by A. D. Mira
MS: Some hidden points of criticism in your novels are education and religion. One of the stories I like best is "The Miracle at Ballinspittle." Do you intend to write a novel with these themes as the main topics?
TCB: I don't think so. But you never say never. I just follow my instincts as to what I want to work on next. You know, I write a lot of novels that have historical settings. Having a relevance to a specific time gives me a way of giving a certain balanced view of the 20th century and the crazy changing technological society we live in, on top of, I think, an irrational universe. So I really like the fixture of history. Right now I'm working on a very long, complex historical novel set in the period from 1900 to 1930 in my new home of Montecito, California, near Santa Barbara. It has nothing to do with politics, however, the new stories may -- I have new stories out in '99 -- after this new novel. I think I certainly have to have a new book out in 2000, and that will be another contemporary novel and probably dealing with some issue. I just have to figure out what issue interests me and what will infuriate the most people. (Both laugh.) Not actually, not actually. I didn't write this book in order to infuriate people, I wrote it because I am genuinely concerned: I live amongst the problem, and I'm sure these critics who have a kind of knee-jerk reaction do not. "Knee-jerk" in English is, I'm sure you're aware, when a doctor tests your reflexes like this (He demonstrates.) That means that it is just a reflex, that you don't really think about an issue: you're a leftist or a rightist and you're on the right side, and anything in between you don't want to hear or discuss or think about, you don't want to think deeply: "this is my position, that is my position and they are morally correct and anybody who doesn't follow them is wrong." I don't think that's true. I think that what you need to think about in the work of art is aesthetics above all. Is this a strong and fine work of art? Obviously, this one is my most political book, so it begs the question of the politics in the book. And I think that it is much more realistic in the scenario to come to a conclusion, to think about this whole problem in a very complex way. For instance, what is this biological imperative that I'm talking about? We are an animal species, we are vastly overpopulating the earth and we will move, just like the coyote, to wherever there are resources. And the ramifications to this in a socio-political way are just as the title asks: Is there any sense in having nations, states, boundaries, ethnic divisions? We will just be increasingly inundated in an industrialized world that is where the resources are.
MS: You said that you live with the social problems and you know about them. Are you active in any social or ecological group or is it just in your writing that you try to make people aware of the problems?
TCB: This is another thing that will disappoint the critics who don't feel that I am leftist enough. No, I would never join any group for any reason. I'm not an activist. I don't want to be an activist. I am an independent free agent. I'm an artist exploring the world and it is my right and intention to say anything I like on any subject, in fact, that's the beauty of living in a democracy. I owe nothing to anyone except to myself, that includes the critics, the booksellers, the publishers, anything and anybody. I have my own reason to live and my own reason to make art and my own vision which is constantly changing. Excuse me, I see Frau Boyle coming in.
(Boyle's wife and a local organizer were coming back from a shopping tour. We had a short break.)
TCB: Sorry for that. You know how it is to be married and have a wife. I don't know how your relationship did start [sic] , but after we had lived together for some years, my wife kept begging me to marry her, and finally I said, "Okay, I'll do it, I'm ready." And the result is that I'm her utter slave. I do every sigle lick of work in our lives. I'm doing the house, I make the money, I maintain the property. I do everything because I want her -- and I think it is true for German men -- I want her to have the kind of life Princess Grace of Monaco had, before she was decapitated [in a car accident]. (Both laugh.)
MS: That sounds familiar. (Both laugh.) In most of your novels, your view of society is rather bleak, often deterministic, like in World's End. Are there any positive traits of society left in your fictional world?
TCB: I would hope so. My world view is really pessimistic, but I try to be a kind of happy guy. It's just that I don't picture myself as being quite as grim as Samuel Beckett, for instance. But I don't see much good news. I really don't. I do have a very pessimistic view. There is a small gestire at the end of The Tortilla Curtain which is an approbation of common humanity, I mean that is about as far as it goes. I'm opposed to demonizing a group of people and opposed to racism, but I'm thinking deeply about the issue which many critics have not. We were talking earlier about the biology involved here, the human race is headed for some kind of terrible cataclysm, and I think it's coming soon, when you're reading books like The Song of the Dodo by David Quammen [New York: Scribner's, 1996], which is not published in German yet. It's a marvelous book about evolution and island bio-geography, which means it examines the way creatures have evolved on islands around the world throughout history; his point being that now we've essentially cut all the continents into islands for animals, that is, they can't get across human-made barriers to interbreed, so that within fifty years or so, all major kinds of mammals, aside from deer and cows and so on, will be extinct. We've destroyed the ozone layer, the amphibians are dying off all over the world which are a central link of the food chain. You can't really imagine what is going to happen there. We've altered the weather totally. Laurie Garrett's book, The Coming Plague [New York: Farrar, Straus, 1995] , where she talks about all the various micro-organisms and parasites that are becoming multiply drug-resistant and constantly mutating to take advantage of the situation we present them... Six billion people -- tons and tons and billions of tons of meat for them to work their way through. You know, AIDS and Ebola are just the tip of the iceberg here. Paul Kennedy's book, Preparing for the Twenty-First Century [New York: Random House, 1991] , which came out about five years ago -- it's an overview of the economic, social, and political conditions of all the major countries and regions of the world for the 21st century projection. It is so grim, he should have taped two cyanide tablets to the last page so you can eat them after you have finished the book. So my view is informed. It is a very grim prospect, I think, for the whole human race at this time in history. The only good news that I can find anywhere is that human sperm counts are declining worldwide. If we get them down to zero, then, I think, everything will be OK. You can trace that right back to Delaney Mossbacher being a naturalist. You know, naturalists in America, or the Green Party here, are people who are very liberal, but on one issue they are reactionary and that is the issue of immigration of any kind because who is the enemy of the environment? More people. Who wants more people of any race? Or any level of skills or intelligence, whatever? And this is exacerbated in America by the fact that everybody coming, but, for the most part especially across the southern border, is illiterate, uneducated, needs health care, needs food stamps, needs a place to stay, and there are no jobs for them. Even the most menial jobs are filled. We live in an increasingly technological society where even to work in a factory -- and there are precious few factory jobs anymore -- you need to have at least a high school degree and a knowledge of math and computers. So people like Cándido, Cándido is just your everyman who isn't good or bad. He just exists. And what does he want? He wants what anybody needs on the most elementary level. A place to sleep, something to eat, work so he can buy something to eat. He is not sugar-coated, he is not idealized, as I'm sure the leftist version of this novel would idealize him and make him into this angelic monument to labor or whatever. But he is just real. He comes from this macho society where men suppress women, for instance. He's ignorant, he beats his wife, he's jealous of her when she gets a job, and yet you sympathize with him because he is a common man, just bearing the brunt of all this. I think, though, you sympathize with Delaney, too, because you see him go from a guy who has these vaguely li
beral ideas to a guy who becomes increasingly right wing. If the book works, you can see how he is pushed into it by the society around him.
MS: Does the name Cándido mean something like "the naïve" in Spanish, aside from the literary allusion to Candide?
TCB: No, it comes from Candide, Voltaire's Candide, who is, you know, famous in literature. He is the man who bears all this ill luck, all the ill luck sent upon him. This is why I chose Cándido.
MS: What influence has political correctness on your writing?
TCB: (laughs) It has no influence on what I do, except that it makes me so angry that I want to attack the politically correct because political correctness is a kind of fascism in itself. It presumes to tell you what you can and cannot do. From their standpoint of taking the high moral ground, I totally and utterly reject it. It is silly, it's dangerous, it's wrong. Again, I feel that no one can tell an artist what to do, you know? The whole process of writing a book is to give an individual expression. I think that it is equally valid to write a stirring novel about, let's say, Cándido and everybody succeeding and making a labor union and building new housing and living happily ever after as it is to write a novel about a guy who masturbates 42 times a day and shoots heroin in his temples and kills people as long as it is beautifully, brilliantly done as a work of art. There is no degenerate art as long as it is good. All that matters is does this work aesthetically, is it a good book? It's fine if you have a message and if the audience believes it and if it likes that message. You have to have a message, you have to say something, you have to have some belief system, but I don't think that the place for making political statements is in a novel. I think a novel is not a statement, it is a seduction, it's an entertainment that seduces the reader to a point of view. Well, in the case of this book, it seduces the reader, I think, into the story and the lives of these characters and forces the reader to think more deeply about the subject, rather than just a knee-jerk reaction.
MS: Have you had any controversial discussions so far with minority writers concerning Tortilla Curtain?
TCB: No. In fact, the Latino press haven't covered the book much because Viking missed the boat and didn't publish simultaneously a Spanish language edition, it won't be out in Spanish until later this year. There was no negative criticism that I'm aware of from the Latin American community. A very huge part of it is American and speaks English as a native language, as well; they are bilingual. The first reading I gave, that is, on my three month tour, was in the L.A. public library and more than half of the audience was Latino. High school kids and guys out of work, so my feeling is that it is a realistic portrayal. The only ones who were angry were the white liberals who thought I was too hard on people like Delaney Mossbacher, that he is not hypocritical and should be championed more and so on and so on. Also the right wing would say things like I was too soft on immigration and we should kick the illegals out and so on. Yet, it was the guardians of the politically correct who made the most asinine statement: that since I'm not Mexican, I don't have the right to write about Mexicans. So, I presume that since I'm not a woman, I can't write about women; since I'm not an old man, I can't write about old men. This is totally absurd. That's why I'm so much opposed to this ridiculous idea of what is politically correct. In fact, we can all agree that we should be civilized, that we should not be racists, we shouldn't offend people, we should support the liberation of women economically and so on. These are my ideas, too. I like this, it's all great. But I'd be damned if somebody is going to tell me how to do it and i must do it, you know. That makes me run right the opposite way.
MS: You are often compared with other post-modernists or black humorists. Do you have any contact or an exchange of ideas with people you know from Iowa, for example, John Irving?
TCB: John Irving is one of my former teachers. I had John Cheever, the great American short story writer, I had Vance Bourjaily, a novelist of the 50s, who was a marvelous teacher--John Irving had been his student--and when he left he introduced me to John Irving and for one semester I was John Irving's student. In fact, it was John (laughs)... Well, at this time there were also Raymond Carver, Gail Godwin, and many others. I was only a short story writer until I wrote Water Music. The last book in German by Hanser Verlag, Tod durch Ertrinken, that was really my first book, Descent of Man. I had written all the stories at Iowa and before and I told John I just wanted to be like Carver, I would surely be a short story writer, I don't think I'll ever write a novel, and he said, "You might change your mind." (laughs) No, I'm not much in touch with other writers, especially writers of my own age in America, personally, but only because occasionally I see them at a literary festival or on stage or something. But it's fairly rare. I'm not much into communication with them just on my own.
MS: What do you think about Kurt Vonnegut? Because I often miss his name in the list of authors with whom you are compared. The late Vonnegut, in Hocus Pocus, for example, deals with the general problems of society, as you do in your novels.
TCB: I haven't read most of his later work. He was very important and influential to me, as he was for anyone who knew to read in America in the late 60s and early 70s when we read all of his books. His black humor, his sense of social engagement, his sense of history, all that I share, but more important to me are other writers I'm sure you heard or read about that I'm always talking about in interviews, not mostly Vonnegut, although he was an influence, too.
MS: What do you think about literary theory in general? Do you write with a specific theoretical idea in your mind, do you intend to write a metahistorical novel, for example, or something like that?
TCB: Well, I already have--Water Music.
MS: Yeah, that is why I ask. Did you write Water Music because you wanted to write a metahistorical novel or did it just come out as metahistorical?
TCB: Thank you, choice B! (both laugh) The linguistic theories have been very prevalent in terms of literary criticism over the last 25 years or so. All those who are relevant I don't enjoy reading, aside from Lévi-Strauss and people like that. Camus I've read, but he seemed dull to me, extremely dull. I think if you open up literature to the interpretation of words and the etymology of words in linguistics, it's wonderful. It is a great little science within literature. I'm not a scientist and I don't have an analytical sense of mind and I don't really care much about it. I live in a world in which metafiction existed prior to most of the theories or at least its introduction into universities in the 60s and 70s, so my idea of metafiction and as it appears in my own stories, and in Water Music, and I think in a few of my other works, is deriving mainly from the literature of the day that I was reading when I was a student, thinking about being a writer. So I was reading Jorge Luis Borges and his wonderful magical stories, Gabriel García Márquez, Günter Grass' early books, Thomas Pynchon, Robert Coover, Flannery O'Connor, Ionesco, Beckett. And all of these people are my influences and I think you might say that the artist preceded the critic in this, the critics seem to come along behind, and I don't know what will come next because, again, I'm not that interested in structuralism, deconstruction, and so on, except as a curiosity. I'm just working to set myself new challenges and to find out what else is left in my brain. Each story is amazing to me. It is very rewarding to write a story or a novel because it is such an incredible challenge to find out who I am and what I think. I just begin and then I deal with some research and the first line and follow it. I never write a plan. I don't have a structure. My structure is in me, it is the function of the subconscious to bring this material together. It would be too abstract for me to think like that. Especially when you start writing, you don't say, "Well, these are my psychological problems; these are my concerns and worries in life; what I like to say, I think I'll write ten novels on these themes." It doesn't work that way. Just as you are a unique human being throughout your life, so is your work of art. You can only see what you mean and how your books hold together in retrospect, and you can see about my books by reading th
em all and comparing them and seeing how they are interlinked and how the overwriting has turned to keep coming up. I certainly didn't know this at the start of my career and I'm aware of it now only because I can look back. But it still doesn't influence my choice of the next book, except in a subconscious way. I'm all sorts of a writer; I'm not an autobiographical writer and not particularly or ususally a realistic writer, although I don't want to exclude any kind of mode. I like to write in many modes. I can do anything I like and write any kind of story I like because of the politically correct and the difficulties in American with illegal immigration. Sure, all of the critics come out of the woodwork and say, "Oh, Boyle can't write about a Mexican point of view" and so on, but these critics are pretty ignorant because earlier on Boyle has presumed to write from the point of view of black Africans and invented tribes and languages, written from the point of view of Germans, of medieval Scandinavians, of American Indians, of God, Dutch patroons. I've written from the point of view of every body of every sex and every kind of wit. I'e written from the point of view of monkeys, gorillas, chimps, (laughs) Dogs! I've written fron the point of view of Lassie. These people are very tedious and, of course, ultimately in history -- if history continues -- they will look foolish and I will look good because I have a vision and I know what I'm doing. I'm totally confident. And who are they? They're merely critics (laughs).