Dalkey:
English 1110.01–Dalkey-13qdnsb(download word file here)
Ruiqi Cao(Pollyanna)
English 1110.01, MWF 10:20—11:15AM
Professor: Cathy Ryan
Assignment: Dalkey
Feb. 19, 2017
Interview with Rikki Ducornet
Reading multiple author interviews from Dalkey archive, I was fascinating by the conversation between Rikki Ducornet and Sinda Gregory. There are several reason that I chose this comprehensive conversation. Firstly, one of my friends recommended her to me a couple month ago. I even added her fiction the one Marvelous thing (2008) into my book list this year. I am curious about her background and living experience. Why she can write so many imaginable fiction with numerous brilliant thought. Besides, Sinda Gregory mainly focused on the experience of author during the interview. These critical and thoughtful questions caught my eyes immediately.
She lived real and authentic. Every life piece was her ideal spring. Living into Egypt one year, she introduced Egyptian element into her article with her fantastical notion. Staying with his imaginable grandmother, she came out numerous creative ideas into her article.With many great child experience, Rikki Ducornet figured out her own writing style which is connecting Latin American fabulism and magic realism.
When she grew up and was in Greece, she read a piece by a leftist agitator who had been arrest and tortured. During the interrogation period, she felt a sense of outrage so she wrote all night—- her strange little book called From the star Chamber came out. This is the first time that awakened her interest in writing fiction. Once she walked in the woods with a friend, she came out upon the body of a red fox swarming with bees. She then depicted those scenes to book Le chien andalou. Her writing work was derived from the living, beyond the living. It won the fond of her reader and tended to popular in her era.
If I got a chance to interview her, I would like to ask her why she would like to connect her life with her work. How she considered the relationship between illustrations and novel since I found out she publish several illustrations and novel simultaneously. I thought she would like give me the following answer, as she mentioned in the interview that art work is like colorful way to convey the world in her eyes. Besides, basing her life, all her article instilled her real spirits and thoughts, which made the reader feel the way she thought about the world better.
Rikki Ducornet has written many great works throughout her lifetime. Below is a list of her great works.
Novels
Short fiction collections
- The Butcher’s Tales(1980)
- The Complete Butcher’s Tales(1994)
- The Word ‘Desire’(1997)
- The One Marvelous Thing(2008)
Poetry
Essays
Anthologies edited
Children’s books
- The Blue BirdAdaptation of mem (1970)
- Shazira Shazam and the Devil(1972)
Illustrations
Title: The origins of steely Dan
Format: Biography with facts
Author: Rob Brunner, March 17th ,2006
Rating: ★★★★ out of ★★★★★
Source: http://ew.com/article/2006/03/17/origins-steely-dan/
This website briefly talks about Steven Moore’s interview with Ducornet in the Bloomsbury Review (January/February 1998), which concludes with Ducornet’s account of the song: “I knew Donald Fagan at Bard. He was wildly gifted. He gave me a phone number which I never used and I guess I lost! Philosophically it’s an interesting song; I mean I think his ‘number’ is a cipher for the self”
===============================================
A Conversation with Rikki Ducornet By Sinda Gregory and Larry McCaffery
From “The Review of Contemporary Fiction,” Fall 1998, Vol. 18.3
SINDA GREGORY: What kinds of books did you read when you were a kid?
RIKKI DUCORNET: One of my favorite books was Heinrich Van Loon’s Ancient Man, filled with his strange little drawings. Whether he was sketching Neanderthals or Babylonians, Van Loon’s ancients all looked like insects. Ceram’s Gods, Graves and Scholars had drawings too; I recall a mysterious House in Ur and Mayan glyphs of the months of the year. And, of course, I read Alice.
LARRY MCCAFFERY: I know you spent some time as a child in Egypt. Did that have any kind of an influence on your sensibility?
RD: I was “stunned” by Egypt. We lived there one year. My father was Cuban, and so we also spent some time in Cuba, too, when I was very small. I cherish memories of the old Havana.
LM: That’s interesting simply because it seems to provide a biographical connection with the Latin American fabulism and magical realism feel that your writing often has.
RD: I had a very “Marquezian” grandmother—fantastical, greedy, and narcissistic. She was a perverse storyteller, and she was an anti-Semite. She never forgave my father for marrying my mother—who was Jewish. Once, when she thought she was dying, she confessed to a black African and a Jewish ancestor. Like the fresh chocolate in one of her favorite stories that was spoiled by a naughty schoolboy’s sliced-off finger, the family blood had been soiled.
SG: This sounds like some of the images and background material that appear in Entering Fire.
RD: Emelina Carmen Dionysia is the bad wind behind much of my work.
LM: At what point did you start becoming interested in surrealism?
RD: I first came to surrealism in early childhood and through the back door: via Dali and Cocteau. I say “back door” because both were titillated by totalitarianism and, in fact, were not surrealists. Cocteau never was and Dali only briefly. But the “convulsive” beauty of Cocteau’s Blood of a Poet—which I saw at the age of eight—and Dali’s inspired drawings from the thirties and early forties really seized my imagination. After that I was forever hunting down a similar resonance or “quality;” it was a kind of hunger. Remember, I grew up near a college library. I found Ernst and Eluard (together, in a book with a pale blue cover and treacherously brittle pages), Duchamp, Tanguy, and even Jarry. Breton’s Nadja was one of “the” books of my adolescence. Later on, when Guy Ducornet and I returned from Algeria, we met the Chicago-based group “Arsenal” at the first anti-Vietnam war rally in New York City and soon after joined the Paris-based international group, “Phases.” My engagement with both was primarily as a graphic artist; I didn’t start writing until much later.
LM: Your first one-person show was in Algeria. What was the background of that?
RD: Just after Algerian independence, Guy went to Constantine for a two-year engagement in the “Cooperation” (the French equivalent of the Peace Corps). I went with him. During the day I was alone and could not move freely through the city—it proved too dangerous: I looked Arab, and I refused to wear a veil. So I did drawings—imaginary architectures inspired by the human face and ideal landscapes.
SG: What was it that first awakened your interest in writing fiction?
RD: Just after the coup d’etat in Greece, I read a piece by a leftist agitator who had been arrested and tortured. During the interrogation she miscarried. I felt such outrage I wrote all night and when I finished I had a strange little book called From the Star Chamber. Its dark energy is rooted in the torture of Algerian students in Paris, the night of Crystal, My Lai, Hiroshima . . . and in my personal life also. Guy’s brother had died in a car crash; my mother was battling cancer. The first Butcher’s Tales are here.
LM: Charlotte Innes’s Nation article referred to The Butcher’s Tales in painterly terms—for instance, she likened those stories to miniatures. I realize this topic is probably something that’s difficult to articulate with any degree of precision, but could you talk about the way your background as a visual artist may have influenced your fiction?
RD: Looking at the paintings of the artists I love—such as Bosch or Vermeer—has had an influence on the way I see the world and so on the way I write. Often I want a kind of Vermeer light—that transcendency- and a Boschian “noise.” That savagery. That clarity. That delicacy.
LM: I first became aware of your work when I saw those drawings you did for Bob Coover’s Spanking the Maid. Those seemed to be beautifully integrated with what Bob was doing in that piece—his interest in representing transformation and metamorphosis, the peculiar combination of abstraction and sensuousness, and so on.
RD: We met in ’66. I was drawing, “transforming,” objects. They were like aberrant natural histories or subversions of encyclopedia plates. And Bob was writing Pricksongs—those wonderfully mutable stories. There was a startling affinity there; our friendship has been long and delightful.
SG: Fairy tales and other forms of fabulous storytelling that you’ve used in your work are similar to science fiction—that is, anything can happen from one moment to the next as long as it fits into the logic of the story, as opposed to realistic fiction, where you’re locked into describing only certain kinds of characters and events. Obviously your approach allows you to present these transformations almost “naturally,” in a way.
RD: The world was imbued with beauty and magic when I was a child. I had the luck to grow up on the Bard campus; which, as I think of it now, reveals itself as an “axis mundi”—a metaphysical core. There was a window of green grass on the second story of the old library. For a child of six, walking across it to shelves on the other side was like walking on water. Beneath it, the first floor looked like it was submerged. I used to dream of libraries that were also aquariums. And there was an. intimate biology lab—its door always open—filled with queer things floating in jars. A few years ago I met Rosamond Wolff Purcell, we discovered that for both of us childhood has the intoxicating smell of formaldehyde!
Child experience
Once while walking in the woods with a friend, we came upon the body of a red fox swarming with bees. And I think because I had been reading so many fairy tales that summer, the fox’s body seemed magical, portentous—and the forest enchanted. I remember we both needed to shit—to leave a mark, an offering of some kind—beside the body of the fox. As though at some pagan altar! Because the encounter was sacred somehow, simultaneously beautiful and terrible. Like Black Kali! Or a scene from Le Chien Andalou!
LM: Your works seems to display a sense of the world as a place of inscrutability. There’s an emphasis, let’s just say, on mystery. Again, this goes back to the notion of the realistic novel, which emerged in the eighteenth century during the age of a world where everything can be explained. In your work I never get that sense. There’s always that respect for ambiguity.
LM: There’s that incredible moment in The Stain when Charlotte’s father comes home to find his wife about to give birth and that moment of horror. That scene struck me as one of the most powerful moments in your work. It seemed to embody that fear of the feminine, the fear of mystery, the fear of, of everything that that represented—the blood, the birth, the vagina, the mystery. All these things seem to come together right at that moment.
RD: Exactly. Charlotte’s father is a hunter; he’s been out in the woods reducing life to a bone. He exemplifies the lie that because things die (or can be “seized” or soiled) they have no intrinsic value—a profoundly fascist idea that broods at the heart of capitalism: nature and people reduced to marketable objects. Remember Robinson Crusoe and his endless list? He survived on his island only because an entire hardware store washed to shore.
LM: When I first read The Stain I was struck with how authentic these descriptions of life in this village were. Could you tell us a little bit more about this village you were living in and how the experience of living there might have affected your work? For example, did you actually start writing either The Butcher’s Tales or The Stain while you were living in that village?
RD: Yes, both those books were written in Le Puy Notre Dame. I was fascinated by village life, the seasonal chores imposed by wine growing, the customs, the superstitions, archaic political structures, and so on. We were living in the poorest section of the village among an uneducated peasantry. There were no television sets, washing machines, telephones, cars. For a time my husband was called upon to drive old people to funerals. My son grew up among children who could imitate the crowing of roosters and knock flies off the wall with a rubber band.
SG: One of several politically incorrect things that you have done in your work is to present Charles Dodgson in such a favorable light in The Jade Cabinet. This goes against all the negative reinterpretations of Lewis Carroll—the suggestions that he was a sort of pederast or pervert. And yet you have all these wonderful descriptions of the joy that he brought these girls, and how much they enjoyed taking off their clothes, that freedom they felt in his presence when he was taking the photographs of them, and so on. Such treatment struck me as being very brave.
RD: I researched Carroll very carefully, and there is nothing in any of the loving reminiscences of the women who were his child friends to imply that he was a “voyeur” or abusive in any way. In fact, several insist upon the joy it was to kick off their boots and run around naked! I think he was a little girl himself. Did you know he signed his earlier pieces “Louisa Carolina”?
LM: You mentioned earlier that as a child you loved Carroll’s books. What was there about his works from an adult perspective that made you decide to have him play such an important role in The Jade Cabinet?
RD: What makes those books so extraordinary—coming out of the Victorian Age as they do—is that common sense is always triumphant, and that a little girl is the voice of reason.
LM: You also have in your works all those interesting speculations about language itself—about paradox, the different ways words can mean, and so on—and the ongoing delight in wordplay.
RD: To a great extent Alice is all about the irrational use of language by tyrants. Humpty Dumpty is a terrifying figure, for example, insisting that words have no intrinsic meaning. I think of him as the first deconstructionist making language do his bidding.
LM: Edward Lear is often associated with Lewis Carroll, for obvious reasons; but I think he’s really more interested in true nonsense (whatever that might mean!) than Carroll was—or the surrealists were, for that matter. Are you interested in nonsense? I recall the epigraph to The Stain—something like “aaa ooo zezophazazzaieozaza”—seemed to introduce the notion of nonsense. Where did that come from, anyway?
RD: That bit on nonsense is a Gnostic mantra. Its intention is to empower the navigating soul as it passes the planets—all guarded by demons—on its way back “home.”
LM: Again, that sort of discourse seems to be operating differently from nonsense. The way I think of it is that nonsense is literally nonsensical words or phrases, whereas surrealism suggests that the symbols have different kinds of hidden meaning that the artist can access. Again, I know you’ve always been interested in Lear; the epigraph to your first book of poems—The Star Chamber—Up Yours was for Lear, wasn’t it?
RD: Lear’s old man of Ibreem who threatens to scream is threatened with a beating just as Alice is threatened with decapitation when she “talks back.” Nonsense delights us I think because it offers us language in mutation, in gestation—how much richer English is for “brillig” and “snark!”—and because it ridicules pompous, vain, and obsessive behavior.
LM: You did the illustrations for an edition of Borges’s Tlon, Uqbar and Orbis Tertius—just one indication of many that Borges has been important for you.
RD: Very much so. Those drawings are a parallel itinerary. And this because Borges’s wonderful story “evolves” so much—causing the reader to dream startling and inventive dreams. I spent six months on that series of illustrations, and as I was drawing, I would return to the text to discover that I was constantly reinterpreting it. It seemed to be a text in spontaneous mutation. This experience had tremendous impact on the writing of The Fountains of Neptune, which is riddled with implied histories.
SG: I’d say your work often seems to operate that way—that is, like Borges and Calvino, you often seem to enjoy creating lists or an extended series of images that summon up all these other narratives that aren’t fully developed in your own book but which invite subsequent exploration by readers. For instance, there’s a scene in The Jade Cabinet where they visit the circus and see all these fabulous and hideous creatures, each possessing its own background stories which you briefly mention and then move on to the next. It’s almost as if you’re saying to the reader, Yes, there’s all these stories to be told about these things, but I don’t have time to tell them so why don’t you tell them yourself.
RD: One of the delights of travel is to discover that the world is full of stories. Heinrich Bleucher used to say: that man is mythmaker! Perhaps for me writing stories is a way of engaging in the infinite, the mutable, the “evocative” world which is the world of the imagination.
SG: As I’ve already suggested, it seems to me that postmodernism has gradually evolved so that it is now synonymous with skepticism and nihilism. But the fact that any story can be approached from all of these different directions and that there are multiple tellings possible of everything doesn’t mean that there is no truth; it just suggests to me that there are many truths that can be expressed with language. This is deeply troubling to a culture that seeks to limit “truth” to linear, logical propositions. I guess one of the things that I like so much about your work is that you seem more interested in using language to express multiplicity than using it in the service of either the reductiveness of rationalism or the kind of empty relativism that seems so “hip” these days. You have that great line in your work about the path that goes straight a leaden door, while the circuitous one goes to a garden.
RD: Certain writers, specific books come to mind at once: Marcel Detiene’s Le Jardin d’Adonis, Robert Harbison’s Eccentric Spaces, Pierre Mabille’s Le Miroir du Merveilleux, Gass’s Omensetter’s Luck, Sarduy’s Cobra, Coover’s Pricksongs and Descants, Calvino’s Cosmicomics, all of Borges. Manuel Puig, Angela Carter, Mary Caponegro. I just finished Harry Mathews’s wonderful new novel, The Journalist. Speaking of metaphysical delirium!
LM: What about Jose Donoso? I was just wondering because you apparently lived in Chile for a while.
RD: I’m especially fond a story of his called The Walk. I met Donoso recently, and it turned out he had been analyzed by Mateo Blanco—a Chilean analyst of special interest to Jonathan. So the meeting was delightful and intense for all of us!
SG: You mentioned last night over dinner that you developed a friendship with Angela Carter.
RD: Bob Coover suggested we meet because he knew we shared a similar private landscape. And there was a remarkable affinity between us. An early interest in the surrealists, Sade, and Freud had a lot to do with that connection, and our love of Rabelais and Jarry. Despite her terror of bicycles, Angela was a fearless, an acutely subversive creature.
LM: Over the past couple of years, you’ve been sending me sections of work-in-progress that’s not connected to the tetralogy. Have you found the process of working on it to be any different since it’s outside of this structure you’ve been working on for so long? Or has it been basically the same?
RD: In some ways the writing of the new book—which is now entitled Phosphor in Dreamland—has been somewhat different. It is a slender novel that I would describe as a species of parable. However, I would say that if it stands alone, it also illumes the tetralogy.
LM: As you were working on the books in the tetralogy, you obviously had these central metaphors or motifs—earth, fire, water, and air—that created a kind of organic framework for what you were doing. Is there any kind of unifying image or principle that you are aware of with the new book? Or were you mostly just telling a story?
RD: I think the unifying principle was Don Quixote—but as a “folie a cing.” The novel turned out to be about all sorts of things: terror of the female body, of the unknown, of the abyss, of absences. The attempt to fill the hole with noise. Magical thinking! Orthodoxies and sexual craziness. As the novel progressed, the vanished aborigines of Birdland returned in the shapes of visions, food, songs, erotic artifacts, a painted cave, and, finally, a living lover. So if the book is about human folly, it is also about the resurgent capacity of the erotic imagination.
LM: Do you find your creative process operating differently now from the way it did when you were first starting as a writer? For instance, you mentioned that you are now perhaps more aware of reworking motifs and character type.
RD: Somehow that doesn’t get easier. When I write it’s almost as if I’m in a waking hallucination even though I’m aware that I’m consistently dealing with certain kinds of motifs, like the cosmic egg, or twins, or monkeys, or the problem of power. The only thing that’s different is that, having done it before and survived, I know I can do it again. Psychologically, then, it’s easier; from a technical standpoint, it’s not. If anything, there seem to be more challenges.
LM: Beginning with that early scene in The Stain where Charlotte eats the clock, references to eating and food are a constant in your fiction—in fact, I don’t think I’ve ever read anybody who has as many different kinds of food references that operate in so many different ways, sensuously and also metaphorically. Can you talk for a moment about the role of food in your work? It was obvious from the dinner you made last night that you’re interested in food from a personal standpoint, but at what point does this become a motif that you’re aware of as an artist?
RD: I love the sensual world, I love the body, and I love the physical, natural world. And for me part of the delight of existence is the feast. The ideal day for me is to get a walk in nature, do creative work of some kind, and then prepare a feast at the end of the day.
SG: In The Jade Cabinet you describe Tubbs arriving in Egypt and wanting to make it into a pudding with raisins. That sentence seemed to express beautifully not only a deep-seated response to the awareness that time and the cosmos are devouring everything—but the desire to turn this around, so that “he” can do the devouring.
RD: Tubbs is the Market! He would eat the world with a runcible spoon if he could—he is so fearful of being devoured himself: by space, by time. It is mortality that prods him on.
LM: After you had finished Entering Fire, at what point did you begin The Fountains of Neptune?
RD: At once. The wonderful thing about having the tetralogy in mind was an extended “season;” it was like writing a single book.
LM: Those vivid, fantastic stories that Nicolas hears throughout the opening of Fountains of Neptune, the ones about ghost ships, bars made out of whale bones, mermaids and sea monsters and so forth—where did those come from?
RD: Some of them came from living in the village and listening to my neighbor, who was drunk but also a wonderful storyteller; the stories that would up in the book aren’t his stories, but there’s something about the quality of his storytelling that informed Toujours-La’s voice.
LM: It struck me while I was reading The Fountains of Neptune that you were describing the last period in which this kind of magical storytelling was possible. We can’t have stories like that anymore—the magic and mystery has been dispelled by the cameras and information.
RD: No, its gone, You know, that’s one of the things that I really miss about living in the village before television. There were a lot of old codgers around who would say things like: “I remember when sardines were so precious that for a treat we would have them for dessert with coffee.” An image like that one would often be enough to get me writing.
LM: Nicolas’s construction of this strange, idealized other world—a place outside of space and time that he could control—reminded me of similar creations: J. Henry Waugh’s baseball universe in Bob Coover’s Universal Baseball Association, Kinbote’s Zembla in Nabokov’s Pale Fire, the various fantastic imaginary cities and worlds you find in Borges, Calvino, and Robert Kelly.
RD: Nicolas’s ideal world originates in my father’s passion for war games. He had hundreds and hundreds of lead soldiers—Hittites, Nazis, everything. He also played a postal game and had named himself the Emperor of d’Elir. It was delirium! My father was brilliant, handsome, eccentric, and fearful of the world. Playing at war, he could make and break the rules. I grew to hate games because whenever he was cornered he would pull a new rule out of the air. Once he offered to teach me fencing, and before I knew it he had lunged at my heart. The “rule,” I knew, was that a touch was enough to win. I thought: “what if that rule gets broken?” I never did learn to fence.
Many years later he was nearly blind and living in Canada, he was desperate to play Chinese chess. I felt sorry for him and said OK. He got out a board—I think it was for Parcheesi, and various pieces from chess and checkers games (even dominoes!)—upon which he had stuck little emblems, and said “As you can see I don’t have a Chinese chess set, but these elephants will be horses and they move like bishops except that on certain occasions they can leap to the left (or the right); and then this piece with the tiddly-wink glued to its head will be the emperor although it’s the wrong color. But you’ll remember that all the black pieces belong with the red—you’ll notice we have black, red and white; the green tiddlywink is really black.” This went on for ten minutes and then I said, “Dad, I need a walk, I’ll be back.” And walked over to my friend Jane Urquhart’s house and I said, “Jane, I need a whiskey.” And Jane said, “Rikki, you don’t drink whiskey.”
SG: Where did the image of the jade cabinet come from?
RD: I love jade and the tales about the uncut stone’s destiny conveyed to the carver in a vision or a dream—the virtual image hidden within that he is to give tangible form to. A terrific metaphor for a character telling the author what the book must be. I’ve done many drawings inspired by Chinese or Mayan jade—imaginary archeologies. But The Jade Cabinet was precipitated by a phrase of Kafka’s that’s always intrigued me: “All language is but poor translation.” In other words, if we could speak the language of languages, the language of Eden, we would have the power to conjure the world of things: a tower of Babel, cabbages and kings. But it was Memory who gave the book to me, just as Septimus gave me Entering Fire.
SG: Of course, the main focus of The Jade Cabinet is Etheria. Did you ever consider narrating the book from her point of view? Although that would have kept her from being such a figure of levitation.
RD: You’re right. Etheria had to be talked about; her story was “porous.” This is why she takes form through scraps of letter, journals, phrases, and memories. She is volatile, a spirit or inspiriting presence, an animating air. For her gravity-bound husband, Radulph Tubbs, she is also a season of the mind.
SG: At the end of the book, were you aware when those shots were fired that killed the magician that it wasn’t Etheria who had been murdered?
RD: No, I didn’t plan it that way. I didn’t know that until Memory discovered it. At that point, I though, My God, Etheria has vanished!
SG: There are several ways that your work goes against the grain of a lot of things that are in the air, philosophically and aesthetically, in postmodernism. For instance, there seems to be an insistence in your writing that everything is finally not undecidable and relative, that there are moral distinctions that can be made (and need to be made). So for all the emphasis in your work about flux and ambiguity, there’s also an almost old-fashioned insistence on the difference between good and bad. But it also strikes me that in your work the difference between good and evil is not the difference between power and passivity, but more between the willingness to use power for life enhancement or for destructiveness—it often seems as simple as destruction vs. creation, or something like that. Part of that has to do with the way you present language itself—this sense that language has an ability to control and limit in bad ways versus language which liberates, which opens things up, in good ways.
RD: I grew up on Sartre and continue to think that freedom without responsibility is just another form of enslavement. We live in terrible times in which the so-called freedom to make money without concern for the social and ecological consequences is unquestioned. Living and being has been usurped by taking! To fight this is seen as subversive.
It seems to me that rigor—aesthetic, intellectual—is the paradox at the heart of creative work. But what I call rigor resists definition because it cannot be reduced to one small bone; it is not palpable, but intuited. Every artist worth her salt knows what I mean—either one chooses the well-trodden path, platitude, sentimentality, the current orthodoxy, whatever, or one blazes a trail which is, no matter the nature of the work, part of the process of becoming. I think rigor implies trusting inner experience, investigating inner experience, and so investigating the work of courage. In this way the artist reveals the darkness and the wild beauty at the heart of things. Such a revelation can be a profound aesthetic experience and, simultaneously, a transgressive, a regenerating experience.
I fear we are undergoing a “fascistization” of culture and one indication of that is the idea that beauty is elitist, or somehow “soft.” As if beauty didn’t belong to all of us. And the idea that truth is a lump of bloody human cartilage attracting flies and not the “living being.” What I am attempting to describe here is the process toward understanding, and if I speak of rigor and imagination so much it’s because I think we cannot function as free beings, as “imagining” beings, unless we have the courage to perceive the world and to name what we see, to choose clarity over opacity.
LM: Again, the way you’re describing this process—this struggle between competing forces, the existence of an evil that is actual rather than just a metaphor—sounds almost Manichean.
RD: There’s a connection there with Manichism, I’m sure, but I’m not talking of “cosmical” powers but worldly ones. I’m talking about the constant tension or struggle I perceive—well, it is “palpable”—between forces of enslavement and obscuration, and forces of liberation and illumination. For example, what are the descendants of the Maya fighting for now? They are fighting for what we all want and what we all must have: the right to “be” in the fullest sense.
LM: In some basic sense your books always seem to present these opposing kinds of principles struggling for control of people’s minds and lives—and one thing I admire about your treatment of this struggle is that you’re “old-fashioned” enough to eschew the easy relativism that’s become associated with so many postmodern works. In other words you’re willing to take sides and come down clearly on the side of “life.”
RD: I’m saying the side of life is the primary subversion.