(réf. Etudes Britanniques Contemporaines
n° 8. Montpellier: Presses universitaires de Montpellier,
1995)
1
An interview with lan McEwan
*
Université de Poitiers
Gilles
Ménégaldo
–
Mr McEwan, you seem to
privilege, in your short stories in
particular,
the perspective of children and/or
adolescents or adults who are immature and sometimes
have a limited approach of the world – why this constant and
renewed interest in children's
perspective and
discourse?
I was very much in reaction against a certain kind of English writing
which took the form of social documentary, and which was principally interested
in the nuances of English class. To me it seemed like a stuffy, over-furnished
room. Round about that time, when I was twenty-one I began to read Freud
and Kafka, and also Thomas Mann, and they seemed to offer freedom. In retrospect,
I can't quite understand how I saw Mann as someone detached from a definable
social world, but I certainly thought Kafka was. My point of departure was
to look for de-socialised, distorted versions of my own existence. Many of
those early stones were like dreams about my own situation: they carried
only a little biographical content, but they bore the same structural
relationship to my own existence that a dream might. Often I understood this
only long after a particular story was written.
I found in the voices of adolescence a detachment, which was useful
rhetorically. I had read stories in the literary tradition of 'crossing the
shadow line,' of emerging into young adulthood, and since I'd emerged recently
into young adulthood myself, it was a natural
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subject. Adolescents were a useful presence in the short story form,
because they were full of adult desire, and childish incapability, a useful
tension fictionally, and one I probably felt in my own life. The eye of the
child gave me somewhere else to stand, a different way – a colder regard,
perhaps – a way of looking at the adult world, of describing, it as
though one came from another planet.
So First Love, Last Rites and
to a lesser extent the second collection of stories, In
Between the Sheets, were a
dream-like recapitulation, as it were, of my life up to then. All kinds of
conflicts, all kinds of frustrations were enriched with fantastical, rather
outrageous situations. By choosing the short story form, and having the stories
narrated in the first person, I opted for an intense and enclosed fictional
universeworld – and that way took my first tentative steps as a
writer.
So my head was filled with other people's voices and I didn't find
it a problem. Pastiche was my own way of finding my own voice. "Homemade,"
for example, was a rather flamboyant story, written after reading
Tropic of Capricorn. I wanted both
to honour Miller and make fun of him by describing, a rather foolish, miserable
and hilarious episode of lovemaking, rather than a triumphant sexual conquest.
That story also borrowed something of Philip Roth's
Portnoy's Complaint. "Disguises" owed a little to Angus Wilson's
"Raspberry Jam," a strange and quite vicious story of his early writing.
I don't remember now all the literary sources of those stories, but I certainly
patrolled other people's territory in order to come back with something,
that I could start to call my own.
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IMcE – Well, these narrators were alienated
figures, outsiders, sociopaths. They must all, I have to admit, bear some
relationship to myself. I think they were dramatisations of my sense not
only of exclusion, but of ignorance, profound ignorance about the world.
I had no clear idea of where I stood in relation to British society generally.
Nor did I have an artistically worked up romance about myself as an outsider;
in fact, I wanted to join in. But my own background was rather
déclassé: both my parents came from working-class
backgrounds – hard-working, very poor. My father became commissioned
as an officer when I was fairly young, and that involved the whole family
in a certain kind of strange displacement. My father became an officer in
the British Army, but not an officer of the middle class. He was what was
called a 'ranker.' That gave us a curious kind of dislocated existence. Then
I went to a boarding-school which was itself an experiment in social mobility:
most of the kids were working-class, very bright, from the Inner London area,
exported to the countryside to see if they could improve themselves with
a state-funded English public school education. So that too was a kind of
vacuum. Then straight into a newly constructed university, having spent a
pretty alienated year myself, doing the most appalling kinds of jobs –
I worked mostly as a dustman.
So I really didn't know where I fitted in. As I said earlier, when
I read the fiction of Angus Wilson or Kingsley Amis or John Wain or Iris
Murdoch – figures who were central to English writing at the time –
I could find no way in for me there. I didn't really understand the middle-class
world they described. Nor did I recognise the working-class world described
by David Storey or Alan Sillitoe. I had to find a fictional world that was
socially, and even historically disembodied. So these characters carry with
them something of my loneliness, as it was, and something of my ignorance
of social texture, and something also of my longing for social texture, social
connection. That's why they've come out in this strange
way. At the same time I wanted to give these stories a surprising quality - I mean, I was often accused, later, when these stories were published in volume form, of writing to shock, and although I've always denied it, it is the case that I did want them to be vivid.
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I
was struck by the uniform greyness of English writing at the time.
Kafka could have a man wake up to find himself transformed into a giant bug.
He takes it for granted, worries about how he's going to get to work, worries
about what his parents might think, but isn't worried by the fact that he
is a giant bug. I loved that mixture
of fantasy mediated by emotional realism. That was what I was looking for,
and that was what I wanted to write.
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Liliane Louvel
– A set of stories and
novels are concerned with the notion of passage
and
thresholds, in the broad sense, not
in the restrictive one. So could you comment on that,
when we look at the emphasis on ritual which is in your work, and
perhaps we could see a sort of
homology between the itineraries of characters and some recurrent spatial
structures, such as mazes or labyrinths
or the tunnel or maybe the tree in The Child in Time.
So could you speak about that and the use of
space?
GM
–- What is also very
perceptible in your work is the problematic identity of
characters in search of their own self,
in search of a new, different self. That is all enduring topic, I
think, not only in the short stories
but in the novels as well. There is a certain emphasis on
the notion of mask, disguise, shift of identity, of sexual identity
as well. Maybe this could be
paralleled with your fiction, that
may also in a way borrow different disguises and be
subjected to different readings. In
other words, in the same way as you raise problems of
identity in your fiction, you also raise the problem of the identity
of your novels, of the type of
novel – there are gender problems or identity problems in the same way
as there are genre problems. For
instance, some critics refer to the neo-gothic element in your work, for
instance in The Comfort of Strangers,
or the way in which you use the spy-novel
model in The Innocent, etc. Would you like to comment on that?
IMcE – Yes, different kinds of
genres become a kind of resource. I am not an enthusiastic reader
of spy-novels. Nor have I ever been remotely interested in the Gothic tradition.
And yet I've been described as a writer who draws on these traditions, or
is part of them. I've been toying, for some years now with writing science
fiction. If I could just find the right way in, I'd be happy to do it. But
again, I don't read science fiction. They say you can be most profoundly
influenced by the books you haven't read. Perhaps in the same way you are
swayed by the literary genres which
you are too impatient to read.
There are notable exceptions of course, but genre writing is so
passionately committed to bad prose. By convention the detective novel sets
itself free from considerations of originality. Well, that's not the kind
of fiction I'm interested in, but I am intrigued by the detective novel.
I don't want to read one. I want to write one. It interests me because
I've
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been thinking a greal deal recently about the scientific as opposed
to the mystical or religious world-view. Or, put another way, the head and
the heart – a familiar polarity in Western literature. I think we all
sense that the polarity is useful but also artificial. Our everyday reasoning
is drenched in emotionality and yet we feel there is a tension. The
detective-hero embodies these tensions. As a problem solver he is an
arch-rationalist, and as a man who follows hunches and contemplates motivation
he is a creature of the heart. I've got a feeling I could turn this to my
own purposes. And this is what would lead me to poach on the
genre.
LL – You show a lot
of interest in science, especially in
The
Child in Time. We are now
living at the end of a century where
there are new ways of conceiving the world, flew
"episteme," new theories in the field of mathematics and physics,
the theory of chaos, fractals and
all that. ... Is science a source
of inspiration for you and do you think it might
lead to new forms of literature?
IMcE – I've always been interested in science.
I've often regretted I didn't do a science degree. I don't share the general
suspicion, nourished partly by our Romantic tradition, and sustained even
now, particularly in Britain, by a liberal arts education, that science crushes
the human soul or the imagination. I believe the contrary. I think it's a
route to wonder. The world as presently conceived by the cosmologies of
physicists seems far more extraordinary, far more exciting, far more of a
challenge and stimulus to the imagination than a world depicted as, say,
being propped up by two elephants. The last twenty or thirty, years have
seen extraordinary times in science. The rediscovery, or the renewal rather,
of Darwinian thinking by way of genetics and the discovery of the structure
of DNA has been particularly interesting. In the biological sciences Generally
there's been something of a renaissance. The first three decades of this
century encompassed the great classical era of modern physics; quantum mechanics
and relativity theory offered two entirely distinct and contradictory ways
of understanding the world. The mighty project of unifying them is beginning
to be fulfilled. Perhaps an even more significant task will be to generate
an ethics from these emerging syntheses. Philosophy is increasingly informed
by neuroscience. Evolutionary psychology is beginning to offer a bridge between
biology and the social sciences. Who knows, we might yet arrive at a radical
synthesis of the humanities and the sciences. Where this leaves fiction,
I don't know, but a writer is bound to be interested in the possible consequences
of such things. That is why I've been interested in reading more science,
and thinking, more about our distrust of it. In
Black Dogs, my heart was really
with
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the character, Bernard, the rationalist. But I gave the best lines
to June, the mystic. At some point, I'd like to redress the balance. I'd
like to write a novel in praise of rationalism – rationalism as I understand
it, mediated by emotional wisdom – and beyond that, in praise of what
I think is probably the most splendid and most effective intellectual tool
we've ever given ourselves – scientific method. In the world of letters
there is something vaguely perverse about this because the dominant assumption
is still that numbers, scientific measurements, scientific endeavour is somehow
cold and profoundly inimical to the soaring human spirit. But I just don't
buy that.
LL
–
So
maybe new shapes and new forms will come out of
that?
IMcE
-
Yes, I think they will evolve, but not in the hands
of any one writer.
GM – To come back to
another recurrent motive in your books, the theme of loss
and deprivation, absence and what
is called in French "le travail du deuil": a number of
protagonists are deprived of parents,
often fatherless, for instance the protagonist in Black Dogs,
looking for a substitute father and
mother and the counterpart of that is another
central motive of appropriation and
possession. These two motives seem to be constantly
interwoven in all your work. Could
you comment on that, and has there been an evolution
on that level, from the situation you describe in The Comfort
of Strangers to the one you describe
in Black Dogs?
IMcE –
Well, I never really understood it myself, but it's
been pointed out to me at various times. There is a great deal of loss in
my work and it was only in my mid-thirties that I began to understand the
source of this sense of deprivation. In the story, "The last day of summer",
a boy of eleven is involved in a rowing accident in which a mother figure
and a small baby are drowned. This is the 'last day' of summer because the
next day the boy's boat is going to be put away. It's September and he's
going to go off to his new school. It wasn't until I was well into my thirties
that I understood that the story is really about my being sent away to
boarding-school at the age of eleven. The woman in the boat is clearly my
mother, the baby in the boat is clearly myself, as is the boy. Their drowning
is the 'death' of my mother, and the end of childhood. In those days
boarding-schools were much harsher places than they are now. Being sent away
as a child produced in me the sense of loss that has seeped into my
fiction.
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The other matter, possession, invasion. Well, like
many writers, I suppose I have a sponge-like quality, an emotional neutrality.
I absorb things from other people without being fully aware of it. This has
obvious advantages for a writer, but if I'm not careful, people can invade
my space all too easily. I've had to learn to put up barriers. The
Comfort of Strangers expresses
something of that anxiety – if you open yourself up too much, you can
be taken over. There are always people who want to take you over. I believe
that there's a small indefensible core of your own selfhood which you have
to hang on to at all costs.
GM – Another aspect
that could be related in a way to the previous one is the emphasis
on family relationships, and
conflicting family relationships, at various levels, for instance the
complex and ambivalent relation there
is to the father figure or father substitute in some of
your works, for instance the ironic father figure in "Solid geometry
", the sadistic father in The Comfort of Strangers,
and at times on the contrary a rather
positive
view
of the father-son relationship
as in The Child in Time, for instance, or to another degree, the substitute
relationship between the narrator in
Black Dogs and the figure of Bernard.
Why again this ambivalent attitude
to the father figure.
IMcE
–
Well, I think a writer can only answer such a question
in biographical rather than thematic terms. The father figures you mention
come unbidden they push at the door. Which means I have to talk about my
own father. He is presently very ill and weak, but he was once a powerful,
domineering, slightly bullying man who was extremely loving towards me,
passionate about me in ways that were both supportive and oppressive. I inherited
my mother's shy nature. He was precisely one of those figures from my fiction
who seemed to want to take me over. He was the regimental sergeant-major,
feared and hated by the men below him because he was so strong, such a stickler
for the rules, such a disciplinarian. You'd have to say he was a very effective
soldier. He wasn't tough like that with me at home, but he was frightening.
He didn't have – and I think he would agree himself – he didn't
have an easy way of talking to children. He was a loving man who did not
have the means to express his love. I remember once when he came to stay
in my house and my seven-year-old son climbed on my lap while we were talking
and put his arms around my neck. I hardly noticed; one of the joys of having
children is that you simply inhabit this terrain of love. We went on with
the conversation. And then my father pointed at little Gregory and said,
'That's amazing, that would never have happened between us. You were too
frightened of me.' And I nodded, rather sadly.
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One recurring nightmare scene from my childhood: my father would seize hold of me in a playful way and, ignoring my struggles, pretend that I was a baby and cradle me and make a shushing noise. He would do this in front of people. I felt that he was ridiculing my relationship with my mother. He thought that I was too close to her. It was an intense drama he enacted behind the mask of a joke. So I had very powerful and confused feelings about him. I loved him and I feared him. I enjoyed doing exciting things with him – climbing the ropes of the Army assault courses, going out into the North African Desert with him. But I also shrank from his loud presence.
Perhaps this was
another reason why Kafka interested me. He addressed his father in a long
letter. I ended up addressing mine with stories and novels. In
The Cement
Garden, I killed him off early on. He's there in
The Comfort of Strangers, and he pops up in other places.
In the later fiction, I've tried to redeem him by becoming the father,
by trying to take his strengths, his huge capacity for love and giving it
expression.
GM – I'd like to ask
you a question concerning the broadening of your scope in
literature, the growing part that is played
by history and historical facts, and also by a reflection on
the state of society. You've written,
for instance, a reflection
on
the institutional discourse
and power in The Child in Time,
and more specifically on ideology and
commitment in Black Dogs. Could
you comment on that evolution from a rather restricted world in a way to
broader social and historical issues,
which were sometimes broached upon in your previous
stories, but more definitely in the recent
works?
IMcE – Well, I said at
the beginning of this conversation that one source of the closed-off quality
of my short stories was my ignorance of the wider world. At the same time,
I did describe relationships, often in fairly bizarre terms. A couple makes
for a kind of society, and for a while the couple was my world. As I understood
more I began to take courage and want to incorporate what I had
understood.
An important moment of transition was writing for television. Dialogue
without narrative gave me a moral freedom which I'd felt I didn't have in
the stories. Or perhaps I mean it gave me a moral purpose which I thought
would inhibit the stories. I wrote a television film called
The Imitation Game, which is about a young woman's attempt to
find interesting work during the war. It was heavily influenced by feminist
thought. It certainly made a society, that of England in 1940, and although
it wasn't completely successful, I began to understand what people meant
when they talked of writers playing God.
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The Comfort of Strangers
edged into a slightly larger world, and by the time I'd written an
oratorio about the threat of nuclear war and came to start
The Child in Time,
I thought I could
find
ways of bridging the earlier, small canvases of intense psychological
states with a broader public reality – oddly enough, through the idea
of child-care manuals. In them one had an unconscious expression of the spirit
of the age, of what people really wanted their children to be – projections
of their ideal selves.
From then on, I've never really been interested
in anything other than trying to find connections between the public and
the private, and exploring, how the two are in conflict, how they sometimes
reflect each other, how the political invades
the
private world.
ALF –
In
I979, you said: 'I don't know if this is a very good time for English
fiction.' I wonder what you meant
then and if you've changed your mind now.
IMcE
–
Well, I think things have improved. The eighties
were a reasonably good time for British fiction. Things opened out and we
shook off our provincialism. All kinds of new people came alone. We had writers
from the Commonwealth or ex-Empire bringing all kinds of Englishes into British
fiction. A lot of good women writers came onto the scene. Literary fiction
itself seemed to occupy more space in the public mind: new lists were started,
and there was the success of the Waterstones book chain which by the end
of the eighties had almost a hundred shops. The Booker prize, for all its
idiocies. helped bring literary fiction to a wider readership. Then there
was a spate of takeovers in the
publishing world in the mid
to late eighties, which led to writers being paid vast sums of money which
I personally did not abhor. There was an interesting mix of formal
experimentation with a commitment to remaining connected and relevant to
a readership. There was a fairly general kind of audience that was ready
to fork out money for hardback books. So I think we've had something of a
silver age, certainly in quantity; only time will tell about the
quality.
GM – In your last novel,
The Daydreamer, which is a
children's book, in a way, you tread a new path. However you revert to the
short story form you seemed to have
given
up. What
part will the short story play in your
forthcoming works? A second aspect of the question is
that this book seemingly addresses
a different readership. Yet, a number of stories concern
the adult reader as well, and one is able to recognise familiar motifs
and
images
that you
used in other stories and novels –
for instance the doll motif that you
used
in In Between the Sheets,
or the dismemberment motif that you
used
in
various other stories and in
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The Innocent.
Why did you choose to rewrite these
motifs differently? It also seems that you
identify at last with the fictional
writer of The Child in Time, who
also wrote children's
books.
IMCE
–
Well, The Daydreamer
is a series of stories with a central character linking them all.
It also has a kind of shape. So in a sense it's a hybrid, a mating of novel
with a collection of stories. There is a degree of development: by the end
the boy-hero's final daydream takes the form of a humorous version of Kafka's
Metamorphosis. He has a deep foreboding
that the adult world he is soon to join is profoundly dull. Grown-ups seem
to do little else in life beyond sitting, around talking, snoozing or worrying.
He goes to bed with these thoughts on his mind, and the following morning,
wakes to find himself transformed – into a giant person, an adult. But
then he tastes some of the pleasures of the grown-up life: he kisses a girl,
he stays up late, he has interesting work: he's invented an anti-gravity
machine. The future is redeemed.
When I wrote The
Daydreamer I wasn't really
thinking about short stories. I was writing for children, and I wanted
self-enclosed, bedtime tales that would take twenty-five minutes to read,
that would have strong plots, be surprising, and contain not a hint of moral
instruction. I ended up with a collection of stories but I thought at the
time I was doing something else. And that's the only way I'll write stories
now. They can't be means to experimentation or pastiche. Perhaps I'll find
some other way in the future (to try and answer your question) of fooling
myself again into writing them.
As for the recurrence of themes, I can only
say – well, this is the
furniture of my mind. I don't choose these things, they're there because
I wrote as seriously as I would for adults. I wrote carefully, I put the
stories together over a period of three years, I only wrote one when I really
had one to write. The
Daydreamer was written while I was working on
Black Dogs and the screenplay of
The Innocent. I'd like to think that
The Daydreamer is a
book for adults written in a language children can understand. In Italy it
had an exclusively adult readership because of the way it was presented.
Because it's a celebration of daydreaming, and therefore of the imagination,
the Italians took it to be in the tradition of Calvino, of
Cosmicomics and so on.
A book about daydreaming is bound to be, by extension,
a book about writing. I have to say that over the last twenty-five years
my pleasure in writing has steadily increased. To the point of delight. It
used to be a source of pleasure-pain, a kind of compulsive self-torture.
But now I know that the crucial ingredient of writing-pleasure is
surprise. Surprising oneself with a thought, or a formulation.
Making something that seems to come from a mind that is better than your
own. On a good day, writing offers
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itself up as pure mental freedom, and as one of
the greatest single pleasures in life – right up there with sex and
skiing and mountain walking.
IMcE
–
I
have all the usual
superstitions about speaking of the next thing, but it's there, embedded
in the conversation we've just had.
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(réf. Etudes Britanniques Contemporaines
n° 8. Montpellier: Presses universitaires de Montpellier,
1995)