when it becomes real, you realize that you don’t have to believe in things for them to be true. Drama is that function that occurs while navegating distance. I incriminate the dramatists not for their falsity but for their insecurity, being the predator that lives in the distance. Symbolism is born of their sense of iniquity. I only help their argot along by feeling guilty for hating them and pretending not to avoid them.
Nonetheless, until recently, I couldn’t work at high levels without something I called faith in people. I don’t remember exactly how people came to occupy this prize position, perhaps it’s just what happens to most women of above-average intelligence: they learn to infallibly legitimize their limitations. Then, further down the road, they are allowed to learn to find one person who exceeds those limitations, and (don’t think I’m happy about this) they call this “falling in love.” Then, just beyond that, they learn to objectify capacity and so not to leave their emotions to chance or hormones, which, like the NASDAQ, dictate faith quotients daily.
You need to get on a road that exceeds good taste in order to pass through perfection (3). Learn to recognize that spot beforehand and get off there. If this isn’t possible, say hello to David Bowie for me. ——– 1) In addition to being a tool of applied business, the study abroad principle is a functional element in hermits, who, in general possess both extreme self-awareness and sufficient independent means to exempt them from convincing, bartering, or the rest of the public desperation sideshow (which, incidentally, ends in joy). House-builders: don’t choose this deck. 2) “Genealogy of theatrical decay,” a soft pass:
- The association of belief with creation, and
- The intravenous supplantion of self-help with creative standards. Tips for the dramatist: Becoming a successful person should have nothing to do, in the first trimester, with identifying greatness. Give belief back to those aspiring to the world to come. Don’t believe in yourself. Read yourself and learn to base all subsequent actions on the interpretation of your findings.
3) The cultivation of information excess and the creation of ambiguity therefrom is not a potential road, but rather, the corrosion of roads, a sabotage technique used by nearly-urbanized hostiles.
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Otohime 