7. The Novel as an Interior Journey
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Koshikawa: I am not sure if Japanese are more creative readers than Americans, but it seems true that you have more enthusiastic readers here. Why do you think your works are so popular in Japan?
Erickson: Boy, I'd like to know the answer to that myself. If I knew the answer to that, then I could do the same thing in the United States. I don't know. All I know is that I give a number of interviews to a number of journalists, and the few interviews that I have given to Japanese journalists or Japanese professors have always been more challenging, more complex. I think you would have to tell me why, because I have no idea. I would not have expected it. And yet now it doesn't surprise me, for some reason.
Koshikawa: It's funny, but there was a rumor last year that Bob Dylan was a candidate for the Nobel Prize for Literature.
Erickson: Well, Bob Dylan is one of the great influences in my life; Henry Miller, William Faulkner, and Bob Dylan. Bob Dylan changed me as a writer in 1965 the same way reading Faulkner for the first time changed me. Having said that, I think that Bob Dylan's greatness is as a songwriter rather than as a poet. I think Bob Dylan's words work with his music and his voice. In a way, they do not work as well just on the printed page. I would have no problem at all giving Bob Dylan a Nobel Prize for Literature, but then we would have to redefine literature, which is OK with me. But if you give Bob Dylan a Nobel Prize, then the next year you have to give it to Ray Charles, and the year after you have to give it to the Beatles, and so on. Because all of these people have had more impact than novelists have. It's sad but true. Or it might not be sad. I might just be the way it is.
Koshikawa: Some of my friends, editors of literary magazines, often worry that people are losing interest in literature.
Erickson: Well, the same thing is happening in the United States. People are reading less and less and less. I worry that the novel as an art form is becoming obsolete. There is nothing that I can personally do about that. For better or worse, I was born to be a novelist. And I actually can understand why. As life gets faster and faster and as the consumption of information multiplies tenfold, a hundredfold, just the time and patience it takes to lose yourself in a novel demands a lot, I think, in contemporary life.
I'm not sure that on a mass scale the culture can be conditioned to love literature the way it has been conditioned to love TV, because there are ways in which reading a novel is still very much a private thing. And it's supposed to be a private thing. It's not like going to the movie theater, where you are sitting with a lot of people and watching a movie, or even sitting at home in front of your TV set alone. There are still other people on that TV set. And so it is not the utterly private experience that reading a novel is. And there is the question of whether the age still has room for something like that. And there are plenty of times that I despair that it doesn't, when I think that the novel is a vanishing form--8,000 copies of Arc d'X is not bad, but 8,000 CDs, 8,000 people going to see your movie, you've got a problem. The scale of success and the measure of success is so completely different, and so miniaturized, as time goes by, for literature.
But I think that each art form has its individual idiosyncratic potential. Music is capable of communication in ways that no other art form is. The movies communicate in ways that no other art form does. I still think that the novel is capable of doing it, that the novel still takes people places, especially into the interior landscapes, that other narrative art forms cannot. And what I would hope to do with my fiction is find a way to obliterate the barriers between the exterior landscapes and the interior ones. That is what I want to do, because it seems to me that that is what a novel can do that no other art form can do. And hopefully that is still going to be important. And as long as that is still important, as long as those sorts of interior journeys are still important, the novel is going to be a worthwhile endeavor. But I think that people have to find that for themselves.
End
Back to "Finding a Way to Obliterate the Barriers"
Edited by Syuichi OTOMORI