By Samuel R. Delany

In 1998 I wrote a preface for Vincent Czyz’s Adrift in a Vanishing City, a short story collection that I praised as “a small landmark in the sedimentation of new form in fiction.” I thought it was Czyz’s first book. Actually, it was his first published book but second in order of composition. His first book, Sun Eye Moon Eye, was published in March of this year, some three decades after it was completed.

Sprawling across the American landscape, Sun Eye Moon Eye follows Logan Blackfeather, a musician and composer of mixed Hopi heritage, as he treks through the mid-1980s. The novel is replete with offshoots of that era—skinheads, yuppies, punks, aging hippies. After suffering the early loss of his father, Logan is raised by an abusive uncle, and, for the duration of the novel, is estranged from his mother. Emotionally troubled and prone to violence, he is also disturbed by visions that may or may not be hallucinations. A year-long stint in a psychiatric hospital steadies him, and he eventually makes his way to New York City, where he finds a job as a piano man in a West Village bar. Uneducated (though intelligent) and something of a country bumpkin (he grew up in rural Kansas), Logan falls for Shawna, a refined ad executive. A novel of shifting voices and narrative techniques, Sun Eye Moon Eye is a kaleidoscopic descent into myth, art, dream, and the murkier regions of the unconscious.

Samuel R. Delany: Your main character, Logan, who’s half Native American, is about twenty-two when the novel opens. He’s a musician and songwriter, although at this point, he’s given up music. Logan strikes me as suffering from certain identity conflicts and maybe some existential chafing. Can you talk a little about that?

Vincent Czyz: Logan’s mother is Eurasian but passes for white. Although Logan’s Hopi on his father’s side, he grew up in Kansas, a long way from the Hopi mesas—physically and culturally. He misses out on the ceremonies, the dances, the storytelling, as well as the normal, day-to-day stuff. So a key aspect of Logan’s identity is displaced. Although he’s exceptionally intelligent, he doesn’t find many outlets in rural Kansas. He has friends who enjoy hanging out with him, but the things that fire his neurons don’t much appeal to them.

Basically, he’s torn between the mysteries of the wider world and a need to belong, between detaching himself from the crowd and being part of it. He finds life in a small town stifling, yet once he arrives in New York City, he’s once again unable to fit in. He’s drawn to his heritage but feels cut off from it. He identifies with the indigenous archaic, but he’s surrounded by the Anglo modern. He enjoys solitary pursuits but not the accompanying loneliness. He dislikes violence, but feels the need, as a man, to be fluent in it. This is hammered into him early on by Cal, the hot-tempered uncle who raised him.

So Logan is pulled in half a dozen directions, and when he gives up music—fallout after a mental breakdown—he feels empty, hollow, identity-less. To a large extent, the novel is an account of Logan’s attempts to reconcile these inner conflicts and re-establish a relationship with himself.

Delany: The reader first encounters Logan drifting aimlessly around the Southwest, vaguely in search of a purpose. Logan’s breakdown—how is it central to the novel?

Czyz:  Humans seem to have a fascination with apocalypse—especially, in the last decade or so, with zombie apocalypses. When I was writing Sun Eye Moon Eye at the end of the eighties, I was interested in personal apocalypses, in wrecked psyches and inner armageddons. This is why the novel opens with Logan hitchhiking through the Southwest with no sense of direction, no sense of a future. Hopi cosmology lent itself well to this scenario since the Hopi believe the world we now live in is the Fourth World, and three others were previously created and destroyed. There’s an implicit parallel between beginnings and endings on cosmic and individual scales.

The origin of Sun Eye Moon Eye was my own mini-apocalypse, which took place in Kansas when I was twenty-two. I have to emphasize that I went through a very minor version of the psychological trauma that Logan suffers through. This, along with a couple of other dream-like experiences, is what I built the novel around.

The approach I decided on isn’t far from what the Beats were up to. Kerouac insisted he wanted to “work in revelations, not just spin silly tales for money.” He likened writing to fishing in his own unconscious. Throughout the eighties, I was heavily into the Surrealists, Jung, mythology, the collective unconscious, and Huxley’s idea of opening up the “reducing valve”—his term for the brain, which has to screen out the vast majority of the information it takes in. Rimbaud and André Breton, who figured prominently in my master’s thesis, also fixated on revelation, which led them to experiment with what Breton called “the language of revelation.”

This sort of thinking is taboo today because the suggestion, I suppose, is that you’ve stumbled onto some absolute truth, or that, in your hubris, you have some great wisdom to bestow on the world. But that’s not necessarily true. In my own case, I’m not even sure of everything I’m expressing, which is in keeping with what’s loosely termed “visionary fiction”; and I’m inviting readers to help me figure it out. Visionary writing is essentially an author’s attempt to communicate something that surpasses their own understanding, opening a way to the proverbial unknown (Rimbaud’s obsession). Put another way, it’s just an attempt to see beyond surface appearances, to punch through the “pasteboard mask,” as Ahab put it (Moby-Dick, incidentally, is the quintessential visionary novel). I don’t claim to have done anything like that; I only claim to have gone, saw, and done my best to work my experiences into a novel.

Delany: In your afterword, you mention that it took thirty-two years for the manuscript of Sun Eye Moon Eye to be accepted for publication, but you don’t say how long it took to write. You also mention it went through several major revisions. Did you, in effect, write two different books?

Czyz: I began Sun Eye Moon Eye in 1985, when I was about Logan’s age, and finished it six years later. Yes, it underwent numerous revisions. You could say I wrote two different books, but that’s not a fair assessment. My original concept remains what it was when I finished the novel in 1991—same opening, very nearly the same middle, same ending. I should also point out that at that time I’d never taken a creative writing course. This, I think, turned out to be an asset because no one told me what you could or couldn’t do with fiction. No one tried to rein me in. The downside is that no one tried to rein me in! Not even my agent. So the first version was over eight hundred pages—not a good idea for an unknown author without so much as a published short story to his name.

The upside to living with the manuscript for such a long time is that the novel grew with me. As I traveled and accumulated experience, I was able to make the characters wiser and give them more depth. I also cut passages that I later realized were somewhat naïve or not fully thought-out. I did my best to polish the writing, but a couple of weird things happen when a novel is with you that long (and when the writing is your own and you can’t read it objectively). One is that you’ve seen the text so many times, the sentences have worn ruts into your neural pathways, and sometimes you don’t recognize something that’s clunky or maybe too wordy because it’s part of your consciousness at this point. Second, there are times when you see something that you’d never write now, but you can’t cut it because it would be a betrayal of the spirit of the work. In a sense, many of these passages preserve, sometimes for the worse, the writer you were.

Delany: You use several distinct narrative styles in the novel. What is their common thread?

Czyz:  While I enjoy what I call “performative prose”—when it’s done well—I didn’t think it was right for this novel. What I mean by performative prose is writing where the author seems to have one eye on what the reader’s reaction will be to their sentences and another on what they’re trying to convey. David Foster Wallace and Jonathan Franzen, both outstanding authors, tend to write with reader reaction in mind and seem to have inspired a generation of young writers. Garth Risk Hallberg, to take one example, writes so much like Franzen I can barely tell them apart. Sergio de la Pava reads like Wallace’s understudy.

Yes, there’s humor in Sun Eye Moon Eye, mostly in the dialogue, but entertainment was low on my list of priorities. I was more interested in expressing the experience of a given character, whatever they’re confronting—an object, a dream, a hallucination, a sunset, an irrevocable loss. If nothing else, in evoking an afterimage of an encounter with the everyday or with an unknown that defies my ability to define or even describe it.

Virtually every time I open up a highly touted new book, I’m disappointed to see the author conscious of themselves—as though they’re on a stage and obligated to hold the audience’s attention. Their struggle isn’t with reality or our experience of it, but with being witty enough, clever enough, funny enough, satirical enough to get the reader to go to the next page. That’s not the standard I wanted to set. My challenge was with language and what I wanted to convey with it. That, I think, is what ties all of the voices together.

This may be a bit of an aside, but Lisa Roney, a fellow author, recently reminded me of a discussion on prose style we had in the early nineties. She said, “You made a statement once about how you preferred realism that sounded like magic over magic written in ordinary prose.” I think that still holds true.