Despite Ihara's assertions that The Paris Review Interviews, Volume II is for grad students, I've spent the past few days enjoying them so much that I'm smiling. Deeply. Everywhere I go. While I agree that some of the questions veer into Silverblatt-land of "look how much I know" and some questions simply boggle the mind ("Do you want readers to like what you do?"), the insights into craft and process and the work itself far outweigh any grad-schooliness that lingers.
I'm particularly taken with the 1986 William Gaddis interview. He is damn funny, in the most biting way possible. Snarky almost, as only a proper satirist could be. I dig it.
Q: Since over the years you've acquired a reputation for avoiding interviews, particularly those that address your work, let me ask why you are submitting to this one.
A: I suppose because I've got some illusion about finally getting the whole thing out of the way once and for all. In the past I've resisted partly because of the tendency I've observed of putting the man in the place of his work, and that goes back more than thirty years; it comes up in a conversation early in The Recognitions. That, and the conviction that the work has got to stand on its own-- when ambiguities appear they are deliberate and I've no intention of running after them with explanations--and finally, of course, the threat of questions from someone unfamiliar with the work itself: Do you work on a fixed schedule every day? On which side of the paper do you write? That sort of talk-show pap, five-minute celebrity, turning the creative artists into a performing one, which doesn't look to be the case here.
Q: Thank you for the vote of confidence.
A: And so I've the hope of laying a few things to rest; an interview I can simply refer people to when the threat of another appears, without having to go through it again.
Off to a fine start, no? What I particularly love about his interview is that, one, he "submitted" to it, and two, he seems hell-bent on dispelling some of the guesswork that has surrounded his novels. While he takes great pains to point out that ambiguities exist in his work for a reason ("if there are ambiguities, well, life is filled with them"), he does wish to stick-it to critics who've spent the bulk of their career finding links in his work to other great writers, such as Joyce. He feels that all of the guessing is childish, a waste of anyone's time. He points out it can be dangerous to try and read into why he chose a character's name or a book title...because in most cases, the critics are dead wrong. By being wrong, they create a whole slew of meta-associations with other novels that don't exist. In doing so, they ruin the experience of reading his novels without the associations and preconceived notions of what they're about and what inspired them.
Gaddis seems supremely irritated with one critic in particular - John Gardner. Who, interestingly, also has an interview in the book, which I've not yet read. Here are a few choice barbs that Gaddis has for Gardner:
G: Frequently enough, careless or predisposed readers, John Gardner for instance, see these books as chronicles of the dedicated artist crushed by commerce, which is, of course, to miss, or misread, or simply disregard all the evidence of their own appetite for destruction...
G: Because it is that real note of hope in JR that is very important. It's the kind of thing that someone like John Gardner totally missed.
G: This is what I mean about being wary of tracing down sources, inferences; Gardner, I think, traced the name Bast down to some Greek reference, which was, of course, nonsense.
Such unprompted vitriol for Gardner surprised me. I have underestimated, it seems, the hatred that Gardner's On Moral Fiction (and his horrible pronouncements about "big" writers in interviews at the time) engendered when it came out in 1978. A bit of searching turned up Dwight Garner's recent Paper Cuts post on just this moment in literature. The comments on the post are interesting as well.
The debate on Moral Fiction (caps) is a grand one and I've no intention of tackling it here. At least, not now. Instead, I point all of this out for a few reasons:
- I love, love, love that reading opens so many doors and tunnels and underground passages to other places. It is what I love about writing and what I love about reading. You start off in one place. If you follow the thread, the crumbs, the ideas that spur other ideas, who knows where you'll end up. I've got a list of seven things I now want to read as a result of one Gaddis interview. (I suspect this is the caliber of Gaddis more so than it is merely an interview, but no matter.)
- It is important for me to remember, always, the context of what we read. I read On Moral Fiction years ago and knew, academically, about the anger it flamed on all sides. Yet, I forgot about how intense that anger was. In this context, the Gaddis interview, only ten years after the publication of On Moral Fiction, and six years after Gardner's untimely death, makes perfect sense.
- The Gaddis interview, for me, represents all the reasons I love author interviews. He is a writer so encumbered by the "difficult" label. His work is deemed difficult, he is deemed difficult. After reading this interview, I see that yes, he is difficult. But after hearing it for so long, after carrying that label around in my own head, I find he is far less difficult than he was ever made out to be. And quite funny. Which, of course, I adore. I feel I understand the man better and as a result, might give his work another go...outside the academic constraints in which his novels were first presented to me...as, you guessed it, difficult.
This is a fine, fine interview with many good insights about fiction and character and the whole lot. I highly recommend it if you've not already read it.
