Interviews

William T. Vollmann, The Art of Fiction No. 163

Interviewed by Madison Smartt Bell

William T. Vollmann, the author of eleven books, all published since 1987, has
become known for his highly unusual prolificity, for his extraordinary stylistic
pyrotechnics, for the unique engagement of his own personality with his work,
and for the quite staggering ambition of his literary projects. He also has begun
to achieve a certain notoriety for his parallel career as a professional
adventurer.

At twenty-two, Vollmann traveled to Afghanistan in the hopes of aiding the

mujahideen rebels in their struggle against the Soviet army. His less than
successful efforts are recounted in the tragicomic memoir An Afghanistan
Picture Show (1992). In the early eighties, while living in San Francisco, he
befriended the prostitutes in the Tenderloin to gather material for his first story
collection, The Rainbow Stories (1989).

For over a decade Vollmann has been at work on Seven Dreams: A Book of
North American Landscapes, a grand multinovel project to recreate the history
of the North American continent. Id like to see these books taught in history
classes, he has said. The Ice-Shirt (1990) recounts the brief colonization of a
part of the continent by the Vikings; Fathers and Crows (1992) tells of the
relationships among the French Jesuit priests and the Iroquois and Huron Native
Americans; and The Rifles (1994), the third novel to be written (actually the
sixth in the series), focuses on the exploits of British explorer Sir John Franklin,
who died on a naval expedition to the Canadian Arctic. To research The Rifles,
Vollmann spent two weeks at an abandoned weather station at the magnetic
North Pole, where his sleeping bag didnt warm him and he began to hallucinate
from lack of sleep: Every night now he wondered if he would live until
morning, he writes.

Vollmanns other works include the short-story collection Thirteen Stories and
Thirteen Epitaphs (1991), as well as the novels Whores for Gloria; or, Everything
Was Beautiful Until the Girls Got Anxious (1992) and The Royal Family, which
was published earlier this year.

Though it was updated this fall, the main portion of this interview took place in
New York City in the fall of 1993. Vollmann was traveling to promote his most
recent publication, the episodic novel Butterfly Stories. We talked in the small
living room of his sister Sarahs Hells Kitchen apartment, where Vollmann was
staying while in New York.

INTERVIEWER

Youve written and published an incredible amount of material since your first
novel came out in 1987. Are you impressed with your rate of production?

WILLIAM T. VOLLMANN

Well, no. I work fast for different reasons. Partly its because I really enjoy doing
it; partly its that from time to time my publishers were paying me almost
nothing. I didnt want to do anything else but write, which meant that I had to
write more books to pay my bills. Now Im doing more journalism and working
harder than ever, but I really like it. Ive written a bunch of books, and I think
that the time has just about come for me to slack off a little bit, try to enjoy life
and also paint more watercolors of girls with no clothes on.

INTERVIEWER

Sounds pleasant.

VOLLMANN

One of the things that I had to do occasionally while I was collecting information
for that prostitute story, Ladies and Red Lights from The Rainbow Stories, was
sit in a corner and pull down my pants and masturbate. I would pretend to do
this while I was asking the prostitutes questions. Because otherwise, they were
utterly afraid of me and utterly miserable, thinking I was a cop.

INTERVIEWER

Not the most comforting sight though . . .

VOLLMANN

Perhaps not. But I have no problem like that anymorewhat helps me now are
the watercolors. I paint nudes of them, and I can chat with them while I paint
them. They feel really sorry for me because they look at the watercolors, which
are not a hundred percent figurative, and they think that they are really
atrocious. So they just imagine that I am a total loser. They open up to me, and I
give them money and they give me all kinds of things. It works out pretty well.

INTERVIEWER

Do you have any formal training in art?

VOLLMANN

No. I would enjoy taking a couple of art classes. I met this woman the other day
who does beautiful watercolors of flowers. I would love to learn some tricks from
her.

INTERVIEWER

Do you usually write or take notes when youre in the midst of these
experiences?

VOLLMANN

Always.

INTERVIEWER

As a rule, how many hours a day do you work on your writing?

VOLLMANN

My work habits have never been structured. Its just something I do as much as
I can. For the first few books, it was pure enjoyment. Now, the enjoyment is not
there quite as much because my hands hurt all the time when I type.

INTERVIEWER

When did your hands start to go bad?

VOLLMANN

Right when I turned thirty. Fathers and Crows is where I put in the most time
working sixteen-hour days.

INTERVIEWER

Do you type your first drafts straight on a computer?

VOLLMANN

Yes, until I got carpal tunnel syndrome I did. Lately Ive been doing more stuff
with notebooks, just because it doesnt hurt my hands to write in a notebook. I
can see the day coming when Ill no longer be able even to compose on the
computerIll have to write everything in a notebook and pay somebody to
transcribe it.

INTERVIEWER

Have there been any changes in your writing habits, apart from the carpaltunnel problem?

VOLLMANN

When I was writing the first few books, what I would do is write a bunch of
sentences and then go back and expand and explode those sentences, pack as
much into them as I could, so theyd kind of be like popcorn kernels popping . . .
all this stuff in there to make the writing dense, and beautiful for its density. I
still do that from time to time, but Im getting increasingly interested in taking
things out as I write. Its fun for me to try to write concise, compact things. Its a
very good exercise for me. And I think its important to try to do different things
change what I write about, and also the way I write. Otherwise, Id just be
repeating myself, which wouldnt be good for me, or fair to my readers.

INTERVIEWER

Did you mention somewhere that you were working on some kind of manual for
writers?

VOLLMANN

Yeah. Whenever I come up with a good idea, I put it down, and sometimes when
I get stumped I scan it on the screen and say, Oh yeah, I can always try this . . .

INTERVIEWER

So its kind of a running report on your own methods.

VOLLMANN

Thats right. Its called Wordcraft and its got a section of rules, some long
notes on various works of literaturehow they address or fail to address certain
problems. The bulk of it is quite dryso I take excerpts from books at various
stages of production and show how Ive worked on them.

Its of little interest except to somebody who wanted to understand the revision
process for himself. After all, most of what we writers spend our time doing is
making the words better, or trying to . . . sometimes we make them worse. So
Wordcraft is a very tedious thing, sort of like a calculus textbook.

INTERVIEWER

Its odd to think of you as a heavy rewriter, considering the amount of things
youve put out so quickly. It must just be the time youve put in.

VOLLMANN

The computer really does help. One good thing about having had a job as a
programmer is that I learned to look at things on the screen. I dont really need
to hold a piece of paper in my hands to see if the thing works or not. When its
alive and volatile on the screen, thats just as good for me.

INTERVIEWER

Do you think that speeds you up?

VOLLMANN

Probably. But I think a crucial part to writing, always, is letting it sit; a greater
efficiency on the computer cant really address that problem. Once youve
finished typing and moving text around and everything else, you have to leave
it alone for a while. You do that to see if it stands up, to see if all the loose
edges have been trimmed, if it makes sense, if its consistent, what shape it
really has. You cant tell that while youre working on it. The computer also helps
in that I work on a lot of books at onceas many as six or seven.

INTERVIEWER

When did you work as a computer programmer?

VOLLMANN

I was in a Ph.D. program at Berkeley for a year. Then I decided that it wasnt for
me. They had given me a fellowship for that year, and I felt kind of guilty about
taking it. At the time what I needed to do was just go out there and have
experiences and express myself. So I dropped out after a year and never went
back. I became a door-to-door canvasser, and that lasted for about six months.
Then I got a computer-programming job in Silicon Valley, and I started working
on You Bright and Risen Angels in the office.

I slept in the office quite a bit. I worked at midnight. I dont drive, so I stayed
there all week, sleeping under my desk, a wastebasket in front of my head so
the janitors wouldnt discover me, living on candy bars. I always got Three
Musketeers because you got an extra half ounce for the same amount of money.
I worked on the book whenever I could, and stored it on computer tapes. I very
rarely printed out a hard copyI think I did it once.

There are lots of things about the book that I like, but it was kind of a kids book;
it was too easy to just go on and on and have a good time making things up. Im
more interested right now in looking at things around me and trying to
understand them. Maybe some time if I got a lot older and didnt travel as
much, Id enjoy being back inside my head again, but not right now.

INTERVIEWER

Was that the first job you had after college, working in Silicon Valley?

VOLLMANN

After college I went to San Francisco and worked as a secretary in a reinsurance

company. That was a pretty dismal job. It was a real small place. Guys would
come in and theyd sort of stick out their arms like wings so I could take their
coats off. Theyd tell me, Two, and Id put two lumps of sugar in their coffee. Id
sit there and work on the bosss letters. I guess I was probably twenty-one. I
was a very timid person and I really wanted to please, and so the guy would
often keep me till late at night and not pay me anything extrait just seemed
like it was my entire life. I hated that office. I worked there until I had enough
money to go to Afghanistan.

INTERVIEWER

Why did you want to go to Afghanistan?

VOLLMANN

Why? Because it was a current, urgent case of politically induced suffering (as
Iraq and Kosovo are today). I wanted to do something about it. I mostly failed.
But I learned a lot, which is why I wrote a book about it.

INTERVIEWER

Was An Afghanistan Picture Show the first book you wrote?

VOLLMANN

No, the first book I wrote was when I was in first or second grade. It was about
some astronauts who try to explore another solar system. I worked it out so that
there were exactly as many planets in the solar system as astronauts, each
planet a kind of death trap, so they all got picked off one by one.

When I was in college I wrote a book called Introduction to the Memoirs. It

wasnt any good as a book, but it occasionally had good paragraphs and
sentences, and Ive cannibalized from it occasionally in some of the other
books.

After that, I guess I started working on something that would become Bright and
Risen Angels, but I didnt know what to do with it. I put it aside and then wrote
the Afghanistan book, which also wasnt really good enoughnot finished when
I thought it was. So I guess Bright and Risen Angels was the first one that was
actually finished, although I tried to sell Picture Show first, thinking that it was
finished, thinking it was OK when it really wasnt.

INTERVIEWER

Where were you when you wrote the first draft of An Afghanistan Picture Show?
Back in California?

VOLLMANN

I was in San Francisco. My original goal in writing it was to help the Afghans, to
come up with some kind of book that would be interesting in the way that
Orwells Homage to Catalonia was interestinga book that contains both
narrative description and political analysis. As you read it, you get a sense of a
particular situation, but at the same time the book doesnt date, even though

the situation does. Its still interesting reading in the same way Thucydidess
history of the Peloponnesian Wars is. Thats what I wanted to do. I was a student
at Berkeley at the time. I submitted it to a political science competition. The
judge wrote me a little note and said he really liked it, that it was really
interesting as a work of literature, but it wasnt a work of politics. So I gave it to
a literary agent, who said it wasnt literature, it was politically interesting, but
not literature.

INTERVIEWER

Thats called falling between the stools.

VOLLMANN

Right. So that made me feel that Id succeeded.

INTERVIEWER

How long did it take you to write the first draft?

VOLLMANN

Oh, three or four months, I suppose. I just sat down every spare moment that I
had and worked on it. Id taken lots of photographs, which I studied as often as I
could. Visual aids are very important to me in my writing. I like to see places
that Im writing about, experience things that Im writing about. So throughout
my career Ive taken photographs of things, which I can then study. The whole
business in Wordsworths Lyrical Ballads, when he talks about the spontaneous
overflow of emotion recollected in tranquilitya photograph can help you do
that.

INTERVIEWER

Were you already working in very short text blocks with the first draft?

VOLLMANN

I was. I was impressed by this book by Danilo Kis, a Yugoslav writerA Tomb for
Boris Davidovich. For me, at least, its easier to create coherence and beauty on
a small scale. Organize a block, reread and rewrite from beginning to end.
Afterward, the blocks can be arranged in a narrative or architectonic way,
rejiggered accordingly.

INTERVIEWER

Have you been especially influenced by any other writers?

VOLLMANN

I like Lautreamont a lot. He taught me how important and how possible it was to
write a sentence that is just gorgeous. Actually, Im about overdue for a
rereading of Maldoror. Id like to pick up a few tricks from that book again.

INTERVIEWER

Any other writers whove influenced your style?

VOLLMANN

When I wrote The Atlas, a series of very short prose pieces from all over the
worlda lot of which are war piecesI guess Hemingways piece about the old
man at the bridge in For Whom the Bell Tolls was an inspiration for some of
them. The old man is not going to make it across the bridge, or if he does it will

be blown up; no one can possibly help him; sooner or later they are going to
catch up with him and that will be the end of him. The way Hemingway handles
all thisin a page and a halfis pretty amazing.

INTERVIEWER

You went to college at Deep Springs in California. How did you decide to go
there?

VOLLMANN

Well, I just really liked the idea of going there, and I liked the fact that it was
free if you were acceptedtuition, room and board. I had never worked with my
hands before I went to Deep Springs, and actually I kind of dreaded that part of
it. I thought I would be really bad at it. I was a slow learner, but once I figured
out how to do something I always did an OK job. I did a lot of feeding and
slaughtering. I ran the bookstore, the library . . .

The college was set up by Lucien Lucius Nunn, who did all these experiments
with alternating currents in Telluride, Colorado, and made a whole bunch of
money. He was interested in vocational training, which was kind of rare back
then. It was a really wonderful place. It taught me a lot. They are focused on
trying to be of service to other people, which has always been something I have
wanted to do.

INTERVIEWER

Where is it?

VOLLMANN

Its two valleys west of Death Valley. The next one over is Eureka Valley, where
Charles Manson hung out. Its a pretty desolate place. The valley is about the

size of Manhattan. The ranch and a maintenance station, which is now

abandoned, are the only two things in it.

INTERVIEWER

Did you know what their angle was when you started out there?

VOLLMANN

After I had been accepted, they sent me this thing called The Gray Book, which
contains the sayings and pontifications of L. L. Nunn. Some of it is pretty
ridiculous, and a little racist and elitist, but some of it is really good. What he
wanted to do was to create what he called Trustees of the Nation: people who
could take over and run things. But he thought that you could do that just as
well by being a blacksmith as by being president. I think that is kind of a nice
idea. It may not be true, but I like to think it is.

INTERVIEWER

It seems like you would have had an easier time almost anywhere else, so why
there?

VOLLMANN

I guess it was great to be totally in this other world and to really get away from
home and be independent, financially independent. My parents always wanted
me to go to business school. Later, when I was at Cornell, my mother said, You
know, your father and I think you should go on to business school and graduate
school and if you do it, well pay for it. If you want to do your own thing, we
wont pay for you. I said, OK, Ill do my own thing and you wont pay for me. I
was probably thinking along those lines when I went to Deep Springs. I have
always felt that I could do what I wanted and nobody could stop me. So that
was really good for me. The students ended up being sort of full of themselves.

But its great because everyone depends on you. If you blow it, theres no milk
for people.

INTERVIEWER

You went from Deep Springs to a Nunn-sponsored program at Cornell. What was
that program like?

VOLLMANN

Well, its called Telluride House, named after Telluride, Colorado. Telluride had
gone co-ed, against Nunns wishes. I really looked forward to that. I was pretty
girl-starved by the time I left Deep Springs. But I hated Telluridevery
hierarchical, elitist. At Deep Springs you get the foundations of character by
punching cows, and at Telluride you go on to stocks and ballroom dancing. Very
inbred. They have their own jargon. For instance, they highly value something
they called I.I.I.Informal Intellectual Interchange. They would always be
saying, Theres not enough I.I.I. in the house. If they think someone is not a
good house member they can send you away for a semesterthey rusticate
you. Very vanguardist. One girl who was part of the Nunnian dynastyher
father and grandfather had both been to Deep Springs and Telluridesaid,
Some people were born to be led and other people were born to lead, and were
the Association and we are going to lead you, and thats how it is. You kind of
have to admire them when they are frank about it. I tried to organize a little
faction there to overthrow the ruling class. Of course, we failed miserably
because we had no guns on our side. The Tellurides have usually ended up
becoming academics. One girl in my class started off as a Leninist, joined the
Association, and ended up writing speeches for Jean Kirkpatrick.

INTERVIEWER

Have any of them turned out to be cowboys?

VOLLMANN

No, no. No cowboys.

INTERVIEWER

Sounds like you felt responsible for paying your own expenses. Did your parents
really refuse to help you or did you just want to do it that way?

VOLLMANN

My parents were pretty well off, but I always felt a little uncomfortable asking
them for anything. When I was nine years old and my sister was six, she
drowned. I was supposed to be watching her and I didnt. I always felt guilty
about it, and my parents kind of blamed me for it a little bit too, I think. It was a
pond in New Hampshire; it had a shallow bottom, which dropped off abruptly
and . . . she couldnt swim. I knew she couldnt swim, and I was supposed to be
keeping an eye on her. My father and my uncle were out swimming. I just
stopped paying attention at one point. I was lost in some sort of daydream.

INTERVIEWER

Mightnt your parents have shared in the responsibility to some extent by

deciding to leave her in your charge?

VOLLMANN

Oh, sure, theyre democratic about it. I think they blame themselves a little bit,
too, at this point. But somehow after that I felt very uncomfortable at home.

INTERVIEWER

Starting at age nine?

VOLLMANN

I felt like I wasnt exactly wanted there, and . . . I sort of exaggerated things, I
think.

INTERVIEWER

Did you talk about it to them much?

VOLLMANN

Never. I felt shy and uncomfortable about it. I had nightmares practically every
nightof her skeleton chasing me and punishing me and stuff like thispretty
much through high school, and then things got a lot better for me.

INTERVIEWER

Because you went to Deep Springs?

VOLLMANN

Deep Springs just gave me a lot of self-confidence.

INTERVIEWER

What do your parents think about what you do now?

VOLLMANN

Well, at first they kept saying, Bill, when are you going to grow up, when are you
going to stop this writing stuff and do something that supports you? Then after
the first book came out they were real proud of me. They were proud of me for
quite a while; they are still proud of me, but they are starting to feel very
uncomfortable about it, because I am writing more and more stuff about myself,
and about sex. I feel kind of bad for them, a little bit embarrassed, but at the
same time I have to do what I have to do. Butterfly Stories, when Esquire ran an
excerpt, made them pretty miserable.

INTERVIEWER

Do you ever have an intention to shock? Do you have the reader in mind when
you write?

VOLLMANN

No, I dont shock myself, and I dont care about shocking others. Im not
egocentric or a performer.

INTERVIEWER

Its clear that parts of Butterfly Stories have to be fictional, but still I wonder, did
you have unprotected sex with that many prostitutes? Why take those risks?

VOLLMANN

Well, I wouldnt mind finding some other way. When I was writing Angels,
Rainbow Stories, and the other stories, that sort of thing wasnt particularly
interesting to megetting involved with all the prostitutes that way. But I kept
thinking when I first began writing that my female characters were very weak
and unconvincing. What is the best way to really improve that? I thought, Well,

the best way is to have relationships with a lot of different women. Whats the
best way to do that? Its to pick up whores.

INTERVIEWER

Has this worked?

VOLLMANN

I dont know, but I feel that I have created some really good characters. Also, I
often feel lonely. Its been really nice for me to have all of these women who
really, I truly believe, care about me. I care about them. I keep in touch with
them. I help them out, they help me out; they pay my rent because I can write
about them. I do pictures of them, I give them pictures; I paint them myself. It
works pretty well.

INTERVIEWER

It seems to me youd learn a whole lot about how prostitutes think and are, and
not necessarily that much about more conventional women.

VOLLMANN

Right. Well, I have been able to sleep around with some of them too.

INTERVIEWER

Well, good. Im glad to hear that.

VOLLMANN

I almost never sleep with American prostitutes any more, unless they really
want me toif they are going to get hurt if I dont. I have a lot of them as
friends. They pose for me as models, and I have written a lot of stories about
them.

INTERVIEWER

Ive heard that you bought a ten-year-old prostitute out of servitude.

VOLLMANN

Oh, I did that in Thailand. That Afghanistan book is all about how I tried to help
people and failed. Even the book itself was a failurenot a perfect book and it
sold terribly. Everything has been totally consistent about it.

INTERVIEWER

Its a masterpiece in its own way.

VOLLMANN

A masterpiece of failure. Anyway, so when I was in Thailand, I went to a town in

the south and bought a young girl for the night. This awful brothelone of these
places hidden behind a flowershop with all these tunnels and locked doors and
stuffwas like a prison. I tried to help a couple of the girls but you just cant get
them out. I tried and I couldnt. I made the mistake of going to the police, trying
to have the police get them outall that did was nearly get them arrested and
put in jail, because the police are paid off. I managed to get the raid called off
by taking all the cops out to dinner and buying them Johnnie Walker. I bought
this fourteen-year-old girl and got her in a truck and drove like hell to Bangkok. I
was with this other girl at the timeYhone-Yhone, a street prostitute, a very
happy one. She was my interpreter. She put the fourteen-year-old girl at ease
and got her to trust me. We got her set up at a school run by a relative of the

king of Thailand. I went up north, met her father, gave him some money, and
got a receipt for his daughter. He didnt know shed been sold to a brothel.
When I met him and told him he said, Oh. I didnt know that, but, well, whatever
she wants. Hes not a bad guy, just a total loser. Hes a former Chiang Kai-shek
soldier. Theyre all squatters there in Thailand. They cant read or write. He lives
on dried dogs and dried snakes.

INTERVIEWER

You own his daughter?

VOLLMANN

Thats right. I own her. She doesnt particularly like me, but she was really
happy to be out of that place. She loves the school. Its sort of a vocational
school. Its called something like the Center for the Promotion of the Status of
Women. Many former prostitutes are in there. Most of them arent learning how
to read or write because thats useless to them. She is learning how to sew.
Some of them are learning how to be beauticians.

INTERVIEWER

When you went to Afghanistan, according to the book, you were out to save an
entire nation. Whats the value of saving one person in a situation where there
are so many?

VOLLMANN

That used to bother me, but then I said, You can only do what you can do, and if
you were that one person you would be really happy to be saved. Its a netpositive effect. And thats all you can say.

INTERVIEWER

You went to Bosnia recently. Whats the appeal for you in going to these war
zones?

VOLLMANN

There is no appeal in it. Its not fun. If it were, I would be shallow, or else a
monster. However, it is possible to learn a great deal about human beings when
one sees them in extreme situations. This helps me become a better writer and
more empathetic person. More importantly, its my responsibility to use my
talents and competence to illuminate human suffering. Illumination is the first
step toward alleviation. It is difficult to perform emergency surgery in pitch
darkness.

INTERVIEWER

I gather the nature of your interest in such situations must have changed a little
bit since Afghanistan.

VOLLMANN

Thats right. I am actually a competent war correspondent at this point, instead

of being a war idiot like I was in Afghanistan. The appeal for me in being there
was that I was working on a long essay about when violence is justified and
when it isnt; I was trying to come up with some kind of moral calculus for it,
and the best way to do that is with case studies of war. I want to keep seeing
them.

INTERVIEWER

What about the missionary impulse?

VOLLMANN

Well, I tried to get one girl out of Sarajevo, a Serbian girl, but I couldnt do it.
People at the UN were bickering with the Serbs; Croatians and Muslims wouldnt
talk to each other. I couldnt get permission to get her out.

INTERVIEWER

Did you go armed into these places?

VOLLMANN

No, Im trying to get a permit, actually. I would like to have a permit to have a
gun in Thailand.

INTERVIEWER

Do you practice on a range?

VOLLMANN

Sometimes. I think I could probably do an OK job of defending myself.

INTERVIEWER

Well, in most of these situations youre very close to your assailant.

VOLLMANN

Exactly. Just out of arms length, I understand.

INTERVIEWER

My weapon of choice for home defense is a shotgunmarksmanship is not an

issue. As my father once said to me, If you use a shotgun, you might not kill
whatever it is, but youll make it go away.

VOLLMANN

I have one that I use for protection from polar bears when I go up north. Its
actually such a hassle to take it across the border that I just leave it with a
friend up in Canada. I was always sort of afraid of a shotgun for home defense
just because I imagined that in close quarters it would be so easy for the
intruder to just grab it by the barrel. You know, pull it away from you . . . Youd
want a sawed-off shotgun for sure.

INTERVIEWER

I see youre imagining a situation where theres conversation. Thats not the
way I picture it.

VOLLMANN

Maybe youre right.

INTERVIEWER

Do you keep guns at home? What do you like?

VOLLMANN

Well, Ive got a Sig-Sauer P-226, its a nine millimeter, an automatic kind of
revolver. It works pretty well, very little recoil. It just started jamming on me
recently, I have to figure out why. Ive had it for years. I used to have a
Browning BDA 380. It was kind of a nice looking thing but I could never hit
anything with it. I am thinking about getting the new Desert Eagle in a fifty
caliber.

INTERVIEWER

Fifty caliber?

VOLLMANN

Its the most powerful handgun ever made.

INTERVIEWER

Christ. What happens when you fire it, your arm comes off at the shoulder?

VOLLMANN

Thats why I kind of want to try it. Every time I go to Deep Springs, they have
this dump with all these old washing machines and other things. I always take
some plinks with a gun. With a nine millimeter itll make a clean hole right
through the center of the door of the washing machine, but it wont crack it. It
would be fun to try the fifty caliber on that.

INTERVIEWER

Can you picture yourself ever actually shooting someone?

VOLLMANN

I used to wonder what I would do if I saw somebody getting really, really hurt,
and I decided that I would come out with my gun and try to stop it, because I
just couldnt bear to do nothing. My Inuk friend, who Reepah [from The Rifles]
was partly based on, came down to New York one time. That was the one time
that I carried a gun on the subway. She was so trusting that she would go up
and shed talk to everybody on the subway. I was so afraid that someone was
going to hurt herif someone would have grabbed her and started to hit her,
there was no question in my mind that I would just pull out the gun. Im really
happy that nothing happened to her. She was so good and so sweet that she
would go up to anybody and talk with them and they would just sort of smile at
her. Most people could see that she wasnt playing with a full deck. She was just
very good and very well-meaning and her brain was half gone, and they didnt
have the heart to say anything to her, even though she would pick up their kids
and do all kinds of things. But I was always afraid that she would push one guys
buttons without meaning to, you know.

I left New York finally. It seemed like so often I would see people abusing each
other. It was so dirty and hard to find trees. Central Park, even, if you stand on
one side you can see the buildings on the other side. You cant get away from
the people. Give me the Arctic anytime.

INTERVIEWER

How is New York so different from San Francisco?

VOLLMANN

San Francisco is a little more low key. The feeling that I always had was that in
California people would let you take all kinds of liberties with them, but they
dont in New York. I remember one time I was up in Morningside Heights and

some black teenagers got hold of me and left a nice little scar on my arm. They
were burning me with cigarettes. I felt pretty helpless. I was sort of joking
around with them while they were burning me because I figured that was what a
good Iroquois would do.

INTERVIEWER

What were the circumstances of this?

VOLLMANN

Well, Id been doing a little stuff with some prostitutes around Times Square.
One of them agreed that I could come hang out with her. Her little brothers and
sisters had some kind of game where they rode on top of elevators. I really
wanted to see that. I would have done it with them; I tried to get in with them
but I couldnt. They just hated me because I was white or something. I always
felt in San Francisco when I got into a situation like that I could get out
gracefully.

INTERVIEWER

Well, you carried a gun there.

VOLLMANN

In San Francisco, in the West, people are just a little bit slower in their reactions.
They stop and think. That works to the researchers benefit. In New York I felt
people might set certain rules, but they might not follow their own rules. You
could just get in too much trouble. Even having a gun, if all of a sudden
everyone else has a gun too, then your having a gun makes everything worse.

INTERVIEWER

Let me ask about your series of historical novels. Did you first imagine Seven
Dreams as a series? How did it come to your mind?

VOLLMANN

I imagined it as something like Ovids Metamorphoses. I thought it was going to

be a one-volume thinga fairly big volume, a kind of long prose poem about
our continent over the last thousand years, making use of all kinds of European
and Native American myths, legends, and stories. Quickly I realized that I
couldnt do it all in one volume. Then I realized that I wanted it to be a history
as well. Fathers and Crows has got some weak parts, some dead spots, some
dry spots, but still you get a sense, I think, of what life must have been like in
the first half of the seventeenth century in Canada. It makes me feel good that I
accomplished that. As well as it being, in parts, a good story. I would like the
chance to do The Ice-Shirt over, because with that book I was kind of feeling my
way. I think I caught on to some of it with Fathers and Crows. I think The Rifles is
pretty good.

INTERVIEWER

What discoveries have you made in the process of working this out so far?

VOLLMANN

I figured out that no degree of care in research is ever sufficient. Each dream
deals with at least two colliding points of view. The vanquished viewpoint
survives only in archives since obviously a twenty-first-century Iroquois is very
different from his seventeenth-century cousin. If I cant get inside the head of
the seventeenth-century Indian, then all Ill have written is another Gee, isnt it
terrible what we did to the Indians? piece of sentimentality. Hence I need to
know how the seventeenth-century Iroquois dressed, traded, hunted, loved,
etcetera. It was really, really hard. I was very proud of myself because I think
with a couple of the characters in Fathers and Crows, like Amantacha,
sometimes Born Underwater, I succeeded. The Rifles was much easier, because
Ive had Inuit friends. So I know how these people talk and to some extent how
they think.

INTERVIEWER

Does telling a good story ever get in the way of history?

VOLLMANN

In the Seven Dreams, history is itself the good story, and any scene I write must
be corrected if its out of line. In the other novels, the tales come before all else.
In An Afghanistan Picture Show and in my journalism, I simply obey the slogan
that was painted at the headquarters of Khun Sa, the Burmese-Shan Opium
Kingthe only obligation is to tell the truth.

INTERVIEWER

Theres always a character in your work that seems to be you. Was the account
of your expedition in The Rifles pretty much exactly what happened?

VOLLMANN

Its pretty accurate, except that the Subzero character cried and I didnt. It gives
a pretty good idea of how it was. I tried to take this little quiz in Arctic survival,
and I passed it with a C minus or a D plus.

INTERVIEWER

With some of those stories and novels I think you could excise yourself and your
own role and they would still hold up. Fathers and Crows conceivably would be a
lesser book but the integrity of the plot would still be there.

VOLLMANN

It would be fine. With The Rifles I couldnt. In these earlier books of the Seven
Dreams, I was trying to recreate something that basically doesnt exist
anymore. The landscape is still the same, but thats about all. There was no way
that I could possibly interact with the characters. My discovery was going there,
walking over the landscape, reading the primary sources, whereas with The
Rifles the discovery of what the whole thing was about involved having a
relationship with people who are still around. There would be no way for me to
get into that world without being a part of it.

INTERVIEWER

So that was the motive for the expedition to the Arctic?

VOLLMANN

I really wanted to get inside the heads of those Franklin guys and try to imagine
what their last couple of years must have been likein terrible conditions,
utterly stuck, and knowing that they couldnt get out and knowing that they
were probably going to die. This seemed like a really good way to do it, just
going someplace where I was totally by myself in the middle of the winter. I
thought I would learn something about loneliness and fear and the bad weather
and survival, which I did.

INTERVIEWER

Do you feel like The Rifles is a more successful book for that reason?

VOLLMANN

I think its more successful, but not because of me in it. I like Fathers and Crows
a lot. I think there are pages of Fathers and Crows that are necessary, but it
takes quite a while to set all the machinery going; everything was so foreign,
not just the Indian side but the European side. I had to get into a lot of

unfamiliar names and everything else. Whereas with The Rifles I think the
reader can be more immediately moved because I was able to experience it;
when the reader feels that the thing is experienced its always better. In The
Rifles, just about everything comes alive because I could see it. It may be less
of an accomplishment than Fathers and Crows, but its a better read.

INTERVIEWER

Would you have gone to the Arctic if you werent interested in writing about
Franklin?

VOLLMANN

Probably not at that time. I might have tried something different. But I have
always been interested in the Arctic, and I would like to feel like I am an
emancipated, self-reliant human being up there. Eventually, I would like to get
to the point where I could go there any time and know that I could make it for a
couple of weeks, no matter what. I love it up there. I like being with the people,
and I like being alone up there too, and gradually over the years Ive been
perfecting the gear, figuring out everything I need, and learning how to live
there for short periods of time. I would never be able to live there permanently,
but sometime I would enjoy crossing from Ellesmere Island to Axel Heiberg
Island, or walking across the frozen sea off Greenland. It would be fun to go with
some Inuit and go hunting. If I ever had a bunch of money, I would enjoy paying
them to travel around with me for a whole year, living off the land, like in the
old days. Thatd be such a kick!

INTERVIEWER

Do you hunt when you go up there?

VOLLMANN

No. I go with them. I love to eat what they catch. I figure there is a lot of
pressure on those animals and I dont have any right to do it because Im not
from there. I dont want to put more pressure on them. But if they want to do it,
Im glad they let me come with them and watch. I love seeing the tricks they
use and I like eating walrus or seal or caribou.

INTERVIEWER

I understand your biggest problem was dehydration. Why couldnt you just eat
the snow for water?

VOLLMANN

If you eat snow, it will make you dehydrated. It takes so much energy to melt
the snow that you would die from eating snow. What the Eskimos used to do
was fill a skin bag with snow and keep it close to their body all day and it would
melt the snow.

INTERVIEWER

Do you prefer the researchthe experienceor the writing? What are their
different pleasures?

VOLLMANN

That depends on the experience and on the writing. Obviously I dont enjoy the
drudgery of cutting a piece of journalistic thoughtfulness into a bleeding square
of hackwork. Nor do I enjoy going to war zones and getting shot at. I do love
exploring alien landscapes and learning about new people. I love representing
what I learn. I also love writing the books, where (with disastrous typographical
exceptions) I am in full control and can do my best.

INTERVIEWER

How do you fit your new book, The Royal Family, into the rest of what youve
done?

VOLLMANN

I guess you could see the prostitute novels as a trilogy of which this would be
the third book. The common motif is just prostitution and love. Beyond that, I
dont know. It was fun to try to explore some other worlds in this book, like the
suburban world of Sacramento, but I feel like Im just starting on that and I
could probably do better.

INTERVIEWER

Did you ever think that you would do something else besides being a writer?

VOLLMANN

I think that for the stuff that I am interested in, writing is not enough. I want to
take some responsibility and act as well as write. I dont mean to be an actor,
but rather to accomplish things . . . do things that will help people somehow . . .
things like kidnapping the sex slave. It would be great if I could make my
contribution to abolishing the automobile or eliminating television or something
like that.

INTERVIEWER

So you dont comfort yourself with the idea that by writing these books you
change peoples attitudes and move their hearts and minds and influence the
world for good?

VOLLMANN

I dont think that washes. I think many times I have seen peoples hearts and
minds moved and then the next day they go back and do whatever they were
going to do.

INTERVIEWER

You can end up doing more harm than good.

VOLLMANN

I am fascinated by somebody like Yukio Mishima, who stood for what I think
were utterly stupid ideals, who killed himself utterly pointlessly, made his family
suffer, and hurt that poor general he held as a hostage. He acted like a
complete idiot. And yet, I like the idea of taking something so far, taking
something from your own beliefssomething that starts off as an aesthetic
thingand somehow translating it into the practical sphere of human affairs. Of
course, his address to the soldiers was a total failure. That must have been
pretty mortifying for him, to be shouted down in the last moments of his life.

INTERVIEWER

Your self-portraits, if they are self-portraits, are always somewhat hapless

figures, except maybe in The Rifles. Do you see yourself as hapless?

VOLLMANN

No, I dont think I am that hapless. Im trying to understand political things

about the world and learning about the world as it used to be in a historical way.
These days I have a great life. Im doing everything I want.

INTERVIEWER

Do you write for others, or for yourself?

VOLLMANN

I write journalism for others. My violence book, Rising Up to Rising Down, was
meant to be of benefit to others. My Seven Dreams series might possibly teach
people a little about history and cultural identity. My other novels are purely to
please myself, although I enjoy pleasing others and would be very happy to
hear that readers and critics liked them. If not, Im indifferent. After all, the
world doesnt owe me a living, so I may as well waste my life as I choose.

INTERVIEWER

So you read reviews?

VOLLMANN

I read them and I enjoy them. But if everyone were to say that some book was
bad and I thought it was good, then I would keep on thinking it was good.

INTERVIEWER

Do you feel like you have any public image or that you are going to end up with
one?

VOLLMANN

Well, probably some people will think that Im a chauvinist or that Im really
daring or even that Im some kind of doomed figure. Its always easier for

people to characterize the writer rather than the work. Because the work they
would actually have to read.

INTERVIEWER

Most writers would say that . . . but they dont have themselves in their work in
the way that you do.

VOLLMANN

Thats true.

INTERVIEWER

Is any part of your life not available as a subject for your work?

VOLLMANN

I dont cannibalize from my life in order to write. Sometimes I might wish to

investigate something, then decide to experience what I investigate in order to
vivify the descriptions. At other times I write to express or exorcise some strong
feeling that I have. Some people amuse themselves believing that everything
my characters do, I have done. Those people are free to believe what they wish.
I do try to be decent about my own privacy and that of others.

INTERVIEWER

Considering the free use you make of yourself as a fictionalizable character and
the amount of hard fact there is in your fiction, I wonder what distinction you
draw between your fiction and your journalism.

VOLLMANN

My journalism is mainly for money. Most of what the magazines publish under
my name, they damage or destroy. If I am writing political journalism (which is
most of the journalism I write), I insist that the basic message not be tampered
with although its modulations often get abraded in the editorial process.
Other than that, I am a complete hack. I write the best I can, but I grin and bear
it (and cash the check) when the piece has been ruined. This is how I survive
financially.

Our societys materialist quietism has long since decreed the following: literary
craftsmanship is a nuisance that gets in the way of the message. As for the
message itself, who cares? Speaking for myself, I see only increasing difficulties
ahead. My journalism is in danger of becoming the antics of a circus animal sent
to perform in perilous places. My books, which they cannot tamper with,
continue to get published only on sufferance. A string of bad reviews and thatll
be over.

I know only a very few people who are serious about books for their own sake. If
I can make a difference by saying in a periodical or a book that our sanctions
against the Iraqi civilians are evil, then I will be sorry not to be able to make that
difference in the future.

INTERVIEWER

There are some other writers who do make an issue of their personalities in
their work in one way or anotherNorman Mailer, in certain phases of his
career, or Hunter Thompson or Charles Bukowski, whose material is similar to
whats in The Rainbow Stories. But that style of self-presentation is often about
vanity. I was wondering how you felt about this. Are you aware that people are
watching? Do you care? Do you think that no ones watching?

VOLLMANN

I figure some people are watching, but I really dont care what anybody thinks.
All I want to do is be able to have my freedom and do the things in life that I

have always wanted to do. I want to see all of these unknown places, walk on
the frozen sea as often as I can, and see the jungles. I want to fall in love with
beautiful women of all races. Rescue somebody every now and then, improve
my painting, and improve my sentence structure. If I can make a living doing
that stuff, thats great, and I will keep doing it, and they can do whatever they
want with my image. I couldnt care less.

Don DeLillo, The Art of Fiction No. 135

Interviewed by Adam Begley

A man whos been called the chief shaman of the paranoid school of American
fiction can be expected to act a little nervous.

I met Don DeLillo for the first time in an Irish restaurant in Manhattan, for a
conversation he said would be deeply preliminary. He is a slender man, gray
haired, with boxy brown glasses. His eyes, magnified by thick lenses, are
restless without being shifty. He looks to the right, to the left; he turns his head
to see whats behind him.

But his edgy manner has nothing to do with anxiety. Hes a disciplined observer
searching for details. I also discovered after many hours of interviewing spread
out over several daysa quick lunch, a visit some months later to a midtown
gallery to see an Anselm Kiefer installation, followed by a drink at a comically
posh barthat DeLillo is a kind man, generous and thoughtful, qualities
incompatible with the reflexive wariness of the paranoid. He is not scared; he is
attentive. His smile is shy, his laugh sudden.

Don DeLillos parents came to America from Italy. He was born in the Bronx in
1936 and grew up there, in an Italian-American neighborhood. He attended
Cardinal Hayes High School and Fordham University, where he majored in
communication arts, and worked for a time as a copywriter at Ogilvy &
Mather, an advertising agency. He now lives just outside New York City with his
wife.

Americana, his first novel, was published in 1971. It took him about four years
to write. At the time he was living in a small studio apartment in Manhattan.
After Americana the novels poured out in a rush: five more in the next seven
years. End Zone (1972), Great Jones Street (1973), Ratners Star (1976), Players
(1977), and Running Dog (1978) all received enthusiastic reviews. They did not
sell well. The books were known to a small but loyal following.

Things changed in the eighties. The Names (1982) was more prominently
reviewed than any previous DeLillo novel. White Noise (1985) won the National
Book Award. Libra (1988) was a bestseller. Mao II, his latest, won the 1992
PEN/Faulkner Award. He is currently at work on a novel, a portion of which
appeared in Harpers under the title Pafko at the Wall. He has written two
plays, The Engineer of Moonlight (1979) and The Day Room (1986).

This interview began in the fall of 1992 as a series of tape-recorded

conversations. Transcripts were made from eight hours of taped material.
DeLillo returned the final, edited manuscript with a note that begins, This is not
only the meat but the potatoes.

INTERVIEWER

Do you have any idea what made you a writer?

DON DeLILLO

I have an idea but Im not sure I believe it. Maybe I wanted to learn how to
think. Writing is a concentrated form of thinking. I dont know what I think about
certain subjects, even today, until I sit down and try to write about them. Maybe
I wanted to find more rigorous ways of thinking. Were talking now about the
earliest writing I did and about the power of language to counteract the wallow
of late adolescence, to define things, define muddled experience in economical
ways. Lets not forget that writing is convenient. It requires the simplest tools. A

young writer sees that with words and sentences on a piece of paper that costs
less than a penny he can place himself more clearly in the world. Words on a
page, thats all it takes to help him separate himself from the forces around
him, streets and people and pressures and feelings. He learns to think about
these things, to ride his own sentences into new perceptions. How much of this
did I feel at the time? Maybe just an inkling, an instinct. Writing was mainly an
unnameable urge, an urge partly propelled by the writers I was reading at the
time.

INTERVIEWER

Did you read as a child?

DeLILLO

No, not at all. Comic books. This is probably why I dont have a storytelling
drive, a drive to follow a certain kind of narrative rhythm.

INTERVIEWER

As a teenager?

DeLILLO

Not much at first. Dracula when I was fourteen. A spider eats a fly, and a rat
eats the spider, and a cat eats the rat, and a dog eats the cat, and maybe
somebody eats the dog. Did I miss one level of devouring? And yes, the Studs
Lonigan trilogy, which showed me that my own life, or something like it, could
be the subject of a writers scrutiny. This was an amazing thing to discover.
Then, when I was eighteen, I got a summer job as a playground attendanta
parkie. And I was told to wear a white T-shirt and brown pants and brown shoes
and a whistle around my neckwhich they provided, the whistle. But I never
acquired the rest of the outfit. I wore blue jeans and checkered shirts and kept
the whistle in my pocket and just sat on a park bench disguised as an ordinary

citizen. And this is where I read Faulkner, As I Lay Dying and Light in August.
And got paid for it. And then James Joyce, and it was through Joyce that I
learned to see something in language that carried a radiance, something that
made me feel the beauty and fervor of words, the sense that a word has a life
and a history. And Id look at a sentence in Ulysses or in Moby-Dick or in
Hemingwaymaybe I hadnt gotten to Ulysses at that point, it was Portrait of
the Artistbut certainly Hemingway and the water that was clear and swiftly
moving and the way the troops went marching down the road and raised dust
that powdered the leaves of the trees. All this in a playground in the Bronx.

INTERVIEWER

Does the fact that you grew up in an Italian-American household translate in

some way, does it show up in the novels youve published?

DeLILLO

It showed up in early short stories. I think it translates to the novels only in the
sense that it gave me a perspective from which to see the larger environment.
Its no accident that my first novel was called Americana. This was a private
declaration of independence, a statement of my intention to use the whole
picture, the whole culture. America was and is the immigrants dream, and as
the son of two immigrants I was attracted by the sense of possibility that had
drawn my grandparents and parents. This was a subject that would allow me to
develop a range I hadnt shown in those early storiesa range and a freedom.
And I was well into my twenties by this point and had long since left the streets
where Id grown up. Not left them foreverI do want to write about those years.
Its just a question of finding the right frame.

INTERVIEWER

What got you started on Americana?

DeLILLO

I dont always know when or where an idea first hits the nervous system, but I
remember Americana. I was sailing in Maine with two friends, and we put into a
small harbor on Mt. Desert Island. And I was sitting on a railroad tie waiting to
take a shower, and I had a glimpse of a street maybe fifty yards away and a
sense of beautiful old houses and rows of elms and maples and a stillness and
wistfulnessthe street seemed to carry its own built-in longing. And I felt
something, a pause, something opening up before me. It would be a month or
two before I started writing the book and two or three years before I came up
with the title Americana, but in fact it was all implicit in that momenta
moment in which nothing happened, nothing ostensibly changed, a moment in
which I didnt see anything I hadnt seen before. But there was a pause in time,
and I knew I had to write about a man who comes to a street like this or lives on
a street like this. And whatever roads the novel eventually followed, I believe I
maintained the idea of that quiet street if only as counterpoint, as lost
innocence.
INTERVIEWER

Do you think it made a difference in your career that you started writing novels
late, when you were approaching thirty?

DeLILLO

Well, I wish I had started earlier, but evidently I wasnt ready. First, I lacked
ambition. I may have had novels in my head but very little on paper and no
personal goals, no burning desire to achieve some end. Second, I didnt have a
sense of what it takes to be a serious writer. It took me a long time to develop
this. Even when I was well into my first novel I didnt have a system for working,
a dependable routine. I worked haphazardly, sometimes late at night,
sometimes in the afternoon. I spent too much time doing other things or
nothing at all. On humid summer nights I tracked horseflies through the
apartment and killed themnot for the meat but because they were driving me
crazy with their buzzing. I hadnt developed a sense of the level of dedication
thats necessary to do this kind of work.

INTERVIEWER

What are your working habits now?

DeLILLO

I work in the morning at a manual typewriter. I do about four hours and then go
running. This helps me shake off one world and enter another. Trees, birds,
drizzleits a nice kind of interlude. Then I work again, later afternoon, for two
or three hours. Back into book time, which is transparentyou dont know its
passing. No snack food or coffee. No cigarettesI stopped smoking a long time
ago. The space is clear, the house is quiet. A writer takes earnest measures to
secure his solitude and then finds endless ways to squander it. Looking out the
window, reading random entries in the dictionary. To break the spell I look at a
photograph of Borges, a great picture sent to me by the Irish writer Colm Tn.
The face of Borges against a dark backgroundBorges fierce, blind, his nostrils
gaping, his skin stretched taut, his mouth amazingly vivid; his mouth looks
painted; hes like a shaman painted for visions, and the whole face has a kind of
steely rapture. Ive read Borges of course, although not nearly all of it, and I
dont know anything about the way he workedbut the photograph shows us a
writer who did not waste time at the window or anywhere else. So Ive tried to
make him my guide out of lethargy and drift, into the otherworld of magic, art,
and divination.

INTERVIEWER

Do your typed drafts just pile up and sit around?

DeLILLO

Thats right. I want those pages nearby because theres always a chance Ill
have to refer to something thats scrawled at the bottom of a sheet of paper
somewhere. Discarded pages mark the physical dimensions of a writers labor
you know, how many shots it took to get a certain paragraph right. Or the
awesome accumulation, the gross tonnage, of first draft pages. The first draft of
Libra sits in ten manuscript boxes. I like knowing its in the house. I feel
connected to it. Its the complete book, the full experience containable on
paper. I find Im more ready to discard pages than I used to be. I used to look for
things to keep. I used to find ways to save a paragraph or a sentence, maybe by
relocating it. Now I look for ways to discard things. If I discard a sentence I like,
its almost as satisfying as keeping a sentence I like. I dont think Ive become

ruthless or perversejust a bit more willing to believe that nature will restore
itself. The instinct to discard is finally a kind of faith. It tells me theres a better
way to do this page even though the evidence is not accessible at the present
time.

INTERVIEWER

Athletesbasketball players, football playerstalk about getting into the

zone. Is there a writers zone you get into?

DeLILLO

Theres a zone I aspire to. Finding it is another question. Its a state of automatic
writing, and it represents the paradox thats at the center of a writers
consciousnessthis writers anyway. First you look for discipline and control. You
want to exercise your will, bend the language your way, bend the world your
way. You want to control the flow of impulses, images, words, faces, ideas. But
theres a higher place, a secret aspiration. You want to let go. You want to lose
yourself in language, become a carrier or messenger. The best moments involve
a loss of control. Its a kind of rapture, and it can happen with words and
phrases fairly oftencompletely surprising combinations that make a higher
kind of sense, that come to you out of nowhere. But rarely for extended periods,
for paragraphs and pagesI think poets must have more access to this state
than novelists do. In End Zone, a number of characters play a game of touch
football in a snowstorm. Theres nothing rapturous or magical about the writing.
The writing is simple. But I wrote the passage, maybe five or six pages, in a
state of pure momentum, without the slightest pause or deliberation.

INTERVIEWER

How do you imagine your audience?

DeLILLO

When my head is in the typewriter the last thing on my mind is some imaginary
reader. I dont have an audience; I have a set of standards. But when I think of
my work out in the world, written and published, I like to imagine its being read
by some stranger somewhere who doesnt have anyone around him to talk to
about books and writingmaybe a would-be writer, maybe a little lonely, who
depends on a certain kind of writing to make him feel more comfortable in the
world.

INTERVIEWER

Ive read critics who say that your books are bound to make people feel
uncomfortable.

DeLILLO

Well, thats good to know. But this reader were talking abouthe already feels
uncomfortable. Hes very uncomfortable. And maybe what he needs is a book
that will help him realize hes not alone.

INTERVIEWER

How do you begin? What are the raw materials of a story?

DeLILLO

I think the scene comes first, an idea of a character in a place. Its visual, its
Technicolorsomething I see in a vague way. Then sentence by sentence into
the breach. No outlines maybe a short list of items, chronological, that may
represent the next twenty pages. But the basic work is built around the
sentence. This is what I mean when I call myself a writer. I construct sentences.
Theres a rhythm I hear that drives me through a sentence. And the words
typed on the white page have a sculptural quality. They form odd
correspondences. They match up not just through meaning but through sound
and look. The rhythm of a sentence will accommodate a certain number of

syllables. One syllable too many, I look for another word. Theres always
another word that means nearly the same thing, and if it doesnt then Ill
consider altering the meaning of a sentence to keep the rhythm, the syllable
beat. Im completely willing to let language press meaning upon me. Watching
the way in which words match up, keeping the balance in a sentencethese are
sensuous pleasures. I might want very and only in the same sentence, spaced a
particular way, exactly so far apart. I might want rapture matched with danger
I like to match word endings. I type rather than write longhand because I like
the way the words and letters look when they come off the hammers onto the
pagefinished, printed, beautifully formed.

INTERVIEWER

Do you care about paragraphs?

DeLILLO

When I was working on The Names I devised a new methodnew to me,

anyway. When I finished a paragraph, even a three-line paragraph, I
automatically went to a fresh page to start the new paragraph. No crowded
pages. This enabled me to see a given set of sentences more clearly. It made
rewriting easier and more effective. The white space on the page helped me
concentrate more deeply on what Id written. And with this book I tried to find a
deeper level of seriousness as well. The Names is the book that marks the
beginning of a new dedication. I needed the invigoration of unfamiliar
languages and new landscapes, and I worked to find a clarity of prose that
might serve as an equivalent to the clear light of those Aegean islands. The
Greeks made an art of the alphabet, a visual art, and I studied the shapes of
letters carved on stones all over Athens. This gave me fresh energy and forced
me to think more deeply about what I was putting on the page. Some of the
work I did in the 1970s was off-the-cuff, not powerfully motivated. I think I
forced my way into a couple of books that werent begging to be written, or
maybe I was writing too fast. Since then Ive tried to be patient, to wait for a
subject to take me over, become part of my life beyond the desk and typewriter.
Libra was a great experience that continues to resonate in my mind because of
the fascinating and tragic lives that were part of the story. And The Names
keeps resonating because of the languages I heard and read and touched and
tried to speak and spoke a little and because of the sunlight and the elemental
landscapes that I tried to blend into the books sentences and paragraphs.

INTERVIEWER

Your dialogue is different from other peoples dialogue.

DeLILLO

Well, there are fifty-two ways to write dialogue thats faithful to the way people
speak. And then there are times when youre not trying to be faithful. Ive done
it different ways myself and I think I concentrated on dialogue most deeply in
Players. Its hyperrealistic, spoken by urban men and women who live together,
who know each others speech patterns and thought patterns and finish each
others sentences or dont even bother because it isnt necessary. Jumpy, edgy,
a bit hostile, dialogue thats almost obsessive about being funny whatever the
circumstances. New York voices.

INTERVIEWER

Has the way you handle dialogue evolved?

DeLILLO

It has evolved, but maybe sideways. I dont have a grand, unified theory. I think
about dialogue differently from book to book. In The Names I raised the level of
intelligence and perception. People speak a kind of idealized caf dialogue. In
Libra I flattened things out. The characters are bigger and broader, the dialogue
is flatter. There were times with Oswald, with his marine buddies and with his
wife and mother, when I used a documentary approach. They speak the flat
prose of The Warren Report.

INTERVIEWER

You mentioned early short stories. Do you ever write stories anymore?

DeLILLO

Fewer all the time.

INTERVIEWER

Could the set pieceIm thinking of the Unification Church wedding in Mao II or
the in-flight movie in Playersbe your alternative to the short story?

INTERVIEWER

I dont think of them that way. What attracts me to this format is its non-shortstoryness, the high degree of stylization. In Players all the major characters in
the novel appear in the prologueembryonically, not yet named or defined.
Theyre shadowy people watching a movie on an airplane. This piece is the
novel in miniature. It lies outside the novel. Its modularkeep it in or take it
out. The mass wedding in Mao II is more conventional. It introduces a single
major character and sets up themes and resonances. The book makes no sense
without it.

INTERVIEWER

We talked a little about Americana. Tell me about your second novelwhat was
your idea for the shape of End Zone?

DeLILLO

I dont think I had an idea. I had a setting and some characters, and I more or
less trailed behind, listening. At some point I realized there had to be a
structural core, and I decided to play a football game. This became the

centerpiece of the novel. The same thing happens in White Noise. Theres an
aimless shuffle toward a high-intensity eventthis time a toxic spill that forces
people to evacuate their homes. Then, in each book, theres a kind of decline, a
purposeful loss of energy. Otherwise I think the two books are quite different.
End Zone is about gameswar, language, football. In White Noise there is less
language and more human dread. Theres a certain equation at work. As
technology advances in complexity and scope, fear becomes more primitive.

INTERVIEWER

Plot, in the shape of shadowy conspiracy, shows up for the first time in your
third novel, Great Jones Street. What brought you to write about the idea of a
mysterious drug possibly tied to government repression?

DeLILLO

It was in the air. It was the way people were thinking. Those were the days when
the enemy was some presence seeping out of the government, and the most
paranoid sort of fear was indistinguishable from common sense. I think I tried to
get at the slickness connected with the word paranoia. It was becoming a kind
of commodity. It used to mean one thing and after a while it began to mean
everything. It became something you bought into, like Club Med.

INTERVIEWER

Were you looking for a plot?

DeLILLO

I think the plot found me. In a book about fear and paranoia, a plot was bound
to assert itself. Its not the tightest sort of plottingmore like drug fantasies,
seeing dead relatives come out of the walls. What we finally have is a man in a
small room, a man who has shut himself away, and this is something that

happens in my workthe man hiding from acts of violence or planning acts of

violence, or the individual reduced to silence by the forces around him.

INTERVIEWER

The most lyrical language in Great Jones Street is reserved for the last chapter.
Bucky Wunderlick, deprived of the faculty of speech, is wandering the streets of
lower Manhattan. Why did you apply such poetic beauty to these scenes of
dereliction?

DeLILLO

I think this is how urban people react to the deteriorating situation around them
I think we need to invent beauty, search out some restoring force. A writer
may describe the ugliness and pain in graphic terms but he can also try to find
a dignity and significance in ruined parts of the city, and the people he sees
there. Ugly and beautifulthis is part of the tension of Great Jones Street. When
I was working on the book there were beggars and derelicts in parts of the city
theyd never entered before. A sense of failed souls and forgotten lives on a
new scale. And the place began to feel a little like a community in the Middle
Ages. Disease on the streets, insane people talking to themselves, the drug
culture spreading among the young. Were talking about the very early 1970s,
and I remember thinking of New York as a European city in the fourteenth
century. Maybe this is why I was looking for a ruined sort of grandeur in the
language at the end of the book.

INTERVIEWER

Theres three-year period between Great Jones Street and your next book,
Ratners Star. Did it take you all that time to write it?

DeLILLO

It took a little over two years of extremely concentrated work. Im amazed now
that I was able to do the book in that period of time. I was drawn to the beauty
of scientific language, the mystery of numbers, the idea of pure mathematics as
a secret history and secret languageand to the notion of a fourteen-year-old
mathematical genius at the center of all this. I guess its also a book of games,
mathematics being chief among them. Its a book in which structure
predominates. The walls, the armature, the foundationI wandered inside this
thing I was building and sometimes felt taken over by it, not so much lost inside
it as helpless to prevent the thing from building new connections, new
underground links.

INTERVIEWER

What got you so interested in mathematics?

DeLILLO

Mathematics is underground knowledge. Only the actual practitioners know the

terms and references. And I was drawn to the idea of a novel about an
enormously important field of human thought that remains largely unknown.
But I had to enter as a novice, a jokesmith, with a certain sly deference. I had to
sneak up on my subject. No other book Ive done was at the same time such fun
and such labor. And all the time I was writing the book I was writing a shadow
book in another part of my mindsame story, same main character but a small
book, a book the size of a childrens book, maybe it was a childrens book, less
structure, less weightfour characters instead of eighty-four or a hundred and
four.

INTERVIEWER

What you actually wrote is very different from your first three books.

DeLILLO

Somebody said that Ratners Star is the monster at the center of my work. But
maybe its in orbit around the other books. I think the other books constitute a
single compact unit and that Ratners Star swings in orbit around this unit at a
very great distance.

INTERVIEWER

Your next book was Players.

DeLILLO

Structure again but in a completely different way. Structure as something

people need in their lives. Its about double lives. The second life is not only the
secret life. Its the more structured life. People need rules and boundaries, and if
society doesnt provide them in sufficient measure, the estranged individual
may drift into something deeper and more dangerous. Terrorism is built on
structure. A terrorist act is a structured narrative played out over days or weeks
or even years if there are hostages involved. What we call the shadow life of
terrorists or gun runners or double agents is in fact the place where a certain
clarity takes effect, where definitions matter, and both sides tend to follow the
same set of rules.

INTERVIEWER

Owen Brademas, a character in The Names, makes some interesting remarks

about the novel. At one point he says, If I were a writer, how would I enjoy
being told the novel is dead. How liberating to work in the margins outside the
central perception. You are the ghoul of literature.

DeLILLO

The novels not dead, its not even seriously injured, but I do think were
working in the margins, working in the shadows of the novels greatness and
influence. Theres plenty of impressive talent around, and theres strong

evidence that younger writers are moving into history, finding broader themes.
But when we talk about the novel we have to consider the culture in which it
operates. Everything in the culture argues against the novel, particularly the
novel that tries to be equal to the complexities and excesses of the culture. This
is why books such as JR and Harlots Ghost and Gravitys Rainbow and The
Public Burning are importantto name just four. They offer many pleasures
without making concessions to the middle-range reader, and they absorb and
incorporate the culture instead of catering to it. And theres the work of Robert
Stone and Joan Didion, who are both writers of conscience and painstaking
workers of the sentence and paragraph. I dont want to list names because lists
are a form of cultural hysteria, but I have to mention Blood Meridian for its
beauty and its honor. These books and writers show us that the novel is still
spacious enough and brave enough to encompass enormous areas of
experience. We have a rich literature. But sometimes its a literature too ready
to be neutralized, to be incorporated into the ambient noise. This is why we
need the writer in opposition, the novelist who writes against power, who writes
against the corporation or the state or the whole apparatus of assimilation.
Were all one beat away from becoming elevator music.

INTERVIEWER

Could you tell me about the passage in White Noise in which Jack listens to his
daughter Steffie talking in her sleep, and she is repeating the words Toyota
Celica?

DeLILLO

Theres something nearly mystical about certain words and phrases that float
through our lives. Its computer mysticism. Words that are computer generated
to be used on products that might be sold anywhere from Japan to Denmark
words devised to be pronounceable in a hundred languages. And when you
detach one of these words from the product it was designed to serve, the word
acquires a chantlike quality. Years ago somebody decidedI dont know how
this conclusion was reachedthat the most beautiful phrase in the English
language was cellar door. If you concentrate on the sound, if you disassociate
the words from the object they denote, and if you say the words over and over,
they become a sort of higher Esperanto. This is how Toyota Celica began its life.
It was pure chant at the beginning. Then they had to find an object to
accommodate the words.

INTERVIEWER

Tell me about the research you did for Libra.

DeLILLO

There were several levels of researchfiction writers research. I was looking for
ghosts, not living people. I went to New Orleans, Dallas, Fort Worth, and Miami
and looked at houses and streets and hospitals, schools and librariesthis is
mainly Oswald Im tracking but others as welland after a while the characters
in my mind and in my notebooks came out into the world.

Then there were books, old magazines, old photographs, scientific reports,
material printed by obscure presses, material my wife turned up from relatives
in Texas. And a guy in Canada with a garage full of amazing stuffaudiotapes of
Oswald talking on a radio program, audiotapes of his mother reading from his
letters. And I looked at film consisting of amateur footage shot in Dallas on the
day of the assassination, crude powerful footage that included the Zapruder
film. And there were times when I felt an eerie excitement, coming across an
item that seemed to bear out my own theories. Anyone who enters this maze
knows you have to become part scientist, novelist, biographer, historian and
existential detective. The landscape was crawling with secrets, and this novelin-progress was my own precious secretI told very few people what I was
doing.

Then there was The Warren Report, which is the Oxford English Dictionary of the
assassination and also the Joycean novel. This is the one document that
captures the full richness and madness and meaning of the event, despite the
fact that it omits about a ton and a half of material. Im not an obsessive
researcher, and I think I read maybe half of The Warren Report, which totals
twenty-six volumes. There are acres of FBI reports I barely touched. But for me
the boring and meaningless stretches are part of the experience. This is what a
life resembles in its starkest formschool records, lists of possessions,
photographs of knotted string found in a kitchen drawer. It took seven seconds
to kill the president, and were still collecting evidence and sifting documents
and finding people to talk to and working through the trivia. The trivia is
exceptional. When I came across the dental records of Jack Rubys mother I felt

a surge of admiration. Did they really put this in? The testimony of witnesses
was a great resource period language, regional slang, the twisted syntax of
Marguerite Oswald and others as a kind of improvised genius and the lives of
trainmen and stripteasers and telephone clerks. I had to be practical about this,
and so I resisted the urge to read everything.

INTERVIEWER

When Libra came out, I had the feeling that this was a magnum opus, a life
accomplishment. Did you know what you would do next?

DeLILLO

I thought I would be haunted by this story and these characters for some time
to come, and that turned out to be true. But it didnt affect the search for new
material, the sense that it was time to start thinking about a new book. Libra
will have a lingering effect on me partly because I became so deeply involved in
the story and partly because the story doesnt have an end out here in the
world beyond the booknew theories, new suspects and new documents keep
turning up. It will never end. And theres no reason it should end. At the time of
the twenty-fifth anniversary one newspaper titled its story about the
assassination The Day America Went Crazy. About the same time I became
aware of three rock groupsor maybe two rock groups and a folk group
touring at the same time: the Oswalds, the Jack Rubies, and the Dead Kennedys.

INTERVIEWER

How do you normally feel at the end of writing a novel? Are you disgusted with
what youve done? Pleased?

DeLILLO

Im usually happy to finish and uncertain about what Ive done. This is where
you have to depend on other people, editors, friends, other readers. But the

strangest thing that happened to me at the end of a book concerns Libra. I had
a photograph of Oswald propped on a makeshift bookshelf on my desk, the
photo in which he holds a rifle and some left-wing journals. It was there for
nearly the entire time I was working on the book, about three years and three
months. When I reached the last sentencea sentence whose precise wording I
knew long before I reached the final page, a sentence Id been eager to get to
and that, when I finally got to it, I probably typed at a faster than usual rate,
feeling the deepest sort of relief and satisfactionthe picture started sliding off
the shelf, and I had to pause to catch it.

INTERVIEWER

There was a passage in a critical work about you that disturbed me a bitI
dont know if it came from an interview you gave or just a supposition on the
writers partin which it was claimed that you dont particularly care about your
characters.

DeLILLO

A character is part of the pleasure a writer wants to give his readers. A

character who lives, who says interesting things. I want to give pleasure through
language, through the architecture of a book or a sentence and through
characters who may be funny, nasty, violent, or all of these. But Im not the kind
of writer who dotes on certain characters and wants readers to do the same.
The fact is every writer likes his characters to the degree that hes able to work
out their existence. You invent a character who pushes his mother down a flight
of stairs, say. Shes an old lady in a wheelchair and your character comes home
drunk and pushes her down a long flight of stairs. Do you automatically dislike
this man? Hes done an awful thing. But I dont believe its that simple. Your
feelings toward this character depend on whether or not youve realized him
fully, whether you understand him. Its not a simple question of like or dislike.
And you dont necessarily show your feelings toward a character in the same
way you show feelings to real people. In Mao II I felt enormous sympathy toward
Karen Janney, sympathy, understanding, kinship. I was able to enter her
consciousness quickly and easily. And I tried to show this sympathy and kinship
through the language I used when writing from her viewpointa free-flowing,
non-sequitur ramble thats completely different from the other characters
viewpoints. Karen is not especially likable. But once Id given her a life
independent of my own will, I had no choice but to like heralthough its

simplistic to put it that wayand it shows in the sentences I wrote, which are
free of the usual constraints that bind words to a sentence in a certain way.

INTERVIEWER

Did you try with Libra for a larger audience than the one that you had achieved
at the time of The Names?

DeLILLO

I wouldnt know how to do that. My mind works one way, toward making a
simple moment complex, and this is not the way to gain a larger audience. I
think I have the audience my work ought to have. Its not easy work. And you
have to understand that I started writing novels fairly late and with low
expectations. I didnt even think of myself as a writer until I was two years into
my first novel. When I was struggling with that book I felt unlucky, unblessed by
the fates and by the future, and almost everything that has happened since
then has proved me wrong. So some of my natural edginess and pessimism has
been tempered by acceptance. This hasnt softened the tone of my workit has
simply made me realize Ive had a lucky life as a writer.

INTERVIEWER

I can see how Mao II would come naturally out of Libra from a thematic point of
viewthe terrorist and the man in the small room. But Im curious as to why,
after Libra, you went back to the shape and feel of your previous novels. Theres
something about the wandering in Mao II that goes back to Players or Running
Dog.

DeLILLO

The bare structure of Mao II is similar to the way Players is set up, including a
prologue and an epilogue. But Mao II is a sort of rest-and-motion book, to invent
a category. The first half of the book could have been called The Book. Bill

Gray talking about his book, piling up manuscript pages, living in a house that
operates as a kind of filing cabinet for his work and all the other work it
engenders. And the second half of the book could have been called The
World. Here, Bill escapes his book and enters the world. It turns out to be the
world of political violence. I was nearly finished with the first half of the book
before I realized how the second half ought to be shaped. I was writing blind. It
was a struggle up to that point, but once I understood that Bill had to escape his
handlersthe most obvious things tend to take the form of startling revelations
I felt a surge of excitement because the book had finally revealed itself to me.

INTERVIEWER

We talked briefly about men in small rooms. Bill Gray the writer. Lee Oswald the
plotter. Owen Brademas in the old city of Lahore. Bucky Wunderlick blown off
the concert stage and hiding out. But what about the crowd? The future
belongs to crowds, you wrote in Mao II. The sentence gets quoted a lot.

DeLILLO

In Mao II I thought about the secluded writer, the arch individualist, living
outside the glut of the image world. And then the crowd, many kinds of crowds,
people in soccer stadiums, people gathered around enormous photographs of
holy men or heads of state. This book is an argument about the future. Who
wins the struggle for the imagination of the world? There was a time when the
inner world of the novelistKafkas private vision and maybe Becketts
eventually folded into the three-dimensional world we were all living in. These
men wrote a kind of world narrative. And so did Joyce in another sense. Joyce
turned the book into a world with Ulysses and Finnegans Wake. Today, the world
has become a bookmore precisely a news story or television show or piece of
film footage. And the world narrative is being written by men who orchestrate
disastrous events, by military leaders, totalitarian leaders, terrorists, men dazed
by power. World news is the novel people want to read. It carries the tragic
narrative that used to belong to the novel. The crowds in Mao II, except for the
mass wedding, are TV crowds, masses of people we see in news coverage of
terrible events. The news has been full of crowds, and the TV audience
represents another kind of crowd. The crowd broken down into millions of small
rooms.

INTERVIEWER

One of the funnier moments in Mao IIits a typically grim funny momentis
when Bill Gray has been run over by a car, and he approaches a group of
veterinarians to try to determine the extent of his damage. Where did that
come from?

DeLILLO

I said something earlier about going from simple to complex moments. This is
one of those instances. I wanted to reveal the seriousness of Bill Grays physical
condition, but it seemed ridiculously simple to have him walk into a doctors
office. Partly because he didnt want to see a doctorhe feared the blunt truth
but mainly because I wanted to do something more interesting. So I took an
indirect route and hoped for certain riches along the way. I wanted to make
basic medical information an occasion for comic dialogue and for an interesting
play of levels. What I mean is that Bill pretends to be a writerof course, he is a
writerdoing research on a medical matter he wants to put into his book. This
happens to be exactly what I did before writing the passage. I talked to a doctor
about the kind of injury Bill suffered when the car hit him and what the
consequences might be and how the effects of the injury might manifest
themselves. And I played his answers back through the medium of three tipsy
British veterinarians trying to oblige a stranger who may actually be gravely ill
and isnt sure how he feels about it. Bill the writer becomes his own character.
He tries to shade the information, soften it a bit, by establishing a kind of fiction.
He needs this for a book, he tells them, but it turned out to be my book, not his.

INTERVIEWER

There are a number of characters in your work who discover that they are going
to die sooner than they thought, though they dont know exactly when. Bucky
Wunderlick isnt going to die, but hes been given something awful, and for all
he knows the side effects are deadly; Jack Gladney, poisoned by the toxic spill,
is another obvious example; and then we come to Bill Gray with his automobile
accident. What does this accelerated but vague mortality mean?

DeLILLO

Who knows? If writing is a concentrated form of thinking, then the most

concentrated writing probably ends in some kind of reflection on dying. This is
what we eventually confront if we think long enough and hard enough.

INTERVIEWER

Could it be related to the idea in Libra that

DeLILLO

all plots lead toward death? I guess thats possible. It happens in Libra, and it
happens in White Noise, which doesnt necessarily mean that these are highly
plotted novels. Libra has many digressions and meditations, and Oswalds life
just meanders along for much of the book. Its the original plotter, Win Everett,
who wonders if his conspiracy might grow tentacles that will turn an
assassination scare into an actual murder, and of course this is what happens.
The plot extends its own logic to the ultimate point. And White Noise develops a
trite adultery plot that enmeshes the hero, justifying his fears about the death
energies contained in plots. When I think of highly plotted novels I think of
detective fiction or mystery fiction, the kind of work that always produces a few
dead bodies. But these bodies are basically plot points, not worked-out
characters. The books plot either moves inexorably toward a dead body or
flows directly from it, and the more artificial the situation the better. Readers
can play off their fears by encountering the death experience in a superficial
way. A mystery novel localizes the awesome force of the real death outside the
book, winds it tightly in a plot, makes it less fearful by containing it in a kind of
game format.

INTERVIEWER

Youve said that you didnt think your books could be written in the world that
existed before the Kennedy assassination.

DeLILLO

Our culture changed in important ways. And these changes are among the
things that go into my work. Theres the shattering randomness of the event,
the missing motive, the violence that people not only commit but seem to
watch simultaneously from a disinterested distance. Then the uncertainty we
feel about the basic facts that surround the casenumber of gunmen, number
of shots, and so on. Our grip on reality has felt a little threatened. Every
revelation about the event seems to produce new levels of secrecy, unexpected
links, and I guess this has been part of my work, the clandestine mentalityhow
ordinary people spy on themselves, how the power centers operate and
manipulate. Our postwar history has seen tanks in the streets and occasional
massive force. But mainly we have the individual in the small room, the nobody
who walks out of the shadows and changes everything. That week in Maine,
that street I saw that made me think I had to write a novelwell, I bought a
newspaper the same day or maybe later in the week, and there was a story
about Charles Whitman, the young man who went to the top of a tower in
Austin, Texas and shot and killed over a dozen people and wounded about thirty
more. Took a number of guns up there with him. Took supplies with him, ready
for a long siege, including underarm deodorant. And I remember thinking, Texas
again. And also, underarm deodorant. That was my week in Maine.

INTERVIEWER

One of the other things thats very important in Libra is the existence of a
filmed version of the assassination. One of the points you make is that
television didnt really come into its own until it filmed Oswalds murder. Is it
possible that one of the things that marks you as a writer is that youre a posttelevision writer?

DeLILLO

Kennedy was shot on film, Oswald was shot on TV. Does this mean anything?
Maybe only that Oswalds death became instantly repeatable. It belonged to
everyone. The Zapruder film, the film of Kennedys death, was sold and hoarded
and doled out very selectively. It was exclusive footage. So that the social
differences continued to pertain, the hierarchy held fastyou could watch
Oswald die while you ate a TV dinner, and he was still dying by the time you
went to bed, but if you wanted to see the Zapruder film you had to be very
important or you had to wait until the 1970s when I believe it was shown once
on television, or you had to pay somebody thirty thousand dollars to look at itI
think thats the going rate.

The Zapruder film is a home movie that runs about eighteen seconds and could
probably fuel college courses in a dozen subjects from history to physics. And
every new generation of technical experts gets to take a crack at the Zapruder
film. The film represents all the hopefulness we invest in technology. A new
enhancement technique or a new computer analysisnot only of Zapruder but
of other key footage and still photographswill finally tell us precisely what
happened.

INTERVIEWER

I read it exactly the opposite way, which may be also what youre getting
around to. Its one of the great ironies that, despite the existence of the film, we
dont know what happened.

DeLILLO

Were still in the dark. What we finally have are patches and shadows. Its still a
mystery. Theres still an element of dream-terror. And one of the terrible dreams
is that our most photogenic president is murdered on film. But theres
something inevitable about the Zapruder film. It had to happen this way. The
moment belongs to the twentieth century, which means it had to be captured
on film.

INTERVIEWER

Can we even go further and say that part of the confusion is created by the
film? After all, if the film didnt exist it would be much harder to posit a
conspiracy theory.

DeLILLO

I think every emotion we felt is part of that film, and certainly confusion is one
of the larger ones, yes. Confusion and horror. The head shot is like some awful,

pornographic moment that happens without warning in our living rooms some
truth about the world, some unspeakable activity people engage in that we
dont want to know about. And after the confusion about when Kennedy is first
hit, and when Connally is hit, and why the presidents wife is scrambling over
the seat, and simultaneous with the horror of the head shot, part of the horror,
perhapstheres a bolt of revelation. Because the head shot is the most direct
kind of statement that the lethal bullet was fired from the front. Whatever the
physical possibilities concerning impact and reflex, you look at this thing and
wonder whats going on. Are you seeing some distortion inherent in the film
medium or in your own perception of things? Are you the willing victim of some
enormous lie of the statea lie, a wish, a dream? Or, did the shot simply come
from the front, as every cell in your body tells you it did?

INTERVIEWER

From David Bell making a film about himself in Americana to the Fhrer-bunker
porno film in Running Dog, to the filmmaker Volterras minilecture in The
Names, you return incessantly to the subject of movies. The twentieth century
is on film, you wrote in The Names, its the filmed century.

DeLILLO

Film allows us to examine ourselves in ways earlier societies could not

examine ourselves, imitate ourselves, extend ourselves, reshape our reality. It
permeates our lives, this double vision, and also detaches us, turns some of us
into actors doing walk-throughs. In my work, film and television are often linked
with disaster. Because this is one of the energies that charges the culture. TV
has a sort of panting lust for bad news and calamity as long as it is visual.
Weve reached the point where things exist so they can be filmed and played
and replayed. Some people may have had the impression that the Gulf War was
made for television. And when the Pentagon censored close coverage, people
became depressed. All that euphoria drifting through the country suddenly
collapsednot because we werent winning but because theyd taken away our
combat footage. Think about the images most often repeated. The Rodney King
videotape or the Challenger disaster or Ruby shooting Oswald. These are the
images that connect us the way Betty Grable used to connect us in her white
swimsuit, looking back at us over her shoulder in the famous pinup. And they
play the tape again and again and again and again. This is the world narrative,
so they play it until everyone in the world has seen it.

INTERVIEWER

Frank Lentricchia refers to you as the type of writer who believes that the shape
and fate of the culture dictates the shape and fate of the self.

DeLILLO

Yes, and maybe we can think about Running Dog in this respect. This book is not
exactly about obsessionits about the marketing of obsession. Obsession as a
product that you offer to the highest bidder or the most enterprising and
reckless fool, which is sort of the same thing in this particular book. Maybe this
novel is a response to the war in Vietnamthis is what Im getting atand how
the war affected the way people worked out their own strategies, how
individuals conducted their own lives. Theres a rampant need among the
characters, a driving urge that certain characters feel to acquire the books
sacred object, a home movie made in Hitlers bunker. All the paranoia,
manipulation, violence, all the sleazy desires are a form of fallout from the
Vietnam experience. And in Libra, of coursehere we have Oswald watching TV,
Oswald working the bolt of his rifle, Oswald imagining that he and the president
are quite similar in many ways. I see Oswald, back from Russia, as a man
surrounded by promises of fulfillmentconsumer fulfillment, personal
fulfillment. But hes poor, unstable, cruel to his wife, barely employablea man
who has to enter his own Hollywood movie to see who he is and how he must
direct his fate. This is the force of the culture and the power of the image. And
this is also a story weve seen updated through the years. Its the story of the
disaffected young man who suspects there are sacred emanations flowing from
the media heavens and who feels the only way to enter this holy vortex is
through some act of violent theater. I think Oswald was a person who lost his
faithhis faith in politics and in the possibility of changeand who entered the
last months of his life not very different from the media-poisoned boys who
would follow.

INTERVIEWER

In The New York Review of Books you were dubbed the chief shaman of the
paranoid school of American fiction. What does this title mean to you, if
anything?

DeLILLO

I realize this is a title one might wear honorably. But Im not sure Ive earned it.
Certainly theres an element of paranoia in my workLibra, yes, although not
nearly so much as some people think. In this book the element of chance and
coincidence may be as strong as the sense of an engineered history. History is
engineered after the assassination, not before. Running Dog and Great Jones
Street may also have a paranoid sheen. But Im not particularly paranoid
myself. Ive drawn this element out of the air around me, and it was a stronger
force in the sixties and seventies than it is now. The important thing about the
paranoia in my characters is that it operates as a form of religious awe. Its
something old, a leftover from some forgotten part of the soul. And the
intelligence agencies that create and service this paranoia are not interesting to
me as spy handlers or masters of espionage. They represent old mysteries and
fascinations, ineffable things. Central intelligence. Theyre like churches that
hold the final secrets.

INTERVIEWER

Its been said that you have an ostentatiously gloomy view of American
society.

DeLILLO

I dont agree, but I can understand how a certain kind of reader would see the
gloomy side of things. My work doesnt offer the comforts of other kinds of
fiction, work that suggests that our lives and our problems and our perceptions
are no different today than they were fifty or sixty years ago. I dont offer
comforts except those that lurk in comedy and in structure and in language, and
the comedy is probably not all that soothing. But before everything, theres
language. Before history and politics, theres language. And its language, the
sheer pleasure of making it and bending it and seeing it form on the page and
hearing it whistle in my headthis is the thing that makes my work go. And art
can be exhilarating despite the darknessand theres certainly much darker
material than mineif the reader is sensitive to the music. What I try to do is
create complex human beings, ordinary-extraordinary men and women who live
in the particular skin of the late twentieth century. I try to record what I see and

hear and sense around mewhat I feel in the currents, the electric stuff of the
culture. I think these are American forces and energies. And they belong to our
time.

INTERVIEWER

What have you been working on recently?

DeLILLO

Sometime in late 1991 I started writing something new and didnt know what it
would bea novel, a short story, a long story. It was simply a piece of writing,
and it gave me more pleasure than any other writing Ive done. It turned into a
novella, Pafko at the Wall, and it appeared in Harpers about a year after I
started it. At some point I decided I wasnt finished with the piece. I was sending
signals into space and getting echoes back, like a dolphin or a bat. So the piece,
slightly altered, is now the prologue, to a novel-in-progress, which will have a
different title. And the pleasure has long since faded into the slogging reality of
the no-mans-land of the long novel. But Im still hearing the echoes.

INTERVIEWER

Do you have any plans for after the novel-in-progress?

DeLILLO

Not any specific plans. But Im aware of the fact that time is limited. Every new
novel stretches the term of the contractlet me live long enough to do one
more book. How many books do we get? How much good work? The actuaries of
the novel say twenty years of our best work, and after that were beachcombing
for shiny stones. I dont necessarily agree, but Im aware of fleeting time.

INTERVIEWER

Does that make you nervous?

DeLILLO

No, it doesnt make me nervous, it just makes me want to write a little faster.

INTERVIEWER

But youll keep on writing?

DeLILLO

Ill keep writing something, certainly.

INTERVIEWER

I mean, you couldnt take up gardening?

DeLILLO

No, no, no, no, no.

INTERVIEWER

Handball?

DeLILLO

Do you know what a Chinese killer is? Its a handball termwhen you hit the
ball right at the seam of the wall and the ground, and the shot is unreturnable.
This used to be called a Chinese killer.

Imre Kertsz, The Art of Fiction No. 220

Interviewed by Luisa Zielinski

At the beginning of our first session, Imre Kertsz told me that he moved to
Berlin not for the architecture, but for the lifethe air of culture and freedom.
This is a life in which Kertsz can no longer take part, for he is in the last stages
of a battle with Parkinsons disease. Our interview was clearly taxing for him.
Although he speaks fluent German, Kertsz relied on his good friend Can Togay
both to relay his answers to me and to translate my questions from German into
Hungarian. At times, it was all Kertsz could do to follow his own train of
thought; our conversations were interspersed with pauses when he grew tired
or needed help shifting position in his chair.

Kertsz was born in 1929, in Budapest, into a Jewish family. He was deported to
Auschwitz in 1944, and then to Buchenwald. The Holocaust and its aftermath
are the central subjects of his best-known novelsFatelessness (1975), Fiasco
(1988), Kaddish for an Unborn Child (1990), and Liquidation (2003)as well as
his memoirs, such as Dossier K. (2006). When Kertsz was awarded the Nobel
Prize for Literature, in 2002, the committee lauded his writing for upholding the
fragile experience of the individual against the barbaric arbitrariness of
history. Yet for Kertsz, the Holocaust is not the stuff of personal anecdotes.
Instead, it represents a rupture in civilization, the implications of which he
explores far beyond his own personal experience. Auschwitz, as he has said,
is everywhere.

Despite the pain he was in, Kertsz maintained a sly, courtly sense of humor
throughout our two sessions, and he spoke with the clarity and conviction
familiar to readers of his books. His wife, Magda, was an attentive hostess,
plying the three of us with white wine and goose-liver sandwiches while we sat

close around a dictaphone in a corner of the Kertszes elegant, high-ceilinged

living room. I wish to express my gratitude to her and especially to Imre Kertsz
for welcoming me into their home under such difficult circumstances.

Luisa Zielinski

INTERVIEWER

What was your introduction to literature? Did anyone in your family write?

KERTSZ

No one in my family wrote. And there was no real introduction. I suppose I

somehow blundered into it when I was about six or seven years old. I was asked
what present I would like, and, without knowing why, I responded that I would
like a journal. It was a beautiful journalso beautiful that I didnt want to sully
it. As time went by, I tried to write and ended up resenting everything I put on
paper. And so I tried to improve what was already there. I think a man turns into
a writer by editing his own texts. Then all of a sudden I realized that I had, in
fact, become a writer.

INTERVIEWER

When was this?

KERTSZ

When I was twenty-four. I have written about that many timesthe moment it
struck me, right there on the street.

INTERVIEWER

Is that the moment at the heart of The Union Jack?

KERTSZ

Yes, and it also appears in Fiasco. But really, it didnt make much sense for me
to start writing. My financial circumstances werent such that I could afford to be
a writer. I didnt even have a pen.

INTERVIEWER

So in light of such adverse circumstances, what was it that drew you toward a
life in letters?

KERTSZ

I could spend my entire life talking about this, and write countless books on the
subject along the way. But we would lose ourselves in these stories. And really,
we writers shouldnt tell anyone. We should conduct our profession in private, in
secret.

Its because we writers feel a certain way . . . Writing changed my life. It has an
existential dimension, and thats the same for every writer. Every artist has a
moment of awakening, of happening upon an idea that grabs hold of you,
regardless of whether you are a painter or a writer. The change in my life wasnt
professionalit was a moment of profound awakening.

I was interned in Auschwitz for one year. I didnt bring back anything, except for
a few jokes, and that filled me with shame. Then again, I didnt know what to do
with this fresh experience. For this experience was no literary awakening, no

occasion for professional or artistic introspection. I had no idea what it was

exactly that I wanted, and figuring that out was a struggle. But even then,
writing wasnt my profession. It took a long time for me to learn even the basics
of writing.

INTERVIEWER

You spent thirteen years working on your first novel, Fatelessness.

KERTSZ

Thats true, yes. But that doesnt mean I spent every day laboring away at my
novel . . . except, of course, I did! My life was very difficult in those days. The
repressive atmosphere of the Communist years meant that I had to hide what I
was up to. So it took a long time for the first sentences to take shape, for me to
know what I wanted.

But I knew from the beginning that I wanted to write a novel. I knew I wanted to
craft sentences. And what interested me more than anything were the
totalitarian systems I lived in, whose reality is so difficult to convey in words.

INTERVIEWER

You wrote Fatelessness in the sixties and seventies, yet it deals with the
Holocaust. Which historical episode exerted more of an influence on how the
novel came to life?

KERTSZ

Well, I wrote the entire novel during the Communist period. I had no concept of
what I was about to say, but my first challenge was to create a language, a
form, and finally, a sujet.

I wanted to examine the particular existence, the experience of life within a

totalitarian system. It was not at all clear to me how I could go about that
stylistically. I had to forge a language from scratch, one sufficiently strong and
precise. I didnt just want to add to all the white noise around the topic. And
anyway, I already felt that anyone who had lived through this era of
totalitarianism would find it hard to become a successful, well-paid writer.

INTERVIEWER

What did you do to make a living during those years?

KERTSZ

A friend suggested that I write operettas, so thats what I did. He was a very
successful Broadway authorand I had absolutely no intention of following his
example! This friend approached me one day, and for that you need to
understandI lived in a twenty-eight-square-meter flat with my wife. This friend
saw what our lives were like and asked me whether I really wanted to starve to
death. Of course I didnt. So he suggested that I, too, write operettas. I knew
nothing about writing operettas, but I did know how to write dialogue. So we
agreed to come up with the plot together, after which I wrote the dialogue
under his supervision, since I had no real concept of the work I was doing. I was
lucky to be flexible stylistically, so I could simply execute the tasks I was given.
He, on the other hand, was a slave to his passion.

INTERVIEWER

How did you combine this with working on Fatelessness?

KERTSZ

I would spend my evenings at this friends house, talk about operettas and all
manner of things, but all of a sudden I would start thinking about my novel. A

sentence would come to me. I wouldnt talk about it and would just sit thereno
one wouldve been able to tell. I like the turnip better than the carrot, that
kind of sentence, declarative and unspectacularI cant reconstruct the
sentence exactly, but at one point it dawned on me that this was going to be
the method of my novel. Unremarkable as such a line may be, it illuminates the
novels fundamental principlemy having to craft a new language. Its quite
funny that one sentence should bring this whole business to life.

There were three main considerations for melanguage, form, and plot. This
forced me to remain focused. I was aware that I was about to start writing a
novel that might easily turn into a tearjerker, not least because the novels
protagonist is a boy. But I invented the boy precisely because anyone in a
dictatorship is kept in a childlike state of ignorance and helplessness. For that
reason, I not only had to create a specific style and form, but I had to pay close
attention to temporality.

As I was working on Fatelessness, Semprns The Long Voyage was published in

Budapest. The book was much celebratedyet Semprn had chosen the wrong
technique, narrating only the most spectacular of events and mangling
temporality in the process. Its a spectacular method, but its just not true.
Whereas if you tell the story of a child, you have to conceive of a temporality
that is appropriate, for a child has no agency in his own life and is forced to
endure all.

So as Semprns book was reaping so much praise, it became clear to me that if

I were to be true to the story I had to tell, I would have to describe, from
beginning to end, a situationany situationin which my protagonist finds
himself, rather than opting merely for the spectacular moments. Take, for
example, the famous twenty minutes it took to unload the trains at Auschwitz.
Thats just how long it took, and a lot happened in these twenty minutes.

INTERVIEWER

In your Nobel Lecture you said, The nausea and depression to which I awoke
each morning led me at once into the world I intended to describe. Did writing
subdue this condition?

KERTSZ

I was suspended in a world that was forever foreign to me, one I had to reenter
each day with no hope of relief. That was true of Stalinist Hungary, but even
more so under National Socialism. The latter inspired that feeling even more
intensely. In Stalinism, you simply had to keep going, if you could. The Nazi
regime, on the other hand, was a mechanism that worked with such brutal
speed that going on meant bare survival. The Nazi system swallowed
everything. It was a machine working so efficiently that most people did not
even have the chance to understand the events they lived through.

To me, there were three phases, in a literary sense. The first phase is the one
just before the Holocaust. Times were tough, but you could get through
somehow. The second phase, described by writers like Primo Levi, takes place in
medias res, as though voiced from the inside, with all the astonishment and
dismay of witnessing such events. These writers described what happened as
something that would drive any man to madnessat least any man who
continued to cling to old values. And what happened was beyond the witnesses
capacity for coping. They tried to resist it as much as they could, but it left a
mark on the rest of their lives. The third phase concerns literary works that
came into existence after National Socialism and which examine the loss of old
values. Writers such as Jean Amry or Tadeusz Borowski conceived their works
for people who were already familiar with history and were aware that old
values had lost their meaning. What was at stake was the creation of new
values from such immense suffering, but most of those writers perished in the
attempt. However, what they did bequeath to us is a radical tradition in
literature.

INTERVIEWER

Do you consider your own works part of this radical tradition?

KERTSZ

Yes, I do, except Im not sure whether it is my work or my illness thats going to
kill me now. Well, at least I tried to go on for as long as I could. So obviously I
havent yet died in the attempt to come to terms with history, and indeed it

looks as though I will be dying of a bourgeois disease insteadI am about to die

of a very bourgeois Parkinsons.

INTERVIEWER

Is writing a means of survival?

KERTSZ

I was able use my own life to study how somebody can survive this particularly
cruel brand of totalitarianism. I didnt want to commit suicide, but then I didnt
want to become a writer eitherat least not initially. I rejected that idea for a
long time, but then I realized that I would have to write, write about the
astonishment and the dismay of the witnessIs that what you are going to do
to us? How could we survive something like this, and understand it, too?

Look, I dont want to deny that I was a prisoner at Auschwitz and that I now
have a Nobel Prize. What should I make of that? And what should I make of the
fact that I survived, and continue to survive? At least I feel that I experienced
something extraordinary, because not only did I live through those horrors, but I
also managed to describe them, in a way that is bearable, acceptable, and
nonetheless part of this radical tradition. Those of us who were brave enough to
stare down this abyssBorowski, Shalamov, Amrywell, there arent too many
of us. For these writers, writing was always a prelude to suicide. Jean Amrys
gun was always present, in both his articles and his life, always by his side.

I am somebody who survived all of it, somebody who saw the Gorgons head
and still retained enough strength to finish a work that reaches out to people in
a language that is humane. The purpose of literature is for people to become
educated, to be entertained, so we cant ask them to deal with such gruesome
visions. I created a work representing the Holocaust as such, but without this
being an ugly literature of horrors.

Perhaps Im being impertinent, but I feel that my work has a rare qualityI tried
to depict the human face of this history, I wanted to write a book that people
would actually want to read.

INTERVIEWER

Is there perhaps a redemptive quality to writing itself?

KERTSZ

Not for everybody.

INTERVIEWER

But for you?

KERTSZ

I was very surprised when I realized, in 1954, that I had lived in a terrible world.
A world you should not be able to survive. And yet nothing remained of it
some anecdotes, some interesting stories, all just jokes. I was crushed when it
dawned on me that I had fantastic material on my hands that I felt I should
really start working with. So I had to decide, Do I want to accept myself as
somebody who received his moral education in totalitarianism and
concentration camps, or do I block out these episodes of my life? If I hadnt
seized that moment to speak up, I would have forgotten these stories. I would
have been reduced to saying, I grew up in a petty bourgeois family. I got
unlucky and was deported to Auschwitz. Some people helped me, others didnt.
I wouldve been left with all those little snippets, all of them ripe for the
wastebasket. But they werent waste, so I had to put my life on the line to write
down these stories. I just didnt expect to get away with it, too. My experience
was the price I paid to enter into literature. I tried to wrangle out the truth
somehow, to tell a story that cannot be told.

INTERVIEWER

Were you much of a reader in those days?

KERTSZ

I practically devoured all of world literature. Well, I should have read the classics
at school, but obviously, in those days, it was difficult to get hold of those
books. But later, the Hungarian government tried to gain legitimacy by
publishing all of those works, churning them out en masse at three forints
apiece. Unfortunately, that didnt include modernist fiction, so it was up to me
to make up my own Weltanschauung, my literary point of departure. I spent
years working on individual chapters of my first novel, but you cant tell. One
should never be able to tell.

INTERVIEWER

Its true, you cant tellit reads as though it could not have been written any
other way.

KERTSZ

Im glad. I remember when Fatelessness was published in Germany. I got letters,

bags full of them. There were some remarkable complimentsthat I captured
the Holocaust in words, for example. One reader told me that Id opened a
window. I opened the eyes of readers whose mothers and fathers had remained
silent. They refused to speak because they did not want to confront history. And
thats a difficult task, to be sure. But it has to be done.

INTERVIEWER

Sitting in your tiny room, what were the things that brought you joy, or at least
distraction?

KERTSZ

Those are very private stories about which I dont like to speak. I did nothing
much. I wrote operettas.

INTERVIEWER

And that gave you pleasure?

KERTSZ

No.

INTERVIEWER

Was there anything that you did?

KERTSZ

Writing itself.

You know, thats a good questionwhat gave me pleasure. And if my reply is

writing itself, then, of course, that was not true when I was actually writing.
Whenever I sat down to write, it felt like a tragic fate I had to endure. There is
pleasure only in retrospect. I once did a reading in Stuttgart, after which I had
dinner with a lady who said that she pitied me for all I had lived through. In that
moment, in Stuttgartthirty years after writing my first novelI realized that,
actually, I had been very happy in those days.

INTERVIEWER

Writing your novel?

KERTSZ

Absolutely. I managed to finish a work under terrible circumstances, and

eventually some lady from Stuttgart is moved to profound pity. Her words were
a badge of success for me. I realized that I had succeeded in creating a lifes
work. This was the moment I understood, and it was a moment of tremendous
happiness.

INTERVIEWER

Do you consider the Fatelessness, Fiasco, Kaddish for an Unborn Child, and
Liquidation tetralogy your lifes work?

KERTSZ

No, it was some dumb Hungarian journalist who came up with this notion of a
tetralogy. Back when Id only published Fatelessness and Fiasco and Kaddish for
an Unborn Child, he said I had conceived a trilogy. He really knew nothing of my
work.

INTERVIEWER

You said in Dossier K. that your place is not in history, but at your desk.

KERTSZ

Rarely ever did I write at a desk! But lets not talk about personal things.

INTERVIEWER

Well, its not a personal question per se.

KERTSZ

All right then, my desk was yellow.

INTERVIEWER

How do you write these days?

KERTSZ

Its tricky, because I can no longer use a computer. Nor am I able to write by
hand. But Ive got all this material Ive collected over the course of my lifemy
diaries, my reports, Liquidation. With all of that done, I no longer have to write
anything new. Ive finished my work.

INTERVIEWER

Then lets talk about your last novel, Liquidation. What was the initial spark of
inspiration?

KERTSZ

I had originally intended to write a play. I thought I was done writing novels. But
I wanted to depict this moment during the regime change in 1990, a moment
that I felt had dramatic value itself. Then it struck me that I was wrongIm not
a playwright, nor am I particularly interested in the stage. The stage, for me,

seemed an obstacle, an inbuilt disadvantage. And so I tore up the plays

manuscript, understanding that this was a topic for a great novel in a small
format.

I was interested in examining how different people coped with the regime
change. I had met so many people, read their biographies, and listened to their
stories, most of which were full of lies. It was a society of informants. But
combining that with the legacy of Auschwitzthats what drew me in. I tried to
find a key figure. Someone who did not live through a concentration camp but
whose life is cast in its shadow. Thats when I found the characters Judit and B.,
the editor whose career is a fiasco and the writer who commits suicide.

INTERVIEWER

Fukuyamas end of history has become something of a clich perhaps, but I

wonder whether that was on your mind when you were writing Liquidation.

KERTSZ

Ive never thought of it like that. What did you make of the novel?

INTERVIEWER

It seems to me that your novel is akin to something like this end of history. Its
written from the vantage point of the early 2000s, yet it captures the moment
at the fall of Communism in 1990, a moment at which various currents merge
and collide, forming a point of crystallization, and possibly liquidation, for
twentieth-century history.

KERTSZ

Actually, youre completely right. Its exactly like that. Weve got the man who
was born in Auschwitz, and then Judit, the woman who experiences Auschwitz

through him and who attempts to find a conclusion to her own history. But then
she escapes that world and marries a man who is untouched by totalitarianism.
She decides to have children, and thus commits herself to life. That was the
secret, the gesturebearing children is the gesture that creates the possibility
of continued life. Faced with choosing between life and death, she opts for life.

All right, thats enough. That was my last interview.

INTERVIEWER

For today?

KERTSZ

Forever. Now its done.

Javier Marias, The Art of Fiction No. 190

Interviewed by Sarah Fay

A waiter at a restaurant in Madrid gasped when I mentioned that I was in town

to interview Javier Maras. You know him? he asked, as if Id named a
president or a movie star. Sometimes we see him walking down the street.

Although Maras is not yet well known to readers in the United States, in Europe
he is a literary and intellectual sensationthe author of eleven novels, two
books of short stories, a collection of biographical essays, and a column on
politics, literature, film, sports, and social issues for the Madrid newspaper El
Paiss weekly magazine. He is also one of Spains leading translators from
English. His own books have been published in more than thirty languages and
have sold over five million copies worldwide, and he is often mentioned in the
European press as a contender for the Nobel Prize. Critics and admiring
colleagues (J.M. Coetzee, Salman Rushdie, and the late W.G. Sebald) have
praised the way he pits Spanish black humor against English grandiloquence to
produce novels that are simultaneously fast-paced and meticulous, speculative
and clinical, stylish and classical.

In person, too, Maras presents a fine balance of opposing qualitiesalternately

a grandee and a recluse, gregarious and reticent, punctilious and totally laidback. Like the ghostly narrators in his novels, he is a little hard to pin down. He
tends to perch rather than sit on his couch and to overenunciate when he
speaks in English. He habitually drinks Coca-Cola, subsists on a diet of serrano
ham and Manchego cheese, and will not wear a tie unless it is pressed upon
him. Maras has a blog but has never seen it and refers to it only as the Web
that wears my name. It is managed by an assistant, who posts his newspaper
columns and writings. He does not own a computer or mobile phone. He rents
two nearly identical apartments just off of Madrids famed Plaza Mayor. In one,
the furniture is dark; in the other, the same furniture is white. Not far from the
floor-to-ceiling bookshelf that houses his Greek, Latin, and Byzantine books is an
entire room of DVDs stocked with Jerry Lewis and Dean Martin movies as well as
episodes of Bonanza, Maverick, and Friends. Despite the fact that his living
space is cluttered with toy soldiers, literary memorabiliaDashiell Hammett and
Joseph Conrad letters, a bust of Laurence Sterne, photographs of various writers
and fan mail, Maras insists that he is orderly. Its just that I have no time to
put things in order, he says.

Maras is forever redrawing the thin line that separates illusion from reality, and
they are central elements of his work. It is not only his narrators who are
unreliable; the entire world of his novels is unreliable. His books enact the
Nabokovian principle that memory is ultimately false, which gives his stories a
sense of timelessness.

Maras was born in Madrid in 1951, twelve years after Franco took power
throughout Spain. His father, Julin Maras, a renowned philosopher, was
imprisoned and later prohibited from teaching in Spain for opposing the Franco
regime, and Maras spent brief periods of his childhood in the United States. He
completed two novels before the age of twenty-one, both of which were
published: Los dominios del lobo (The Dominions of the Wolf, 1971) and Voyage
along the Horizon (1973). He studied English at Complutense University in
Madrid, and after his graduation did not write another novel for six years,
working instead on translations of American and English writers as diverse as
Sir Thomas Browne, Sterne, William Faulkner, Wallace Stevens, and John
Ashbery. He taught translation theory at the University of Oxford, where his
sixth novel, All Souls (1989), is set. In that novel, Maras lampoons life among
the Oxford dons and sympathetically portrays the writer John Gawsworth, who
inherited the title of king of Redonda, a small island off of Antigua. The
publication of All Souls led to Maras being named the new king of Redonda, a
title he still holds today. Marass seventh novel, A Heart So White (1992), won
the IMPAC Award, and he has since published four more novels, including
Tomorrow in the Battle Think on Me (1994) and Dark Back of Time (1998).

This interview took place over six spring evenings in Marass apartmentthe
one with the dark furniture. His father had died a few months earlier, and
Marass eyes were set in deep shadows. I sleep badly, he confessed. He
chain-smoked guiltlessly, often ambidextrously, while the nearby fax machine
overflowed with proofs of book jackets awaiting his approval and details
concerning an award Maras had just given under his publishing imprint, Reino
de Redonda. Maras speaks in winding sentences, full of dependent clauses and
parenthetical statements, that suggest what it might have been like to talk to
Henry James, who, as Maras notes approvingly in his book Written Lives (1992),
spoke as digressively and obliquely as he wrote and once referred to a dog as
something black, something canine.

INTERVIEWER

In addition to being a Spanish citizen, you are the king of the island of
Redonda, a micronation in the West Indies. I believe you are the first
monarch The Paris Review has interviewed. How did you come by your crown?

JAVIER MARAS

There was a shipping magnate in the nineteenth century by the name of Shiel,
who lived in the Caribbean, and he had eight or nine daughters but no son.
Finally, he had a male baby, Matthew Phipps Shiel, who became a writer. To
celebrate his sons fifteenth birthday in 1880, Shiel claimed ownership of the
uninhabited island of Redonda, which is close to Montserrat and not far from
Antigua. He organized a coronation with a Methodist minister from Antigua, and
M.P. Shiel was crowned king of that island. Recently, I learned that Redonda is
the equivalent to Transylvania in Europe, which is appropriate for a literary
legend. Its a very rocky place with limited access. It was used as a harbor for
smugglers, and there were legends of terrible beasts and horrific events that
happened there. Shortly after Shiels coronation the British decided to annex
the island because aluminum phosphate was found. The Shiels disputed the
British for years, and finally the colonial office said they were not going to give
the island back to anyone, let alone a crazy ship owner and a writer, but they
had no objection to Shiel using the title of king of Redonda as long as it was, as
they said, void of content.

Eventually, Shiel settled in Britain, where a younger writer named John

Gawsworth helped him in his old age. When Shiel died in 1947, Gawsworth
became his literary executor and heir to his estate. Gawsworth activated an
intellectual aristocracy, as it was called, and named dukes and duchesses,
including Lawrence Durrell, Henry Miller, and Dylan Thomas. Gawsworth had
been a very promising figure, publishing books at nineteen. He fought in India,
Algeria, and Egypt during the war. Amazingly, he published small booklets of
poetry everywhere, even in Calcutta. I dont know how he managed to do that
during the war. He was one of the youngest members of the Royal Society of
Literature and was in touch with many of the major literary figures of the time,
from Thomas Hardy to T.E. Lawrence. But Gawsworth became a drunkard and
was soon penniless. He had a lot of debts with his landlord and bartenders and
started to sell titles to these people. He even put an ad in the Times to sell the
title of king of Redonda. A lot of people were interested. I reproduced a telegram
in one of the books I published under my Reino de Redonda imprint. I have it
here. Carl Werner Skogholm of Denmark wrote:

Your Royal Highness, King John Gawsworth of Redonda,

Regarding your advertisement I beg to send you the following questions which I
hope you will kindly answer:

1) What is the Kings duties?

2) What is the Kings rights?

3) Is the Isle of Redonda a good place to live in?

4) Is it possible for the King to contact Diana Dors?

5) I have two daughters. Is it possible for girls to inherit the throne?

It would be wonderful to become a king suddenly. I hope to be able toif you

are still willing to sell.

INTERVIEWER

It would be wonderful to become a king suddenlythats what happened to

you.

MARAS

Yes. But for me, except for the fun of the legend, it has not been particularly
wonderful. It seems that during the worst years of his life Gawsworth did sell it
he issued documents to different peopleso there is some controversy
regarding the title. Some of the heirs to those bartenders who claim they are
inheritors to the throne are very angry with me. One said, It was so difficult to
overthrow the Spaniards, and now youre giving it back to them! That makes me
laugh. I have never said that I am the king of Redonda or signed anything other
than my name, Javier Maras. I have never been monarchic. I am rather a
republican.

INTERVIEWER

But how did you become this reluctant king?

MARAS

These pretenders, as they are called, say that I bought the title at an auction,
which I did not. In 1997, after I included one of Gawsworths stories in an
anthology and mentioned his story in my novel All Souls, Jon Wynne-Tyson, who
had become king after Gawsworth, wrote to me and said he wanted to abdicate
because the pretenders had been writing to him for years. He is an extremely
nice person, I must say. Since I had an understanding of Redonda and made it
more famous than it ever was, he asked who I thought would be a good
successor. He mentioned Seamus Heaney because Shiel was of Irish descent,
and because he is such a great writer. I said, Yes, I thought it should be a real
writerthe throne should be inherited not by blood but by letters. We had very
British conversations with a lot of understatementsIf you are saying what I
think you are saying, but I would not dare to think that you are really saying
what it seems you sayuntil he openly said, I think you would be a good choice.
I said that if something this novelistic intrudes in my life and I dont accept it, I
should not be considered a novelist. So I accepted.

It is only a title. The island was recovered by Antigua, it belongs to Antigua, and
I am not going to have dynastic disputes about anything that is more fictional
than real. In my opinion, Jon Wynne-Tyson made the mistake of answering to the
pretenders, and he was disputing with them all of the time, probably more
privately than publicly. I decided never to reply to anyone. And that is what I
have done. I have said, tongue in cheek, that this is the only kingly thing to do:
not reply at all. What would the king of England or the king of Spain do? They
would not reply.

INTERVIEWER

Given the way you weave fiction and truth in your novels, some people have
wondered if the island is completely fabricated.

MARAS

But there are maps. The island is there.

INTERVIEWER

Have you seen it?

MARAS

No, not personally. Jon Wynne-Tyson did. But visiting it is not very important in
my opinion either.

INTERVIEWER

Youve continued the tradition of granting titles to writers and artists, such as
Pedro Almodvar (Duke of Trmula), John Ashbery (Duke of Convexo), Francis
Ford Coppola (Duke of Megalpolis), among others. What are their duties?

MARAS

There are no duties whatsoever, not even that of loyalty. All of the dukes and
duchesses have namesfunny nameswhich is a tradition started in the
1930s. Otherwise, I have tried to keep a low profile.

INTERVIEWER

Each year, you also give an award in the name of the island.

MARAS

Yes. The problem is that when I write to the winners, it helps if they know who I
am, but if they dont I have to explain the whole legend of Redonda and it
sounds crazy. Doesnt it? I have to ask them not to take the whole kingdom
thing seriously just so they wont think that I am a madman or something. Its a
bit complicated. So far, its been OK. This year the winner is Ray Bradbury. We
have to see if he understands the joke, because if he doesnt I will have to go to
Jean-Luc Godardwho came in secondand explain the whole thing again, this
time in French. Mr. Bradbury will need to decide what title he would like to have
as a duke of Redonda. I suggested a few: Duke of Diente de LenDandelion; or
Duke of Carnaval OscuroDark Carnival. But of course he may choose anything.

INTERVIEWER

In your book of biographical essays, Written Lives, you portray twenty-six

writers, including William Faulkner, Yukio Mishima, James Joyce, and Isak
Dinesen. Most of the writers you chose had disastrous personal lives. They
failed at love and relationships.

MARAS

They were rather calamitous, yes.

INTERVIEWER

Are you a disastrous individual?

MARAS

Yes, but not as blatantly as some of them. I have not tried to kill my wifeI do
not have a wife at the moment, nor do I think I will have a wifethe way
Malcolm Lowry did. But I suppose I have been modestly calamitous in my life.

INTERVIEWER

How so?

MARAS

Well, from my parents point of view, I suppose I oscillated too much. I didnt
establish myself professionally. For years, it was not clear if I could make a real
living. Certainly translating doesnt allow you to make a living. I had periods of
great distress and restlessness. I lived in other countries. I did not marry. I had
different girlfriendssome were married, and some wouldnt marry me or
maybe I wouldnt marry them, some were foreign and lived somewhere else.
There was always some kind of difficulty. I remember my mother, who died
twenty-nine years ago, said that of her five sons I was the one who put myself
in danger. She worried about me the most. I crossed the street when the light
wasnt redthings like that.

It might have been much worse if I had not been successful as a writer. That is
something that could very easily have happened. I never forget that. I dont
think my books are easythey arent too difficult eitherbut if my novels had
sold only ten thousand copies, that would not have been strange. There are
many writers who sell much less than that. I have been very lucky, and it was
gradual. I was not the kind of writer who wrote one book and became an instant
success. The Man of Feeling was more successful than all of the previous novels,
and All Souls more successful than that, and then A Heart So White was much
more successful than all of the others. I have come to have loyal readers, but it
might not have been that way at all.

INTERVIEWER

Another common quality among the writers you profile is that they didnt take
themselves too seriously. The notable exceptions are Thomas Mann, Joyce, and
Mishima. How do you avoid taking yourself too seriously?

MARAS

Its not a matter of avoiding it. Either you have a feeling that you are important
and that you are going to be remembered, or you do not. Those three seemed
to consider themselves very important and to think very much of their posterity.
There is a poem by Stevenson that I translated many years ago in which he
calls writing this childish task. In the poem he addresses his ancestors, all of
whom built lighthouses. He apologizes for not having followed the tradition and
for staying at home and playing with paper like a child.

To think of posterity nowadays is ludicrous because things do not last. Books

seem to last more than films or records but even they do not last very long.
Now more than ever, we depend on the mercy of the living. When writers and
filmmakers die there are three or five days during which, with any luck, the
newspapers and the TV devote pages and programs. There is a big fuss, but
then you have to wait ten years until there is a commemoration. The moment
you are not here to defend your work in interviews, you literally do not exist.
There is a penalty.

Of course, some people are lucky with posterity, or they deserve it. Elvis Presley
has been lucky. He is on the minds of many people, including my own, very
often. I think Elvis Presley deserves to be remembered very often. But for most,
it is not like that. On Faulkners centenary, I made a small volume, a tribute to
him, with a few texts I had written, the poems I had translated, and a text by
someone else. The booklet made people from the press take an interest in
Faulkner. When they called and asked me about him, I had the feeling that a
mediocre writer like myself was doing Faulkner the favor of talking about him. I
am not trying to be falsely modestyou always have your heroes and you never
will surpass them, never. So, from my point of view, thanks to a mediocre
Spanish writermeand because of the accidental fact that I was alive and
well known, people in Spain read Faulkner. But Faulkner should not need favors
from anyone.

INTERVIEWER

In the first volume of Your Face Tomorrow, which you published in 2002, you tell
a version of your own fathers story, creating a kind of posterity for him. Why
did you decide to publish that book in three separate volumes?

MARAS

This book, especially the first volume, Fever and Spear, was partly inspired by
my father, whose story of having been betrayed by one of his best friends
immediately after the Spanish Civil War is attributed to the narrators father. I
feared that if I went on and on and didnt publish it until it was totally finished
and I saw very clearly that the book was getting quite longit might not be in
print in time for him to read it. Old men live with fewer thingsthey are thrilled
by fewer thingsand I saw that my father was very curious to see how his story
was told. I read part of it to him to see if he would object. The only thing he said
was that, unlike my narrator, he never revealed the name of the man who
reported about him to Francos police. But I said, I am telling the story now, and
he accepted it. He wanted to see how he was portrayed in fiction. His eyesight
was too poor to read by himself in his last years, but I read those parts of it to
him. He could listen to it.

INTERVIEWER

Your father was a disciple of the philosopher Jos Ortega y Gasset and a wellknown public intellectual in Spain until he was driven out by Franco. Did his
exile have an effect on you, or were you too young?

MARAS

Exile is not the right word. He belonged to the inner exile, those who were
against Franco but who stayed in Spain and did what they could. He went to
prison for a few months. He might easily have gone before the firing squad, but
he escaped death. Like many who were not permitted to practice their
professions, he was prevented from teaching and left to live on I dont know
what. He was not even allowed to write for the newspapers for a decade. So he
went to the States.

My very first memories are of New Haven, where we lived for a year. There is an
image in Tomorrow in the Battle Think on Me that comes from that time. We
stayed in a furnished house that belonged to a professor who was on leave. I
slept in a room that belonged to another boy and would belong to that boy
again when he returned. A mobile of toy airplanes hung from the ceiling.

INTERVIEWER

Did you speak English as a child?

MARAS

A little. When I was in New Havenit must have been 1955 or 1956we did not
go to school because there was polio and my mother thought it was better if we
didnt go. My father and mother taught us at home, but we did not speak
English. We had a great time. It was a novelty. There was the snow and there
were squirrels. We had a back garden.

My father had offers to stay in the Stateshe taught at Wellesley, Indiana,

UCLA, and Yale, among other placesbut he didnt want to. He said that even if
things were horrible in Spain, and horrible for him in particular, he felt that he
should not leave the country permanently. He said, If I had stayed in the United
States I would have had American sons. I dont mind having American
grandchildren but a son is too close. He was also aware that as a writernot a
literary writer, he wrote philosophical essays, a book on Don Quixote, a memoir
you must be in touch with your own language.

So it was not an exile. He went now and then for three months but then came
back. In the sixties, he mainly taught American students here in Spain on their
junior year abroad. When I was a boy, I was very much in touch with Americans.
I remember when I was eleven I fell in love with a Tulane student who was
probably eighteen or nineteen. I liked her very much. Her name was Ieva. I think
she was of Lithuanian origin.

INTERVIEWER

Was it difficult for you to have such a visible public figure for a father?

MARAS

Not really. When I started publishing I was rebellious. I felt rather independent.
I felt my writing had not much to do with my fathers, and I certainly did not
want to beor take advantage of beingJulin Marass son. In fact, I could not
have taken advantage, as he loathed nepotism. Other people did make me feel I
was a writers son, and therefore looked upon my books with diffidence, or even
worse than that. It is funny: a writer may be an architects or a shoemakers son
and no one will care about it. But if your father is a writer, even of a very
different kind, you are very easily dismissed as something like an intruder. That
kind of misgiving was, at times, more difficult than anything else. For years, I
was asked, Do you have anything to do with Julin Maras? I started replying,
Yes, I am his father.

INTERVIEWER

What did your grandparents do?

MARAS

My fathers father, Julin as well, had been the director of a bank. He was
apparently a very funny and crazy man who laughed a lot. During World War II
he put all his money in Deutschmarks, so he went bankrupt. My mothers father,
Emilio, was a military doctor. His wife, Lola, was born in Havana, Cuba, and
came to Spain in 1898, when she was about seven or eight. She kept her
accent. She is portrayed as the narrators grandmother in A Heart So White. She
had eleven childrentwo of them died when they were still babies. She could
hardly do anything besides raise them, I suppose.

INTERVIEWER

What was your mother like?

MARAS

Whenever I see photographs of her, she always seems a little melancholy.

However, she did laugh a lot and had a very strong character. Her opinion was
very important to my father. Sure of himself as he was, he never sent an article
to the press without first having read it aloud to her. She was indeed very
motherly, she was always afraid something might happen to usno wonder, as
she had lost her first-born when he was only three and a half years old. Maybe
her melancholyin the eyes mainlycame from the war, from the fact that her
younger brother, at only seventeen, was killed for nothing during it.

After my mother died in 1977, my father kept all of her clothes. My brothers and
sisters-in-law and I asked him what he wanted us to do with them, and he said,
Just leave them. Leave them as they are for the moment. Of course, no one
bothered him again about it, and they stayed there for more than twenty-eight
years until he died last year. He was not a morbid personhe just wanted
things to be left alone as they were. I dont think I would do that myself, but I
understand that.

INTERVIEWER

Your brothers are writers too, arent they?

MARAS

In a way. My eldest brother, Miguel, is an economist but he has also been a

cinema critic for years. He has written three books, including one on Leo
McCarey, who directed Going My Way, The Bells of St. Marys, and An Affair to
Remember. My second brother, Fernandonot to be confused with Fernando
Maras the novelist, whom I havent readis an art historian, and yes, hes
written quite a few books. He also taught at Harvard for a period. My younger
brother, lvaro, is a musician. He plays the flute and the recorder, and he has a

few CDsbaroque music. Now and then he writes music reviews, but no books.
Yes, I suppose we all write in a way.

That is the immediate family, but there are two filmmakersa cousin of mine
who died a few years ago and one of my uncles, my mothers brother, who went
by the name Jess Franco. He has made hundreds of filmsall kinds, all very bad,
from horror films to Fu Manchu films, Dracula films, porno films, or almost-porno
films. He worked with actors past their prime, like George Sanders and Jack
Palance. In recent years he has become a cult director. A few years ago, I called
a bookseller in London to order a few books and I gave the clerk my full name,
the name on my credit card, Javier Maras Franco. Officially we have two
surnames in Spain. The first one, which is the one that matters, is the fathers
name, and the one that follows is the mothers name. My mothers name was
Francono relation to the dictator. Its not an uncommon name. When I told the
clerk my full name, he said, Can you spell it? I said, Yes, like the dictator. And he
said, The dictator? He was a young man and didnt know who Franco was. Then
he said, Like Jess Franco? I said, Yes, hes my uncle. The clerk was very
impressed.

INTERVIEWER

Who in your family had the most influence on you?

MARAS

Maybe my mother, but also Miguel. He was older and we have a confluence of
interests. There was also the other brother, who died. I write about him in Dark
Back of Time. But my mother read a lot to us and told us stories. I have been
told by my father that my mother used to lull us to sleep by reading us The
Iliad. I hope that was an exaggeration on his part, because it sounds very
pedantic.

INTERVIEWER

Your mother published a literary anthology of writings about Spain, but she
stopped writing to raise you and your brothers.

MARAS

I recently discovered a book she translated into Spanish from French when she
was in her late twentiessome letters by Napoleon, with a short and very good
prologue by her. She knew people and the world better than my father did, I
would say. She was very respectful, even with her children. She could keep a
secret. People tended to tell her their stories and problems, she never passed
them on, not even to my father. She graduated with a degree in philosophy and
letters at a time when not many women went to university.

INTERVIEWER

In Dark Back of Time there is a line spoken by the narrators mother. She says to
him, I dont understand, but I understand that I dont understand. Did your
mother say this?

MARAS

Yes, she told me that in a letter. I went to live with a woman in a different city
when I was twenty-three, and that woman was married and had a small boy.
Divorce did not come to Spain until after Francos death. My parents were rather
open and liberal for the time, but they were both Catholic and they didnt like
that sort of thing. My mother worried. Three years later, my relationship with
the woman was over, and my mother could not understand how that had
happened. She could not accept the fact that it did not last. That was when she
said that.

INTERVIEWER

Is it difficult for you to look back on your early work?

MARAS

Very difficult. Sometimes I have the feeling that I have started writing three
different times. My first two books are much different from what came after. The
good thing about them is that Im not ashamed of them. They dont make me
blush. I was lucky enough to see them published, but that is unusual. These
novels are still in print thanks to a few things: they are not autobiographical,
they are not pretentious, they dont want to do something unheard of or new,
and it seems that they are readable and fun. They are imitations, parodies.
When you are very young, you are really writing exercises. The first novel, Los
dominios del lobo, parodies American cinema. It takes place in the United
States. The first one is fun. The second, Voyage along the Horizon, is more
literary.

INTERVIEWER

When you were younger, you were criticized for not being Spanish enough.
What was the substance of that complaint?

MARAS

In order to diminish what I did, they said that many of my novels do not take
place in Spain. But most of my characters are Spanish and my country is
present in my novels, even though they are not typically Spanish novels. I didnt
write the kind of folklore, for instance, that some people have profited from.
People expect Spanish literature, theater, films, and painting to be folkloric. But
the Spain Ive known is a rather normal country, even during the dictatorship, in
the sense that our cities are not very different from other European cities. There
are cultivated people in Spain who have not been portrayed in the Spanish
novel. There has been a tendency toward rural passions and crimes and women
with knives in their garters. My books did not match the clich.

For years, they said that I wrote as if it were a translation, which for me was
praise. You know how important I think translation is. After a time, when they
couldnt say that anymore, they said my books were too cold, too brainy. Then
when I published a novel that was, I guess, not so cold, when the cold wore off,
they said that I wrote for women. This was a bad thing. Like most writers, I have
a lot of women readers. Women read more, and I find that women are better
readers precisely because they read more.

INTERVIEWER

Do you find it easy to write about women?

MARAS

No, it is not very easy for me. I would say that my female characters are a bit in
the shade. I dare not portray them in full. Often I am amazed, and not
necessarily in a positive way, at a woman who decides to write a whole novel
from the male point of view. The idea of a male writing a female narrator and a
female writing a male seems absurd. I know many people have done it well
Flaubert did it very well. I find books like that a little unbelievable. Only once
have I written from a female perspective and that was in a short story. I would
not be able to sustain it for a whole novel. My latest novels have been in the
first person, and the female characters are always seen through the eyes of a
male. Thats the way it is and thats the way it should be in a novel for the sake
of plausibility: for the story and the point of view. There is something called
subjectivity. I see the world from my manhood, and thats the way I see women
in my novels.

INTERVIEWER

You have a reputation for being a ladies man

MARAS

Thats a falsehood.

INTERVIEWER

People tend to equate you with your narrators, and your narrators often think of
themselves as great seducers.

MARAS

Thats not true. Because I taught in Oxford for a number of years like the
narrator of All Souls, there has been a tendency on the part of my readers to
identify my narrators with myself, more than usual. Critics sometimes mention
the narrators beautiful wife, Luisa. I have never said that any of the women in
my books are beautiful. I am very careful not to say openly that she was
marvelous or she was splendid. In All Souls, there is a moment when the
narrator talks about the woman who would become his lover, Clare Bayes,
about her dcolletage, and he says he wont say any more about her looks
because given the fact that she becomes his lover it would seem presumptuous
to say, You see, I did conquer that beauty. I would dislike it very much if my
narrators were like that. Who doesnt have an affair now and then? That doesnt
mean that he is a ladies man. My narrators dont boast.

INTERVIEWER

Do you think of your narrators as heroes?

MARAS

I would not call them heroes if by hero you mean someone who is active and
who fights against the development of things or the situation. They all renounce
their own voices, which is funny because they talk and talk and reflect and then
digress and narrate all of the time. The narrator of The Man of Feeling is an
opera singer, who reproduces words he didnt write; the narrator of All Souls is a
lecturer, someone who conveys knowledge that is not his own, it is inherited; in
A Heart So White you have an interpreter who translates what other people say
to the point that he has the habit of interpreting gestures, he converts gestures
into words when there are no words; in Tomorrow in the Battle Think on Me you
have a ghostwriter who gives his own voice to others. Dark Back of Time is a
different case because the narrator is someone called Javier Maras. And in Your
Face Tomorrow you have someone who has the capacity to see what we dont
accept we see, for instance when we see something we dont like in someone

we love. One must have courage to see what one does see and not to deny it
for convenience. So they are interpreters as well, though they are not indifferent
to what happens or to what they see.

One of the best possible perspectives from which to tell a story is that of a
ghost, someone who is dead but can still witness. Its not that I believe in
ghosts, but a ghost is someone to whom everything has already happened,
someone who cannot really interveneor only slightly. At the same time, it is
someone who still cares about what he left behind, so much so that he comes
back. You could say that my narrators are ghosts in that particular sense. They
are passive, but they are still curious, they are observant.

INTERVIEWER

The wives and girlfriends of your narrators are often called Luisa. Why is that?

MARAS

There has not been an important Luisa in my life, but names are very important
to me, and I am uncomfortable with most of them. Some I find too literary,
others too common, which is like not naming in a way.

I often use my own surnames. In Spain, we have our two official surnames, but
unofficially we have sixteen secondary surnames. My third surname would be
my fathers mothers surname, my fourth surname would be my mothers
mothers surname, and so on. I use those for characters, usually for the
meanest characters. For instance, Custardoy in A Heart So White is a bit sinister
thats one of my secondary surnames. Ruibrriz de Torres in Tomorrow in the
Battle Think on Me is not exactly a commendable manthat is another of my
surnames.

INTERVIEWER

What about Villalobos?

MARAS

That comes from a teacher at school. I use names I am accustomed to.

Sometimes I use the names of old football players.

INTERVIEWER

Youve written nonfiction books on film and on footballtwo of your pastimes.

What else absorbs you when you are not writing?

MARAS

I listen to music often. I probably consider music the highest art. In a way, I
would like to make something like it with words, but that is not possible. The
problem with words is that they cannot not have meaning, whereas music is so
blessed: it can not have meaning. And yet there are some notes that
immediately make you feel melancholic. Why is that? With words, you are
telling something awful or sadof course it would make the reader feel that
but with music its quite mysterious.

INTERVIEWER

The narrator in Dark Back of Time is a writer by the name of Javier Maras, who
has published a novel called All Souls. Is Dark Back of Time a novel or a memoir,
or is the lack of distinction, our inability to answer this question, the point?

MARAS

I call it a false novel. I use the term because I cant accept it as a novel. It is
telling something that is true, something that did actually happen to someone
with the same name as me, the author. At the same time, I cant say that it is

an autobiography. Even with my digressions, it is more narrative than anything

else. As a memoir, it would be rather odd, not to say poor: most of the facts are
true, but some I invented for the sake of a particular page, and there are pages
and pages in which the narrator, the author, is not present at all. That is why I
called it a false novel. It is as readable as a novel, but it cannot be a novelto
mebecause what I tell actually happened.

INTERVIEWER

In America, writers are criticized for publishing memoirs that greatly

exaggerate, embellish, or distort the truth.

MARAS

In the past the only people who wrote autobiographies or memoirs were very
important, those who had a crucial role in the history of their own country
Napoleon, Goetheor were witness to major events or people who had singular,
adventurous lives. Otherwise, it is ridiculous to write your autobiography.
Everyone does it, but I cant see the interest. Some writers are capturing things
all of the time. The moment something is said or happens, they think, Oh, I
could use this for a book. If I take something from reality, it is always a
posteriori. People think I am a very good observer, but I am rather
absentminded and distracted. I am rather the kind of person who, if you turned
around and asked me the color of your eyes, I would not know. Though maybe I
can do it afterwardI can recover things I didnt realize I had noticed. What I
present to the reader comes from my experience and from what I have
invented, but it has all been filtered by literature. That is what matters: the
filter.

When you look at a novel, at the cover art, the blurb, the title, the dedication,
the curtain is still down. But after a certain page, the curtain rises and you say,
OK, I am going to read this in a different way than I have read everything else
so far. From this moment until the end of the novel I am going to try to believe
this. It doesnt really matter if this comes from real life and that doesnt. In Your
Face Tomorrow it doesnt really matter if the story of the narrators father is my
own fathers story or not. It only matters because I am alive and because my
father was well-known in Spain, but in Hungary they wont know that. They will
read it as a novel, and they are going to make the effort to believe what has
been invented.

If, on the contrary, someone publishes something claiming that it is his

autobiography or memoir, then the reader is not going to distrust the author.
The author is supposed to be telling the truth. If he says, This is my
autobiography, yet everything is invented, then hes just lying. Nowadays, fakes
are very much appreciated. The book may be great, but he is lying to the
reader. Im not condemning a whole genre, but I wouldnt write one myself. I
dont consider that what I have done or what I have seen would be of interest to
anyone.

INTERVIEWER

But dont you document your life in your fiction?

MARAS

Im passing my life through a filter. That is the important thing for me. In fact,
my wish is that the reader doesnt notice the different origins of the material
but reads everything as what it isas part of a novel.

INTERVIEWER

You sometimes use actual photographs in your novels.

MARAS

Yes, because when I read about an image I like to see it at the same time, be it
a painting or a photograph. But you must be very careful with putting actual
things in a novel. In the first volume of Your Face Tomorrow, there is a moment
when the narrator recalls the story of his uncle, who was killed during the war,
and how his mother had to look for him because he didnt come home, and she
eventually found a photograph of her brother dead. That is a real storyit
happened to my uncle. He was killed in the war when he was seventeen. I did
reproduce one photograph, but I knew I could not put in the other one of him

dead. Just as it is told in the book, the photograph was inside this box, wrapped
in red cloth. It is quite a terrible photograph. I did not dare make it part of a
fiction. You cant expose the dead too much.

The first time I used photographs was in All Souls, in 1989. I doubted whether I
should use them because it was not something people usually did in a novel.
The two photographs I used are of John Gawsworth. I told part of his storyhis
real storyand most people thought that part was absolutely invented. I said,
But there are two photographs, one of him as an officer, and they said, It could
be a photograph of any soldier. A novel, any artistic artifact, accepts less than
reality does. Things do happen, but sometimes if you put them in a novel they
arent believable. Life is a very bad novelist. It is chaotic and ludicrous.

INTERVIEWER

You use time in an unusual way in your novels: your narrators think and
consider for pages. They go off on long tangents. Something very minoran
object or incident or glimpseusually sets them off.

MARAS

That happens to everyone, doesnt it? But I think the tangents are rather
controlled. They always come back to where they should.

INTERVIEWER

Do you do this in order to teach the reader to have patience?

MARAS

Patience?

INTERVIEWER

When I first started reading your novels, the narrators digressions made me
anxious to get to the point.

MARAS

Yes, I think I am forcing that. In the second volume of Your Face Tomorrow, there
is a scene in which a man draws a sword. The scene takes place at a disco, and
the man is about to cut someones throat. The narrator is a witness to this, and
he tells it, and he is startled, of course, and horrifiedit is something very odd
to see in contemporary Londonbut then what comes immediately after is a
reflection on the sword: what a sword means, what a sword has meant in
history, what it means nowadays and how anachronistic it is, and how, precisely
because of this, it is feared maybe even more than a gun because a gunthe
possibility of its being drawnis something that you would expect if you are
attacked. There is a long reflection for many, many pages. No one knows what
has happened to that sword that has just been drawn. If someone would skip
those pages to find out whether the man is going to be beheaded, they are free
to do that, but my intentionmy wishful thinkingis that all digressions in my
books should be interesting enough in themselves to make the reader wait, not
just for the sake of waiting, but to say, OK, this writer has interrupted this and I
would like to know what happens with the sword, but what he is telling me next
instead of what happened with the sword is something that I am interested in
too. I try the readers patience on purpose but not gratuitously.

INTERVIEWER

The sentences in your novels are long and winding, full of parenthetical and
dependent clauses and phrases. They make Faulkners sentences seem brief.
Are you conscious of this when youre writing?

MARAS

Both Faulkner and James were very strong influences in this sense. The
difference between James and Faulkner is that Faulkner sometimes seems to

lose sight of where he started. Faulkner seems not to find where the period
should be. This is not bad. From a literary point of view it is very energetic and
powerfullike a geyser. Whereas James never forgets where he started. He
always closes the sentence. He always finds the period. Juan Benet and Sir
Thomas Browne are also important influences.

My sentences are often very longthere are many dependent clausesbut my

prose should be read quickly, not with heaviness. There should be a linking of
phrases and sentences. Youll notice that sometimes I use commas in an odd
way, but it is not as if I dont use periods. I do. In fact, I hate books that dont
use them. To my mind, there is a kind of enjambment that occurs as a result of
my use of commas instead of periods or even instead of real parentheses.
Maybe those enjambments are more Faulkner-like. My hope is that it helps to
make it lively.

INTERVIEWER

Vladimir Nabokov said that there were certain writers who didnt exist for him:
Faulkner was one, also Albert Camus and D.H. Lawrence. Are there any writers
of note who simply do not exist for you?

MARAS

Dostoevsky does not exist for me. Virginia Woolf does not exist for me. Her
essays are quite good, but her novels are not of much interest for me. And
Joyce. His stories are wonderful, but his novels are too artificial, even pompous.
I have heard some writers say, When I read Kafka or Flaubert or Dostoevsky, I
think, why should I write? He is so good. For me, writers like Kafka are so closed
they dont allow you to follow them, whereas someone like Shakespeare leaves
many paths unexplored, many things just announced, strong images
unexplainedthese invite you not to follow him but to be inspired. He inspires
me.

INTERVIEWER

Does a reader need to read all of your books to fully understand your work?

MARAS

No, my books are linked in many aspects, but they are separate books. But I
dont understand what is meant by being fully understood. You dont write
books to be understood, do you? That is not the reason for doing it.

INTERVIEWER

What is the reason for doing it?

MARAS

I have never had a literary project or a plan. I dont want to compose a fresco of
my time or anything of the sort, nor would I like to renovate the genre. I am not
even concerned with being original. Trying to be original is very dangerous. If
you say, Im going to turn literature upside down, most often the result is
ludicrous. Maybe I write because it is a way of thinking that has no possible
match. It is a very active way of thinking. You think more clearly when you have
to put something down in words. Even people who are not professional writers
clear their minds while writing a letter or keeping a diary.

Some have said that writing is a unique way of knowing, but it is a unique way
of recognizing. This happens very often in Proust in particular. You read
something and you say, Yes, this is true, this is something I have experienced,
this is something I have seen, I have felt this, but I wouldnt have been able to
express it the way he has. Now I really know it. That is what the novel does
better than any other genre or any other art, in my opinion. I wouldnt say that I
think best when I am writing. But I think differently.

INTERVIEWER

Is that what you mean when youve written of pensamiento literarioliterary

thinking?

MARAS

The term is not new, of course. As a readerand I am more of a reader than a

writer, we all are, I supposeI can enjoy a good story, but in a novel, which
takes time to read, a good story is not enough for me. If I close a book and there
are no echoes, that is very frustrating. I like books that arent only witty or
ingenious. I prefer something that leaves a resonance, an atmosphere behind.
That is what happens to me when I read Shakespeare and Proust. There are
certain illuminations or flashes of things that convey a completely different way
of thinking. Im using words that have to do with light because sometimes, as I
believe Faulkner said, striking a match in the middle of the night in the middle
of a field doesnt permit you to see anything more clearly, but to see more
clearly the darkness that surrounds you. Literature does that more than
anything else. It doesnt properly illuminate things, but like the match it lets you
see how much darkness there is.

INTERVIEWER

Its interesting that you mention light and darkness because the characters in
your novels often entertain powerful illusions, and self-delusions.

MARAS

Illusions are important. What you foresee or what you remember can be as
important as what really happens. We usually tend to tell our own story by
mentioning only the positive things, but there is also a negative part of your life
that forms you: what you didnt do, what you renounced, what you didnt dare
to do, what you doubted and discarded, what you dreamt of, what you
expected, what you left aside, what you didnt study but thought you would, the
job you didnt take, the job they didnt give you even though you wanted it. The
things youre not are a part of you as well. We avoid talking about these things,
even to ourselves, as if they dont count. In my novels, I want them to count.

INTERVIEWER

Violent things occur throughout your books. Do you consider your novels to be
violent?

MARAS

If there is violence, I think it is rather austere or sober. I dont think I am ever

truculent. To give you an example: I am about to write a scene in the third
volume of Your Face Tomorrow that is to be seen in a video, its going to be
something taped, in whichI probably should not be telling you this because I
havent even written it yetone man is going to do something to another man.
It is possible that he will take the other mans eyes out. I dont know exactly
how it will be told, but if that happens his eyes will not be mentioned at all. I
may use a simile: He took them out with the same gesture with which you pull a
pit from a peach. To tell it directly is too easy. In fact, I hate the kind of novel
that has one brutality after another only to shock. Its very easy to impress a
reader with that. Its more horrifying when something is insinuated.

INTERVIEWER

Do you work from notes when writing your novels?

MARAS

A sheet of paper is all I have by way of notes, if you can call it that, for all three
volumes of Your Face Tomorrow. These arent really notes toward something in
the future. They are really just reminders. In my novels there is what I call a
system of echoes or resonances. A sentence reappears, sometimes with a
variation. I try not to make it just a repetition but an illumination of the previous
occasion in which it appeared. If I foresee that something will be used again in
the book, then I write the page where it appeared. I have a good memory in
general, but with a large book it is not so easy to know: Did I say this? When did
I say this? Did I say it in the first volume or the second? I have never had one in
my hands, but I am told that a computer would make my life much easier. It
seems I could know exactly when I used a word here or there.

INTERVIEWER

Youve said that your writing method forces you to lose an infinite amount of
time.

MARAS

I lose time in the sense that I very rarely write more than one page per day,
sometimes two, which means that I dont advance very quickly. Until I have
finished one page the best possible way and have rewritten it as many times as
necessary, I dont move on to the next. Many writers I know write a first draft
and then revise again and again. On page two hundred they realize that it
would be better if they had said something different on page one or two. They
change page one or page two, but that is precisely what I never do. Even if it
would make things easier if I hadnt said this or that on page five, I wont
change it. If I wrote that something would happen or be said by a certain
character, then on page two hundred I must stick to it.

This method is quite a risky one and I wouldnt recommend it to anyone

because the final result can be disastrous. But I write my novels according to
the same principle of knowledge that rules life: If you do something when you
are fifteen or twenty, you cant change it. When you are forty you may wish you
hadnt done this at fifteen or twenty, but you have and you cant change that.
Some people try to change it, some people try to forge a past, some people
become imposters, some people hide the things they did, but in fact you cannot
undo what was done. You have to stick to what happened. Much of what I write
in the beginning of a novel occurs by chance. Once I finish a page, it goes to the
printer. Later, I force myself to make things match, to make necessary what was
whimsical. If you come to think of it, it is quite absurd to do this in a novel,
because in a novel you do have the chance to change everythinguntil it is
published.

INTERVIEWER

Is it ever difficult to pick up the next day where you left off?

MARAS

It is best to have a few lines of the new pagesomething to depart from. When
many writers start writing a book they already have a map. They know exactly
what they are going to find on the journey: here, well find a river; there a
desert; there, a cliff; there, a precipice. They have the whole story in their minds
before writing the very first page. I work without a map. I work only with a
compass, which means that I know more or less where I am going. Its not that I
just wander nonsensically in a totally whimsical way. I probably find the same
river and the same desert and the same cliffs and the same precipice that the
other writers find, but I find them unexpectedly. I like not to know everything.

The verb to invent, or inventar in Spanish, comes from the Latin invenire, which
means to discover, to find out. That is what I like to do in writing: find out what I
am writing about as I write it. I decide on the spot. If I had decided the whole
story from the starthow many characters there will be, what will happen to
them, etceteraI probably wouldnt write it. In a couple of short stories, I knew
the whole story before I started writing and then I was a little bored. It seemed
to me like I was making a report. I suppose you think the reader doesnt know
the whole story and you try to write it in a way that moves him or her or
interests or thrills or whatever, but then youre applying mere technicalities. You
know the whole story and you try to use this or that for effect, but that effect is
not coming along at the same time as the writing. If you write page five in
preparation for page fifty, it is very likely that youre revealing too much without
meaning to. Then the book can become predictable.

I started by saying that I would never recommend my way of writing to anyone

because it is very risky. It is also absurdly self-imposing. Why cant I change
what I wrote on page five? I can, and it is perfectly licit to do so, but my method
has one benefit, which is that if I dont know the whole story and if I dont know
what is going to happen, even in the next chapter, the reader may not know
either, and then the book is unpredictable. That is a small advantage to this way
of writing.

INTERVIEWER

It would seem that you couldnt interrupt the writing process or else youd lose
the thread.

MARAS

I do interrupt it, of course. One ridiculous thing nowadaysI suppose it happens

to most writersis that we have to fight to have time to do what we are
supposed to do. There are too many distractions: they ask you to give lectures
and interviews. Im not a hermit, but sometimes it is not the right moment to
stop the work.

INTERVIEWER

Given your writing method, do you ever have regrets when youre looking back
on a finished novel?

MARAS

When a book is finished, you cannot possibly think that it could be different
from what it is. When you read A Heart So White it seems like the quote from
Macbeth that gives the book its title is the key, or as Nabokov said, the first
throb. But I know how that happened. I had written about eighty pages by the
time I reached that scene. In those days, I never used to stay home at night, I
went out, but for some reason that night I didnt go out. I stayed home and put
on the TV. I was watching Orson Welless version of Macbeth and I noticed the
scene in which Lady Macbeth says to Macbeth after he has killed King Duncan:
My hands are of your color; but I shame / To wear a heart so white. I thought,
What does Lady Macbeth mean? When I finished watching the film, I went to my
annotated editions of Shakespeare and saw that there was not one note about
that line, not one. That was odd. To me, it is not very clear what she says and
why she says it and what exactly she means by white and the verb to wear?
That scene, which is about four or five pages, became a motif in A Heart So
White, but it was by chance that I included it in the book. If I had gone out that
evening, as I did on other evenings, I would not have watched that film again
and I wouldnt have noticed that sentence and it wouldnt have been in the
book and the book would have been different. I know that when people read my
books in years to come they will see it as indisputable that that scene exists in
the novel, but it could very well not have been that way.

The older I am, the less I understand the process of writing. I write every page
as if it were the only one. It seems very odd and strange to me that something
comes out in the end and its this many pages and I know that I have done it
line by line.

INTERVIEWER

Have you ever been tempted to translate your own novels?

MARAS

No. Nabokov did that, and so did Beckett. For me it would be boring to go back
to what I once did. But mainly, my English isnt good enough. To write in a
different language is the most difficult thing to do. You can read it and
understand it and give an interview or a lecture, but the language is not yours. I
wouldnt feel sure enough. I would make mistakes. It would be a huge task.
Borges once said that translation is one of the biggest mysteries. How is it
possible that a text that has been stripped of the language in which it was
conceived could still be the same text? But it is, and we accept that. You think
you are reading Dickens in Spanish or Cervantes in English and not one word of
what you are reading was written or chosen by the author.

INTERVIEWER

Do you keep regular writing hours?

MARAS

No, I cant.

INTERVIEWER

How many hours a day do you write?

MARAS

Not manythree, four.

INTERVIEWER

Every day?

MARAS

When I can. I usually write down in my date book when I begin a book, when I
interrupt it, and when I resume. Every fifty pages I see how many days I worked
and how many days elapsed. Sometimes the working days are steadyI write
fifty pages in about thirty-five or forty-five daysbut sometimes one hundred
and twenty days elapse before I complete my fifty pages, which means I have
only been able to sit down and really work thirty-five days out of one hundred
and twenty.

INTERVIEWER

Do you work when you travel? Are you able to write when you are in other
cities?

MARAS

Not the novels, no. But I have a rented apartment in a small town about two
hundred and thirty kilometers from Madridand there, yes. It is the coldest
place in Spain. It snows there in the winter. During my childhood we spent many
of our summers there because it was fresh and cool in the summer and it had a
river where we could bathe. I didnt go there for twenty or thirty years. Then I

was invited to give a lecture there, and I saw that the flat belonging to a very
good friend of my parents was for rent. He died years before. He was an
extremely nice man, a widower. He had a son and lived with his two sisters.
Whenever it rained and we could not go to the park or to the river we went to
his place. He had a good library. I spent many evenings and afternoons playing
cards and reading there. Ive rented it for five years or so. I go there from time
to time for eight or ten days. I work well there. No one has my telephone. There
is no mail coming in. I like to take walks to the river, to the castle.

So in that country place I can write. I have another typewriter that is identical to
this one. There, everything is double: my shaver, everything. Thats like going
home. But when Im traveling, no.

INTERVIEWER

Youve written a column on social and political issues for one or another of
Spains newspapers for eleven years. Do you ever get tired of giving your
opinion?

MARAS

Sometimes I worry that I give my opinion on too many things. And sometimes
its difficult to find what to talk about. Astonishingly enough, many European
writers seem to have very clear opinions on everything. When the first Gulf War
was about to start in 1990, most writers on TV and radio had made up their
minds about what was right and what was wrong, but it seemed to me that that
war was not so easy. The second one, yes, that is easyat least for me it is a
farcebut that one was more difficult. And Kosovo, for example, also wasnt
easy. Yet no one said, I dont know, I havent thought about it enough or I
havent made an opinion as yet. As for me, I couldnt see it clearly for myself.

INTERVIEWER

What made you want to be a writer?

MARAS

I never knew that I wanted to be a writer. I dont even know that I want to be a
writer now, but I have been publishing for most of my life, so I cant deny that I
am one. But I am not the kind of writer who publishes a new novel every two
years. I never thought of it as a career. I have never had the feeling that its
been three or four years since my last novel and I should write another one or
else I will be forgotten. If something comes Ill do it, but I wont force myself to
do it because it is my profession.

INTERVIEWER

Is there one quality that a novelist should have?

MARAS

Patience.

INTERVIEWER

Are you patient?

MARAS

I try to be.

INTERVIEWER

In Written Lives, you note that Joseph Conrads natural state was disquiet
bordering on anxiety. What is your natural state?

MARAS

Indecisionbut that doesnt mean I never decide. It means I take my time.

INTERVIEWER

If you dont have a clearly defined plot in mind when you write, how do you
know when your novels are finished?

MARAS

I suppose I know it because there is nothing more to tell. All books could go on
and on. Don Quixote ends because Don Quixote dies. That is the only thing
preventing him from having more adventures. You know what Borges said about
the concept of a definitive text: he didnt believe it existed. He thought the only
reason we have what we consider to be the definitive text was the exhaustion of
the author. With Your Face Tomorrow, perhaps I will know when it is finished
because of the exhaustion. There will come a moment when I will think, Enough
enough of being in touch with these characters. Its not that I think they are
living people. There is that feeling of great vividness that literary characters
sometimes acquire when you have been submerged into an atmosphere with
them. Still, there comes a moment when you are ready to return to the world.

Milan Kundera, The Art of Fiction No. 81

Interviewed by Christian Salmon

This interview is a product of several encounters with Milan Kundera in Paris in

the fall of 1983. Our meetings took place in his attic apartment near
Montparnasse. We worked in the small room that Kundera uses as his office.
With its shelves full of books on philosophy and musicology, an old-fashioned
typewriter and a table, it looks more like a students room than like the study of
a world-famous author. On one of the walls, two photographs hang side by side:

one of his father, a pianist, the other of Leo Jancek, a Czech composer whom
he greatly admires.

We held several free and lengthy discussions in French; instead of a tape

recorder, we used a typewriter, scissors, and glue. Gradually, amid discarded
scraps of paper and after several revisions, this text emerged.

This interview was conducted soon after Kunderas most recent book, The
Unbearable Lightness of Being, had become an immediate best-seller. Sudden
fame makes him uncomfortable; Kundera would surely agree with Malcolm
Lowry that success is like a horrible disaster, worse than a fire in ones home.
Fame consumes the home of the soul. Once, when I asked him about some of
the comments on his novel that were appearing in the press, he replied, Ive
had an overdose of myself!

Kunderas wish not to talk about himself seems to be an instinctive reaction

against the tendency of most critics to study the writer, and the writers
personality, politics, and private life, instead of the writers works. Disgust at
having to talk about oneself is what distinguishes novelistic talent from lyric
talent, Kundera told Le Nouvel Observateur.

Refusing to talk about oneself is therefore a way of placing literary works and
forms squarely at the center of attention, and of focusing on the novel itself.
That is the purpose of this discussion on the art of composition.

INTERVIEWER

You have said that you feel closer to the Viennese novelists Robert Musil and
Hermann Broch than to any other authors in modern literature. Broch thought
as you dothat the age of the psychological novel had come to an end. He
believed, instead, in what he called the polyhistorical novel.

MILAN KUNDERA

Musil and Broch saddled the novel with enormous responsibilities. They saw it
as the supreme intellectual synthesis, the last place where man could still
question the world as a whole. They were convinced that the novel had
tremendous synthetic power, that it could be poetry, fantasy, philosophy,
aphorism, and essay all rolled into one. In his letters, Broch makes some
profound observations on this issue. However, it seems to me that he obscures
his own intentions by using the ill-chosen term polyhistorical novel. It was in
fact Brochs compatriot, Adalbert Stifter, a classic of Austrian prose, who
created a truly polyhistorical novel in his Der Nachsommer [Indian Summer],
published in 1857. The novel is famous: Nietzsche considered it to be one of the
four greatest works of German literature. Today, it is unreadable. Its packed
with information about geology, botany, zoology, the crafts, painting, and
architecture; but this gigantic, uplifting encyclopedia virtually leaves out man
himself, and his situation. Precisely because it is polyhistorical, Der
Nachsommer totally lacks what makes the novel special. This is not the case
with Broch. On the contrary! He strove to discover that which the novel alone
can discover. The specific object of what Broch liked to call novelistic
knowledge is existence. In my view, the word polyhistorical must be defined
as that which brings together every device and every form of knowledge in
order to shed light on existence. Yes, I do feel close to such an approach.

INTERVIEWER

A long essay you published in the magazine Le Nouvel Observateur caused the
French to rediscover Broch. You speak highly of him, and yet you are also
critical. At the end of the essay, you write: All great works (just because they
are great) are partly incomplete.

KUNDERA

Broch is an inspiration to us not only because of what he accomplished, but also

because of all that he aimed at and could not attain. The very incompleteness
of his work can help us understand the need for new art forms, including: (1) a
radical stripping away of unessentials (in order to capture the complexity of
existence in the modern world without a loss of architectonic clarity); (2)
novelistic counterpoint (to unite philosophy, narrative, and dream into a single

music); (3) the specifically novelistic essay (in other words, instead of claiming
to convey some apodictic message, remaining hypothetical, playful, or ironic).

INTERVIEWER

These three points seem to capture your entire artistic program.

KUNDERA

In order to make the novel into a polyhistorical illumination of existence, you

need to master the technique of ellipsis, the art of condensation. Otherwise, you
fall into the trap of endless length. Musils The Man Without Qualities is one of
the two or three novels that I love most. But dont ask me to admire its gigantic
unfinished expanse! Imagine a castle so huge that the eye cannot take it all in
at a glance. Imagine a string quartet that lasts nine hours. There are
anthropological limitshuman proportionsthat should not be breached, such
as the limits of memory. When you have finished reading, you should still be
able to remember the beginning. If not, the novel loses its shape, its
architectonic clarity becomes murky.

INTERVIEWER

The Book of Laughter and Forgetting is made up of seven parts. If you had dealt
with them in a less elliptical fashion, you could have written seven different fulllength novels.

KUNDERA

But if I had written seven independent novels, I would have lost the most
important thing: I wouldnt have been able to capture the complexity of human
existence in the modern world in a single book. The art of ellipsis is absolutely
essential. It requires that one always go directly to the heart of things. In this
connection, I always think of a Czech composer I have passionately admired
since childhood: Leo Janek. He is one of the greatest masters of modern

music. His determination to strip music to its essentials was revolutionary. Of

course, every musical composition involves a great deal of technique:
exposition of the themes, their development, variations, polyphonic work (often
very automatic), filling in the orchestration, the transitions, et cetera. Today one
can compose music with a computer, but the computer always existed in
composers headsif they had to, composers could write sonatas without a
single original idea, just by cybernetically expanding on the rules of
composition. Janeks purpose was to destroy this computer! Brutal
juxtaposition instead of transitions; repetition instead of variationand always
straight to the heart of things: only the note with something essential to say is
entitled to exist. It is nearly the same with the novel; it too is encumbered by
technique, by rules that do the authors work for him: present a character,
describe a milieu, bring the action into its historical setting, fill up the lifetime of
the characters with useless episodes. Every change of scene requires new
expositions, descriptions, explanations. My purpose is like Janeks: to rid the
novel of the automatism of novelistic technique, of novelistic word-spinning.

INTERVIEWER

The second art form you mentioned was novelistic counterpoint.

KUNDERA

The idea of the novel as a great intellectual synthesis almost automatically

raises the problem of polyphony. This problem still has to be resolved. Take
the third part of Brochs novel The Sleepwalkers; it is made up of five
heterogeneous elements: (1) novelistic narrative based on the three main
characters: Pasenow, Esch, Huguenau; (2) the personal story of Hanna
Wendling; (3) factual description of life in a military hospital; (4) a narrative
(partly in verse) of a Salvation Army girl; (5) a philosophical essay (written in
scientific language) on the debasement of values. Each part is magnificent. Yet
despite the fact that they are all dealt with simultaneously, in constant
alternation (in other words, in a polyphonic manner), the five elements remain
disunitedin other words, they do not constitute a true polyphony.

INTERVIEWER

By using the metaphor of polyphony and applying it to literature, do you not in

fact make demands on the novel that it cannot possibly live up to?

KUNDERA

The novel can incorporate outside elements in two ways. In the course of his
travels, Don Quixote meets various characters who tell him their tales. In this
way, independent stories are inserted into the whole, fitted into the frame of the
novel. This type of composition is often found in seventeenth- and eighteenthcentury novels. Broch, however, instead of fitting the story of Hanna Wendling
into the main story of Esch and Huguenau, lets both unfold simultaneously.
Sartre (in The Reprieve), and Dos Passos before him, also used this technique of
simultaneity. Their aim, however, was to bring together different novelistic
stories, in other words, homogeneous rather than heterogeneous elements as in
the case of Broch. Moreover, their use of this technique strikes me as too
mechanical and devoid of poetry. I cannot think of better terms than
polyphony or counterpoint to describe this form of composition and,
furthermore, the musical analogy is a useful one. For instance, the first thing
that bothers me about the third part of The Sleepwalkers is that the five
elements are not all equal. Whereas the equality of all the voices in musical
counterpoint is the basic ground rule, the sine qua non. In Brochs work, the first
element (the novelistic narrative of Esch and Huguenau) takes up much more
physical space than the other elements, and, even more important, it is
privileged insofar as it is linked to the two preceding parts of the novel and
therefore assumes the task of unifying it. It therefore attracts more attention
and threatens to turn the other elements into mere accompaniment. The
second thing that bothers me is that though a fugue by Bach cannot do without
any one of its voices, the story of Hanna Wendling or the essay on the decline of
values could very well stand alone as an independent work. Taken separately,
they would lose nothing of their meaning or of their quality.

In my view, the basic requirements of novelistic counterpoint are: (1) the

equality of the various elements; (2) the indivisibility of the whole. I remember
that the day I finished The Angels, part three of The Book of Laughter and
Forgetting, I was terribly proud of myself. I was sure that I had discovered the
key to a new way of putting together a narrative. The text was made up of the
following elements: (1) an anecdote about two female students and their
levitation; (2) an autobiographical narrative; (3) a critical essay on a feminist
book; (4) a fable about an angel and the devil; (5) a dream-narrative of Paul
Eluard flying over Prague. None of these elements could exist without the
others, each one illuminates and explains the others as they all explore a single
theme and ask a single question: What is an angel?

Part six, also entitled The Angels, is made up of: (1) a dream-narrative of
Taminas death; (2) an autobiographical narrative of my fathers death; (3)
musicological reflections; (4) reflections on the epidemic of forgetting that is
devastating Prague. What is the link between my father and the torturing of
Tamina by children? It is the meeting of a sewing machine and an umbrella on
the table of one theme, to borrow Lautramonts famous image. Novelistic
polyphony is poetry much more than technique. I can find no example of such
polyphonic poetry elsewhere in literature, but I have been very astonished by
Alain Resnaiss latest films. His use of the art of counterpoint is admirable.

INTERVIEWER

Counterpoint is less apparent in The Unbearable Lightness of Being.

KUNDERA

That was my aim. There, I wanted dream, narrative, and reflection to flow
together in an indivisible and totally natural stream. But the polyphonic
character of the novel is very striking in part six: the story of Stalins son,
theological reflections, a political event in Asia, Franzs death in Bangkok, and
Tomass funeral in Bohemia are all linked by the same everlasting question:
What is kitsch? This polyphonic passage is the pillar that supports the entire
structure of the novel. It is the key to the secret of its architecture.

INTERVIEWER

By calling for a specifically novelistic essay, you expressed several

reservations about the essay on the debasement of values which appeared in
The Sleepwalkers.

KUNDERA

It is a terrific essay!

INTERVIEWER

You have doubts about the way it is incorporated into the novel. Broch
relinquishes none of his scientific language, he expresses his views in a
straightforward way without hiding behind one of his charactersthe way Mann
or Musil would do. Isnt that Brochs real contribution, his new challenge?

KUNDERA

That is true, and he was well aware of his own courage. But there is also a risk:
his essay can be read and understood as the ideological key to the novel, as its
Truth, and that could transform the rest of the novel into a mere illustration of
a thought. Then the novels equilibrium is upset; the truth of the essay becomes
too heavy and the novels subtle architecture is in danger of collapsing. A novel
that had no intention of expounding a philosophical thesis (Broch loathed that
type of novel!) may wind up being read in exactly that way. How does one
incorporate an essay into the novel? It is important to have one basic fact in
mind: the very essence of reflection changes the minute it is included in the
body of a novel. Outside of the novel, one is in the realm of assertions:
everyone's philosopher, politician, conciergeis sure of what he says. The
novel, however, is a territory where one does not make assertions; it is a
territory of play and of hypotheses. Reflection within the novel is hypothetical
by its very essence.

INTERVIEWER

But why would a novelist want to deprive himself of the right to express his
philosophy overtly and assertively in his novel?

KUNDERA

Because he has none! People often talk about Chekhovs philosophy, or Kafkas,
or Musils. But just try to find a coherent philosophy in their writings! Even when
they express their ideas in their notebooks, the ideas amount to intellectual

exercises, playing with paradoxes, or improvisations rather than to assertions of

a philosophy. And philosophers who write novels are nothing but
pseudonovelists who use the form of the novel in order to illustrate their ideas.
Neither Voltaire nor Camus ever discovered that which the novel alone can
discover. I know of only one exception, and that is the Diderot of Jacques le
fataliste. What a miracle! Having crossed over the boundary of the novel, the
serious philosopher becomes a playful thinker. There is not one serious
sentence in the noveleverything in it is play. Thats why this novel is
outrageously underrated in France. Indeed, Jacques le fataliste contains
everything that France has lost and refuses to recover. In France, ideas are
preferred to works. Jacques le fataliste cannot be translated into the language of
ideas, and therefore it cannot be understood in the homeland of ideas.

INTERVIEWER

In The Joke, it is Jaroslav who develops a musicological theory. The hypothetical

character of his thinking is thus apparent. But the musicological meditations in
The Book of Laughter and Forgetting are the authors, your own. How am I then
to understand whether they are hypothetical or assertive?

KUNDERA

It all depends on the tone. From the very first words, my intention is to give
these reflections a playful, ironic, provocative, experimental, or questioning
tone. All of part six of The Unbearable Lightness of Being (The Grand March) is
an essay on kitsch which expounds one main thesis: kitsch is the absolute
denial of the existence of shit. This meditation on kitsch is of vital importance to
me. It is based on a great deal of thought, experience, study, and even passion.
Yet the tone is never serious; it is provocative. This essay is unthinkable outside
of the novel, it is a purely novelistic meditation.

INTERVIEWER

The polyphony of your novels also includes another element, dream-narrative. It

takes up the entire second part of Life Is Elsewhere, it is the basis of the sixth
part of The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, and it runs through The
Unbearable Lightness of Being by way of Terezas dreams.

KUNDERA

These passages are also the easiest ones to misunderstand, because people
want to find some symbolic message in them. There is nothing to decipher in
Terezas dreams. They are poems about death. Their meaning lies in their
beauty, which hypnotizes Tereza. By the way, do you realize that people dont
know how to read Kafka simply because they want to decipher him? Instead of
letting themselves be carried away by his unequaled imagination, they look for
allegories and come up with nothing but clichs: life is absurd (or it is not
absurd), God is beyond reach (or within reach), et cetera. You can understand
nothing about art, particularly modern art, if you do not understand that
imagination is a value in itself. Novalis knew that when he praised dreams. They
protect us against lifes monotony, he said, they liberate us from seriousness
by the delight of their games. He was the first to understand the role that
dreams and a dreamlike imagination could play in the novel. He planned to
write the second volume of his Heinrich von Ofterdingen as a narrative in which
dream and reality would be so intertwined that one would no longer be able to
tell them apart. Unfortunately, all that remains of that second volume are the
notes in which Novalis described his aesthetic intention. One hundred years
later, his ambition was fulfilled by Kafka. Kafkas novels are a fusion of dream
and reality; that is, they are neither dream nor reality. More than anything,
Kafka brought about an aesthetic revolution. An aesthetic miracle. Of course, no
one can repeat what he did. But I share with him, and with Novalis, the desire to
bring dreams, and the imagination of dreams, into the novel. My way of doing
so is by polyphonic confrontation rather than by a fusion of dream and reality.
Dream-narrative is one of the elements of counterpoint.

INTERVIEWER

There is nothing polyphonic about the last part of The Book of Laughter and
Forgetting, and yet that is probably the most interesting part of the book. It is
made up of fourteen chapters that recount erotic situations in the life of one
manJan.

KUNDERA

Another musical term: this narrative is a theme with variations. The theme is
the border beyond which things lose their meaning. Our life unfolds in the
immediate vicinity of that border, and we risk crossing it at any moment. The
fourteen chapters are fourteen variations of the same situation's eroticism at
the border between meaning and meaninglessness.

INTERVIEWER

You have described The Book of Laughter and Forgetting as a novel in the form
of variations. But is it still a novel?

KUNDERA

There is no unity of action, which is why it does not look like a novel. People
cant imagine a novel without that unity. Even the experiments of the nouveau
roman were based on unity of action (or of nonaction). Sterne and Diderot had
amused themselves by making the unity extremely fragile. The journey of
Jacques and his master takes up the lesser part of Jacques le fataliste; its
nothing more than a comic pretext in which to fit anecdotes, stories, thoughts.
Nevertheless, this pretext, this frame, is necessary to make the novel feel like
a novel. In The Book of Laughter and Forgetting there is no longer any such
pretext. Its the unity of the themes and their variations that gives coherence to
the whole. Is it a novel? Yes. A novel is a meditation on existence, seen through
imaginary characters. The form is unlimited freedom. Throughout its history, the
novel has never known how to take advantage of its endless possibilities. It
missed its chance.

INTERVIEWER

But except for The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, your novels are also based
on unity of action, although it is indeed of a much looser variety in The
Unbearable Lightness of Being.

KUNDERA

Yes, but other more important sorts of unity complete them: the unity of the
same metaphysical questions, of the same motifs and then variations (the motif
of paternity in The Farewell Party, for instance). But I would like to stress above
all that the novel is primarily built on a number of fundamental words, like
Schoenbergs series of notes. In The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, the series
is the following: forgetting, laughter, angels, litost, the border. In the course of
the novel these five key words are analyzed, studied, defined, redefined, and
thus transformed into categories of existence. It is built on these few categories
in the same way as a house is built on its beams. The beams of The Unbearable
Lightness of Being are: weight, lightness, the soul, the body, the Grand March,
shit, kitsch, compassion, vertigo, strength, and weakness. Because of their
categorical character, these words cannot be replaced by synonyms. This
always has to be explained over and over again to translators, whoin their
concern for good styleseek to avoid repetition.

INTERVIEWER

Regarding the architectural clarity, I was struck by the fact that all of your
novels, except for one, are divided into seven parts.

KUNDERA

When I had finished my first novel, The Joke, there was no reason to be
surprised that it had seven parts. Then I wrote Life Is Elsewhere. The novel was
almost finished and it had six parts. I didnt feel satisfied. Suddenly I had the
idea of including a story that takes place three years after the heros deathin
other words, outside the time frame of the novel. This now became the sixth
part of seven, entitled The Middle-Aged Man. Immediately, the novels
architecture had become perfect. Later on, I realized that this sixth part was
oddly analogous to the sixth part of The Joke (Kostka), which also introduces
an outside character, and also opens a secret window in the novels wall.
Laughable Loves started out as ten short stories. Putting together the final
version, I eliminated three of them. The collection had become very coherent,
foreshadowing the composition of The Book of Laughter and Forgetting. One
character, Doctor Havel, ties the fourth and sixth stories together. In The Book
of Laughter and Forgetting, the fourth and sixth parts are also linked by the
same person: Tamina. When I wrote The Unbearable Lightness of Being, I was
determined to break the spell of the number of seven. I had long since decided
on a six-part outline. But the first part always struck me as shapeless. Finally, I
understood that it was really made up of two parts. Like Siamese twins, they

had to be separated by delicate surgery. The only reason I mention all this is to
show that I am not indulging in some superstitious affectation about magic
numbers, nor making a rational calculation. Rather, I am driven by a deep,
unconscious, incomprehensible need, a formal archetype from which I cannot
escape. All of my novels are variants of an architecture based on the number
seven.

INTERVIEWER

The use of seven neatly divided parts is certainly linked to your goal of
synthesizing the most heterogeneous elements into a unified whole. Each part
of your novel is always a world of its own, and is distinct from the others
because of its special form. But if the novel is divided into numbered parts, why
must the parts themselves also be divided into numbered chapters?

KUNDERA

The chapters themselves must also create a little world of their own; they must
be relatively independent. That is why I keep pestering my publishers to make
sure that the numbers are clearly visible and that the chapters are well
separated. The chapters are like the measures of a musical score! There are
parts where the measures (chapters) are long, others where they are short, still
others where they are of irregular length. Each part could have a musical tempo
indication: moderato, presto, andante, et cetera. Part six of Life Is Elsewhere is
andante: in a calm, melancholy manner, it tells of the brief encounter between
a middle-aged man and a young girl who has just been released from prison.
The last part is prestissimo; it is written in very short chapters, and jumps from
the dying Jaromil to Rimbaud, Lermontov, and Pushkin. I first thought of The
Unbearable Lightness of Being in a musical way. I knew that the last part had to
be pianissimo and lento: it focuses on a rather short, uneventful period, in a
single location, and the tone is quiet. I also knew that this part had to be
preceded by a prestissimo: that is the part entitled The Grand March.

INTERVIEWER

There is an exception to the rule of the number seven. There are only five parts
to The Farewell Party.

KUNDERA

The Farewell Party is based on another formal archetype: it is absolutely

homogeneous, deals with one subject, is told in one tempo; it is very theatrical,
stylized, and derives its form from the farce. In Laughable Loves, the story
entitled The Symposium is built exactly the same waya farce in five acts.

INTERVIEWER

What do you mean by farce?

KUNDERA

I mean the emphasis on plot and on all its trappings of unexpected and
incredible coincidences. Nothing has become as suspect, ridiculous, oldfashioned, trite, and tasteless in a novel as plot and its farcical exaggerations.
From Flaubert on, novelists have tried to do away with the artifices of plot. And
so the novel has become duller than the dullest of lives. Yet there is another
way to get around the suspect and worn-out aspect of the plot, and that is to
free it from the requirement of likelihood. You tell an unlikely story that chooses
to be unlikely! Thats exactly how Kafka conceived Amerika. The way Karl meets
his uncle in the first chapter is through a series of the most unlikely
coincidences. Kafka entered into his first sur-real universe, into his first fusion
of dream and reality, with a parody of the plotthrough the door of farce.

INTERVIEWER

But why did you choose the farce form for a novel that is not at all meant to be
an entertainment?

KUNDERA

But it is an entertainment! I dont understand the contempt that the French

have for entertainment, why they are so ashamed of the word divertissement.
They run less risk of being entertaining than of being boring. And they also run
the risk of falling for kitsch, that sweetish, lying embellishment of things, the
rose-colored light that bathes even such modernist works as Eluards poetry or
Ettore Scolas recent film Le Bal, whose subtitle could be: French history as
kitsch. Yes, kitsch, not entertainment, is the real aesthetic disease! The great
European novel started out as entertainment, and every true novelist is
nostalgic for it. In fact, the themes of those great entertainments are terribly
seriousthink of Cervantes! In The Farewell Party, the question is, does man
deserve to live on this earth? Shouldnt one free the planet from mans
clutches? My lifetime ambition has been to unite the utmost seriousness of
question with the utmost lightness of form. Nor is this purely an artistic
ambition. The combination of a frivolous form and a serious subject immediately
unmasks the truth about our dramas (those that occur in our beds as well as
those that we play out on the great stage of History) and their awful
insignificance. We experience the unbearable lightness of being.

INTERVIEWER

So you could just as well have used the title of your latest novel for The Farewell
Party?

KUNDERA

Every one of my novels could be entitled The Unbearable Lightness of Being or

The Joke or Laughable Loves; the titles are interchangeable, they reflect the
small number of themes that obsess me, define me, and, unfortunately, restrict
me. Beyond these themes, I have nothing else to say or to write.

INTERVIEWER

There are, then, two formal archetypes of composition in your novels: (1)
polyphony, which unites heterogeneous elements into an architecture based on
the number seven; (2) farce, which is homogeneous, theatrical, and skirts the
unlikely. Could there be a Kundera outside of these two archetypes?

KUNDERA

I always dream of some great unexpected infidelity. But I have not yet been able
to escape my bigamous state.