At one point I felt a tension between objects, their real, physical lives, and the idea of meaning: the physical, material reality of a book, and the totally intangible experience of reading it.
Sergio ChejfecLike when you pick up a book and you don't realize what type of text it is - it could be an essay, a novel, a biography - and at one point you realize you don't know where, as a reader, you want to be. Where are you going with this text? What is the goal? How are you supposed to interpret what you're reading? And people's responses vary - some dislike it, and are put off by the confusion, the lack of comprehension.
Sergio ChejfecNot to say that the process assumes anything of "greater" or "lesser" importance, though: it's just more graphic information. Take the surrealists, for example, or a work by Cage. For me, there's a great value in doing this with literature. There's a certain form of dependence; process and product inform each other, depend on each other. I consider myself a writer who doesn't write with a style, almost. I begin with tension, with a vibe, a character.
Sergio ChejfecI like to compare the first experiences of the Internet - the fortuitousness, the chance - with reality, with the experience, for example, of being in a city that you don't know. Many times - and I don't know if I can totally defend this argument - I've found that the way one experiences the world, and daily life, we are constantly dealing with these perceptions. And it seems like it works, this superficial perception of determinacy, but it's completely ridiculous.
Sergio ChejfecI find that, for me, it is this concept of borrowed or built life, life on loan, that gets me writing. It's similar to speaking about literature. I like it, and then I don't like it. It has such an inherent vein of pretention, because you're not speaking about real things. There's a literary pretentiousness made of speaking and spending so much time on unreal persons. And it seems, now, impossible to create an unpretentious, totally organic character.
Sergio ChejfecWe can speak of politics, ethics, and in this way, speak about the world. But at the same time, it's always in a way that is totally nebulous and abstracted, this way of thinking about reality. And that's why I write the way I do - it's an almost immortal way to show dependence on the biological, the political, the moral parts of us. I say immortal because we now have to find new formats, new eloquences, and resolve within ourselves this "constructed" life, a life that is incomplete, imperfect.
Sergio Chejfec