JC: One of the things that’s so remarkable about the books is that you never try to use these coincidences toward some end, which is, I think, the point you’re making: that we don’t feel that we’re being manipulated to see the world — I mean, in a lot of these pop-psychology novels there’s a realization that, “Oh, because our birthdays are on the same day it means we should stay married.” Or something like that. There’s a tendency to reduce the world to some theme that this then becomes the proof of. And it’s amazing to me that you resist that urge in novel after novel.
WGS: Well, it would trivialize it. Nevertheless, it has significance. The first section of Vertigo is about Stendhal, and this rather short piece finishes with Stendhal’s death in a certain street in Paris, which is now called the Rue Danielle Casanova. I didn’t know who Danielle Casanova was, except that Casanova meant something for me in the same context of that book, but not Danielle Casanova. The following summer I went to Corsica, walking through the mountains in Corsica, and I came to the coastal village of Piana, and there was a little house with a plaque on it, and it was a memorial plaque for Danielle Casanova, who had been murdered by my compatriots in Auschwitz. She’d been a dentist and a communist and was in the French Resistance. And I went past the house three or four times and it always seemed closed. Then on one occasion I went round the back and there was her sister. And then, you know, I talked to her for a week. [Audience laughter.] These things do happen. I have all her papers now, and I don’t know what I shall do with them, but. . it’s that sort of connection. And if that sort of thing happens to us, then we think, perhaps, that not everything is quite futile. It gives one a sort of passing sense of consolation, occasionally.
JC: We were talking backstage about your first book in German, After Nature, which is still in manuscript in English, about how that book came about. You’ve been quoted as saying that it was [the sixteenth-century painter Matthias] Grünewald who brought you into it, but then you were telling me that it was [Georg Wilhelm] Steller, who is in the second section, and that that came out of a footnote.
WGS: Yes. It may be of interest because you don’t know how I got into this strange business of writing books of this kind. I mean, I had never had any ambitions of becoming or being a writer. But what I felt towards the middle point of my life was that I was being hemmed in increasingly by the demands of my job at the university, by the demands of various other things that one has in one’s life, and that I needed some way out. And that coincided at the time — I just happened to be going down to London and reading a book by a rather obscure German writer called Konrad Bayer, who was one of the young surrealists, as it were, postwar surrealists who’d been kept down by the famous Gruppe 47, and who subsequently took his own life. He’d only written a number of very slender little things, among them a book called The Head of Vitus Bering, and that had in it a footnote reference to an eighteenth-century German botanist and zoologist called Georg Wilhelm Steller, who happens to have the same initials that I have [audience laughter], and happened to have been born in a place which my mother visited when she was pregnant in 1943, when she was going from Bamberg, which is in the north of Bavaria, down to the Alps, where her parents were, because the bombers were coming in increasingly. She couldn’t go through Nuremberg, which is the normal route, because Nuremberg had just been attacked that night and was all in flames. So she had to go around it. And she stayed in Windsheim, as that place is called, where a friend of hers had a house.
JC: Which is in the book.
WGS: Which is mentioned. This preoccupation with making something out of nothing, which is, after all, what writing is about, took me at that point. And what I liked about it was that if you just changed, as it were, the nature of your writing from academic monographs to something indefinable, then you had complete liberty; whereas, as you well know, as an academic, people constantly say, “Well, it’s not correct, what you put there. It’s not right.” Now, it doesn’t matter.
JC: There’s a theme in your work that seems to be present from After Nature on. You’ve said,
We’re living exactly on the borderline between the natural world from which we are being driven out, or we’re driving ourselves out of it, and that other world which is generated by our brain cells. And so clearly that fault line runs right through our physical and emotional makeup. And probably where these tectonic plates rub against each other is where the sources of pain are. . And I think there is no way in which we can escape it. . I have, in fact, not a great desire to be let off the hook.
It seems that even in After Nature, particularly in Grünewald’s painting The Crucifixion, that this theme is perceived:
. . the panic-stricken
kink in the neck to be seen
in all of Grünewald’s subjects
exposing the throat and often turning
the face towards a blinding light
is the extreme response of our bodies
to the absence of balance in nature
which blindly makes one experiment after another
and like a senseless botcher undoes
the thing it has only just achieved.
Was that idea, that theme, something that came to you in the writing of After Nature?
WGS: No, it’s something that’s preoccupied me for a long time. And I don’t quite know why. But I think if you have grown up as I have done, in a village in the postwar years of the Alps where there weren’t any cars or indeed any other machines worth speaking of, then you still know what silence is, you live in a house where the sounds are made by the house itself as it expands or contracts in the heat or the cold. You’re not listening to the fridge going on and off all the time or the television in the other room or the central heating doing its thing. If you took a kind of closed-circuit camera film of, I don’t know, a house here in Queens, you might well be excused if you got the idea that the people in it are only there to service the machines. [Audience laughter.] In terms of evolution, they are of the higher order, there’s no doubt about it. Whether they are intelligent or not is neither here nor there, but they are of the higher order. They come after us. It is encapsulated in that wonderful image of the dog listening to the gramophone. There is that nagging sense that we’re being kept, as it were, on sufferance. And I find the idea that perhaps one day a very severely decimated number of us might be kept like the dogs are now kept in New York not very appealing.
There was, as it were, a décalage or discontinuity in time so that in a sense in the late forties and early fifties in the Alps, you lived in the eighteenth century, for a few years. It’s changed very rapidly. There was this unevenness of time. It’s now very difficult to find any spaces where the twenty-first century isn’t as yet. Certainly Germany has all been leveled out. Even in the 1960s, the frontier tracks in the east towards Czechoslovakia were, way back in time, underdeveloped, predeveloped. And that has all changed. So I think we move out of our earlier forms of existence or arrangements with nature at a price, always. There is always something we have to give up.