Chris Campanioni writes in transit and on transit, and I read his new novel VHS (CLASH Books) on subways and airplanes, while drinking coffee and before falling asleep. I met Chris at a reading a year and a half ago at Unnameable Books in Brooklyn and have been fortunate to get to know him and his work since then. Below, we focus on VHS, a book that’s hard to describe but easy to get absorbed in. I hope you enjoy reading this conversation, whatever the weather or however long your morning commute.
Chris Campanioni was born in Manhattan and grew up in a very nineties New Jersey. His work on migration and media theory has been awarded the Calder Prize for interdisciplinary research and a Mellon Foundation fellowship and his writing has received the Pushcart Prize, International Latino Book Award, and Academy of American Poets College Prize. His essays, poetry, and fiction have been translated into Spanish and Portuguese and have found a home in several venues, including Best American Essays, Fence, American Poetry Review, Denver Quarterly, and Latin American Literature Today.
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Reuben Gelley Newman: VHS begins with a writer searching for “photographs of my parents before they came to this country and before they were my parents.” It’s autofiction, maybe, but it’s fragmented: the book seems like a twisted cassette player of stories, with many snapshots and anecdotes but no singular narrative. You write that, in a VCR player, “the narratives pile up but they also cover up.” So I’ll start with a broad question: what’s your relationship to narrative? Can you/we/anyone even define it?
Chris Campanioni: I think of narrative as an account, as an accounting for. This is probably why in my books, as in VHS, there is always this excess, the desire to relate story but also the story being told. I mean written. I mean heard.
That entanglement of sensory modalities is like an organizing principle of the text. I love that you quote that specific passage—about how excess functions in service of concealment, absence disguising itself through repetition—because it’s what fascinates me about videocassettes more generally: the fantasy of a format that moves through displacement and multiplicity, in which the opening credits of The Lion King could melt into scenes from Ferris Bueller’s Day Off and my fifth grade chorus performance filmed on a shaky camcorder, which is being taped over for the season premiere of 24, whose episodes purport to unfold, coincidentally, in “real time.” I’m on a six-hour flight now—I’m still, I think, in hour 1, so your question about narrative arrives at an opportune time, hovering, as I am and so often like to be, between different layers, cloaked in ambiguous flight mode.
In VHS, I wanted to pile up these moments, encounters and non-encounters, re-enactments of my parents as children and recurring dreams. But I also wanted to cover up, knowing that autobiography is subject to the inversions of any reflection, that any narrative is conditioned by the story being told: threads as loose ends. This is a novel that begins on the attempt—impossible, absurd?—of turning stories into memories and memories into words and words into voices and voices into photographs and photographs into videos. What is obscured in that feint of movement? I wanted to make an untraceable text.
RGN: I love these loose ends and threads, and I want to pick up on movement as a physical act in VHS. There’s movement through intercontinental migrations and as characters go on vacation. In “Fatal Attraction,” the narrator is mid-flight, noticing guards clad in Joint Task Force Empire Shield outfits and remembering a scintillating photo of himself in the same, untraced location. The narrator’s constantly reading or writing on trains, taking the downtown F train in one paragraph, wearing fancy “Tinman Elite” on the next page and emerging into an East Berlin dance hall. How do movement and migration contribute to the narrator’s mutations in this text?
CC: I’m back now—I mean home again. A lot of my writing is composed on the move, and as you cited, those intervals and delays and indeterminacies of times and spaces finds its way into the text, a come and go, here/there tempo that I think lends the itinerary of events an atmosphere of errantry. When we are constantly moving, we pick up things, but we also lose them. I’m attracted to that fluidity, that drip. In another conversation, at Stanza Books in Beacon, I mentioned the desire to write a book that when read back would feel like a dream, a story in which setting is as amorphous and gauzy as a dreamscape. I tend to write about my experiences “at work” a lot, and so I also wrote a lot of my exercises with students into the narrative; one of the suggestions I’ve offered them over the years is that we only ever discover ourselves when we’re moving. To speak of movement I think begs the question of trajectory. Publishers Weekly would have preferred for me to develop a narrative arc. But migration, and especially exile, in which one lives with doubles and false resemblances, doesn’t arc, it splinters. Migration isn’t linear, nor is it always a narrative that bears restoration (return, repatriation, et cetera). In order to undertake VHS, I felt I was under the obligation to stay true to the subject of the story, as well as the frame of the storytelling—the medium of videocassettes with which the writer assembles their project, not to restore the past but to re-create it. I think that’s the difference, too, between a conventional fiction that harnesses autobiography and whatever category it is that this novel may fall under. There’s no legible past here in which to return. So the only way to find those “photographs of my parents before they came to this country” is to forge them.
RGN: Yeah, one way to view the act of writing here is as a visual composition, where you’re forging dreamscapes, snapshots, and photos. As you say, there’s not a linear trajectory, you’re not even really, like Roland Barthes in Camera Lucida, searching for the essence of your mother in a photo, and finding it. The narrator, though, seems preoccupied with the acts of photographing, copying, and “[seeing] things as they are,” or were; the past/present sometimes presents itself through visual images, and sometimes through abstraction. “In an earlier book, I failed at cutting my face out of every photograph in which my face appeared, or disappeared.” Can you expand on how photography—looking at yourself, at others, at “the narrator,” at bodies, at loved ones or dates—threads through VHS? And how does that relate to many of the more abstract, intellectual ideas you’re working through?
CC: Every chapter of the novel holds the spirit of the epistolary mode. It isn’t just another person being addressed but the photographs you mention. So there’s this constant tension between presence and disappearance, and the ekphrastic method of proclaiming or calling an inanimate object by name, conjuring the lost or absent thing “out of thin air,” as people say. One of my students recently asked me: How can analysis be used as a storytelling device? And I showed her a page from my notebook, which reads:
the mingling of fantasy
memory
banal
extraordinary
calling into question the frames of the narrative’s “reality” → makes this plausible
When we’re working with ekphrasis our repertoire includes excess and omission; the imperfection required of any endeavor to reinscribe what’s already lost, not to restore the natural but to mime it for another. I really don’t want to ever reconcile those discrepancies, or beautify (photoshop?) the degraded resolution of a copy. It’s only the act of looking that matters anyway, and I think what I’m trying to do is reformulate that visual-verbal scan on the page.
This might be better explained in another text called north by north/west—nonfiction sibling of VHS with nearby birthdates—in which I write:
My task is to re-create what the eye sees at certain angles, at certain intervals. (And underlined, below this:) The book as a series of evaporating glances?
Sometimes I think of the text—of writing—as nothing less and nothing more than producing these glances between you and the reader. And, for better or worse, my desire to create the conditions in which this kind of consensual voyeurism might occur has governed almost all of my work, and the research that informs it.
RGN: And now you’re reproducing that notebook page in this interview, too—consensual voyeurism, indeed. Can you expand on the excesses/omissions of VHS in relation to north by north/west (whose title references Hitchcock)? In what ways are the books fraternal or identical twins, or which is the older and which is the younger sibling, if I may? How do the books glance at each other?
CC: Trajectories are complicated. north by north/west came together quickly, beginning at the onset of the pandemic, well before I ever imagined the idea of VHS, though a number of chapters that eventually found their way into VHS were written several years before that, some as early as 2015. The book, when it became a book, was likewise arranged “out of order” . . . which is why the narrator’s age keeps changing throughout the novel, and not in any chronological way. Any stable notion of the past is displaced by its being performed in the present. Incidents mentioned in passing in the first half of the text occur on the page much later. But I think these disparities and intervals and variations also signify how memory works; how any occurrence is reformulated at the moment and from the moment in which we remember it. This is why reality, like the memories it contains, does not follow repetition but, as Borges wrote (translated by Anthony Kerrigan), similarities and slight anachronisms.
VHS is fiction that trades plot for the variegated contours of mediation. north by north/west is narrative nonfiction; perhaps it more closely resembles the novel that VHS masquerades as. But they both are stories driven by this fantasy of a mode of production that can turn art back into life. And in each text, the narrator is trying to re-create what doesn’t actually exist. In north by north/west, they plan to remake the 1959 Hitchcock film you referenced above. But they find that, in order to do so, they also have to discompose the ontological coordinates of the Global West/Global North. The medium of the movie they’ve been tasked with remaking is no longer film but myth, a colonial mythology. I think I’m interested in stories whose plots get sidetracked. Maybe I am not writing migration literature so much as the literature of detour.
RGN: The literature of detour! That’s such a great phrase/concept, Chris. Thinking about anachronism and the medium of the movie in VHS, you have chapters named for various films throughout the book: “solaris (1972)”; “my fair lady (1993)”; “great expectations (1946)”; and “berlin alexanderplatz (2020).” At the end of the novel, there’s a geometric photo of you diving into a pool entitled “a bigger splash,” reminiscent of David Hockney’s 1967 painting and Luca Guadagnino’s 2015 film of the same title. These chapters may only mention the films in passing, or they elide the experience of watching the film in favor of detours. How did these specific chapters come about, especially the decision to title them? And what films have you been thinking about recently?
CC: Thank you for sharing this gorgeous Hockney painting! The more recent A Bigger Splash is actually a loose English language rendition of the 1969 French film La Piscine, directed by Jacques Deray and starring Alain Delon and Romy Schneider. We talked a bit about the mode of ekphrasis earlier and I like that the chapters you reference here are all versions of so-called originals; in titling each chapter after a movie, I wanted to call upon but also be carried away by the spirit of these productions, to extract in my oblique adaptation not semiotic content but shades of mood, tone, or some vague sensibility. In the novel, the narrator is constantly looking at things; as a protagonist he is not really an actor so much as an observer; it felt natural likewise to graft these movies—so many of them childhood favorites—onto the narrative post facto, after I’d already written it. I could look at them anew, glazed in the aura of Hollywood or straight-to-video smut. I think the inexact, unfaithful “translation” of these films as chapters also testifies to the questionable project of reprocessing the stories of others as memories of one’s own. If there’s a lesson in VHS it’s in the book’s final pages, taking a cue not from the medium of film, but the cable TV show Quantum Leap: the dangers or pitfalls of temporarily taking the place of others to correct historical mistakes.
I’ve lately been watching a lot of what’s expiring on Criterion Channel. “What’s leaving this month” is like my organizing principle. The Wailing, a Korean film that I saw the other week had haunted me for years—I’d caught it during a limited run at BAM back in 2016 and haven’t stopped thinking about it since—I was delighted to watch it anew after almost a decade, and even better that it was about to disappear again from my life. I’m often entranced by the countdown, since we normally don’t get to see such a visible ledger of imminent extinction in our everyday lives. I like all kinds of movies but I have a particular fondness for eighties and early nineties work—the stuff that just wouldn’t get produced these days. Nonsensical plots and unbelievable characters. I’d only ever seen—or only ever remembered—that one scene in Ghost where Patrick Swayze and Demi Moore are massaging the mud in their hands as the pottery wheel spins, their hands blurring into each other and also the material of the en process art object—so I convinced Lilly, skeptical as she is about anything involving horror, to watch it with me before it enjoyed a ceremonious death on Criterion. It reminds me that it’s the spare moments that endure, that stay with us, not the details of plot or even an ending.
RGN: I also have difficulty remembering plot, and I think one of those moments for me is the absolutely grotesque end of Derek Jarman’s Edward II adaptation from 1991 . . . And I’d love to hear more about your investment in 80s/90s culture (one I share to some extent). What does that decade mean to you? You title your recent poetry collection Windows 85. How do the 80s play out across your work?
CC: Thank you for summoning Derek Jarman. The eighties—I was born in 1985—are still unabashedly present in my life and my work. From an early age, I became enamored—bewitched—by the spell of neon dayglo and the whirling current of no wave, new wave, dark wave, and the much more recent chill wave, a nostalgic permutation of deadened intensity that informs the spy games that set a book like north by north/west in motion. All of my favorite bands pretty much broke up before I ever had the chance to see them live, let alone appreciate their music through studio recording . . . Lilly took me to see David Byrne on Broadway two years ago, as a birthday gift, and I remember sobbing into my palms, completely unraveled before he even sang a single note—when the curtains fell and I realized I was about to experience something I’d already concluded, as a child, was just never going to happen. You know about this desire through irremediable distance; Derek Jarman has joined us, but Arthur Russell, who has served as both your spiritual guide and muse, also deserves to be present for this conversation. The eighties and nineties were also a time of crisis, a turning point that rotated on the axis of epidemic, anti-gay discourse, and border securitization that we are still living through. It isn’t just my self-identification as spy—“the thrill,” I write in VHS, “of being under the covers, while in plain view of unbeknownst passersby”—that permeates each text, but the geopolitical coordinates of an atomized East and West during the Cold War, militarized conditions from which my parents sought refuge as children. Well before I ever found work as a model, I would inherit their compulsion for disguise, the application of belonging meted out in citizenship and the trailing question of authentication: What are you? What else, I might have said, but a spy? What is a spy but someone who is made to pass as someone else?
RGN: Oof, Chris, that hits hard—I’ve also just been thinking about David Wojnarowicz; Nightboat Books is reissuing his Memories That Smell Like Gasoline this June. He, I think, refused to pass as someone else, as did David Byrne, and that experience of seeing Byrne must have been so surreal . . . But now I’ll fast-forward to our current moment of crisis, in one last question for you. In “true romance,” you write:
post internet’s hypothesis was we could fall
in love with someone whose hair we hadn’t ever smelled before
post internet’s hypothesis was not that
your very close friend could be a simulation
but that the simulation could be
your very close friend
We’ve talked a lot about other modes of communication in this interview, but how does the internet impact our subjectivities—and the narrator’s—in today’s militarized and surveilled America? (And thanks again for this conversation, Chris. Over.)
CC: I think the internet allows and normalizes exactly the kind of vicarious experience described in the passage you cite from “true romance”: a situation in which we become so accustomed to making do without the real thing that we foreclose its possibility. Videocassettes are the narrator’s preferred method of reconstruction, but it is the internet that informs the narrative’s simultaneous present tense frame, in which even the most distant memories unfold in a now that is nevertheless at the whim of mediation—technological and bodily. The aspiration for intimacy meets the unbounded horizons of performance, as when, in the chapter called “great expectations (1946),” the narrator is horrified to discover that the person they’ve just begun dating is in on the act; that they are a willing participant to being written about as if they were already (just) a character in a book. And I think that fictive scenario is not so different from the consent we give to others, lovers and strangers, friends and private businesses, public institutions and governments to surveil and be surveilled. Of course that muddles any idea of subjectivity, or at least gestures to the power relations undergirding the processes of subjectification. It felt very important for me to end VHS on a photograph, the only one actually visible to readers in the book, and yet a photograph whose admiration depends precisely on its ability to abstract the subject, to render them illegible. “I like the photo,” the narrator admits, “because it’s the only image I’ve ever been given in which I remain unrecognizable, even to myself.” What does it mean to be seen in a world that exploits visibility? That’s the book I’m working on now. But I have to go and write it.
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