Cobraview:
a Q&A session between Vladislava Gordic and the man himself
If simplification was allowed, I'd readily call him the British version of William Gibson: he definitely is a Brit-lit kind of "cyberfantastico". But there is more to it than the label can denote or Gibson perform: Jeff Noon is an expert in experiment, and a true lover of language - one of those who kill it softly while dancing to its music. His millennial work swerves from plotting fantasy into rewording the world. The result is a bunch of noonisms called Cobralingus. The following small talk with Jeff Noon is a vain attempt to bottle up his spirit...
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 Writers
hate labels, for obvious reasons, but the labels attached to your
work have been exceptionally imaginative, "sleepstream" for instance...You
even invent labels yourself, such as "digital iambic" and "liquid
dub" |
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| Sleepstream?
That's brilliant! I've never heard that before. Where did you find
it? It's a corruption of slipstream. Is this just a mistaken misreading?
Anyway, the thing is, I kind of like labels. It's good to give ways
in to a body of work, footholds, if you like, especially when the
work might be a little different than the usual stuff. So yeah,
I make up labels for myself. They change all the time. My latest
is Post Futurism. It's a way of joining the work to the world. In
a sense, the labels are actually part of the work, rather than just
notes attached to the work. |
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"Cobralingus"
advocates (and performs) text sampling and transformations. I read
that critics relate it to Barthes' "The Lover's Discourse" and Derrida's
"Glass". Does it feel scary to meet with such opinions, knowing
that what you basically had in mind was to enrich the centuries
old narrative techniques with the tips borrowed from computer games
and music remix? |
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| Well,
first of all I should mention that I'm not intimate with either
of the two works referred to. Cobralingus comes completely from
my love of electronic music, attempting to give language a little
of the freedom that music enjoys. At the same time, the work opens
up to whatever influences people see there. Once a work is finished,
placed into the world, it starts to become adapted to, and by, that
world. There's nothing you can do about this, and neither should
you want to do anything about it. People relate a work of art to
the world that they know. Some people will have never heard the
music of Microstoria,
for instance, who were one of the major influences on the work.
But that doesn't matter. Everybody finds their own influences for
a work. |
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In
your article in The Guardian, on the occasion of the hundredth anniversary
of Lewis Carroll's birth, you wrote that you wanted to regenerate
the spirit of Lewis Carroll in the cynical British culture. That
regenerated spirit obviously dwells in Manchester ... Is it possible
at all to stay away from the native (sub)/cultural heritage? |
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| No,
and why should you want to. I have a passionate desire to write
about the England that I live in. Usually, I filter the world-view
through a weird scanner, but all the ideas and feelings are coming
from the country and the culture as they stand at the time of writing.
The work reaches out to other cultures because there are so many
crossing-over points these days, and also because my main interest
is the portrayal of quite basic human emotions, within the weirdness.
I take whatever I need from other cultures, to feed this desire.
There is so much to be said about this country, that just isn't,
in my opinion, being covered in a fictional form. I see this as
being one of my main tasks, to give an alternative voice to the
culture. |
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Did
you envision Web as your creative environment while writing "Pixel
Juice"? It seems to be a true hypertext on paper. |
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| I
think the Web is itself a symbol of an increasingly liquid culture,
rather than being the creator of it. Pixel Juice attempts to form
an impossible map of this culture. It's the particular job of writers
to find new ways of telling stories within this complex web of connections.
There's a paradox here, because books can only, by their very nature,
give a two dimensional line. I enjoy struggling with this paradox.
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Technology
can obviously mean death or oblivion to some of your characters:
Pixel Juice dies together with the secret of her butterfly hand;
Elisa Gretchen develops a function in Chromosoft Mirrors called
the "disable dream switch" which denies dreaming; Alice ends up
confused about her identity. The projects of celeborg and Hyper-Alice
prove not particularly rewarding either. Wherefore such a bleak
vision? |
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| Oh,
you're a close reader! It's good to see someone connecting to the
work so completely. Yes, I have a very strange relationship with
technology. I love it, and I hate it, at the exact same time. But
my stories will always focus on the human. Human beings die, this
is our fundamental nature. Sometimes the stories will move in on
this moment of losing. But I would not say my work is bleak, personally.
I place human beings in a relationship with their culture. They
struggle. Life is in the struggle. I think, I hope, the struggle
saves the work from bleakness. |
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Although
juggling the idea of artificial intelligence and magic potions such
as "vibegeist", you seem to be much more interested in linguistic
invention that brings you close to poetry. True? |
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| As
with Hip-hop, one of my main subjects is language itself. How can
language refer to itself? Can it be bent, mutated, made liquid?
Sometimes this will bring on certain poetic effects. I wouldn't
myself label it as poetry, because I think that should refer to
a more heightened sense of language. I like to fire up words, energise
them, drug them, destroy them, bring them back to live in some other
form. Cobralingus is the end result of this process. I say end result
with meaning, because I'm not sure I would want to take it further
than that. At this moment in time, I'm feeling a great need to get
back to my other great love, a purer storytelling. It's all about
texture and structure, and placing each element in the correct relationship. |
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Will
there be more music projects such as that one with David Toop? |
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| I
hope there will be more music projects. I have such an intimate
relationship with music. My writing is all tied up with it. I listen
to it all the time, writing to the rhythms. |
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Would
you say the CD extends "Needle in the Groove", or contains it? |
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| I
would hope that the Needle CD is a tangent to the novel, something
different entirely, that reveals a view taken from another angle. |
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You
are currently working with Steve Beard on the web-based writing
project called Mappalujo - an experiment in organic writing, which
is currently not more than a sketchpad of ideas, images, and new
techniques. Is the virtual stream of e-mail exchange changing your
working habits and the way your imagination works? |
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| I'm
very interested in working with other writers. It brings a whole
lot of difficulties, but also forces the imagination into areas
it would not usually visit. Mappalujo is a device for creating weird
narratives, using two or more inputs, ie writers. Each writer has
to carry on a narrative using certain procedures and techniques
that are decided upon at the beginning. It's very much part of the
whole remix culture that my work as moved into these few years.
Sometimes, of course, the other writer involved will start to head
the work in a direction different from the one you were hoping to
go down. That's when it gets difficult; that's when it gets interesting.
How do people work together? What decisions have to be made, given
that the work has to be more important than either writer? It's
a fascinating process. |
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Are
we going to see "Automated Alice" animated? |
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| Maybe.
I hope so. Really, somebody has to want to do it. A couple of times
it's nearly happened, but then fallen through. You get used to things
falling through, after a time. We live in hope. We continue. |
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Feedback....?
Links to other interviews on the net:
- AP (1995)
- N. Jay Babcock
- "As per Vurt" and interview from altx (1995)
- The Preston SF Group (1995)
- Urban Desire's Ron Hogan (1996)
- Purefiction's Caroline Griffin interviews (1996)
- Auto Alice
- Spike Magazine's Bethan Roberts (1996)
- An interview from Albedo by Ruud van de Kruisweg and Eya Kuismanen (1997)
- TomorrowSF's David Mathew (1998)
- Chris Wood from purefiction interviews (1998)
- Read the interview from Zeitgeist #1.
- Jim McClellen interviewed Jeff Noon and wrote this article.
- Spike Magazine's Antony Johnston (2000)
- Jeff Online @ Gaurdian Unlimited
"Anybody who's done even a little searching within my books, will know that all of them are about the same thing (underneath the techno whizzbangs): all of them portray the attempts to mend a broken family. Vurt is brother searching for sister; Pollen mother for daughter; Automated Alice sister for sister; and Nymphomation father for daughter." (src: TomorrowSF Interview)