an interview with Christian Bök

CV2: What were some of the complications and revelations in writing Eunoia, understanding that it took you seven years to complete?

CB: When I first started it, I thought the most onerous part of the labour would be accumulating the vocabulary. I read through the Webster's Third New International Dictionary five times and transcribed all the univocal words by hand thinking it would probably take me as long to do this task as it would to learn the software necessary for a computerized search. I spent about two months working on the vocabulary eight hours a day; it was a full time job for those two months in the summer. I assumed it would be a relatively straight forward project, this initial research. There were only about two thousand words for each vowel and that seemed to be a pretty manageable lexicon to work with which to work, but I realized very quickly that, even though it was relatively straightforward to write an intelligible statement, it was very difficult to produce anything that would have poetic merit. I discovered that, if I multiplied the number of constraints imposed upon me in the creative process, that the work produced seemed far more effortless and more euphonic.

I discovered to my surprise that all the vowels have personalities—idiosyncratic moods. I did not anticipate this effect in the course of working on the book, but then again this property of the vowels almost seems to be something imminent within the language itself like a conspiracy among the letters. For example, when working on the letter "I", I discovered that there is a strong recurrence of images from British Romanticism and German Romanticism. There is a lot of pastoral imagery from these two literary movements. And of course the pronoun "I" is privileged in their aesthetics. So the chapter seemed to me to be an odd reflexive comment upon Romanticism, it is actually embedded there, imminent within the language itself. This kind of discovery seemed to me a bit uncanny and induced in me a hint of paranoia.

Over the course of working on Eunoia, I also grew extremely hyper-vigilant in conversations—listening to other people—attempting to tease out univocal phraseology. For example I walked on board a subway and I saw a sign that said "Do not lock doors" and for me, this phrase suddenly became filled with oracular significance. I transcribed these little moments whenever I encountered them.

I worked on the project everyday for four or five hours a day, usually from about eleven o'clock in the evening until about four o'clock in the morning, free from any daily distractions. The labour was really like working on a very large jigsaw puzzle with complicated pieces and a kind of monochromatic scene. It was very frustrating and there were very long moments of black desperation where I would work for months and be unable to put anything intelligible together worthy of publication. I was very concerned that I had wandered into a large bog and I was never going to escape.

After the first two years my friends felt that the project was no longer welcome in their lives, and they really thought that I was jeopardizing my long-term career by investing so much time in a project that I could not seem to finish. I feel vindicated now that I actually took the time to complete it.