An Interview With Christopher Higgs by Andrew Borgstrom

Interview Conducted by Andrew Borgstrom

Christopher Higgs is the author of The Complete Works of Marvin K. Mooney, a novel from Sator Press. My interview with Higgs was birthed from an interview with Higgs and Michael Kimball at The Faster Times, wherein Higgs claimed his novel was heavily influenced by certain films of Jean-Luc Godard.

Borgstrom: You’ve said the thirteen films made by Jean-Luc Godard between 1961-1967 were the most significant inspiration for Mooney. Were you studying these films specifically for the creation of your novel?

Higgs: No. I got on the Godard kick because at the same time I was working on Mooney I was studying the French New Wave with Judith Mayne at Ohio State. Before working with her, I wasn’t particularly fond of Godard. As a film school student a decade earlier, I’d watched a few of his films but never got why people thought he was such an important filmmaker. Then, when Judith screened for us Vivre sa vie: Film en douze tableaux (1962), my mind changed instantly. I was mesmerized. I did a bunch of research on it, wrote a paper on it, and then Judith screened for us Deux ou trois choses que je sais d’elle (1967), a film that was at the time unavailable in the US. It blew me away. I’d seen nothing comparable. It dawned on me that I must have been too young to appreciate what Godard was doing. So I set myself the task of watching all of the films he made after À bout de soufflé (1960) up until he went full tilt Maoist in 1969.

Borgstrom: Do any of these films have a greater impact on your novel than others?

Higgs: No, I think the impact came from the accumulation. They all made a huge impact individually and as a group.

Borgstrom: You translated Godard’s disharmonious juxtaposition of image and sound into emotion and information. Why these? Were there other possibilities?

Higgs: Oh sure. I’m positive I utilized other of Godard’s techniques in other ways, some I may not even be aware of. Why emotion and information…well, it was the easiest translation. In film school they taught us that images convey 70% information and 30% emotion, while sound conveys 70% emotion and 30% information. I’ve always found that insight fascinating; so when it came time to form Mooney, I experimented with disjoining emotion and information the way Godard does image/sound.

Borgstrom: A line from Weekend: “What a rotten film, all we meet are crazy people?” A line from Une Femme est une femme: “Is this a comedy or a tragedy? Either way it’s a masterpiece?” Was it lines such as these that inspired you to include criticism and praise for your novel within your novel?

Higgs: Those are great lines, and they are certainly of the same spirit, but the reason I opened Mooney with those critical responses is that I wanted to get all the objections out of the way so the reader could cathartically expel the negative reactions I anticipated them having. I spent five and a half years in graduate writing workshops and many of those criticisms in the book are directly from responses I received from my peers. See, I’m fairly aware of what people dislike about my writing, and so I thought, well, what if I just write what I know critics are thinking…this book is so fucking cloyingly pretentious, this author is such a jackass showoff, it’s all style and no substance, etcetera.

Borgstrom: Is the metafiction within Mooney representative of Godard’s breaking the fourth wall?

Higgs: There is certainly an influence from Godard on the particular way I approached metafiction in the book. Godard maneuvers multiple levels of metafiction, to name a few: there’s the overt meta-commentary you mentioned in the previous question, then there’s the camerawork that implies meta-cognition, then there’s the interspersion of title cards, the mixing of mediums that calls attention to the film-ness of the film, then there’s the sly wink or the quick glance Anna K. periodically gives the camera in various of the films, then there’s the tension that’s created when characters *don’t* break the fourth wall, like in the opening of Masculin feminine: Jean-Pierre Léaud reads words off of something; he hardly ever looks up from his notes, and when he does he won’t look into the camera. Then Chantal Goya walks in and sits down and checks herself using her compact; someone recognizes her and a phone keeps ringing from somewhere off screen. She, too, will not look into the camera. She fiddles with her hair. It feels like they should be looking at us, but neither of them will. It is beautiful and irritating at the same time. I like that.

Borgstrom: You’ve listed a series of elements culled from Godard’s films–smash-cut editing, randomness and the non sequitur, disharmonious juxtaposition, embracing singularity. Not to lessen the work that is Mooney, but have you found any texts that are particularly effective in employing one or more of these elements?

Higgs: Well, the first name that comes to mind is David Markson—here I’m thinking specifically of Reader’s Block, Vanishing Point, This is Not A Novel, The Last Novel, *not* Wittgenstein’s Mistress, which is the one everybody reads and likes to talk about because David Foster Wallace endorsed it and because it’s more narrative than the Novelist Quartet. Wittgenstein’s Mistress is not revolutionarily innovative in the same way as the Novelist Quartet, it is much more of a standard modernist big sister to Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway. People who bring up Wittgenstein’s Mistress when discussing Markson remind me of people who bring up À bout de soufflé when discussing Godard.

Borgstrom: Which of the13 films would you recommend to someone who hadn’t seen any and would only see one?

Higgs: Maybe Masculin feminine (1966)? But I don’t know. I just wrote that. I could’ve easily written Pierrot Le Fou (1965) instead, or…or…. I really love them all. I just went and looked at the list of titles to see which of them I liked least, but I couldn’t choose one. They are all totally freaking badass. So long as you don’t go past 1968, you can’t go wrong.

Borgstrom: Are there any other directors that have had an impact on your writing?

Higgs: Michel Gondry and Jean-Pierre Jeunet are probably the two other biggest individual influences that come to mind. American avant-garde filmmakers, especially Stan Brakhage and Ernie Gehr, have also greatly impacted my thinking and by extension my writing.

Borgstrom: In La Chinoise, Guillaume says, “I don’t understand how you can listen to music and write at the same time.” Veronique responds, “To understand you had to do it. Music and language. To struggle on two fronts.” Who do you agree with, and if Veronique, what did you listen to while composing Mooney?

Higgs: I’m with Veronique. It’s hard to say what all I was listening to when composing Mooney because it was written over a three year period and I listen to A LOT of music, but there are a few albums/artists I remember repeatedly listened to: Miles Davis (Bitches Brew), Erik Satie (Gymnopedies & Gnossiennes), Glenn Gould’s Goldberg Variations, Blockhead (Music by Cavelight), Craig Burk (History/Decency, Codes), John Lennon & Yoko Ono (Unfinished Music 1 & 2, Wedding Album), a lot of krautrock, musique concrete, minimalism, noise, and other craziness.

Borgstrom: Have Godard’s films affected anything besides your writing?

Higgs: That’s a really interesting question. Yes, I’m certain they have, but it’s hard to say what and how…I mean, they introduced me to narrative techniques I had never previously considered, so they have enlarged my creative playing field. They have encouraged me to really pay attention to what’s on the edge of the frame (or in the case of literature, what is on the edge of what’s being written, what is on the periphery of the sentence). Like in La Chinoise there’s that exchange early in the film: –”What’s a word?” –”A Word is what’s unsaid.” But here I am talking about writing again.

About Christopher Higgs:

Christopher Higgs curates the online art gallery Bright Stupid Confetti. He is also a regular contributor to htmlgiant: the internet literature magazine blog of the future. Other of his belletristic prose can be found in past/present/future issues of many well-regarded literary organs, including: AGNI, Diagram, Quarterly West, Conduit, Salt Hill, Post Road, No Colony, and Action Yes.

About Andrew Borgstrom:

Andrew Borgstrom’s chapbooks are available or forthcoming from Gold Wake, Pear Noir!, Publishing Genius, The Cupboard, & Greying Ghost. He edits for Pindeldyboz and can be found in the Matted Welcome Desert.

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