RM: So why do it at all? Why not write the straight-ahead history?
JJS: Because story-wise, there are things you can’t do without footnotes. I suppose you’re committing the tackiness of saying without saying it that your story is complicated enough to justify including them. So there’s also an awkwardness there. But you just have to hope that you’re recouping something. And in certain cases—and this is definitely the case with this book—you just don’t feel like you have a choice. There’s stuff that you can’t leave out but that would sink the narrative.
RM: By choosing the time and the place that you have—South Carolina in the 1730s—you have chosen a task for yourself that necessarily includes a lot of uncertainty. It feels like you’re wading in this murky space, groping around, and trying to pull out some truths…
JJS: Yeah, the “forgotten half-century” is what they call that period when this story takes place. And the “forgotten frontier” is what they call the southern frontier. And this is a guy who comes from central Europe, from the other Europe, so it’s just a lot of lostnesses coming together, a lot of obscurities overlapping. It brings you in touch with something that is true of all time—just how everything is getting lost, it’s just snip snip snip, things are disappearing. You can feel that as soon as you get into the documents, like God, I’m just looking at a sliver of what was going on here.
RM: Do you ever imagine someone reading your writing as a primary document, 300 years from now, on, say, the ascendance of the Tea Party?
JJS: I don’t know. I won’t allow myself the egomania of thinking about being read by posterity. And yet at the same time, because I’m always reading 18th century shit, I’m always thinking about people reading me in a similar way. So I guess that’s the way I compensate, and get away with it, is that I imagine myself being read by a person who would only be reading about extremely obscure minor things that were almost forgotten. So, someone’s writing a PhD thesis in 300 years about minor magazine writers of the early 21st century, that’s how I imagine them encountering me. But even then, I take the extra step of wondering, Okay, how will I communicate with such a person? How will I write in such a way that it will make sense to them, and will this be a worthwhile little footnote to their essay? It’s such a game. It’s a kind of insanity, really.