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PERSONAL STATEMENT
Renaissance map of Tunis | My
own recent work shows me lingering in the issues raised to myself by my own book
The True Story of the Novel (1996). I have a manuscript (unfinished) on
Apuleius' Metamorphoses, or Asinus aureus (The Golden Ass).
Travel is always important to me in understanding literature and cultural contexts
(or perhaps I like the excuse for a style of travel which leads me to less well-trodden
paths.) In traveling for a better understanding of the world from which Apuleius,
this African writer came, I have visited Tunisia twice and have developed a distinct
fascination with Tunisia (in all its periods) and with ancient Carthage. I also
journeyed to Egypt, and my interest led me to take two Summer School courses on
Hieroglyphics in University College, London. I have a contract to write a short
book on Venice. I started to go to Venice regularly when, in first doing the research
that issued in True Story, I discovered how many manuscripts Venice harbors
of the early novels, as well as other images that are deeply novelistic and deeply
attractive to novelists. |
My recent work includes several articles dealing
in various ways with consciousness in fiction; I am becoming increasingly interested
in the idea of fictional "character" and in characterization. I should also admit
to writing fiction of my own. My novel Aristotle Detective (first published
in 1978) was translated into Italian in late 1999, and this event resurrected
by my fiction-writing career. It was such a "hit" in Italy that the publishers
Sellerio then published in book(let) form an Aristotle short story ("Aristotle
and the Fatal Javelin") and took from manuscript the never-before published sequel
to Aristotle
Detective entitled Aristotle and Poetic Justice (Aristotele
e la giuistizia poetica). (See article in "Repubblica-Palermo",
20 March Interview in "Repubblica" April 4, 2001.) The Italian publications attracted
the attention of Greek publishers, and my "Aristotle" is now hastening to appear
in what may be thought of as "his own" language.
I am presently working
on the third full novel of my Aristotle series, provisionally entitled Aristotle
and the Mystery of Life. The "hit" I made in Italy revived my fortunes in
England. A new issue of Aristotle Detective is about to emerge, to be followed
hard upon by an English publication of Poetic Justice (by Century Publishing,
a division of Random House, London). (We hope to follow this in 2003 with the
third novel). I am thus likely to be sympathetic to everyone who writes fiction,
of any kind, and my own engagement in what some consider writing of a kind below
the level of literature proper has admittedly modified any personal tendency towards
hauteur. I console myself with the memory of the writers of the Enlightenment
in Europe, who engaged variously in different forms of writing-- from serious
essay or philosophical treatise to drama, novel and short fable-- in a period
which set less strict boundaries between genres than we do now.
"Genre"
itself is a not a simple or self-evident matter, and the more language and cultures
we know the harder it may seem to make do with only a few traditional Western
generic terms. I am now greatly interested in story itself, something that precedes
what we call the novel and whose influence is everywhere. My inaugural lecture
at Notre Dame was "What Do We Want from Story?" and that was the title of the
conference arranged on that occasion. At the end of his life Aristotle is supposed
to have remarked that he was more than ever interested in stories (mythoi).
What we human beings do with our stories, what our stories do with us, why we
need them, and how they function --these seem questions worth exploring in a variety
of ways.
Click poster for Inaugural Chair Conference
November 2000.
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