by A. D. Mira
I think it’s great for the audiences too, because so many authors don’t present their material well, or they’re kind of dull. And then everyone’s eyes droop and they begin to think they’re back in English class in the ninth grade with Mrs. Cox, you know? Literature’s not supposed to be like that. If it’s going to be like that, stay home and read it yourself.
I like to turn ‘em on, I like to just do a performance. It has nothing to do with the book itself. I’m not going to read them the most difficult passages, they can read that, it’s on the shelf.
That’s what I do. I’m not shy about it. I mean, I’ll go on TV in an orange jacket and tell jokes. I go on all the radio shows and call-ins. I don’t mind being an entertainer. If it attracts more people to literature in general, and specifically to my books, great. Why not?
I really stand opposed to this whole notion, this whole academic notion, that literature is the province of the academy. I don’t agree with that. Literature is the province of anybody who can read. Just as popular music is, too, it is an entertainment. Which is not to say that you would ever compromise what you’re doing, or to write down to the audience, or write thrillers or vampire novels or any crap like that, but given the context of writing good, serious literature, you have to grab the audience in some way, and I feel that any way you can do it, without compromising yourself, is fine. And I don’t consider the publicity part of a book to have anything to do with the book itself, and the writing of the book—that’s done, that’s finished. Now it’s time to go out and let everybody know it exists.
SR: I think literature needs a few good salesmen.
T.C. BOYLE: Yeah. Absolutely. Yeah. I resent the fact that there’s anybody considered more of a celebrity than writers. We are the greatest. We should be it. I mean, who are these soap opera stars and mere movie actors and actresses, and mere Rock ‘n’ Rollers? Anybody can do that crap. Come on, let’s give credit where it’s due, and revere our writers a little bit more.
SR: Exactly. We need a Pantheon up there on the Washington Mall.
T.C. BOYLE: Yeah. It’s a losing battle, I’m afraid. But I’m fighting it, nonetheless. I have no choice. This is it.
SR: Much of your fiction is loaded with references to pop culture. What advantages or disadvantages do you see to utilizing the stuff of pop culture in writing literature?
T.C. BOYLE: Well, there are a couple of writers who I admire, who have written good stuff, who have come out with selected stories. And they were very much of their time, well one in particular, who worked very much with references to pop culture, but specific references to a time and place in pop culture. I think that that can be limiting to a degree. If the story depends upon knowledge of it, you’re dead. But obviously, every story becomes a piece of history the moment it’s finished. That, more than anything, was brought back to me doing this book of collected stories. And to come back on the given references to a certain war, or a group of people, or a product, or a scientific advance, those were obviously hip, current references, by a hip, current, contemporary writer, but you’d need an encyclopedia and almanac to figure them out. Footnotes.
Yeah, every story does become part of history once it’s done. But you are writing to reflect your feelings, and your thoughts, about society in your time. And, obviously, current references, and products, and so on, have to play a part in it. Unless you’re going to write all your stories set in Ancient Greece. And even then—
SR: Then you better learn about the pop culture of Ancient Greece.
T.C. BOYLE: That’s right, you’d have to represent the pop culture of Ancient Greece, and even then, you would still be writing it as a person in your time. Borges had fun with this in his story, "Pierre Menard, the Author of Quixote," which is so hilarious. You know, he had read Don Quixote, like all of us did, when he was a kid. He hadn’t looked at it since. But he decided to rewrite it, exactly verbatim, by becoming Cervantes, by studying the period of the 16th Century in Spain, by becoming completely infused with it, and knowing everything. And then Borges—who is a critic in the story—says, "Here is the original," and he gives you a paragraph, and then he says, "Here is Pierre Menard’s inspired version," and it’s exactly the same, but he says, "And can you see? The way he infuses it with modern angst!" So hilarious.
SR: You’re a tenured Professor of English at the University of Southern California, where you teach fiction writing. What kind of advice do you regularly find yourself giving to young writers?
T.C. BOYLE: They have to read their contemporaries. They have to know them, thoroughly, and be totally infused with the idea of what is happening now. I often—aside from my advanced class, I also have a community class—I’ve often asked them to list their ten favorite works of contemporary fiction, and few of them can do that. But all of them could list ten CDs or ten movies. They have to understand that, if they’re going to perform at all, they need to know what’s out there.
The second thing is that they shouldn’t really listen to anybody’s advice as being definitive. If it sounds reasonable, then perhaps you might adopt it. You have to have a kind of chip on your shoulder, and feel that you ultimately know what your work is going to be. Otherwise, you might become a clone of somebody else, or you might write in the same style as your teacher, or someone you admire. I think you have to develop your own style, in your own way, and to know what is unique about your approach, and to work fanatically at writing. Because the more you do, the more you practice, the better you’re going to get.
SR: In the past year, you’ve written a novel that marked a substantial stylistic departure from your earlier work, and now published a volume that is a complete retrospective of your career as a short story writer. By publishing this substantial volume now, are you doing something similar to what happens in the closing story of the volume, "Filthy With Things," a kind of mental housecleaning? Do you see this as a kind of clearing of the decks?
T.C. BOYLE: Wow, that’s an interesting observation. Since we’ve spoken to this earlier—I guess so. I haven’t really thought of it in that way. It’s—there so much material, there’s so much material. What am I going to do? Wait until I’m eighty, and do a volume that’s 2,000 pages long? I think it’s a good time to do this. Again, I resisted the idea of it at first, because I’m too young to do a collected volume of anything, but I think it’s good. Your observation—I hadn’t really thought of it in that way, Scott, but it is a clearing of the decks, it does sort of finish off twenty-five years. In fact, the picture on the back speaks to that. That big head shot with the severe lighting. My best friend took that picture, and he took the very same picture, in the same pose, on the whole back cover of my first book, Descent of Man. So it does kind of bookend it.
And what if I didn’t collect it? I would just come out with my next regular collection next year anyway, that’s fine. No loss. But I think maybe this will introduce a new audience to the work, people who came aboard in the last five years and who might not have been there fifteen or twenty years ago when I first began publishing books. So yeah, I guess it is putting those stories behind me, and now we start Volume II. It’s good. It closes a chapter. It doesn’t mean that I’m necessarily going to write different stories altogether, I just want to continue to grow and find out where I go from here.
SR: Another of the recurring obsessions in your stories is human mortality. If you were to be hit by a truck tomorrow, how would you like the world to remember T.C. Boyle, American author?
T.C. BOYLE: The same way I want my biographer to remember it. I want my biographer not to write a biography, because my life is so boring, so full of joy, and pure happiness. He lived, he wrote, he died. You know? That’s it.
I would like to have another hundred years to write stories. But those aren’t the parameters we’ve been given in human life.
Although . . . just because everybody else who has lived has died doesn’t mean that I have to die. So I’m still holding out some hope.
T.C. Bo
yle: Humor and political correctness
Excerpted from Markus Schröder's book, "Nice guys finish last: Sozialkritik in den Romanen T. Coraghessan Boyle." Die Blaue Eule, Essen 1997, 257 p. ISBN: 3-89206-840-2.
Note from Sandye: As you can see from the message below, it took almost a year to track down this interview which was originally included in Markus Schröder's dissertation, published in Germany in 1997. Thanks to a fortuitous connection with Sandra Schäfer on TCB's message board in March 2001 and, through her invaluable assistance in making contact with Dr. Schröder through his former mentor, Prof.Dr. P.Freese, I am able to share this extensive and wide-ranging interview with you.
My sincere appreciation goes to Sandra Schäfer for sending me a copy of the interview and to Dr. Markus Schröder for graciously allowing it to be published on this site.
Posted by sandye on April 23, 2000 at 23:08:22:
dear tom,
while visiting the library of congress website tonight i found this:
Author: Schröder, Markus, 1970-Title: Nice guys finish last : Sozialkritik in den Romanen T. Coraghessan Boyles / Markus Schröder. Published: Essen : Verlag Die Blaue Eule, c1997. Description: 266 p. : ill. ; 21 cm. Series: Arbeiten zur Amerikanistik [etc.]
anything you can tell us about it? it would seem to be only about your work, ja?
sandye
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Posted by TCB on April 26, 2000 at 12:26:33:
Dear Sandye and Jef: Dunno. Maybe Marcus can enlighten us. TCB.
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Interviewed by Markus Schröder, Gottingen, Germany, 10 October 1996.
Markus Schröder: Have you seen a German version of your latest novel [América] ?
T.C. Boyle: Yes, sure.
MS: It is called América here in Germany. How do you feel when you see that the titles of your novels have changed? This one is not even the worst.
TCB: Well, I have to trust my translator, Werner Richter, and my publisher. I have to trust in their judgment. However, I prefer The Tortilla Curtain. Although everyone can identify with the title América on a shelf, it only focuses on one of the four main characters, whereas The Tortilla Curtain gives you the central image of the book which is that of the border, of a wall, of a fence, and so on. And so I prefer The Tortilla Curtain personally which could be very easily rendered into German. There are arguments that no one would know what it means, but of course a lot of people in the States don't know what it means either and they find out. I don't think it's necessarily bad to have an intriguing title. I'm sure I could demand that they give it the original title, but I have to trust them/
MS: And the translator is praised for his work here in Germany.
TCB: I understand that. He's done all of my books but one, and the only one he didn't do was Willkommen in Wellville, and that because I delivered the book so early, ahead of time, that he wasn't ready yet. He still worked on something else, so we had to get another translator [Anette Grube]. I have a sense for his translations because, for instance, the last two nights I was giving a performance [in Cologne and Bonn]. I did it with an old friend, Dr. David Eisermann of Bonn, and David would read some consecutive pieces. I would read one piece and he would read the following piece in German so I could sit there and follow it in the English text. And Werner Richter has managed to reproduce even the sentence structure and the rhythm which is no mean trick from English to German, so I guess he is pretty good.
MS: So I hear you know a bit of German.
TCB: Not really, not really. The only languages I speak are English and Spanish and I never really thought I would need to know German. But, since I have become so popular here and I find myself coming here so often, I decided that I should start to study German. So just this fall I began to take some classes. My wife's mother is German, she speaks German and her children speak German because they did go to the Deutsche Schule. So I thought it is time for my wife and I to speak. We're in a class right now, in fact. I will be back in that class next Wednesday and give them a report of my trip to Germany. In our textbook, we're following the adventures of Herr Clark who is an American businessman who goes to Germany , and goes on business, and goes to the hotel, and all these things. We have dialogues in each chapter, so the other day I asked the professor if he thought that Herr Clark will ever have a girlfriend and... (laughs) and then the professor was quite taken aback because, you see, I came into the class late, and the class had already done most of the book and what I didn't realize was that Mr. Clark is married and has four children. So i intend to report to the class when I get back that, in fact, I met Herr Clark and he is now living with his girlfriend, Dagmar, who is a stripper, in Mannheim. (laughs)
MS: From the beginning on in your novels, you have had a preference for German names. In Water Music it was the city of Geesthacht--I was born only 20 miles away (Boyle laughs) --in The Tortilla Curtain it is Menaker-Mossbacher. Is this rooted in your family relationships?
TCB: Yes, I think so. Give me some other examples, though.
MS: For example, the name Spitzvogel in The Road to Wellville.
TCB: Well, see, that is true to history. I made him up, but all the main theories in natural sciences and medicine were coming from Germany in those days. So that was just true to history.
MS: You once said in an interview that you don't like symbolism in your names. Does it change now, regarding América and Cándido?
TCB: No, not necessarily. I think it may be a misquote. If it is too obvious it becomes sort of like an allegory, like The Pilgrim's Progress or something, and I wouldn't want it to be that obvious. In this book I see it somehow differently. I tried to strip down the language in the story line somewhat and make it a fable. And with that regard, I think obviously Cándido and América's names have a lot of symbolic references. In some respects, Delaney Mossbacher, too. A "mossback" in the American language is someone who is a sort of stick-in-the-mud conservative who doesn't think for himself much, you know. So that has a little bit of symbolism in it, but every book is different.
MS: Despite some serious stories in Without a Hero, The Tortilla Curtain seems to be the crucial point in your writing. It is more serious than the books before. One conservative German critic said your former works "lack a literary and moral necessity." (Boyle bursts out laughing.)
TCB: Well, I would like to inform him that very certainly the literary necessity is to keep me alive (laughs) . That is the literary necessity because writing, of course, is a process of compulsive disorder. I disagree with that critic. I think that all my work is very serious and has a serious intention. It may seem on the surface to a casual reader that it can't be really penetrating because it is so much fun to read. But, I think, real literature should be fun to read and should be deceptively easy. There is an awful lot this critic has overlooked. You must understand that critics have their own prejudices. We have the same thing in America. They tend to regard non-comic literature more highly than they regard comic literature. I don't know exactly why that is. I'm just the opposite, though. I write literature, typically the kind you see in some of the stories in Without a Hero, which isn't published yet in Germany. In this book and in some of the others, like in East Is East, I can catch the audience a little bit off-guard by writing instead a satiric comic work, as in the beginning of The Tortilla Curtain where it is a satire of Delaney and the people like him, and then make the book turn increasingly grim so that you are coming from comic expectations to the inverted. The same thing happens in East Is East which is a very funny book and, at the same time, very serious, I mean far more serious than that critic may give me credit for. By the way, I once got a letter from a guy in Hawaii who just finished East Is East and who wrote me this: he said, "How could you kill him off, you son of a bitch?" That's the whole letter. (Both laugh.)
MS: The problem with German critics, too, is that they think only serious literature can be good literature and some arguments in The Tortilla Curtain can be used for conservative political statements, which is t
he worst thing a serious author in Germany can do. A serious author is leftist by definition. Was this discrepancy in the book intended, that both sides can argue with the characters in The Tortilla Curtain?
TCB: Yeah, I had in interview yesterday with a guy who brought this up. I think that you can't generalize about literature. You have to address each specific work -- each work is different, each work is totally unique. I reject that sort of notion that you should write a political novel because you have a political point of view to make. I don't regard this as a political novel. It is a novel that deals probably with the paramount of political issues in America and, in fact, the world. You have the same problems here, in England, in France, etc. But, I don't begin with a political standpoint. I'm not trying to convince you to join my party. I don't think the political novel works very well for that reason. I think it wrong to sacrifice the aesthetic to the need to make a point or statement about your position. I write a book like The Tortilla Curtain to determine what my position is. I think it's wrong to judge a given work of art in terms of its politics or the expectations of some group of people, you know. It aroused tremendous controversies in America for that very same reason, because people felt that I shouldn't present those points of view, and that when I do finally come down to, I think you'd say, the more leftist point of view in the final sentence, that this should be stronger and, you know, everybody should be waving flags and we should all get up and salute at the end, but I don't think that makes for good art, nor is it realistic, nor is it true. I have still two minds on the issue of illegal immigration and I don't think it's easily resolvable. I think it is a sort of a false art to write a kind of polemic for either the left or the right and say "this is the way it is" and convince the reader that it is the way it is. If I'd have felt that way, I would have better served to do exactly that, write a polemic or an essay. I write in order to discover an aesthetic form to express myself and to discover who I am and what I mean, and I do discover what I mean. You have read all of my books and you know very well what I stand for and how this book fits into all the rest of the books and how it is a natural extension of them. Some critics maybe read only one book and they don't really know much about where it is coming from.