write the conversation between Richard and Maria?
Answers
Answer:
RS: In your collection of short stories, The Mechanical Copula, you played a great deal
with ideas of perception, simulation and the authenticity of experience. I’m thinking in
particular of your interest in Federico Fellini’s 1976 film Casanova, in which this is a
central idea. Do you think these issues also play a part in your novel, Sailor?
MF: Sailor sprang from a scar. A little monkey bit my mother’s leg some time in the
mid 1930s in Belfast. The bite mark is still visible today, not quite angry but definitely
agitated. The novel’s monkey is not the same one who marked my mother, my Sailor, the
eponymous narrator of the novel, is the “providential machine”, as Kant might have it,
who embodies and extends my current social, theoretical and creative pre-occupations:
without this monkey I would be mute. So, in direct relation to this, authenticity of
experience is central to how I begin to write but not to how I carry on writing. This
novel has been necessarily extremely research-heavy, demanding a thorough processing
of oral and historical archives to get the right voice; I’ve had to mine my own Belfast
demotic, (now inevitably diluted as I’ve been living outside of Northern Ireland for
twenty years), and rely upon my family and archives to return my own voice to me. I keep
coming back to the same quote, “The human word is midway between the muteness of
animals and the silence of God”, borrowed from Louis Lavelle’s La Parole et l'Écriture, I’m
somewhere in between.
RS: The other day, I came across the term dinnshenchas, which, as I’m sure you’re
aware, is the Irish word for the way in which the land/landscape is translated into story, a
kind of ‘toponymic lore’, so that every place-name bears a story. As well as being an
archive of your demotic, how important is this sense of place in your novel?
MF: The local as the universal interests me, it seems such a practical, sensible
proposition, speaking to the limits of what can and cannot be remembered by an exile.
Explanation: