ALL LIT UP: Where did The Comedian’s Book of the Dead begin for you? Was there a particular idea, or image that started it?
GARY BARWIN: I like this question because it makes me realize the tangle of ideas and images that have tangled together to become the source of the novel. Naturally, I was thinking of the myth of Orpheus, he who went down to the underworld to convince the gods to let him bring his wife Euridice back to the living world. He was able to move the gods with the power of his song. I began thinking about who else might go down to the underworld to beg for a loved one’s life and I realized how interesting it would be if it were Death, who had had to bring the person down in the first place.
I also wondered what if the Orpheus role was played by a comedian who goes to underworld thinking he’ll do a tight five set to convince them to let them bring his loved one back. What kind of jokes would convince the fates? Who might he going to plead for?
I was thinking about parenthood—fatherhood—and being a son and so that is who is in the Beneath. And I thought that being Death—and perhaps in some circumstances also being a parent—might cause trauma or PTSD. The net of responsibility, guilt, love, individuation, self-determination, happiness and grief. Control and lack of control. I’ve been joking that perhaps it would have been easier to just go to therapy instead of writing the book.
ALU: Your narrator—a stand-up comic who is also Death—is a dad who is trying to make sense of his son’s suicide. What made comedy feel like the right way into a story about grief and mortality?
GARY: I was thinking of the dark humour of life—I’m always thinking of that—there’s an absurd formal metaphysical beauty to a life than ends in death. Is death the perfect punchline? A sudden unexpected yet inexorable twist to the story? Just ask Samuel Beckett. But what to do in the face of tragedy, of grief, of its inevitable presence? How could Death possible deal with the guilt and sense of responsibility for his son’s suicide? For me, comedy is deeply empathetic. Storyteller and audience gathered together acknowledging that life is ridiculous, charming, entertaining, painful, surprising and somehow, that doing it together is helpful. When there’s nothing you can do and you’re painted into an existential or emotional corner, sometimes acknowledging the absurdity, relieving the pain by narrativizing it and using it in a joke, is all you can do. It’s consoling. You have agency in that at least you’re the one telling the story.
There’s a Yiddish saying “Man plans and God laughs.” I don’t know about God—the guy never returns my calls—but there is some agency in we humans doing the laughing even as we plan and hope. You know the Albert Camus line, “we must imagine Sisyphus happy.” Perhaps, but at least I imagine him alive to the rich irony and dark comedy of his situation. And, also, has anyone asked the rock?
ALU: There’s something wonderfully strange about making Death a father. What did this allow you to explore about parenthood?
GARY: Choosing to make Death a father ramped up many of the issues about being a parent and being a child. Everything is seen in the light (and dark) of life or death. A variety of Sophie’s choice when there’s only one kid and there’s no choice anyway.
But I love the idea that a kid might balk at their parent’s job. They see it as some strange role that they don’t like or think is weird or even problematic. Imagine being the child of a principal, soldier, Nazi, or cop who has to enforce what you don’t believe in. And part of the kids’ relationship is to have come to terms with their parent’s role. And the parent realizes that their role takes a toll on them and their relationships. What would it be like to be a soldier with PTSD trying to parent? And, as you mentioned, in the novel, Death’s son commits suicide. Death wonders how much of it is his responsibility, how might he have contributed to his son’s action because of his role as Death and what it did to him, not to mention his other actions.
My Death is, like the Grim Reaper, a psychopomp, which is a great word that means that he only guides people to the afterlife, but doesn’t decide who should die. That’s the job of the Fates. So, like a parent, he doesn’t have control but is just a guide. A lot is determined by fate and the individual. That is a lot like being a parent.
ALU: Not to give too much away, but your narrator takes a quest into the underworld: you have the Beneath, the Fates, and all these mythological elements. How did you go about imagining and building this world?
GARY: My previous two novels and in fact the one I’m working on now (about a Queer medieval witch) take place in eccentric but real historical settings. You’re right that this novel required a different kind of world-building. I was free to invent and to borrow from mythology and other literature. What are the rules for my underworld and my Death character? What does the world look like? And what would best speak to our current moment?
When Death, my narrator, eventually decides to go into the Beneath to try to bring back his son, there were so many stories, so much world-building to draw from. Of course, the classical world of the Orpheus myth, but every other katabasis (journey to the underworld) from Gilgamesh to The Odyssey to Dante, Bosch, and more modern hell and brimstone preachers. (BTW it’s a brilliant inside joke that the designer, Malcolm Sutton set the book in the Dante typeface.) However, my Beneath isn’t all bad—there are many scenes that are idyllic where my characters live a death that is joyous and contented. And I decided that one portal to this underworld was, like the entry to Narnia, through a wardrobe, but in this case through a particle-board one in the “As Is” section of a local IKEA. I like how Dante had many famous figures in his Inferno. So I do, too—Sister Rosetta Tharpe, the “Godmother of Rock and Roll” is there. Some notorious figures from Dante. Even Wayne Shorter, the iconic saxophone player. The Medieval chess-playing Death of Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal inspired me to make my Death play chess. Because of course, Death has to play chess. Though he comes up with new version in my book.
So I created a world and characters based on what felt most resonant for the emotional and aesthetic reality of my story, asking what were the most intriguing, funny, moving, surprising and apposite elements from past conceptions to pair with those I invented on my own.
ALU: Reading The Comedian’s Book of the Dead, I found myself thinking about your essay collection Imagining Imagining and some of the ideas you explore there around language, identity, and death. The two books felt, to me, like they were in conversation with each other in a way. What has changed (or stayed the same) in the way you think about those ideas between writing the essays and writing this novel?
GARY: That’s a really interesting observation and thanks for reading and remembering the essays. The novel and the essays do explore what are perennial concerns of mine. For example, how our experiences are framed, expressed, mediated or embodied in language (letters, words, phrases, sentences, genres and literature as a whole.) Though I feel strong and real emotion for my characters, I am also aware that they are constructions, an authentic artifice. I think about Charles Bernstein’s lines after Pessoa: “Poets are fakers/Whose faking is so real/They even fake the pain/They truly feel.” Our experiences and thus the self, our identity, our emotional and ethical range are filtered through or are the product of our culture, both literary and beyond. We have traditions, heritage, cultural processes. Episteme? You’re soaking in it! In The Comedian’s Book of the Dead I explored all of these things in narrative and one that intersected with my actual experience (though filtered through the magictm of imagination).
ALU: What were you reading or thinking about while you were writing the novel? Were there any books, writers, or music that kept finding a way into it?
GARY: As I was writing, I was thinking that eventually Death was going to have to do a set for the Fates. All the way through I was considering what that might look like. I listened to lots of comedians. For example, I enjoyed the circumlocutionary descriptions and bemused sarcasms of Alex Falcone.
I remembered David Grossman’s A Horse Walks into A Bar which is about a stand-up comedian. Brilliant, compassionate and sad. I also imagined Death to have the slim elegance of Dracula.
In my novel, Death remembers when he was a teen and played saxophone (2nd alto in the band) so there are many references to jazz. John Coltrane, Charlie Parker, Sonny Rollins, and many other players. Of course, he also listens to J.S. Bach—that seemed apt. He replays famous games of chess. So I mention Ruy Lopez, Jose Raul Capablanca, Adolf Anderssen vs. Lionel Kieseritzky (“The Immortal Game”), and various chess openings and gambits. I love chess lore more than playing the game.
Many elements of the book are versions of anecdotes from friends and family, though they’ve been modified and metabolized by the overall narrative. For example, poet Liz Howard once recounted how she used to have a basement bedroom across from the local cemetery and she would think about how she and the dead were lying down at the same distance below ground. And the book opens with a scene I adapted from a memory of when I had to climb a very tall tree to rescue one of my sons when he was very young. It’s always a delicate thing to include details from real life, particularly from friends and family and especially when they are very personal and vulnerable. I hope that because I’ve used so many different ones, disguised details and elided elements that I’ve preserved people’s privacy and offered something more akin to core samples from the broader world rather than particular snapshots from people’s family albums.
ALU: The book spends a lot of time with death. What has been making you feel particularly alive lately?
GARY: Death in the novel is about dying, tragedy and loss, but it is also about love and connection. Remembering, grieving, mourning, celebrating and just plain missing. Valuing and reconnecting with those in one’s life or those who were part of it. So I see all this time with death as a thoughtful celebration, as time to consider the often-painful beauty of life and those we love. But I know that’s not your question. The present times are especially challenging for everyone. I don’t need to list all the things, but they are many, so we seek those things which make us feel we’re plugged into an elemental socket.
This summer, I’ve been taking my saxophone and playing music in different places. Under bridges, in houses under construction, in the woods. And I’ve been making pieces using recordings of birds.
I’ve also been hiking a lot and really loving to be in the fields and woods of Hamilton. I’m in the middle of an ongoing multimedia collaboration with my friend Arnold McBay involving videos, poems and music mostly based around trees and water and that’s made me really consider and enjoy both those things. And come to think of it, some of the other collaborations I’ve been doing have been really enlivening. Writing with Tom Prime, Elee Kraljii Gardiner, Angel T. Dionne, Benjamin Niespodziany, and Lillian Nećakov. And mentoring several really inspiring writers. And playing music with my improvisation ensemble, Ghost Variables.
ALU: If you could invite three comedians, dead or alive, to dinner, who would be at the table?
GARY: Maybe Samuel Beckett, Franz Kafka and the Buddha. But I’ve always loved the existential sad-sackery of Buster Keaton. And in another world, where he wasn’t such a lousy human, Woody Allen. Some of his early work—dark philosophical wisecrackery—is so painfully apt. There’s a strain of Jewish humour that resonates with me, that sarcastic, biting, metaphysic, resigned-with-shrug and a joyous appreciate of the rich irony of [here they wave their hand from left to right to indicate everything] it all. Lot of American comedians come from this tradition. From Groucho Marx to Lenny Bruce to Joan Rivers to Larry David. So maybe I’d invite a young Joan Rivers. She was something else when she was on. Self-aware and steeped in the tradition. But I love the cracked diversions of Lawrence Sterne (author of Tristram Shandy) and also all those Zen monks who wrote those Koans. But three guests. So maybe I’d have Joan Rivers, Buster Keaton and then add Steven Wright. Just imagine the comedic rhythms and the off-kilter mismatched banter.
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GARY BARWIN is a writer, musician, and multimedia artist and the author of thirty-five books of poetry, fiction, and essays. His novel Yiddish for Pirates was a national bestseller, was shortlisted for the Giller Prize and the Governor General’s Literary Award for Fiction, and won the Stephen Leacock Memorial Medal for Humour and the Canadian Jewish Literary Award for Fiction. Nothing the Same, Everything Haunted: The Ballad of Motl the Cowboy was chosen for Hamilton Reads, won the Canadian Jewish Literary Award for Fiction, and was shortlisted for the Vine Award for Canadian Jewish Literature for Fiction. The winner of the League of Canadian Poets’ Life Membership Award, he has been twice shortlisted for their Spoken Word Award. Barwin lives in Hamilton, Ontario.
Find a copy of The Comedian’s Book of the Dead here on All Lit Up or via your local bookseller.
