Most people I think who write are involved in an attempt to solve a problem of what really
happened, what motives are, what the subterranean meanings are in an event.
And many people could only do that if they are very introspective and they think about
it and maybe write about it over a period of time rather than doing something very haphazard
and sort of intuitive.
So this is maybe the project of art itself is to understand ourselves and understand
the world.
And maybe to communicate some meaning because life in itself is a rush and it’s chaotic
and in the turmoil meaning tends to be lost and we feel a malaise and we feel despair
if there isn’t evidently meaning in our lives.
So there are times in cultures in crisis where there’s a feeling of an atmosphere of despair
like a collective despair.
And I think oddly enough that art can flourish in those times because art is a way of trying
to focus and still the chaos and look for meaning.
Writers and artists are all different and everybody has a different way of writing.
What seems to be just absolutely natural and brilliant in James Joyce would just not even
work and be completely impossible in Hemingway for instance.
Hemingway had a very different consciousness.
His whole anthological grasp of reality is very, very different from Faulkner was.
You can sort of see their prose is so different.
So each person has an apprehension of reality that’s different from other peoples.
Some people are very naturally brooding and introspective and they’re going to go inward
and look backward.
Somebody like Faulkner and Proust.
Somebody else like Hemingway is actually also looking backward but he doesn’t allow you
to know that.
So he stays in the present tense and Hemingway’s dramas are very, very tense because a lot
is being pushed down in a subterranean way.
So yet you feel the force of it.
Then there are writers who are more like almost like comic or ironical satiric writers.
And they skitter along the surface and they’re very compelling and very entertaining.
And they too can have a depth of sensibility but they’re not interested in personal psychology.
I’ll give an example of Donald Barthelme over at George Saunders.
There are excellent writers but you don’t go to them for human psychology.
Emily Dickinson’s very, very short, very precise poems that are so powerful in addressing
some of the turmoil of a disintegrating mind for instance.
She writes about people who seem to be teetering on the brink of losing sanity because they’ve
had so much dealing with death.
She was also writing during the time of the Civil War.
So she was writing in a time of crisis but her poetry has a stillness, almost a crystalline
beauty of a great mind being brought to bear on an exemplary human experience which is
an experience of feeling that things are disintegrating, and looking for meaning.
So I think that’s one of the projects of the novelist.