life is not interested in good and evil
01:43 | 07-01-2012 | Culturology, Literature | No Comments
там же, в Paris Review, интервью Уильяма Фолкнера:
INTERVIEWER: How about yourself as a writer?
FAULKNER: If I had not existed, someone else would have written me, Hemingway, Dostoyevsky, all of us. Proof of that is that there are about three candidates for the authorship of Shakespeare’s plays. But what is important is Hamlet and A Midsummer Night’s Dream, not who wrote them, but that somebody did. The artist is of no importance. Only what he creates is important, since there is nothing new to be said. Shakespeare, Balzac, Homer have all written about the same things, and if they had lived one thousand or two thousand years longer, the publishers wouldn’t have needed anyone since[1].
и дальше:
I’m a failed poet. Maybe every novelist wants to write poetry first, finds he can’t, and then tries the short story, which is the most demanding form after poetry. And, failing at that, only then does he take up novel writing.
и еще:
An artist is a creature driven by demons. He don’t know why they choose him and he’s usually too busy to wonder why. He is completely amoral in that he will rob, borrow, beg, or steal from anybody and everybody to get the work done.
мне хочется видеть его до сих пор сидящим за столом с пишмашинкой и стаканом мятного джулепа, где-то среди опаляющей жары Нового Орлеана, истекающим кровью очередного — нового — романа. потому что (и он много говорит об этом в интервью) ничто другое не имеет значения, а он сам — he is too busy writing his works:
The aim of every artist is to arrest motion, which is life, by artificial means and hold it fixed so that a hundred years later, when a stranger looks at it, it moves again since it is life.
—
[1] — как раз в этом интервью Фолкнер высекает свою знаменитую фразу о Джойсе, “You should approach Joyce’s Ulysses as the illiterate Baptist preacher approaches the Old Testament: with faith”. и когда-то, я помню, меня очень восхитил его совет — в нем было что-то величественное и что-то вызывающее одновременно; что-то исключительно божественное, a kind of Prometheus.
но на деле затем все оказалось куда скучнее: Улиссу не требовалась моя вера, он был прекрасен с первых же строк. может быть, как я часто думал позже, даже слишком прекрасен.