Danielle Dutton Time-Travels SPRAWL at Music & Literature

John Vincler and Danielle Dutton discuss Dutton's "nuanced and familiar, yet also otherworldly and weird" book, SPRAWL (Wave, 2018; Siglio, 2010), at Music & Literature. "Your book takes the form of a single paragraph, and this makes it, as you say, like an object. And it is a like a photograph in that it is the meticulously captured world we, as readers, peer into. But it also is expansive, layered, and requires time and movement," says Vincler. From Dutton's thinking on time:

Time was always part of my thinking about the book. For one thing, I wanted it to be of no particular moment in American history, and so to imply all of it somehow. I needed time to be rubbery, hence those lines that imply or pretend that huge swaths of time pass in an instant. The way boredom can feel. Also, something that probably no one really notices is that SPRAWL, despite all its time traveling, actually covers the span of one year, or four seasons. It might not be important that I thought of it that way, but it was important to me at the time. When I wrote SPRAWL, I was very much in this space of not being sure if I wrote fiction or poetry. Well, I always thought I was writing fiction, but other people didn’t always seem convinced. I wanted SPRAWL to be read in the tradition of the novel, but I was also at that time pretty deeply invested in thinking about poetry and poetics. I kept making these overt gestures to indicate time passing, the passage of time being the thing that made the book feel, even if in some hysterical or hilarious way, very much like a novel. What happens in a novel? Time passes. So I got really into transition words like “meanwhile” and “then” and “later.” And those time-traveling sentences. The space of a year, etc. 

I like the idea that a novel moves but is also fixed. Of course, it’s not only a novel that keeps repeating itself. We keep repeating ourselves. America does. Boom and bust! It’s this terrifying reiteration that just stretches on and on, strip mall after strip mall. We can’t seem to imagine planning beyond immediate pleasure or recompense, and so we’re killing our chances to continue to exist, as a species, on this planet...

Read the full conversation at M&L.