December 6–13, 2001

cover story|holiday book quarterly

Turnabout

Curtis White on using postmodernism against the modern age.

by Sara Marcus

Whitestuff: Author Curtis White

Two years ago, desperate to escape the 21st century, author Curtis White started learning to play the piano.

"I wanted to share a human experience that predates the present," explains the 51-year-old author, whose fiction addresses the moral and emotional emptiness of postmodern life. "These days, if we want music, we play the damned stereo. Playing piano makes me feel like I’m in touch with what people would have been doing in the 1830s."

It’s not, White says over the phone, that he idealizes the 19th century. If he has any period-based nostalgia, it’s for the hippie counterculture he embraced in high school and college, which he still describes like a devout believer recounting his coming to Jesus — saying he "got changed" by going to anti-war demos and psychedelic music shows, and was "saved … from whatever drab future my little suburb had planned for me." At the core of hippie culture, White heard an exhortation to be fully alive, and he says he still tries to make that call resonate in his work.

Classical music is one of the few rays of hope in White’s new novel, Requiem (Dalkey Archive Press), a wryly funny but brutal account of human existence from the Biblical era to the present. The book’s essential dilemma is the idea that technology, especially the computer, has altered the human experience in fundamental and often tragic ways. In particular, our ability to connect with each other romantically and sexually has been degraded to a wretched mixture of bestiality and cyberporn.

Moreover, in the intellectual realm, White laments what he sees as a decline in the linear forms of reasoning and narrative common to the art, philosophy and music of the 19th century, and an attendant rise in what he calls "hypertextual thought": fragments of ideas organized in clumps and layers, narratives that move up and down as well as forward. "Could there be a Hegel anymore?" he asks. "Could there be a Beethoven? Or has the species evolved technically in a direction that has degenerated us artistically?"

The punch line, of course, is that White’s fiction is itself fragmented and arranged in layers. The strains of narrative defy traditional expectations of progress and resolution: a murder mystery never gets solved, a man’s drowning replays itself over and over, and most of the putative sex scenes are ultimately unconsummated. Requiem owes its very existence to technology and postmodern structures of thought.

Even White’s chosen escape, classical piano playing, is not immune to the impact of technology. When I tell him I used to play piano seriously, his voice perks up and he asks if I still play. I explain I’ve let it slide because I can’t afford to buy a piano, and it’s hard to find pianos to use for free.

"Well, now you can get those Roland electronic pianos that have the feel of a real keyboard," he suggests, without any irony or sarcasm in his voice; he’s speaking as a piano lover now, genuinely trying to help me find a less-expensive way to get back to music.

Still, the shock of his words, after hearing for half an hour about the pitfalls of technology, is just too much, and I can’t help laughing. "I can’t believe you’d say that to me, after everything!" I say. "Besides, I can tell the difference. I need to be able to feel the hammers, the felts, the strings of a real piano."

"OK, I’m sorry," says White. Maybe it’s only my imagination, but he sounds humbled.

"I’m sorry. I take it back."