Back to realist grounds: an interview with Russell Banks

Re 1•ista de Estudios Norteamericanos. 11.º 4 ( 1996). pp . 89 -98 BACK TO REALIST GROUNDS: AN INTERVIEW WITH RUSSELL BANKS FRANCISCO COLLADO RODRÍG UEZ Universidad de Zaragoza In 1992 critic Tony Hilfer ended one of the chapters of his book American Fiction Sine e 1940 (New York: Longman) posing a suspicion about the near future of American fiction. «It would be premature to declare,» he wrote, «w ho the coming writers of the 1990s will be but there is reason to suspect that most will be realist» (1992, 187). In the same volume Hilfer also affirmed the increasing critica! importance of realist writer Russell Banks, whose novel Affliction ( 1989) goes back to explore American family life and its most anguishing effects -in this case- of divorce, alcoholism, loss of a child, and mental illness. Although his name is not listed yet in the literary anthologies between Baldwin and Baraka, Bank's importance has been increasing in later years. More than a dozen books, including hi s successful Continental Drift (1986) and The Sweet Hereafter (1991), have eamed him, among other things, a chair at Princeton to teach creati ve writing, a po sition that he shares with another member of his literary generation, Joyce Caro! Oates. But, in this literary generation we are dealing with is realism effectively striking back? That was my first question and, from the b eg inning, Banks appeared to have very clear views on th e issue: R. BANKS.- As you probably know, American writers entered a period in the 1960s and 1970s where they seriously questioned the premises of realism, and attacked those premises by and large. If you were a young writer com ing up in that period as I was, it was difficult not to participate in that. But having gone through that anti-realist period, ha ving questioned traditional realism, we are now undergoing a useful retum, I think, to realist premises, freshened and informed by that inquiry of the 60 s and 70s, so I don 't feel so much that what we now have in American fiction is a retum to realism as such. It is a r es umption of the realistic project, but informed by a period of serious selfscrutiny and practice in th e experimental 60s and 70 s primarily. lt isn 't that kind of unconscious, in a way, passive realism of a younger generation of writers, but rather something which is more formally self-conscious. This explains thatAmerican writers 90 Francisco Collado Rodrígue z of my generation -who might be realíst authors Iike Robcrt Stone, Joyce Caro! Oates , Don Delillo, or even Toni Morríson to sorne degree-, nonetheless are writers who ha ve read and applied sorne self-conscious formal structures to their work, formal slructures that they would ha ve not used had not intervened that period of self-critique I mentioned before. So I resíst saying that we are involved in a retum so much as in a continuation, freshened by the insights, the contradictions gained through our earlier practice. F. COLLADO.- There is a !abe! that literary critícs have, perhaps, invented for that. Would you be happy to label your narrative style as postmodern realism? Within this postmodem realism, one of the characteristics that is usually beíng commented on by critics is that the human subject -the self as such-has dissolved, it is nota stable entity any longer. Or, to focus it from anotherperspective, perhaps what is being dissolved is not so much the human subject or the human mind but the event itself, that which everybody interprets in a dífferent way. There seems to be no more grounds for objectivity in this new postmodern realism. In a way a novel like The Sweet Hereafter is a very good example of th is ambiguous approach to reality. R. BANKS.- Well, I didn 't feel that. What I was after in that novel was to avoid, if 1 could , the notion of a classical hero defined, as usual, through the struggle between his ego and the universe. In The Sweet Hereafter l tried to make a description of the universe that was more of a communal effort than the one applied to a single individual vision. In fact, 1 was interested in exploring the possibilities ofthe community as hero and trying to diffract the qualities or the virtues that we normally attach to the sing le hero and test them on a body ot°people which turned up to be four people, which seemed to be a large enough number in ordcr to suggest a much larger set, the whole community if you want. But I'm not comfortable with the notion that there is no stable subject in the type of li terature 1 write. F. COLLADO.- Perhaps the notion has been simply invented by the critics? R. BANKS.-Right, it could be that. It is perhaps a way of describing the enterprise that, I would think, applies more to mannerism and mannerists, than to writers like myself. I feel very much attached to the subject in a classicaJ sense, in a very American Whitmanesque sense. F. COLLADO.- In a humanist sense? You think that humanist values are still operative both in American Iife and in your novels? R. BANKS.- Yes, very much so, and very much in a Whitmanesque sense. 1 aro not particularly comfortable with this notion of the dissolution of the subject. Although I al so have to te ll you that 1 mistrust deeply the ways in which humanist values and humanist assumptions have been dramatized in fiction, conventionally. I think that these notions have to be re-invented, freshly. The language has to be re-appropriated and the fomms and conventions of dramatic fi ction have to be re-appropriated by the writer. That means that the Iiterary project it se lf has not re main ed the sarne. In my case, something of interest here is the re-appropriation of the very notion of narrative, for instan ce with th e use of omniscience in the narrative through means that are highly Back to Realist Grounds: an lnterview with Russell Banks 91 artificial and se lf -conscious and which dr aw attention to those relations in arder for myself, for my own project, to reappropriate the right to tell a story. It 's my own private personal enterprise. I mean, anyone can generalize, I suppose, and see other writers engaged in a similar enterprise, although differently expressed; like Paul Auster, with h is very neutralized white prose and highly ri go rous and disciplined pattem-making. In this way he is doing something similar, but this is differently expressed by each individual writer, I think. Maybe you can generali ze much more easily that 1, to be sure, but I'm much mor e concemed wi th my own enterprise than anybody else. F. COLLADO.-A realist enterprise, as you have said. Realism tries to depict or transcribe the kind of reality that we perceive through our senses, it involves the old co ncept of mímesis. However, man y people in the twentieth century, especia U y scientists and philosophers, have been reaffirming again and again that the reality our senses perceive is not sa tisfactory enough. We are frus tr ated by our poor ca pacity to know the world. Is it then worthwhile to be a realist writer again? R. BA NKS.- Ye s; absolutely. What you have said is true, life is evidently more complex, and any portrait that we ca n manage, any process we can write about should point to the limitations of the process itself, to th e necessarily subje ct ivity of the process. The writer has to conceive that limitation, but having conceived that you still go on, like Beckett. I still go on, 1 have obvious ly realized th at truth is limited, but then 1 ha ve ·also thought that this is something probably irrelevant and ne vertheless l go on. I think that a literary work that doesn 't reflect this human impossibility to ever reach absolute truth is basically a work which is not very conscious and not very interesting as a r es ult. But to go back to what 1 was saying originally, ir would be impossible perhaps, or diflicult, very difficult, to be conscious of ali this had it not been for this whole generation of writers in th e 60s and 70s, writers like Barthelme, Gass, Barth and so forth. They seriously questioned ali those premises, raised them up, took them as far as you ca n take them, but then they b eg an to repeat themse lv es. Having done that much must have taken a while, and it was very beneficia!: I think that a culture ha s to do it periodically, it has to question th e means by which to tell stories, it is a historical process. F. COLLADO.-Let 's talk a little bit more about those experimental writers you ha ve jus t mentioned. Do you still perceive in the country the existence of a gap between this type of highly experimental literature that, if I may say so, can be labeled as airead y canonized, and this other type of realist literature that is perhaps more popular? R. BANKS.- Yes. Well, y ou know , writers like Barth and Ga ss are ca nonized mainly in Europe, they are really nota s canonized here as they are there, as happens in Fran ce certainly, and in England too. Thi s is the case with experimental writers like Coover, Barth, Gass, Doctorow ... you c an also add Thomas Pynchon, although Pynchon is still publicly regarded as a great writer here, al rn ost sornething approaching God, probably because ofhi s invisibility. But inAmerica these writers are regarded as prirnarily academic writers, who rnainly appeal to literary cr itics and scholars whose conce ms are narrow and esoteric, with relatively nothing to do with life. Although, in a sense, th ey 92 Francisco Collado Rodríguez were also anticipatory of the main flow of serious fiction that jus t comes now, in the 80s and 90s: but there is a generational break-off point here that has not been fully acknowledged or described, as far as I know, especially in Europe. There people are probably less conscious than we are here inAmerica, but now we have a generation of writers coming into full maturity, that is to say, authors in their late 40s or early 50s , who grew up in the 1960s, so their first experiences of society were, by and large , informed by the Vi etnam War, by the Civil Rights Movement and the turbulence and social awareness of the 60s. And the writers that preceded them, the experimental writer s we were talking about, were primarily male, primarily white, many ofthem were Eastem educated, primarily with graduate degrees, university degrees. They were writers who grew up and started to mature in the postwar years, in the 50s, and the lives that they have been living have been conditioned, in many ways, by the universities: their relation to writing has been, to a considerable degree, informed by that experience, which somehow explains why in the 60s and 70s the work they do doesn't seem to have an y particular connection to the work of the next you nger generation. There are almost no prominent writers I can think of in my generation, for instance, who would regard Barthelme, Gass, Barth, et c, as their teachers; we practically leap over this whole generation. My generation ma y be influenced by Latin American writers, or by French writers, but we bypa ss that experimental generation of our own writers. De s pite the fact that I am conscious of lh eir experimentation, if you take myself as example, I also leap over tbem and go to writers like Norman Mailer or Richard Wright. I jumped over preceding writers. I think Joyce and Faulkner <lid the same with the great realists of the early part ofthe century. Old er writers malter much more than the pr eceding generation and 1 think it has a lot to do with something that is generational, with a radical di ff ere nc e in the experience of society and literature in your period, in our ca se the period was th e l 960s. We were young men then, and we are influenced by that experience in much the sa me way as the generation that produ ce d writers such as Hemin gw ay or Fitzgerald were influenced by World War I. They were young, they were 20 or 21 years old when lhey first we nt out into the world. 1 think that is generally true for writers; what happen s to them when they first enter the larger world becomes more important than their family or their university. F. COLLADO.- So , you essentially defend the existence of a generational gap between ear ly experimental writers and your own generation, a gap mainly motivated by the effects produced in you by the social events of the l 960s ... R. BANKS.- Exactly, and by the values and priorities of writers, men and women, black and white, ... F. COLLADO.- Would you include in your generation th e figure of Thomas Pynchon despite the fact that he is also experimental? He has even dedicated a book, Vineland, to the events of the 1960s ... R. BANKS.- Exactly, exactly. He is one of the writers whose concems and priorities are informed and created in that pursuit ofthe 60s. But we were teenagers, we Back to Realist Grounds: an lnten •iew wilh Russel/ Banks 93 were in college then, and you know, this is another important factor, the sociological change in this period too: where writers come from, who they are, where they are educated. The generation of experimental writers like Gass or Barth basically carne from the middle and upper-middle class. They went to prívate universities, th ey were defined early on, they were elected in a sense early on in their lives. This may explain thy sense of entitlement they have ofbelonging to a group, an appropriate group by and large. Whereas if you look at it from the perspective of the notes that are contributed today for the best American short-stories anthologies, in 1994, you see that younger writers have gone to state universities ali over the country, they have come from everywhere, they are mixed, they are blacks and whites, male and female, they reflect much more clearly their pluralism, multicultural aspects of this country than writers did in previous generations. And, of course, this has something to do with the shape of contemporary literal ure ... F. COLLADO.- Nevertheless, in this new American multicultural panorama there are sorne voic es that claim that, once again, the whites are the ones who now try to appropriate the voices of the cultural minorities. I assume that you know Ishmael Reed 's opinion about this issue ... R. BANKS.- Well, I think that lshmael might sound a little bit paranoid at times. I mean, he's right about so many things that it's hard to criticize him, but I think he does tend to see conspiracies where there aren't necessarily any conscious or unconscious conspiracies. Ishmael will no more go back to the bad old days than I would; he is much happier here than he would have been 25 or 50 years ago. I think that, in sorne ways, Ishmael feels more excluded by being a Western ora male wr iter than for racial or other reasons. I mean, he 's more worried about the fact that black women are getting more attention on the issue of racism than anybody else. 1 think it might be more a question of competition with them ... He is obsessed with the subject, he writes about it ali the time, but I wouldn't take it too seriously. P: In a sense Ishmael Reed also offers, as a writer of fiction, a curious combination of experimental writing and social commitment, the sa me as happens, at times, in Pynchon 's novels. Despite the evident di ffe rences with the way you write, do you think that Ishmael Reed is close to your own position as a social writer? R. BANKS.-Yes, he is, and Don DeLillo is also. You can ha ve a sense of feeling and c ommunality with writers like Ishmael even if , on the surface, you would think that they have nothing in common with me or with Joyce Carol Oates. But in fact there is a great deal in common. · F. COLLADO.- Despite the fact that Oates, DeLillo, or Banks are white and Reed is not? R. BANKS.- Yes, despite the racial issue. Not only do I feel the same, at times, as Norman Mailer. I also feel the same as Gloria Naylor; she is interested, I think, in trying to distribute moral values across the whole community rather than lo cating them 94 Francisco Collado Rodríguez on individuals, she is challenging and working against the conventional, against the conventional ideas of the hero too, as I try to do in my own wo rk. I don't think the main problem is race, particularly. When you look over the sp ec trum of writers of America today who are between the age of 45 and 55, y ou are talking about a mixture of writers no one of whom stands out and holds the literary floor in the way Hemingway held the floor, or Faulker held the floor in the l 93 0s, for instance. What we have in America now is a much wider and mor e diverse gro up of writers. We are over 250 million people living in this country and our culture isn't controlled by such a small group of people as happened, I sup po se, 20 or 25 years ago. That' s changed a lot and we ha ven 't quite processed the nat ur e of th ose ch anges yet. Th e question that you were arising and what I'm also trying to address in my book s very much has to do with those changes in the last 25 years, since th e.60s. F. COLLADO.- In the life of a contemporary American writer the social role played by the media is usually very important. Wh at happens wh en a writer like Rus sell Banks starts to be canonized? Does is affect y our literary agenda? R. BANKS.- We ll , it doesn 't mean anything particu!arly difficult or depressing. As I was telling you, a writ er here doesn 't get canonized any more as happened te earlier writers. Now this means that your books are socially recognized, that they are translated ... F. COLLADO.- Or that you become a university professor at one of the mos1 prestigious institutions of this country, something that only happens in America. H o~ does it aff ect your work? R. BANKS.-Yes, that is also true. Well, to write and, at the same time, to te ad at the university is so mething so much widespread among writers of vario us qualitie! th at it is difficult to take it seriously. l don 't know, 1 don 't feel canonized in the s en st that in the past you hada handful of writers that, yo u could say, characterized A meri car literalure: Faulkner, Fitzgerald, Hemingway, etc.; you co uld name one of them and th( notion of American literature would be on your head and Lhat 's it. That was canonization Now, there aren't too many reasons to say that there is a canonization. l mean, as W< were saying earlier, the country is huge, we are 250 million people living here. F. COLLADO.- How ev er , only sorne among you b ecom e recognized ove rse as Your novels have been translated and you have been invited to visit sorne Europ ea1 countries, including Spain. Surely it means so mething for you and your work? R. BANKS.- 1 suppose so. But when you talk about such a vast number of w riter s really you may find it m ea ningles s. You ha ve to realize how much the life of writers ha changed in America in the last half centur y, generally. In on e way, the culture support many more writers than it did, but it does so in a much low er leve!. As I told you, th er is no more that kind of gol den superstars who werc like kings. [f you look, for inst an ce in a 1940 issue of Life magazine, there is a picture of Eme st Hemingway advertisin whisky there, and you have the impression that he is an icon, you i..mm ediately recog ni z that figure, in thc same way you would recognize Frank Sinatra ora famous rock si nge1 Ba ck to Realist Grounds: an l nt ervi ew with Russel/ Banks 95 Hemingway's face has a kind of iconographic reality. Writers don't obtain that any more. Or perhaps only writers like Stephen King, pulp writers, but not literary writers. And I don 't mind this kind of leveling, I think it's all for the good not to have a few superstars but to have, ata lower leve!, a system that supports a larger number of serious writers. It's partly the university system that does it, which takes much criticism for this, especially from abroad. But without this system, American writers would surely have a much mor e difficult start. F. COLLADO.-A nd don 't you think that because you are a participant in this system established by the university, you ha ve been assimilated into it? R. BANKS. Well, not necessarily. It gives writers freedom to do what we want to do. If I were not working for the university, I would probably be writing joumalism, writing myse lf to death, something like that. I remember having a big fight with Jim Harrison about 15 or 20 years ago. I was going into teaching at that point and he was writing screen plays. He was criticizing me for being appr opr iat ed by the university, while he was bus y writing scripts, supporting himse lf up there independently. Well, he consumed himself doing that, he spent a lot of time and energy, and I'm sure he couldn 't compromised him self, being a screen writer, a little bit mo re than I did. There is no problem about compromising our ideals, at least here in Princeton and, at th e same time, you help your students advance their way through Jife. F. COLLADO.-And in your double role as university teacher and creative writer, are you and your fictional work directly influenced by contemporary criticism, by thinkers like Derrida, Foucault, or Lacan? When I read sorne of yo ur novels, I had the irnpression that th ey were deconstructing our conventional interpretation of real it y. R. BANKS.- No, and th e danger in this issue is that I ha ve put myse lf in a reactive mood or that, if you wish, l ha ve a reactive demon in so rn e way, out of my anger, frustration, irritation, impatience, when 1 ha ve tried to r ea d the work of sorne contemporary critic s; so now I'm trying basically to ignore them. Deconstructing a world is basically what novels are doing all the time, what writers like Jo yce [Carol O ates l or 1 are doing but you don 't need to read Derrida. 1 like to read fi ction or poetry of a high le ve !, or history. Perhaps in a way I am influenced by these thinke rs when I read works written by people who have been educated and informed by deconstruction theorists, especially if you read history or anthropology. But 1 think it doesn 't organize my thoughts in any way about my own writing. 1 still write with the basic pr emises and sources which I worked from when 1 was 20 or 21 y ear s old, when 1 was first starting. I mean, when 1 didn't ha ve anything to say, and I still don't [laugh] ... Seriousl y, in my case everything is always in relation to the theme I am writing about. Ali problems that occur in writing derive from the relationship that you obtain to this theme. I mean, I write this way, I write th at way, but all the time I'm reorganizing my relation to the theme that I'm trying to write about, and that's a form of concem. F. COLLADO.- And what about your re aders? Do you also keep a particular set of readers in mind when you wr ite? 96 Francisco Collado Rodríguez R. BANKS.-Well, I'm very much interested in a kind of vemacular audience, rather than in a high audience. I'm much happier getting older in this way. And it's pe rhaps better than being canonized: one of the things I'm deeply satisfied as I get older is that my audience gets younger. But the audience shifts. You find that the origina l band pulls down with age. Your books are in paperback more and more and you are moving down a class too; you start as a writer in American hard-cover, and your audience is generally the appropriate one for your books, let's say middle-age women, for instance. but then after a while you mov e down some how into the academy, your readers are Ph.Ds. or be long to the upper middle. I think that' s the so rt of movement that h as been experien ced by writers like Joyce Caro! Oates, Toni Morrison or myself. F. COLLADO.-Let us come back to a very specific part of your audience: yom own students. As a teacher of creative writing, what do you exac tly teach them? R. BANKS .-That's a very good question. Well, 1 could begin by telling yo u tha1 Joyce Caro! Oates and my se lf are not tea ching people here to be writers in the sense that it is a professional training program for graduate students, such as the one the) have in Iowa, for instance. Joyce is an editor, and basica ll y she works with s tudent ~ who are showing their ability to write. But our students are all undergraduates ... The procedure might be simil ar to the one in Iowa, people come with their manuscripts anc th ey are discussed and revised, but the premises are different and the students ar( different. Students are younger here, they are undergraduates, they don't have th( bac h elor degree yet. They are majoring in other areas like English literatur e, ro· manee languages, engineering ... My best writernow is a Chinese-American k id, < chemical engineering s tudent , and he writes the best American slang you 've eve1 seen. He 's got a grea t ear and he just writes this stuff. He 's trained to do it and h( is also really fascinated by it, but he is a chem i ca l engineering kid. Students an working on stor ies, on fiction pieces of various types but they are also readin! anthologies, texts that we assign them and they are discussin g it in a seminar format So the com bination of their being challeng ed to write fiction and to analyze and reac fiction from th e point of view of the writer makes them so m ehow better readers. Sorne· way 1 feel I'm teaching reading rather than writing, I'm teaching reading in a way th a is primarily analytical. F. COLLADO.-And what abo ut literary theory, does it play an important partir your classes? R. BANKS.-Well, our teaching steps her e tend to be more personal and historical and less critically informed and driven by theo ry than what th ey usual\ y ge t in an Eng li sl literature department. As you know, in literature departments theory analysis is ve~ important, but this is not what st ud ents are getting in creative writing programs. In fact it's being said by the number of peop le that the last place, or perhaps the only place nov where they are teaching literature in the American university is in the creative wri tin¡ programs. You see, the only place where we are teaching literature that isn't driven b~ theory, by critica! theory. Back ro Realist Grounds: an lnterview with Russell Banks 97 F. COLLA DO .- I suppose you mean the recenl impact of Cultural Studies in the American University, especially in the English departments ... R. BANKS.- Ye s, that' s correc t. Nowadays th ey include everything in the same program. They include people like Madonna and Henry James , you know. They are studied together and treated as if they have the same significance [laugh]. F. COLLADO.- Yes , the key term in this field of studies seems to be ideology, T suppose, and, as you imply in your words, one may have the impression at times that sorne critics are a little too far-fetched in their research. However, in contemporary culture there is another aspect that, as you commented earlier, has al so become predominant in current studies: I am referring to the present importan ce of cultur al minorities. How does American cultural pluralism affect your own writing? R. BANKS.-Well, I've learned actually a lot from novelists who are writing out of these different traditions. I ha ve already mentioned Toni Morrison but there are other writers in her tradition whose works are also seriously informed, Charles Johnson, for instance, and other African-American writers. They are seriously informed by, let's say, their own position as a minority. This is a fascinating form to me. There are writers, I think, that somehow abuse this literary approach, but it is a very interesting pattem for me. The pluralism of American writing is very useful for ali of us: American storytelling has been basically revitalized for the last de ca de or so, and everybody profits by it. If we are now borrowing from Western European tradition s, it is also true that at the same time we are borrowing from the traditions that recreated, for instance, the African fiasco ... lt has been very positive and useful for American writing. F. COLLADO.- Yes , but do you think that the situation is effectually and socially changing now? 1 mean, do you think that really social repression against minority groups is now being attenuated in American lif e? R. BANKS.- Well, only human beings change, but nowadays you can invite people to have dinner, and tell them to speak at dinner. This is something that has been happening for the Ia st decade with regard to women and with regard to minorities of various types. They are invited to speak up among white males, primarily. Certainly it 's changing, but not in any grand dramatic fashion. This is not like the election in So uth Africa. That's significant, that's dramatic, almost apocalyptic, that's an event you can identify as a real social change. Yes, you can say: Oh, this week in April a huge event will happen in South Africa. Whereas in America we are talking about a gradual shift, very sma ll changes occur overa long period of time. But even so, I would rather be a writertoday, a woman writer, anAfrican-American writer, Chinese-American, Spanish- American, or any kind of American, even a white male writer to be honest with you [laugh], better than 25 years ago. Things are gradually changing. I have four daughte rs and I remember that one day my mother said to me, «I think it's terrible the way ali the good schools now accept women.» My mother, it's clear, has a different mentality. So I said to her, «Mum ! Do you realize that everyone of your granddaughters has gone to college but they co uldn 't