junho 30, 2004
Um dia, um dia
MA: The notion of a "Life in Four Books" presupposes a linear progress, yet Lanark is not constructed in a traditionally linear way, moving as it does from book 3 to prologue to book 1 to interlude to book 2 to book 4 and an epilogue. How do you harmonize the artificially constructed life of the novel with the "real lives" of Lanark and Thaw?
AG: I felt no need to harmonize them. I yoked the bits together and expected the reader's interest to flow over all, as my imagination had done.
MA: Both Joseph Campbell and Mircea Eliade speak of quests as a kind of "enlightened return" unlike Nietzsche's "eternal return" which is divorced from any kind of spiritual enlightenment. A number of novels of character, The Stranger, The Sorrows of Young Werther, Hunger, have elements of this quest motif. Lanark too seems bent on a quest. Did you have such a notion in mind when you wrote the novel and if so what was Lanark's quest?
AG: The quest was to find more love and sunlight. He gets them on the last two pages.
(...)
MA: I read somewhere that you declare you have no religion, yet a character like Duncan struggles with the Judeo-Christian perplexities of God. How do you reconcile that in your writing?
AG: I don't reconcile it. I present it by (sometimes) describing a Thaw, a Lanark, a Jock McLeish haunted by an idea of God, which I am sure haunts many modern people without congregations who, doubting the eternity of mere selfish chaos, feel the possibility of eternal goodness.
(...)
MA: You've been lumped in the group of postmodern novelists. I've always had a problem with who is and who isn't a postmodern writer especially in light of such pre-postmodern writers as Sterne, de Maistre, Diderot, Machado de Assis, etc. It's been said that your novels have "a modish, often naive urge simply to flirt with fashionable styles, or to flaunt a new, post postmodern pretentiousness." What's your opinion of that?
AG: Like you, I have never found a definition of postmodernism that gives me a distinct idea of it. If the main characteristic is an author who describes himself as a character in his work, then Dante, Chaucer, Langland, and Wordsworth are as postmodern as James Joyce, who is merely modern. The opinion you quote does not say whether the critic who uttered it enjoys my fiction, though the verbs flirt and flaunt, the adjectives modish and naive culminating in the thunderous postmodern pretentiousness sound disapproving. But they also suggest I am the prose equivalent of new nursery wallpaper, which at best contradicts the notion that I'm gloomily apocalyptic.
Eu amo o Alasdair Gray.
Por Daniel Pellizzari em junho 30, 2004 4:07 PM
