Bruce Benderson is a land-surveyor. Indeed, this American middle-class family’s son has explored territories which are usually deserted by those of his social class, rubbing shoulders with the marginals of Times Square, with whom he has shared borderline experiences, either sexual or stupefacient. Junkies, transvestites, prostitutes’ customers - it’s in the sexual electricity released by this urban fauna that his unslung writing takes root. In his fiction works (a collection of short stories, Pretending to Say No, and a novel, User) as well as in his sociological essays (Toward the New Degeneracy : An Essay or Sexe et Solitude, published in France only), the writer describes the reality of what he calls the underclass and gives us the description of a world being in the process of standardization, progressively emptying itself from its libido load, a report that continuously urges him to extend his fictional and phantasmagoric territory. Thus, his last novel takes the reader along to Romania.

You abandoned your "bourgeois" education by associating with and describing what you name as "the underclass". How did you get into writing and how do you deal with this particular issue underlying your works ?
I don’t believe that I "abandoned" my "bourgeois education". To be honest, it’s been indispensable in situating and describing my encounters with underclass people, in developing the tools of expression. What I suppose I "abandoned", to a certain extent, are the protective barriers that middle class life, understandably, sets up against underclass contamination. In many cases such self-protection leads, unfortunately, to a certain sterility, a lack of energy. So I’ve played the adventurer, or should I say, flaneur, by sampling this forbidden terrain - that of other social classes. On the other hand, talking about it this way sounds terribly arid and deliberate. And it isn’t how it happened. Let’s just say that I started going to bed with junkies, prostitutes and street criminals because I felt bored and lonely, and because my encounters with others had stopped feeling visceral or urgent. I’m not a methodical person, especially when it comes to amorous, intellectual or aesthetic issues, so I didn’t one day decide that I was going to "abandon" what I’d learned. I was just attracted to a certain male energy, at a certain moment in my life and in the culture, which seemed to promise pleasure, excitement and insight about others. As for my writing, it followed a parallel course. Like most writers of today, I was faced with a dismal lack of subject matter. There seemed to be nothing very interesting left to explore, no more channels for the imagination. I wanted to imagine abandoning my body and mind to a certain extent and living in an exotic entity that would perhaps also teach me something. Obviously, I was getting a real charge out of this intimate experience. It brought me closer to people whom I desired. Finally, I wanted to experiment with voices, narratives and points of view that took me far away from my actual life. What better way than to choose a subject that gave me a hard-on, that put me in up-till-then unfamiliar situations and taught me to identify with people who were different than me ? Finally, sex with macho, criminal young men was all I was thinking about. So what else could I have written about ? There was no other choice for material. The challenge was to make it meaningful to others who weren’t indulging in the same activity.

Your writing goes hand in hand with a deeply felt sexual tension. How do you analyse this relationship between libido and writing in your works ?
As far as I’m concerned, love and sex are ultimate subjects, unless you count violence as well. Writing is nerve-wracking, deadening, isolating. You’ve got to inject the process with life, feel a certain urgency about it. I suppose that means that as I grow older and my testosterone is depleted, I’ll be less and less motivated. I hope that’s not the case. At any rate, late twentieth century critics all have come to the conclusion that writing is closely linked to the pleasure principle. But that’s not the only motive for the sexual tension in my writing. As someone old enough to remember promiscuity before AIDS, I can vouch for it being a force that penetrated social barriers. Before the ’80s, when the ethos of the urban began to die out and the different social classes were moved out of the same space, promiscuity was a great melting pot. It was totally normal to see temporary pairings of the poor and rich, the educated and the illiterate, the young and the old. Sex broke through all social barriers, at least temporarily. It was invincible. So it was natural for me to think that sex could connect me with all kinds of characters in my writing. The tension in my narratives isn’t sexual per se. It is the tension that is created when sexual desire clashes with class values. So it’s very natural that my writing should use sexual tension to set up relationships between characters of different classes. Sometimes this resulted in a comedy of manners. Sometimes it was the starting point for flights of imagination and fantasy. At other times, it produced a certain bathos, an aesthetic of loss and abjection.

In Sexe et Solitude, which is both an autobiography and sociological essay, you explain that we are witnessing a "flight of perversity into immateriality", and a desertion of "the streets for the information highway". Territories of exploration - especially when it comes to the sexual - as well as the places where people from different social backgrounds used to meet - have moved to the virtual meshes of cyberspace. However, do you think that a counterculture - on the fringe of what you denounce as the "dominant protestant archetype" - can develop within cyberspace ?
No, I don’t see a real counterculture developing in this way. I suppose you could call me a materialist. I don’t believe that anything is possible without bodies. You’d expect that two people making love or having sex with only their minds in that disembodied way effected by the internet would have great creativity, originality and leaps of the imagination, but they never do. I believe that inspiration - and pleasure - come from the body, that the brain is only there to carry out the body’s orders, to enhance it. That’s why animals have a certain grace that we lack. I still hold to the hypothesis that the internet produces a Protestant experience, a dialectic of pleasure - sin that always precludes the actual experience. You know, my idea of a Protestant is a person who confesses to his sin at the same time that he commits it, or even before. I’m not a voyeur but a person who hungers for the sensation of touch. The desertion of the streets for the information highway is solitude to me, pure and simple.

In your essays, you denounce the ongoing takeover of subversive cultures - generated by the "underclass" - by dominant classes driven by materialistic values that are delivered by the media. So how do you envision the development of a new contemporary underground culture ?
I’ve never talked about the media as a contaminating force, or of Spectacle as a tyrant. I’m against the Situationist position, the idea that our consciousness is controlled by mediatic representations. I simply don’t believe it. I’m old-fashioned in that I believe that the media is simply a crude mirror of our selves. I hate paranoia about cultural control. It supposes that we’re weaker and less self-determining than we are. So I never said that any takeover was being driven or delivered by the media. What is happening is that a certain class has painted itself into a corner. In an attempt to secure pleasure and safety for itself, the middle class has exiled its pleasure supply. As an example, take Manhattan. The clean-up and gentrification of its streets was supported and aided by the upper classes. What never occurred to them was that the chaos of New York’s streets, as well as the energy emanating from its lower classes, was the very thing that had attracted privileged or middle class people to the city in the first place. Now they’re getting more and more bored and wondering why that is so. The only source for a new underground culture would have to come from this boredom. But it’s going to be hard, since the young people who could create this new culture have lost the historical references for it. They don’t know that there is any other way. I’d hoped that sex, the legendary sex drives of the young, would inspire them to look far a field for remedies, would induce them to rebellion ; but I haven’t experienced the new generation as being very libidinous. So I don’t know what’s going to happen.

Your essays, short stories and novels often appear as the various facets of the same impulse. Do you consider your writings to be variable expressions of the same matrix ? And what is this matrix ?
I think you’re right in seeing my writing as circulating within the same matrix. What is it, I wonder ? Well, on a personal level it has an obsessional structure. I seem to be interested in the same conflict played out in different ways. Fantasy drives the mind into a heightened, perhaps deranged state of some kind that has as a benefit the production of inspiration and even a certain wisdom, until the fantasy is endangered by the practical parameters of the situation it itself has created. As an example, the book I’m writing now : a middle class, disaffected writer driven by a passion for a Romanian street person. The obsession leads the writer into the most untenable situations. He gives up his country, his friends, his money, his identity for this crazy obsession ; and he feels motivated, inspired, full of imagination. But to the eyes of others - possibly even to the eyes of the love object - he’s making a ridiculous fool of himself, wasting his time, energy, prospects for the future. In the end, he’s learned all about a new culture, possibly written an interesting book and helped someone in whom no one has ever seen any value. He’s no less alone than he was, but hopefully his story is a gift that enhances the reader. And the reader risks very little from the experience. That’s the personal aspect of the matrix. I suppose the larger aspect is more complicated : an analysis of obsession ; an investigation of the irony of social roles ; lessons in human emotion, charity, degradation. I don’t know.

"It was 1990 but it looked like the future". The introductory sentence of one of your short stories, New York Rage, displays the futuristic aspect of your writing - although it is also deeply rooted in reality. Even when they are not under the influence of any substance, your characters seem absent to themselves, or sometimes find themselves reduced to an automaton-like state, close to that of a belching apparatus of desire, a machine that generates nervous influxes. Can you tell us about the subdued but peculiar sense of the fantastic that can be found in your books, and about the influence of science fiction on your work ?
I’m really glad that you said that because I try to create a powdery, dazed effect to my narratives. I’m very interested in hypnosis. This isn’t so much social commentary as it often is in science fiction, but tone and affect that I’m trying to set up for the reader. It’s not a comment about the alienated times in which we live. I want to hypnotize the reader, disorient him into absorbing my text. I’m playing on the fact that we are never fully aware of what we’re doing. One of my favorite utterances comes from Breton’s Nadja, the first line, I think, which goes something like, "Who am I ? It might be more correct to ask whom I haunt." By saying this Breton was making a reference to the unconscious, the idea that our conscious self is only a ghost acting out the urges of a hidden, or unconscious, being. Similarly, I want to mesmerize, to reproduce the feeling that we all at times get of moving and acting in a body that is not our own. Finally, I think that this kind of emotional displacement acts to universalize the narrative, make it belong to everybody.

When reading your books, one can feel real fascination for the army of picaresque freaks haunting them. Is there - as for example in Tennessee Williams’ The Mutilated - a Christlike dimension to your characters ?
If Christ interests me at all, it’s for his mutilated, freakish character. I suppose I’m a monster, but I consider the deformed or the mutilated highly erotic. It stimulates empathy and sadism at the same time and, of course, mirrors our own problems with self-esteem and our own feelings of being outsiders. There’s something else to it, as well. The handicapped images that stimulate me are always images of mutilated male strength. The deformation of the strong and of masculinity presents a more dramatic opportunity for empathy and irony.

You writings seem to extend cinematic techniques. Not only because the fantasy which nurtures the words gives a privileged place to images, but also because your prose formally employs cinematic figures (imagistic metaphors, wandering points of view, flash backs... ). How did the 7th art influence your writing ?
I’m very influenced by the art of cinema. It’s something I shared with a mentor of mine, the Argentine novelist Manuel Puig, now deceased. There are a lot of advantages in using this approach as a writer. First of all, there is the obvious allure of the image, its sensual power. But perhaps more importantly, there is the narrative fluidity of film technique - those flashbacks and wandering points of view that you mention. Cinematic writing is a very economical way of creating a story. Finally - and this will probably sound very American to you - I like the easiness of the film experience, its immediacy. I’m in favour of this kind of laziness on the part of an audience. Cinematic language makes things easy to follow, they’re put on a plate for you. Since you’ve pointed out the sexual urgency in my writing, you must also admit it is obvious that pornography is much more effective as images than as text. So a heavy reliance on the visual hopefully creates the allure or fascination I want my writing to have. It’s related to that hypnotic or automaton-like effect you mentioned earlier. These days, and partly due to all that prudish paranoia about the Spectacle promoted by the Situationists, the image has been given a bad name by so-called serious intellectuals. They fear its potential for "control". I disagree. There’s no way that the celebratory, sensory power of imagery can do anything but liberate in the end. And people like Pound believed that in the past. They even thought the image could carry on the work of the Symbolists, lead us toward a new consciousness of things. Consequently, I have a high respect for filmic thinking. In part, I aspire to it.

The appearance of AIDS and of new security policies followed by the American government have deeply affected your apprehension of reality, your sex life, and your experience as a writer. How do you now view these contemporary issues, and how do you live in the post-9/11 period in your country ?
I’ve had a lot of trouble adapting to the post-9/11 period. So has everybody. Look how our government has responded to it ! It’s really frightening. I truly think what happened here is something no one can understand unless they experienced it. Consequently, I’ve had problems discussing it with French friends. This does not at all mean that I support the defensive, aggressive behavior in this country that has resulted from it. It only means that these occurrences have created new feelings in me. Maybe even to say so to a European is too self-dramatic, too narcissistic, given what your continent has had to endure in past decades. However, I do know that things have changed here. I think it makes sense to link the two phenomena, AIDS and terrorism. Both forces push people toward a new conservatism. Unfortunately, there is currently nothing original I can say about these things. I know that there is a pall hanging over this country now. When I went to Paris in November 2002, I was amazed by the frivolity and hilarity I saw in the cafés. It was only then I realized how rarely they’re seen in public places in New York at this point. Life seems normal, you don’t even notice it, but there’s a lack of energy. And yes, after the appearance of AIDS, I saw a similar effect upon gay culture. Unfortunately, traumas tend to make the groups who are affected more provincial, more small-minded. No one is sitting around beating his breast and moaning. The effect is more subtle. But in the ’70s, for instance, gays were in many ways cultural innovators. Others looked to them for new fashions, new ideas, new ways to have pleasure. Their sense of irony, camp and humor were legendary. But then AIDS curtailed such expansive thinking. Caution stifled libido and originality. I think this terrorism experience has had a similar effect upon the American public in general. It leaks into all aspects of culture, art, fashion, anything that requires imagination. I’ll stop talking about this because what I’m saying is too obvious, and too depressing.

For the writers of the Beat generation, reality and fiction were intimately interwoven and were also part of an adventure aimed at writing. What are your projects for the following of this adventure ? Can you tell us about your next novel ?
What you say about the Beats is what I like most about them, their ability to create a matching life style and literary aesthetic. It’s what most attracted me to writing when I was young, the possibility of living life as an artist. It was a common phenomenon of the past. Artists dressed a certain way and they were expected to have great sensitivity and taste. They were cultural arbiters. I suppose the union of life style and literature peaked with the English Romantics. Now that pairing doesn’t seem to exist at all, which depresses me a great deal. When did thought, or writing, become something different than day-to-day living ? I don’t know. It doesn’t make sense. All I know is that, hopefully, there isn’t a great division in my life between the two. I hope to live as I write, and vice versa. Or at least, my writing is an attempt to live out my fantasies. My forthcoming book, the longest I’ve ever written, isn’t a novel but a memoir. I don’t think there’s a word for "memoir" in French. It’s not "mes mémoires", a sentimental and literary remembrance of a life. Nor is it "un journal", a kind of diary in which events and feelings are analyzed from day to day. Instead my memoir, as we call it here, is a synthetic, novelistic but contemplative re-creation of an experience I had, over the period of nine months, mostly in Romania. It tells the story of my relationship with a Romanian and my adventures in that country, as well as the fantasies, realizations and yearnings that went through my mind when the experience was taking place. Within this central narrative, I’ve tried to interweave material about historical figures that serve as loose metaphors for the central subject or expand information about it into other realms. Consequently, there is material in this book about Brancusi, King Carol II of Romania, his Jewish mistress Lupescu and Queen Marie of Romania, as well. They were "kinky" figures, at least on the psycho-sexual level, and I hope they add to the attractiveness of the central story and make it more relevant to a greater number of people.