AD: That brings me to another question… What made you decide to put those quotes at the beginning of every chapter, anyway?
JS: Well that was really something weird, the way that sort of came about. It’s a kinda funny story — funny peculiar though, not so much funny ha ha...
When I did it, I didn’t have the slightest idea why I felt so compelled to do that shit. It was almost like an addictive vibe spurring me on in the beginning, I guess. You know how you can start a book off with a basic quote the way I did with that famous quote from Kerouac… and then it just felt so good and appropriate looking at it there that, like a good addict, I just started craving for more! Like they say, ‘one’s too many and a thousand’s not enough.’ (Laughs)…
So then I came up with the idea of just putting a relevant little literary quote at the beginning of every chapter like that, something pertinent to the overall theme or vibe of the chapter, just like I felt the Kerouac quote was largely pertinent to the whole book itself, at least to its central characters and the whole dynamic going on between them. Cigano’s almost obsessive fascination with Narcisa and his unbreakable attraction to her just seemed to me kinda reminiscent of that same sort of interdependency between Kerouac and his Dean Moriarty character in On The Road.
But it was all completely unconscious to me at that point — so much so, in fact that when I gave the original manuscript of the first edition to a professional book editor to look at before I started in on this huge rewrite of Narcisa, the one I’m peddling to big publishers now, one of the first things she said was how much it reminded her of that On The Road feeling.
Now I haven’t read On The Road in over 30 years… but there it was. Synchronicity. I’ve come to really believe that that sort of synchronicity is like the shadow of the Eternal Muse standing over us, all these little signs and stuff…
But on a more prosaic, rational level, I guess it just goes to show ya that all those books you read 30 years ago, they’re all still in there, in the computer and it all just comes out in the wash somehow eventually… but I digress…. well not really, I guess, because this is kinda about that computer, but even on a much deeper level, like a weird sorta DNA computer that seems to operate and drive us along deep below the level of our own conscious awareness…
Synchrodestiny!