from A Tiny Corner in the House of Fiction
collected interviews of the Anglo-Irish novelist
including a 1978 one with Jean-Louis Chevalier, editor
Q: In your novels, does the mystery in the plot correspond
to the mystery inherent in human beings & their lives?
Well, yes and no. I think that any artist
goes in for mystification, . . . mystery &
mystification can be connected. The
artist doesn't want to be too simple. This
is something very important about art,
that it's a game of tricks, the artist de-
simplifies what he's doing, in a way,
deliberately, in order to present it perhaps
with a certain air of reality, or possibly
to conceal things. There is an element of
mystification in a great deal of art. . . I
think somebody quoted me, that
the person cannot be known. . .
I think it's important that the human person
-- and in this sense one could use the work
of art as a kind of analogue of the human
person -- isn't knowable in the end. I think
this is something that's dawned on me more
and more as I've grown older, that one knows
awfully little. One knows very little about
anything, and one knows awfully little about
the other people and awfully little about oneself.
There's a kind of enormous jumble on the top,
and what exactly is underneath is very obscure
so that I would feel that a novelist especially,
who has a responsibility because he's presenting
people, should, unless there's an aesthetic reason
otherwise -- present his people as not totally
explicable. . . Great characters in great novels
have got this inexhaustible quality. This is
why they're so interesting; you want to discuss
them; people argue endlessly about characters
in Henry James, in Tolstoy, in Proust, in
Shakespeare. There's something profoundly
and interestingly unclear about them.
(page 80, 9th interview out of 23 included by
the editor, Gillian Dooley)
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