JULIETA CALDAS In an essay for The Point last year you wrote, “The critic demonstrates that a person, even a public figure, need not be alienated from her authentic private sensibility. In so doing she keeps this possibility alive for everyone else.” This work, the making public of private thinking, is of course also the work of fiction. I’m wondering how you thought about fiction’s capacity to expose this “private sensibility” in Dimensions, especially since the novel deals with topics, like technology’s infiltration of our inner lives, that you also explore in essays.

GREG JACKSON I wrote Dimensions with an eye to what we used to call “systems novels”. These were large-canvased attempts to portray the various levels of reality we inhabit, from the most personal and intimate to the most structural and overarching. The ambition of this type of novel was to show how the levels hang together and how we, as individuals, comprise the systems we live within – economic, political, technological, et cetera – and how, at the same time, these systems order our lives. The point was, I think, to preserve the human scale in an ever more complex civilisation that seemed to have grown far beyond the scope and agency of individual life. On the other hand, literature, whatever its ambitions, is a private experience. There is the private experience of writing it and the private experience of reading it. At its best, it permits these two privacies to communicate with each other. But unlike a confidence or secret, it must pass through the public realm, and this is where the pitfalls for literature lie. If authors, knowing they will be judged in public, can’t preserve the authenticity of their private experience, they become dissembling. This has become more fraught over the course of my career. I certainly worry more about how honest I can be. I think, for literature to retain its power, we have to protect these reports from private experience from the inhibitory spectre of public judgment.

JC The novel seems to hold together those different levels you mention across both content and form. It has a central idea about what it means to inhabit a shared reality, in language or in technology or in our relationships. Is the frame narrative part of your approach to that question?

GJ You always want the various levels of a novel to speak to one another, and I certainly wanted the largest questions in the book to find themselves dramatised in individual stories. For example, the novel is in many ways about the fraught search for truth in a world saturated in technological mediation, but it explores this against a backdrop that acknowledges the impossibility of any universal or perfectly objective truth. The halfway house it proposes is a sphere of shared or consensual reality, which permits a diversity of stories and perspectives to build into a greater whole. In this way, the frame narrative and the polyphony of voices in the novel reprise its themes. The frame narrative is one of Joseph Conrad’s favourite devices, and my novel began as a modern-day take on Heart of Darkness (1899). I have always liked how frame narratives challenge the sense of authority one tends to invest in a narrator or the presiding narrative spirit. They maintain an awareness that the story is someone’s story and that other people in it might see the narrator and the narrator’s story differently. There’s a nice Rashomon effect, which reminds us that if we want to inhabit a reality with other people, we have to marry our different perspectives and understandings in some sort of compromise.

JC I liked that you addressed this conceit in the book, when the narrator mentions in the final pages that all this reported speech we’ve read might not have been exactly as described. Did you feel compelled to remind the reader of that? 

GJ I did that because there are details in the book that you are asked to take at face value, but that a very literal-minded reader might bristle at. I wanted to trouble the apparent firmness or facticity of the account, just as a frame narrative adds a layer of subjective colouring. This makes the aura of authorial insistence gentler. I had some of the reviews of Conrad’s early novels in mind. These novels have very long passages – even book-length passages – we are supposed to take as direct, quoted dialogue addressed to a real audience in the book. Certain reviewers found this unbelievable. Conrad responded that mariners of the sort he had been and portrayed did spin just such long yarns. I always thought, Why does it matter? I never cared about the strictest, most literal reality in literature. It’s fiction after all. It’s after a different sort of truth.

 JC I’m interested in your trajectory from the interpersonal dramas of the short story to the sweeping systems novel. What was the impetus there? 

JC What was it in autofiction that you wanted to move away from? 

GJ I thought autofiction was at its best when it dared to display interiority without falsifying it, and I felt like less and less of it was doing that. The world of public judgment today lies ready to pounce. The dynamics of the present-day internet teach us to fixate on self-presentation in ways detrimental to the candour and vulnerability literature requires. We all live within the social and cultural pressures of the moment, and there are lots of incentives not to resist them. I think this bravery has become harder to summon in recent years, and that’s a tough thing for literature. I guess I wish we were all more aware of how easy our postures are to see through. This goes for me. It’s so easy to tell when people are trying to create a certain impression of themselves, and it usually make us like them less. It’s hard not to do, because it gives us a feeling of control – that we are in control of the impression we’re making. To give this up is scary, but essential. I often feel afraid, on the one hand, that I am not achieving this vulnerability and, at the same time, of how people will see me if I do. But this simply comes with the territory.

JC I guess the autofictional “I” can act as a shield, in the sense that any failures of the book’s ideas can be put down to human weakness and therefore forgiven.