Interviewcontinued
- You like the sound and structure of words and have created some of your own, such as 'nemonymous', 'wordmonger', 'megazanthus' and 'wordonimous' to mention a few, and I know you are a fan of Proust. Do you prefer to read a story whose form is based more on style and structure than basic story-telling? And do you like to read/write poetry?
Another paradox! I started creatively-writing in the late sixties (when I was 19ish) and wrote loads of stuff that I actually called poems. I studied TS Eliot (a long time favourite of mine) at University in 1968, and WB Yeats, and I admire Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath etc. I suppose I'm a poet, at heart. It was exposure (early on) to HP Lovecraft (accidentally through a friend at school who later went on to edit mass-market Horror anthologies in the early seventies) and to reading Charles Dickens, all of which made me a 'poet fictioneer' (a new term I just invented - and you heard it here first!) - although I spent most of my youth reading Enid Blyton and Biggles books in the Fifties and early Sixties. When did I change? Unfathomable. Probably reading 'Little Dorritt' by Dickens in 63 (?).
But to answer your question properly, the sound and structure of words are, for me, all-important and intrinsic to plot and feeling - and a plot without feeling is not a proper plot, in my opinion. Story-telling is merely fabricated if it has no feeling or texture. Just as cinema films are fabricated if all you can imagine are the cameras and the actors' voice coaches! Proust? Yes I read the big Proust novel twice over a couple of two year periods (one period in the early seventies and the other very recently) - which is another paradox, in a way, because I read him in translation! Incidentally, I had a dream before that second Proust reading which stirred me to read it all over again: a dream that I had escaped from a house fire rather belatedly after all the other inhabitants - by the skin of my teeth - and when asked about this, I admitted that I had been in the middle of reading a sentence by Proust!
- If the opportunity came along, would you like to see your own stories translated or would you be concerned about the loss of e.g. carefully formulated sentence structure, style, the impact of certain English words, the personal meaning and essence behind each story?
Well the odd story by me has been translated (into Japanese & Serbian as two examples, and soon to be a story in Czech). And the whole process of translation fascinates me. I know I ought to worry about reading translations ... bearing in mind my literary 'purism'!
But here are my four equations:
(1) Fiction/Poem = Original Text placed in the audience arena.
(2) What can be taken from or given to the text = reader's 'opinion' or 'reaction' (manifold opinions and reactions, all different and unknowable).
(3) The nearer one is able to reach towards the noumenon of the text = the more one can shuffle off the variable misleading and unknowable historical, biographical, critical, academic extrapolations of the text.
(4)Poet/Author of Fiction/Poem in (1) above = Just another ordinary reader with fallible rights to describe/interpret/evaluate the text, i.e. after it has been placed in the audience arena as a sacrosanct 'sculpture' or entity of creativity.
And each set of equations is triggered anew by a revision of the text etc., which would include a translation. In other words, the translation becomes a brand new equation (1) and that fact sits comfortably with me.
- That's a really interesting way of looking at it. So do you think the audience/reader gives as much to a story as they take out? By this I mean in the way a work of art often depends on its audience to evaluate and assess it for personal meaning. A short story is less abstract than a work of art, of course, but each person who reads it must get something different out of it.
Yes, exactly. Meanwhile, we should Chase the Noumenon! An endless threading of the maze of all those facets of the prose I mentioned before (phonetic, semantic, syntactic, graphologic) - but now, following our line of argument in this interview, we also have a multi-extrapolative ingredient: that pattern or map of evaluations and interpretations that radiate from the text like an aura, often invisible, often glimpsed, often mistaken for something else.
Perhaps I'm getting carried away here! But interviews can surely brainstorm wildly as well as focus on seeking logical truths. How apt this seems when we are indeed talking about fiction, here! The art of fiction is not only about the fiction itself but about the fiction about fiction, too. I see it as stuff written by someone else where the extrapolative 'map' is yet unexplored, even by myself. Sorry...! Next question (append 'smiley' here).