George Salis: Your latest novel, The Logos, features two epigraphs, one of which is from the French philosopher Gaston Bachelard: “If a metaphysician could not draw, what would he think?” Can you take a stab at answering this hypothetical?

Mark de Silva: Thinking doesn’t get far without spatial metaphors: an argument hangs on an assumption, a certain concept is defined by its extension, and so on. Inferential structure, which is what thinking comes down to, can’t readily be understood—a spatial word itself—without invoking the two dimensions of the plane. So I suppose it wouldn’t be only metaphysicians in trouble without the capacity to draw, to delineate, to describe.

GS: Can you describe the logo that would signify the writer Mark de Silva?

MdS: The dollar sign. What else?

GS: The UK edition of The Logos, published by Splice, is over 1,000 pages, yet it’s written entirely in the first person. Why? Did you worry about a kind of solipsism with this decision or did you want to tackle this phenomenon head-on?

MdS: I wanted to picture a wide world from a single prospect, rather than use the multiple angles of my first novel, Square Wave. Claustrophobia only threatens when a narrator’s consciousness fails to embrace much besides the inanimate world and his own voice. That’s why much of Beckett’s writing feels confining—there’s so little event and action, other than the narrator’s running monologue. But a single point of view—which is all any of us has—seems like plenty when there’s a lot to see, as has been clear since at least the time of David Copperfield. The Logos bristles with worldly activity, even if we confront it through one person’s senses.

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Mark de Silva is the author of the novels Square Wave (Two Dollar Radio, 2016) and The Logos (Clash Books [US] and Splice [UK], 2022), as well as the essay collection Points of Attack (Clash Books, 2020). He holds degrees in philosophy from Brown (AB) and Cambridge (PhD). He is the fiction editor of 3:AM Magazine and a research editor at the New York Times Magazine. His website is here.

George Salis is the author of Sea Above, Sun Below. His fiction is featured in The Dark, Black Dandy, Zizzle Literary Magazine, House of Zolo, Three Crows Magazine, and elsewhere. His criticism has appeared in Isacoustic, Atticus Review, and The Tishman Review, and his science article on the mechanics of natural evil was featured in Skeptic. He is currently working on an encyclopedic novel titled Morphological Echoes. He has taught in Bulgaria, China, and Poland. Find him on Facebook, Goodreads, Instagram, Twitter, and at www.GeorgeSalis.com.