GLK: Well, it’s like Wittgenstein says, a language is like a city, with a labyrinthine old center, laid down with haphazard alleyways, and it’s surrounded over time with a rational boulevard grid.

JC: Absolutely.

GLK: And you’re the suburban shock troop moving back to the crumbling houses.

JC: But while writing this book I also thought of the language in computational terms.

Consider the Arabic numerals: they encode integers (i.e. 6, the numeral, contains six ones: 1+1+1+1+1+1). And language, for me, operates similarly: each word in the book was chosen not only for its meaning, but also for its historical referents—there are “secondary” meanings packed into my sentences in the same way individual integers are packed into “numbers.” The novelist is the person who chooses what “state” each bit is “in”—and is free to flip at his/her discretion.

The idea that meanings are packed into words—this isn’t some antiquated graybearded spiel. This is life.

GLK: Except that any given word can carry near-infinite meaning.

JC: Except, I believe in cultural context. Or I believe I live in a cultural context.

And that each novelist creates his/her own context with each book.

For example: read this thing as a tech tale, read this as a biblical allegory.

Read this as an Arab sex romp, or a treatise on How Not to Ghostwrite.

The idea was to do this not just with language but with fictional tropes:

How to collapse all these genres not with trickery, but in a way that mirrors and critiques the online experience.

And reclaims that reading-mind, that reading-time, for the book.

GLK: Can I venture a comparison?

JC: Venture! Venture!

GLK: Well, this book has already garnered comparisons to take-your-pick of the Big Heady Intellectual Seventies Novel, which remains familiar to us from its return to fashion in the Nineties. But it seems to me as though it inhabits that form to a completely different end. Those novels were so often preoccupied with uncovering the secret conspiracy that structures our lives, with tracing the hidden networks of power. But that now power is laid bare; the networks are no longer hidden, and we ourselves fill in all the details.

JC: Paranoia is so over. That's what you're saying, no?

The only thing to still be paranoid about is that there might not be anything left to be paranoid about.

Everything has “come true.”

GLK: So that this novel, instead of uncovering a secret, uses pun/allusion/allegory to multiply the possible meanings, whereas the paranoid style is figuring out what’s going on behind the scenes.

JC: It’s the transference of omniscience. That's how I think about it.

In mid-20th-century America it could be argued that the novelist still had the most claim of anyone to omniscience. Whatever he/she couldn’t prove, he/she could gesture at.

The writers—not just the novelists but the writers—had won this power from God—way back in the time of the Enlightenment. And the later in the last century it got, the more that power was eroded.

GLK: So far, so Wood.

JC: Suddenly, everyone was omniscient.

Or could be.

Suddenly, the collective Wikis—our amateur intelligence agencies—were God. At least, the professional intelligence agencies were.

They saw and heard all.

The nature of the novelist’s power, then, had to change.

If the novelist previously was the information bringer-and-bearer, now he/she had to be something else: something even older—almost pre-Enlightenment...

GLK: Sage? Mystic? Oracle?

JC: The dreamer. The prophet.

He-who-fights-against-God.

But this change in the novelist’s task hasn't much been remarked-upon.

It seems to me that if the novel has any future it’s to scrutinize how we continue to live and write in a world that so relentlessly scrutinizes us—for ways in which to turn yesterday’s suspicions into tomorrow’s news.

Before this digital omniscience the novel could ask, “Is this true?” After, the novel should ask, “How can I live with it?”

GLK: SOMETHING LIKE- You’re really trying for the prophet job, huh? Seriously, though, the book draws interesting parallels, both implicitly and explicitly, between religion and the internet.

JC: Just think about sin, right?

All those laws about not eating this, or not eating that, or no jerking off. That's because God can see and hear you at all times.

For a significant portion of human history this seemed to bother many people. And still does. Now, though, we’re aware that “everything” we do can be seen and heard.

By an entity that has proven itself fairly Old Testament in its notion of random or arbitrary “justice.” (The U.S. govt.) What is the response of the American public?

Overwhelmingly the response is “eh.” Or “feh.”

GLK: So in a sense your response is that nobody is ever going to be persuaded to take the bunker option, but that people might just be convinced to take the linguistic one –

ie, a way to avoid surveillance is through polymorphous perversity of all kinds, to speak in ways the machine can't auto-parse, to search for the porn unrecognizable as porn.

JC: Yes... If “they”—whoever “they” ever are—appropriate your language, you have to speak in a new one. Or redefine all your terms to make a new one.

Detournement is what it’s called, with an accent over the first “e” that I can’t type. French, ’68.

GLK: You’re looking things up again.

JC: There’s no way you can prove that.

What I’m saying is, nothing of the material changes—only the use of its does. And the use, in turn, changes the material. But this, incidentally, is how anyone figures out how to write. You take what you can from what you read, and then present it as your own by moving the margins.

For example: how to write about a world in which there’s no paranoia because everything is true would’ve impossible for me without Pynchon, DeLillo, etc.

It’s not a bad exercise for writing a contemporary novel: just pretend that all the ’70s novelists were “right.”

GLK: Except that everything they sought to uncover is now just being done in the open.

JC: “The content doesn’t change, just the context...” And now I sound like a CEO.

GLK: One of the great pleasures of this book is that you’ve split yourself into two JC:s. You can talk at once in the mode of the CEO JC: and in the mode of the Jeremiah, the writer JC:. And suggest that in fact these are two faces of the same person.

JC: That was revenge: on all the other JCs in this world. Or “Joshuas Cohen.”

And also it was an attempt to safeguard the multeity of existence from representation online.

GLK: Explain what you mean.

JC: We’re all more than the sum of what we seem—especially of what we seem online.

The double-naming in my novel is an attempt preserve that depth. Doubles stories are trying to tell us exactly the opposite of what the Internet tells us. The Internet says: see, you’re the same as everyone else, or you can be. Doubles stories say: you’re not even the same as yourself.

Literature respects the split in the soul.

GLK: But, from the beginning, this is a much more playful doubling than anything we get in Dostoevsky: it's just two Joshes joshing around.

JC: Sure—it has to begin as shits and giggles.

GLK: This being the great irony of the internet: the thing designed for multiplicity has become such a great leveling force.

JC: Absolutely. It levels. But to my mind that’s not the primary danger.

Rather it’s the novelty—the neolatry—the worship of the new.

GLK: But your own book is full of neologism.

JC: But that’s the thing about neologism: you can't understand one unless you understand the "antelogism."

Think of the Jewish-American novel. Whatever the fuck that was.

GLK: The difficulty is always the assimilation, you mean.

JC: Exactly.

Jews writing in American English had a ball for a couple of decades.

How? They were translating Yiddish, if not the language itself then Yiddish-mind-patterns, into a new language. Their readership understood the translation-process—they got what was being transported, and they got the tension of the transport. But then it all flared out—so fast. Culture “produced” at those moments—those moments of “repristination”—is always beautiful, if parochial. I felt like this was that moment for “me”—for “us”—with the Internet. I could still rely on a few people to get a few of my allusions. We’ll see how well the millennials do—or their children.

GLK: So this book, which is already being called the “Great American Internet novel,” is actually just a new version of the immigrant novel?

JC: I mean, that’s the dominant analogy—the generation liberated from Egyptian slavery = the generation enslaved to literature, and the Promised Land = online. So yes, it’s a migrant story. All of Numbers, the Biblical book, is a migrant story. The people wander—they pick up strange traditions—they experiment with different gods—they refashion themselves, or they try to, and in the process of refashioning, they die.