JAMES T. FARRELL
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be too much competition for those people who incline toward a
cult. And the understanding-the reading-of books is made into
something very special, so that you have a special language and a
special way of interpreting symbols and of calling what is typical,
or what seems to be, an "artifact." It's a bad word taken from
geology and anthropology. For instance, to call Stephen
Daedalus, the chief protagonist of
Portrait
oj
an Artist,
an artifact?
It's committing mayhem on the English language. The world is
always unpredictable, but we live today in a time of vast
unassimilated change. We're bombarded with sensations day by
day. Many of these sensations are very distracting and of only
passing consequence. Furthermore, television needs hours of the
time of people.
If
people stop looking, there will be less income.
This consumer orientation has created a whole new set of
problems, including moral problems. There was consumption
before our time, of course. In the 1890s Thorstein Veblen wrote
his
Theory oj the Leisure Class.
But now it's as though the masses are
treated like a leisure class.
Interviewer:
What becomes of fiction when you have this avalanche of
change and unassimilated event?
Farrell:
It
becomes profitable to write certain kinds of books. You
may have to be a masochist to read them. What's going to
become of fiction? I don't know. But the fact that one writes and
goes on writing means that one has faith in the future of fiction.
When I was young, I put the question to myself that perhaps with
the development of science and technology, art and fiction would
become passe and useless. This was during the 1930s. I decided I
didn't care; that's what I was going to do anyway, and that's what
I did. A number of people, particularly those who write bad
novels or none at all, have proclaimed the death of the novel.
Well, the novel had scarcely died when we had the emergence of
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, one of the greatest writers of this or any
century. It's unpredictable from where and when a great writer
will come, and there are not many great writers in any century.
Interviewer:
When you speak of those who proclaim the death of the
novel in competition with all of this "event," are you really
talking about people who use this as a cop-out, who simply can't
handle the situation?
Farrell:
In the sense of one man I know, yes. And Leslie Fiedler has
gone along that line; he reads
Tarzan
to his children. He has a
