“My Goodness, These Are Very Deep Questions You’€™re Asking Me. Why Don’€™t You Ask Me What My Favorite Color Is, Or My Favorite Pop Group?”

Wonderful thoughtful interview with John Banville about his new book The Infinities. I would listen to him talk about his favorite pop group, for sure. I would listen to him tell me his grocery list. If you go back through my archives, I have probably linked to interviews with John Banville more than anything else. (Here, here, here… but the list goes on).

I love his writing (the Banville books, as well as the Benjamin Black books), and I love the connections I have with him and my father – he was probably my father’s favorite living author – and I love that Banville seems to see his art as something that is, well, fun. Even though if you read something like his Booker-award winning novel The Sea you would be forgiven if you thought that Banville could very well be the most depressed person on the face of the planet. But he’s not. He’s an artist. He’s fluid and flexible with that art. He’s a creator.

I also feel that his pseudonym Benjamin Black, the writer who writes Dublin noir-style crime stories, has set him free, although I don’t think he sees his Banville books as drudgery. It’s almost like a great tragic actor deciding to do Importance of Being Earnest in summer stock, before going back to play Macbeth in Stratford the following fall. It’s all the same actor, same commitment, but there is a certain feeling of release that seems to come when you don’t feel the need to rip your guts out. It’s a BREAK, a necessary palate cleanser. Banville talks about this quite openly. A new Benjamin Black is coming out and Banville says about it:

I have a new novel coming out shortly under Benjamin Black’s name. It’s a completely different discipline. I like doing it, it’s an inglorious craftwork that I enjoy immensely. And yes, I’ll keep doing it. It’s an adventure I’ve embarked on, and whether I’m making a mistake or otherwise, I don’t know.

If you go back and read all of the MOUNTAINS of press that Christine Falls got, and every subsequent Benjamin Black book got, you’ll find the interviews with Banville – known as a “serious” novelist – and in every interview there is that tone to it. It’s an adventure. There is no grand master plan. He wanted to break out of the shackles of what he felt was his other fiction, so he created this alter-ego writer and got to work, and blew through his manuscript at lightning speed.

You can feel how much FUN he has with this crazy gift he has been given, this writing gift.

For example:

What kills art is solemnity. Art is always serious but never, never solemn. Good art recognizes, as I say, our peculiar predicament in the world, that we’re suspended in this extraordinary place, we don’t know what it’s for or why we’re here. We know vaguely, but there is no answer to it. It’s simply that by just some chance of evolution we evolved beyond the animals, we got consciousness of death, which goes back to the beginning of our conversation, gives all life its flavor. This is peculiar to us, so far as we know. Who knows, the animals may know that they’re dying but it doesn’t shape their lives in the way that consciousness of death shapes ours. But art, as I say, has to be light, it has to be frivolous, and it has to be superficial in the best sense of these words. Nietzsche says upon the surface, that’s where the real depth is, and I think that’s true. I never speculate, I never psychologize, I just present, so far as I can, the evidence—this is what one sees, this is how the world looks, this is how it tastes and smells. In other words, I don’t know how to answer your question.

hahahaha

I do love that: Art is serious but never solemn.

You get that from his books.

Banville has been very eloquent on Joyce. He is an Irish writer, after all. You’re gonna be asked about Joyce. Banville is probably the most successful and renowned Irish writer today (although it is, as usual, a crowded field), and yet his philosophy (although he does not call it that) is similar to that of Joyce’s. Joyce famously said about Ulysses, “on my honour as a gentleman, there is not one serious word in it.” I believe him, as I have said before. A book can be serious without taking itself seriously and without being serious in and of itself. I enjoy things that are not top-heavy, tipping over with their meaning. It’s one of the reasons why I loved Then We Came to the End so much, because that is one hell of a serious book, its impact reverberates for days, and yet it’s not solemn. It made me laugh out loud. If you think that’s easy, you need to read more. That is hard to do. Joshua Ferris wrote what I feel is one of THE novels of “our time”, and yet he doesn’t treat it in a solemn way. Who knows if it will stand the test of time, if it is so “of the moment” that the reverb won’t last – that’s not for me to say. All I can say is: that book is FUNNY, and when I put it down, I was crushed and awed by what he had been able to perceive and show. It’s not “light”. It may be funny, but it’s not light. I don’t enjoy “light” fiction, because it doesn’t hold my attention. I am bored, because I can’t grasp onto it, or even concentrate.

So there is something fun about Banville’s approach to his work that I find very liberating, and fun to read about.

There’s no message. I constantly say one of my absolute mottos is from Kafka, where he says the artist is the man who has nothing to say. I have nothing to say. I have no opinions about anything. I don’t care about physical, moral, social issues of the day. I just want to recreate the sense of what life feels like, what it tastes like, what it smells like. That’s what art should do. I feel it should be absolutely gloriously useless.

Obviously, when you read something like The Sea, or his earlier books – the one on Kepler, for example – it is hard to take him at his word at times, however he does seem to capture, unlike many other writers (some of them quite good) – the uselessness of it all, in a similar way to Joyce, who didn’t give a rat’s ass about politics, social issues, convention, hot topics, modes of thinking … If you look closely, you can see that Joyce, obviously, has an opinion on, say, the British. Or Catholicism. But he never makes anything about what it means. He goes deeper. Deeper than anyone. Meaning was irrelevant to him, since he appeared to see things in a tailspinning kaleidoscope of interconnecting elements. It is hard to see what Joyce saw, but it sure as hell wasn’t about what it all means. That would have bored him to death.

Portrait of the Artist is one of the angriest books in the English language, but it is Joyce’s stance as an artist that seems to change the way I perceive it. His desire was not to stick it to the British through literature. Many people did that, and while they may have made a splash in their day, their books would not stand the test of time. Joyce’s desire was to capture, in language, what life feels like. He could only write about what he knows (he is the classic example of that – I don’t think you always have to “write what you know” – that’s balderdash – but Joyce ONLY wrote from personal experience – he didn’t create characters, or create plots, nothing writerly whatsoever). Joyce wrote what life feels like. And that included things like listening to sermons and thinking about hell and masturbating and overhearing conversations about Parnell, and all of these highly explosive topics. But if you’ve read the book, then you know that it is not a polemic, a pamphlet, and the meaning is hidden, if there is one.

Once I got that Joyce didn’t care about meaning, I was able to click into his stuff with the greatest of ease.

I love Banville’s thoughts on that. Love it to death, as I work hard on my own writing, sitting and staring at the blank page.

I also love the section in the interview about naming characters and how important it is to find the right name. For him, once he gets the names, all else follows.

Ah, what can I say, love this man so much, and the interview is a good one. The interviewer had done her homework, and gave him some very thought-provoking questions (which Banville commented on a couple of times). She got some really great responses.

Read the whole thing here.