The Millions: In The Black Veil you describe being “converted” after diagramming parts of Of Grammatology by Jacques Derrida. Does Derrida remain an influence? How would you say literary theory has informed your concerns as a writer?
Rick Moody:
Theory was and is still important to me. I still really admire Derrida and feel that my contact with his early work in English — Of Grammatology above all others, but not to the exclusion of Dissemination, Glas, etc. — was life-changing for me. I also really loved Foucault and Barthes.
Do I keep up with theoretical developments now? I admire Avital Ronell’s writing a great deal, and clearly Žižek is of interest. But I think the rigorous epistemological thinking of continental philosophy in the ’60s and ’70s has given way to skepticism, in some quarters, and drives for something like ideological purity at other extremes. The world of theory, that is, is not as it once was. I happened to encounter it at a very fertile moment for the discipline (if that’s even the right word). What I loved above all was the language, the hair-splitting, the monstrous clauses, the paradoxes, the neologisms. It felt playful to me, like experimental fiction, which also exerted a powerful pull in those days. Though the purists would say theory was anti-modernist in some ways (thus post-modernist), it still felt new to me, revolutionary, and thus consonant with Pound’s modernist credo: make it new. I still want my work to be new in that way, today, if possible. I abhor repeating myself. And I still often think about philosophy. I am no expert, but the philosophical bedrock of theory is something I still am grappling with. This year: Heidegger.
