Michael Guinzburg |
Food for thought
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- Are you a vegetarian? Your characters seem to like meat. - No, I'm not. I don't eat rats, but I like a good cheeseburger from time to time. I wanted to use the theme of cannibalism: people eating other people, other creatures, eating souls, basically. - Would you define yourself as a gourmet? - I like good food, but I'm not snobbish about it. If I drink again, maybe I'll appreciate good wine. I appreciate good conversation and good love, when it comes my way. No, I can't say that ! (laughs) - Is there a way from meat to flesh in your books, especially this one? - To me, it's the way of the world. We are, like it or not, creatures of flesh and blood, desire, need, so in the book, these people are concerned with questions of spirit, but they're trapped in their flesh. You can't separate flesh a nd spirit, we are what we are, we have to use what we have to find out who we are. That's a good question and a big conflict, because people have the desire to ascend higher, but we're pinned down by what we are, flesh and blood. The plumber has the theory of finding spirituality through flesh, sexuality. Not very orthodox, is it? - This fight between flesh and spirituality is obvious in the book... - Ultimately, the plumber decides that he cannot separate them and that to really be a child of spirit, you have to accept your fleshly condition and go through it. It's just his way, it's not the only way and maybe it's not the right way, but it's his way. I don't know if it's my way. - Does the plumber act for himself and his own quest or just for the Church? - Ultimately, it's for himself and for his conception of God. He needs to be true to God and not to the Organization. For him, it's about truth finally. In the first stories, he's like a piece of the machine, he's being used. At the end of the first story, he does something that is his own doing. But generally, he does what he's been asked to do and he does it as artistically as possible, which gives him pleasure. In the last story, he has to make a very big choice between the organization and what he really believes inside of himself. Ultimately, he chooses to follow his heart and what he considers to be the truth and he makes a decision which has consequences for everybody, so he thinks. Basically, choosing to keep the Christ child alive when it was born out of perhaps a bad method, is it a good choice? But who is to say? If cloning was a bad thing, but a good thing came out of it, is it good or bad? He has to make that choice. In his mind, if God allowed cloning to exist, he's got to follow it through. He's not guaranteeing anything, he's dumping Jesus off with some poor Mexicans in the mountains of Mexico. He might just live there, become a carpenter and stay a carpenter or be a local doctor and not save the world. But that's for another book, or not! It's a crazy idea. - Is cloning something you're afraid of? - Yes, I mean, like anything else, it's so complicated, it has so many ramifications that we don't understand at all. In the wrong hands, it could get very dangerous. It's a kind of immortality, but it's not, because a consciousness is not a soul and you can't transfer consciousness. Individuality and soul are separate from corporal existence. I think it's definitely bad stuff. I can't see much good in it. It's great if you can clone a new liver, but what are you gonna do? You're gonna have yourself a clone that you're gonna cut open and take parts? It's sick! I need somebody to explain to me how it's not crazy and fucked-up. - Some people think that a kind of "perfection" could protect them from disease, etc. - What's perfection? It's just making yourself again, but there's no guarantee. Maybe with a little genetic tinkering, you can get rid of the problems, but it's not you anymore, it's something else, so what's the point? If you want to have a clone, it's even more egotistical than making children just to have the pleasure to see someone who looks like us. It just looks like you, it's not you. It doesn't have the same thoughts, experiences, emotions or soul. And if it does, it's all over. - For the government, don't you think cloning could be the next step to safe sex and the search for perfection? - I think it's going to take a long time, but it's so complicated. It's something to be afraid of. - For the army as well... - Sure, imagine a war where you had as many soldiers as you wanted, all looking alike... It's hell! They couldn't think of something more disgusting and crazy. It's a strange world we're entering. We're still sitting in Paris, in a room with mirrors, in leather couches, but in a hundred years, maybe there won't be anything like this, maybe it'll all be cold, sterile. Maybe the process of our losing of humanity, replaced by consciousness stored inside of chips will have occurred. Who's to say they won't be able to take our thoughts, feelings, memories, maybe our souls, and reduce them to a computer chip and then we're just chips, living forever. That'll be our immortality. Take all the mystery out, just make us into these little electromagnetic creatures. They're already doing it , you see somebody with a cell phone that's getting smaller and smaller, eventually they're just gonna put this cellphone right in front of your head. But what you don't know is that along with that cellphone, there's gonna be a little monitoring chip too, so they'll always know where you are, who you are. How hard will it be for them to monitor your thoughts and your conversations? And then, we'll all be connected. That's scary as hell. - Talking about connections, is Bill Gates/Bill Bates a new kind of god? - It's just a character, I don't know anything about the real man. Anybody who has that much money and that much power scares me, like another generation was maybe scared of Rockfeller or Henry Ford, but this guy has much more money and much more power and who knows what kind of guy he is? I've no idea, but individuals who have too much power are scary, in general. The individual who's a megalomaniac in business could be that way in social life. - What about the new power of computers? - I think computer is a tool, but it can also become a total slavery. I found it myself with this e-mail thing. I'm addicted to it. Thank God I can't get my computer to work here in Paris. I had withdrawal symptoms for the 1st week, but now it's okay. I don't have to check it every 5 minutes. A lot of people say it's a new freedom and indeed it is, but like everything it's a kind of slavery. The web is a world onto itself and it can dominate you. I want to be able to think and I think the less you are able to think the more you are hooked into any electronic media: television, which kills the brain cells or the web, who knows what it does, what does it do to look into a screen from 2 inches away for 8 hours a day? The radiations fry you in a way. But I'm addicted, so I'm gone. - Do we or does the church need a new messiah? - I think the old ones are pretty good, I think the pope's a pretty good guy, from what I can tell, he's a pretty nice guy. He loves ping pong, like me. But, in the stories, it's not the pope, it's just some character. The head of that organization is a fairly nice guy who makes the choice that he thinks is the best, right or wrong. I think he's a guy who becomes ultimately a victim of his times, like many other people, who make the choice for science against the choice for pure spirit. Many people believe that that is the choice we have to make to get along in the modern world. I don't know about the new messiah. Most religions believe there will be one, what do I know? Do we need one? The child at the end is a symbol, it's not a matter of denomination, the only hope we have is to wake up and to start believing again in love, in the ability for humans to love each other, which was the original message of Jesus. I'm not proselytizing, I'm just saying that all great religions preach the same thing and I think that humanity is getting to the point where we're forgetting that. We're forgetting the message and we're just falling into all these traps, the traps of science, of not relying on ourselves and basically selfishness, that's what I see around the world. We should stop being so selfish and give. It was a way to end the book on hope and a note of healing. I think the world is torn apart and we're damaged souls and we need healing or flushing... One or the other, we reach choice point. What the Christians say is that with the new messiah will come the flushing of the world, it will be the big cleansing, the American Indians say the same thing, all the great religions predict a cleansing moment where all the bad gets burned off and maybe that's what the plumber has chosen to do. By keeping the child alive, perhaps he knows that that's the eventual end. That's the most loving thing to do for the earth and human souls. That's one of the possibilities. - Wasn't it a bit risky to make Hitler and dobermans save this particular child? - Absolutely. It could be a big joke, it could be something that's well thought through. I think the point here is that anybody can be good. Hitler, until he became Hitler, wasn't Hitler. He was just an innocent soul. What I'm saying is that Hitler wasn't an original sin, he's a product of our demons, we made him, Hitler didn't make himself. He was capable of an ultimate gesture of Christian good. I'm certainly not saying that what Hitler was trying to do with the Holocaust was Christian in nature, it had nothing to do with the cleansing, I don't want anyone to think that I'm being sneaky and try to say Hitler was a good guy, he was fucking terrible. He should have his skin stripped off inch by inch. I don't believe so much in torture, but I mean, he's not a good guy. But the thing is that the Hitler of the book is not the real Hitler and a doberman is not crazy unless it's raised to be crazy. I'm saying basically that it's not a question of nature so much as nurture. Maybe it's inflamatory, but I think the message here is that even the worst human being there ever was didn't start out that way and that his association with pure love, as represented by the child, can save him. I guess it's pretty heavy, but why not? - It's a bit like Nietzsche said about no-one being born bad... - That's it. There are those you could say are born pure bad, who knows? Some say it, but it's difficult to say, because how do you test it? They're gonna invent a test, put every kid in the machine and it'll say: "Sorry, you're a psycho killer", when he's born or in the womb? The ultimate fascism is to trust the machine that tells you that and then we're back at the same point. Then we're murdering future people before they become people on the possibilities that they might turn out bad. That's the eugenic question. - There are a number of Japanese characters in your novel, like the guy who buys shit. Do they represent the traditional fear of Americans towards Japan's economic power? - No, I think about 10 years ago, America was stunned at how much of America Japan was buying, but they bought things too expensively and lost a lot of money, so we're not afraid of them anymore. I think they sold back everything they'd bought, I don't know much about the finances. I just read an article about the Japanese having a fetish for turds and collecting them, so I just thought it was too good an opportunity to let go by. It seemed natural to include them in a story about shit. I think the Japanese are an interesting people: once they start something, they get very obsessive about it. But the character in the story has taken the collecting of turds to a different conclusion. I like Japanese, I have nothing against them. Anyway, you can't generalize about people, it just happened it worked better being Japanese than anything else, because it was based on a true story. If you look at their culture, you see they have lots of strange customs and strange sexual piccadilloes. I read a Nobel-prize winner novel about people who rub up against little girls in the subways of Tokyo and it's not one or two people, it's a whole culture who like to expose themselves and pick up young people. Imagine a country with so many people in such a small place, it's gotta develop some strange questions about the body and the flesh. - They also have a strange conception of censorship: you can show tortures and heads cut off in movies, but no pubic hair! - Yes, it's very strange, so you can imagine how bizarre they are in private. I can't, what I heard is strange enough. I like the Japanese anyway, hopefully, they'll read this someday. - Did you read many European books before writing this novel, like Chaucer's "Canterbury Tales"? - I read it a long time ago and I didn't notice the correlation. Actually, you're the second person that said that to me, the other one was Joseph Strich, the filmmaker, who made "Ulysses". He said, it's like Chaucer or Rabelais, man! To me, Europe is still debating the same questions of spirit and religion than it was 500 years ago. The context just changes a little with the time, but we're still stuck at the same point, we're not that much further. People were freer back then, they weren't as afraid of the body as they are now, in some ways, Victorianism didn't come for a while. - Many Italian books or movies have that kind of mixture of sex, religion, spirituality, like Fellini's Decameron, which we don't have in France... - I'd be very interested in the reactions if this book was translated into Italian, because it's so provocative for them. What can I say? I wrote the thing because I was hungry and maybe it influenced the way it came out. I was poor, hungry, my publisher at the time was pushing me to write something provocative and finally found it too shocking. The idea was that every story progressively became stranger and crazier. The first story was commissioned by an aviation company, but they finally refused because sex and religion were too mixed up. I did the second story in England to be safe. I then said that the 3rd story would take place in the Paris sewers, Gallimard were very happy about it, they even arranged for me to visit the sewers. But when they read the story, they thought it was too far out. Then I wrote another one, and they thought it was even more extreme. I wrote a story that I thought would make it all work together, so that they would think there's a beautiful progression and the character finds a soul at the end, and it scared the shit out of them, no pun intended (laughs). They didn't want to do the book, they didn't believe anyone in France would publish it. I was very happy to find Grasset and I'm sure other people would have been interested too. In the end, it's a very human message, not necessarily negative or anti-catholic, rather anti-fascist! - Why did you choose Catholic religion as a target? - Religion is really a metaphor for other things, I hope people don't take it too literally. It's not that I mean Catholics specifically, it's just the idea of religion in general, it could be born-again Christianity, which I think is run by people who want money, even though the individuals who subscribe to it are very sincere. I think that any organization has a tendency of being less about spirit than it does about the organization, that's one of the things I'm saying. I apologize to any Catholics who are offended, but it's not about them. I don't want to get shot (laughs)! - I think you wrote the third story in France and the fourth one in the USA... - The first one was written in New York, the second one was written a little bit in NY, about 2 lines in Jamaica and most of it in France, the third one I wrote completely in France and the fourth one mainly in California, but also NY and Massachussets. The fourth one was the most difficult. It was almost a year between the 3rd and the 4th, and a lot of personal events and desillusions happened, like the relationship with Gallimard, which I tried to save by writing a story about forgiveness and love. I have to be thankful to them, though, ultimately for pushing me in every direction, to come up with something very special. I think it's a fine work of art, but I don't wanna be egotistic! They can ultimately say either it's pretty good and we made a mistake or it's terrible, or they can ignore it completely, which I think they'll do. But if it sells millions of copies and goes around the world, what are they gonna say? - Your book mostly takes place in France, what does this country represent for you? - To me, it's a capital of global intellectuality, a place with beautiful thoughts, beautiful ideas, beautiful clothes, women, etc. It's really the world capital of soul in many ways. America's too stupid to understand its artists and it eats them. In that sense, the theme of cannibalism in the book is as much about America and America as the world's boss as anything else. America eats its young and its artists first, as the appetizer, because they'rte the most visible and perhaps the weakest. No-one is defending the artists in America and the few who do so have to be extra-tough. Today, the world of commerce kills the artist even before he gets there. I'm hardly even published in my own country, because they must think I'm dangerous. When someone figures out how to make some money off of me, I'll be published well there. France to me is a great place and I feel comfortable here. I'd like to live here, but maybe if I did, I wouldn't be as comfortable as I am as a visitor. I like it because I can have interesting conversations, people are nice, the food is good and the transportation is easy, I could write mostly what I want. But in some ways, I think I have a lot to say about America too, so I'll have to live there. It's strange, because this book is as much about America as it is about Europe, when I talk about organizations that crush the individual. It's all the same. But Paris to me is a lot friendlier. - Why don't you try writing universal books, like James Ballard? - Why not? It's an interesting idea. Eventually, I think I'll exhaust specificity, people in France are very willing to suspend the specific. In "Top of the world, Ma", people don't know the details about Jackson Pollock or don't care, it's an American thing, but they didn't even think about that and went with the ideas and identified with that. Maybe when I'm more confident in my abilities as a writer, I'll just hang the shirt on a hanger or thow it anywhere... - What do your main characters, Roger Lymon, Ed and the plumber, have in common? - Roger Lymon was not me, I thought of it as a retelling of the Gatsby legend. It was also influence by Steinbeck's "The Pearl", which is a pure story of the South. They're both myths of dreams come true. Lymon, like Gatsby's narrator, watches others and he gets involved and is changed by them ultimately. But I think I'm both narrator and active. Ed made things happen, I had to flush my feelings about drugs, drug dealers, etc. I had to get out all these things that were annoying me. I was 30 and I hadn't written anything yet, I needed to flush my system. Roger Lymon was easier to write, because he was more natural, less stylized, but the Specs stuff is very stylized. The ideas were pretty difficult, but the writing was very easy. But we're all part of a kind of universal soul and we do have more similarities than differences, so if all these characters are part of me, they're part of you too, and women too. I had a conversation in Valence with a very smart girl who told me how much she identified with Ed. In America, a woman couldn't say that, because there's such a big separation between genders. The nice thing about France is that women are smart enough to be able feel what men feel, because you're universal. It makes interaction between the 2 sexes much easier. It's very European. It also makes me happy when people laugh reading my book, it makes me feel I've done my job. Laughter is like the balloon that keeps us from tumbling down the gravity of death. Life's pretty depressing, that's why we invented the concept of the afterlife. So let's laugh while we have a chance, write and read good books, eat good food and have fun! - Do you think the common point between the 3 books could be desintoxication? - There is a common theme of ultimate change, of people who need to change the world around them. Curtis, in "Top of the World, Ma", is progressing towards the plumber of souls, Curtis is angry and bitter and the plumber is full of love at the end, whereas during the book he's angry and nasty as well. I think we're all orphans in a way, we're all looking for our spiritual fathers, who may have been born a century ago. We're always looking for other people to love us. No matter how big we get, there's always something of the innocent child inside us. To be alone, in the dark universe, in the cold night and the void, is a scary prospect. - What bout the screen adaptation of "Beam me up, Scotty"? - They're still talking about it. A group in Glasgow want to do it, but they haven't come up with a lot of money... Ewan McGregor could do a good job and sell tickets, but does he have the balls? I would think so, but all the American actors who have been offered it are scared. Tim Roth has been asked, but maybe people wouldn't let him see it. You have to go through agents and managers, you can't contact them personnally. Tim Roth and Ewan McGregor would be good, Gary Oldman was offered it, but I think he said no. But who knows? One of my friends here, who's an actress, gave Sean Penn the book and he was nice enough to send it back but he didn't say that he read it. The problem with actors is that they change roles so often thay don't know who they are. If that's what it takes, I'd do it, but my real dream is not to direct, it's to write these damn books and sit in a hotel bar in France talking to people like you, because it stimulates me. Sure, I'd love to make movies too. It was my dream at one point, when I was 18, my dream was to come to Paris and study film. But I lost myself in America for a lot of years. When you're young, you have all these dreams, you should try to make at least one come true. I think it's important you live a little before you do your art. It's food for dreams. Interview by Jean-Paul Coillard |
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You can order Michael Guinzburg's first novel: Beam me up, Scotty |
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