The Third Alternative Interview with Jonathan Carroll
conducted by Andrew Hedgecock
final version in issue 34 (May 2003) of the Third
Alternative Magazine
- 1.
I read somewhere that you grew up in a family in which whose members
had a wide range of religious perspectives. To what extent did this
array of moral perspectives – and the rich mosaic of narratives
and symbols underpinning them – inform the development of your
visionary and richly symbolic stories? Did it make a particular contribution
to the complex mythos underpinning White Apples?
One of my brothers is an orthodox Jew, the other a Sufi, my mother and sister are Christian Scientists. The fact that everyone in my family got on their horses and rode off in all directions (as far as religion is concerned) is interesting but I don’t think it affected me too much in any way. I like to talk to my brothers and sister about their world views, but their different perspectives are theirs, not mine. I was sent off to boarding school when I was 15 and never really went home again, so at that point my family became my pals rather than my influences.
2. From what I’ve read you have an enormous attachment to certain American cities, so what led you to settle in Vienna? In what ways has your experience of living and working in Vienna fed into your work? Are you conscious of American and European influences that have fed into the development of your voice as a writer?
I came to Vienna almost thirty years ago because I was offered a job teaching at the American International School here. After six months in Vienna I realized how happy and comfortable I was here and that was that—I stayed. I do love certain American cities, New York and Seattle in particular, and was re-enchanted by them once again when I did a book tour of the US last fall. But home is where you are most comfortable and if you are lucky enough to find that in your life, hold on tight. Don’t even move apartments or else you might jiggle the ju-ju that’s brought you the happiness there. I’m half joking, half not. People often ask if I’ll be moving back to America. I always shrug and say, I guess-- someday. Influences? We’re influenced by everything we live and know. Vienna surrounds me, as does Europe. But I am an American living far away from what was once home and that too has an effect. I don’t try to analyze it much. If it ain’t broke, don’t try to fix it. Both my supporters and detractors say my work is very obviously European but I have no idea any more—I’ve lost all perspective with those sorts of things.
2. On a related note, your work is full of splendidly realised locations: can you tell me about any places that have a particular emotional resonance for you?
I love Manhattan because it is like walking around inside a human heart pumped full of adrenalin. You cannot help but be stimulated and affected by the life there. Particularly if you come from Vienna where, truth be told, human volume is usually turned pretty low. Seattle is an astonishing combination of mountains and sea and you are lucky enough to be caught in the middle, wherever you turn when you are living in almost preternatural beauty. On this side of the Atlantic, I would say Greece, anywhere in Greece, because it always heals me and makes me quiet inside. And any Viennese café is and always will be home to me. Even the dumpiest dump.
3. I read a piece in which you were quite critical of John Irving for the icy ‘knowingness’ of his work: what irritates you about this tendency in ‘literary’ fiction? And to what extent do you feel writers have a responsibility to engage honestly with the human condition and its discontents?
Irving has re-written GARP for the past twenty years. He just puts different shaped hats on it each time and calls it a different story, but it isn’t. GARP was a wonderful book, the ones that followed weren’t. Irving plays a dishonest game in his work. On the one hand, he wants us to care about the fates of his characters, On the other hand, he wants to be wild and wacky outrageous and naughty, so his characters do ridiculous, unbelievable things like bite dicks off while giving blowjobs, get their hands eaten by tigers, or hide in a closet and take notes while watching a whore do her job. He wants us to believe and care for these people, yet he wants us to laugh at them and la comedie humaine. But it’s not the human comedy the way he portrays it—it’s silly people doing silly things or having silly things happen to them for bathetic effect. In the end, I don’t care about his people and I think no matter what you’re writing, you must make readers care for your characters.
4. You are one of several contemporary writers who have revivified the ‘traditional’ tale of the afterlife: in an era where instrumental reason holds sway in so many areas of life, why do we still want to read and write stories around this theme?
Let’s face it, that’s the only question that matters. Life, love, the pursuit of happiness are all performing in the outside rings of the 3 ring circus. Center ring—where do we go when we die? Because that question and the answers affect everything else. Most people don’t want to think about it though because it makes them deeply uncomfortable and frightened. But I would bet that they think about it a lot more than they admit simply because it is where we are going and where we will end up. Period. End of discussion.
5. What drew you to the fantastic as a form? Are there features of contemporary life that demand a visionary frame of reference? Will the fantastic form continue to provide you with the means to tackle your concerns and obsessions?
I wasn’t drawn to the fantastic at all. I simply told the stories that mattered to me. I distinctly remember when I wrote THE LAND OF LAUGHS and came to the section where the dog talks for the first time. The dog talked before I had a chance to stop it and my reaction was not—what the hell—dogs don’t talk. It was Okay, let’s see where this goes. It has been the same with every book that I’ve written since then, whether they were full of fantasy or strictly realistic. I let them choose their direction and never said—not there, over here. I let them determine it and simply followed, interested to see where they’d lead me this time. I have no idea whether the next book I write will continue to be fantastical or not. And I like that mystery very much.
6. Your books have made fascinating use of ‘traditional’ folk themes and story strands: are there myths and traditional stories that have a particular particularly strongly in your life? If so which of them have captured your imagination – and how have they informed your work?
No, there are none that come to mind as being particularly important to me. I love the fact that certain stories and myths have been told and retold all over the world down the years and still have resonance literally thousands of years later in some cases. In my work I use anything that works towards what I am trying to do. If it is the story of Rumpelstilskin, then so be it. What fascinated me about that fairy tale was it seemed to me so obviously a story about love and fatherhood. Yet no one I’d ever read or encountered had ever interpreted it that way or written about it from that perspective. So I stole the story and tried to do just that—re-tell it from the point of a dangerously doting father.
7. In White Apples, Isabelle’s Orpheus-like retrieval of her urban Eurydice (Vincent) from purgatory seems to tie in to a rich thematic seam in your work: many of your characters experience a symbolic descent to hell. Why are physical and/or psychic underworlds so central to your work?
Because we so often create our own Hells and live in them. Unaware of the fact that we raised their walls and chose the color scheme, we keep shouting I don’t deserve this, let me out of here when we were the ones who made it all in the first place. Sartre said Hell is other people. I tend to think Hell, or the underworld, is often our own doing and we know that, but we don’t WANT to know it because it means we are our own undoing and that is very dangerous.
8. Your characters often experience chaotic and arbitrary upheavals in their lives, while your approach to storytelling is laconic, structured (whether linear or non-linear) and (I hope you’re not offended by the term) traditional. To what extent are you setting your tight, compelling narratives in opposition to the chaos and senselessness of contemporary life?
I love to drop characters into situations which defy reason and the laws they abided by up until five seconds ago. Situations where dogs talk, God appears, aliens drive ambulances, or suddenly we realize we died but are now back in exactly the same life we once had. The question then is how will these people behave faced with those profound realizations/obstacles? Push individuals to extremes way beyond the norm, and you see a great deal about both the good and the bad of human behaviour. When I was a boy I went to a survival school called Outward Bound. Early on, our instructors (a rough lot of ex-soldiers, mountain guides and generally mysteriously shady characters) said, when the going gets tough you’re going to see who are the good ones and who are the bad of your fellow students. And that really was true. So I make the going rough for my people beyond the normal three dimensions and then see which of them float and which sink.
9. Many of your stories centre on the human longing to escape quotidian existence – our yearning for transcendence and contact with the numinous. What draws you to this material? And how has dealing with it affected the way you have approached your fiction (in terms of form, style and approach)?
In one of my books, a character says “I want to live a Prime Time life.” Whether we admit to it or not, we all want to live Prime Time lives but few of us do. Some are held back by fate or life circumstance, others by their own limitations or wrong choices. What’s interesting to me is many, perhaps even most, people would rather live that Prime Time life than gain enlightenment of any sort. They’d rather be on the cover of a glossy magazine than realize certain big truths or move up the psychic food chain. As a result I often try to create characters and stories that go against that grain and deal consciously with larger issues, whether they be God or Death or whatever. Tolstoy said all real art should be moral; it should show us a way towards the light. I agree with that and the first time I read it I remember saying “Yes!” very loudly. He told me what I’d been trying to do all along but just hadn’t figured it out yet.
10. Mike Moorcock called you a “moral visionary”. Do you accept this take on your work? If so, to what extent do your stories tackle the human capacity for evil and folly?
Michael Moorcock could call me a slimy worm and I would be grateful that he had even noticed me, much less the books I’m writing. As I mentioned before, I think there really does come a time when we have to wrestle with the big issues, the real issues. You can do it late or early. But most people who do it late do it under the sword of Damocles of life threatening illness or something else ominous. Better to start thinking about it while we’re healthy and clear mentally and whole. To figure out for yourself what is really good or bad is an achievement. But to do it honestly takes really hard work and a lot of thought. Not many people are willing to spend the time or the effort and I think that’s wrong because those things are all that ultimately matter. I’m lucky because those matters interest me and I’ve been blessed enough to be paid to think about them on paper. David Hare says all writers “write about what bites them” and this is what bites me.
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Copyright © 2003 The Third Alternative
