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I would first like to say that I enjoyed Fooscap tremendously.
Being that you are an English Professor and an Author, I would like to ask a few questions as to your thoughts on writing and reading. What are your thoughts on Rolond Barthes' Death of the Author?
One of the interesting things in Foolscap was reading Theo's thoughts and feelings as he watched "his" play being readied for production. As you were writing this scene, how much (if any) were, or would be, your own reactions if any of your works were to be brought to the stage or the big screen? Also, as you finish a work and put it into the reader's hands, what are your hopes? Would you prefer the reader enjoy the characters and world, without any thought given to the Author?
Of course, when I read a good book, I am not constantly thinking of the Author, but there are many times when I do think, "this author is a wonderful writer," or "what a beautiful passage this is!" or "how witty". I must admit that as I have read your work, there have been many of these "moments".
I appreciate your wit, humor and your beautiful way with words.
Sincerely, A. Lee
. Dear A. Lee,
First, thank you for your kind words about Foolscap. My thoughts on Roland Barthes' The Death of the Author? Well, to paraphrase Mark Twain, rumors of the death of the novelist have been greatly exaggerated. In any case, Barthes' theory appears to have been kicked by Foucault onto the critical graveyard where so many others before it lay piled in a heap.
On the other hand, the death of the NOVEL now. That's something we've had to think about in this era of the memoir. It's as if readers have lost the imaginative energy to invest in fiction and would rather have the easy thrills of tabloid facts--real crime, true confessions of incest and child abuse and misery. (Princess Di instead of Anna Karenina, OJ Simpson instead of Othello.) Many a "story" that would have been told as a first novel a generation ago is now being published instead as a first memoir. I'm convinced that had Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil and Angela's Ashes been written and published as novels (which they well might have been), they would have been far far less successful than they were. We were told that their TRUTH gave them their power. How ironical that we should be right back at the beginning of the novel when Defoe had to make a stylized claim that Robinson Crusoe was a real man (the original "Survivor").
I am a great believer in the novel and in the power of its past. My own novels call consciously upon that past (in the Renaissance sense of imitation), so that, for example, Handling Sin pays tribute to the picaresque tradition of Pickwick Papers, Tom Jones and the great papa of the genre, Don Quixote (Raleigh and Mingo have adventures paralleling those of Quixote and Sancho Panza).
That is why, like its predecessors (and unlike my first-person novels) , Handling Sin has a strong "author's" voice, an omniscient narrator who talks to the reader about the characters, about life, about art. (Now this voice is of course no less fictional, no less contrived and controlled, than the voices of Justin and Cuddy, the first-person narrators of my detective novels Uncivil Seasons and Time's Witness. But the omniscient narrator is pretending to be the author him- or her-self, claiming to have "authority"over the text and so to be telling us what to think about the text.) This voice (so wonderful in a Jane Austen or a Thackery novel) pretty much went out of style in the 20th century. Instead, we preferred a different pretense: that there was no author, just the text. And then that there was no text. Only our interpretations. And then even those were deconstructed.
As for your question of how much Theo's thoughts and feelings about the theatre matched my own, I think it's significant that right after finishing a novel that's about a writer moving from fiction on the page to fiction on the stage, a novel that's about leaving academia for show business, I should myself stop teaching and start writing "drama" for television.
My hope for my novels is that readers go happily into their worlds and stay there not wantingto have to leave. I hope that while they are there they meet characters who become forever a part of their lives. I would like them to learn from those people and their stories that hearts are at their core the same, that laughter is a prayer, that forgiveness and tolerance are gifts to the giver, that grace in this life is possible but takes courage and that the waste of love is the worst of sins. I'd like them to learn, like Theo, to stop waiting in the wings for life to come to them, but to step out on to the stage where life is going on in all its wonderful horrible clutter.
The lesson is in the story not in the author.
Again thanks for the good words.
Cordially,
Michael Malone