The man who invented the future

Have you been thrown into that same ghetto in America? It seems that the American literary establishment is at least a bit more free-form and chaotic.

It's a lot looser in America, although I'm sure you still have a literary establishment. It may be a lot less snooty than over here, although I bet you there are still a good portion of readers and critics who tend to think that American letters begins and ends with Henry James. There are probably strands of snobbishness that exist in American letters just the same as in their English equivalent. I'm kind of an anomaly, but I'm treated very nicely. That's because there's only one of me, so there's no danger of me reproducing and ruining the neighborhood! [Laughs.] I don't really fit into any category, so I am more or less left to my own devices, which is exactly how I want it. I don't think there is a great deal of difference between the American and European response. They are probably both more vociferous than the British response. Not to say that I don't get a fair amount of attention here in Britain, but perhaps the British see me as less exotic than the people across the water.

One of the things about your work that is so striking is that it is utterly dense with information, history, myth and legend. You pack more political and social history into one comic like "From Hell," for example, than we're likely to find in an actual history book.

I'm trying to produce work adequate to my times, and one of the things which makes our current times stand out is that we are saturated with information. Yes, there will be -- especially in my longer works like "From Hell" -- complex layering of levels of symbol, information and narrative. But that's my experience of being an inhabitant of the late 20th and early 21st centuries. All of us have an astounding amount of information in our heads. Hence the rise of the trivia quiz, where we've actually got a brief opportunity to download some of this useless junk our craniums are crammed with! [Laughs.] If we look back a few generations to perhaps our great-grandparents, we've got a very different world in terms of its information content. You have a world where the people's heads were more than likely filled with the details of their own lives. I know that sounds completely unlikely from our cultural standpoint, where our heads are filled with the doings of Joey, Chandler, Ross, Fabian, whoever the other ones are, I can't remember.

Sacrilege!

How quickly we forget! [Laughs.] But, yeah, people's heads are stuffed with a fantastic amount of information, and I think all too often they cannot assimilate, digest or connect up that incredible amount of data into a coherent worldview. And I like to think that if my work is complex, it's because we live in a complex world. What I'm trying to do is give a bit of coherence to that complexity, to say that it is possible to think about politics, history, mythology, architecture, murder and the rest of it all at the same time to see how it connects.

With reference to my interest over the last 10 years in magic, one of the most useful formulas in alchemy, specifically, is "solve et coagula," where "solve" is the act of dissolving something, where we take something apart and study how it works -- what in our modern terms would be called analysis. In a scientific framework, it would be called reductionism. The other part of the formula is "coagula," which is synthesis rather than analysis, holism rather than reductionism, the act of putting something back together in a hopefully improved form. Once you take the watch to pieces and see what was making it run slow, you put it back together and hopefully it works better.

I'd say that we've had an awful lot of "solve" in our culture, but far too little "coagula." There are people who seem daunted by the complexity of our culture to the point that they'll shy away from it rather than try to put those thousands of jigsaw pieces together into some sort of useful, coherent picture. Which is not to say that everybody is like that. You mentioned Thomas Pynchon earlier, and he would be one of my primary inspirations for that worldview. Reading "Gravity's Rainbow" first alerted me to the fact that yes, you could work with this sort of complexity and richness. Pynchon was an authentic 20th century voice adequate to his time; the same with writers like James Joyce and Iain Sinclair.

Writers who have not shied away from the complexities of the world.

Right, and I've tried to do the same in my work. Connection is very useful; intelligence does not depend on the amount of neurons we have in our brains, it depends on the amount of connections they can make between them. So this suggests that having a multitude of information stored somewhere in your memory is not necessarily a great deal of use; you need to be able to connect this information into some sort of usable palette. I think my work tries to achieve that. It's a reflection of the immense complexity of the times we're living in. I think that complexity is one of the major issues of the 20th and 21st centuries. If you look at our environmental and political problems, what is underlying each is simply the increased complexity of our times. We have much more information, and therefore we are much more complex as individuals and as a society. And that complexity is mounting because our levels of information are mounting.

Information is the 21st century's primary currency, it seems.

Information is funny stuff. In some of the science magazines I read, I've found it described as an actual substance that underlies the entirety of existence, as something that is more fundamental than the four fundamental physical forces: gravity, electromagnetism and the two nuclear forces. I think they've referred to it as a super-weird substance. Now, obviously, information shapes and determines our lives and the way we live them, yet it is completely invisible and undetectable. It has no actual form; you can only see its effects. Information is a kind of heat. I would suggest that as our society accumulates information, from its hunter-gatherer origins to the complexities of our present day, it raises the cultural temperature.

I feel that we may be approaching a cultural boiling point. I'm not saying this is a good thing or a bad thing; I really don't know because I can't imagine it, quite frankly. But I think we may be approaching the point at which the amount of information we are taking becomes exponential, and I'm not entirely certain what kind of human culture will exist beyond that point. Except it will happen sooner than we expect, and the difference between us and the kind of people that will exist after such an event will be vastly different than the difference between us and the hunter-gatherer society we've evolved from.

You're saying we might not be able to recognize human beings of the future that well.

Yeah, it could be a quantum leap, a sudden, massive and unprecedented leap. Boiling point is a good analogy, because what you have before that stage is water. What you have after it is something that does not behave at all like water; it's a completely different substance altogether. And that's what I see looming for society -- and it's probably necessary, probably inevitable, probably scary. That's my prognosis. I suppose, as an artist, one of the obligations upon my work is to try and prepare people for the more complex world, to try and make it more palatable and accessible to them and not quite so frightening. That would seem to be a worthy goal, illuminating reality.

That's the "coagula" part of the formula. Synthesizing the future.

Yeah, that's it. If you can find a new synthesis, as I try to do in my work, you can help people find new ways of seeing, thinking and dealing with the times in which they find themselves. That's my intention. Whether or not I've succeeded is up to the readers.

Story finder (3 ways to search Salon)

Search terms:

Salon the Web

Salon Directory (browse by topic)