Q: The Joyce Carol Oates Prize is awarded by NewLit each year to a mid-career author of fiction, one who has emerged and is still emerging. Does that objective resonate for you?
BF: This may sound crazy coming from a guy who's 66 years old, but I feel like I'm just getting going. I've got a new novel I'm about to turn over to my editor, and another in the pipeline that seems to hold as much or more potential as anything I've ever written. The brain feels good! The knees aren't so bad either. So I think "emerging" very much applies to this writer.
Q: We say the literary arts are a public good. The world needs artists and teachers. Care to comment?
BF: The literary arts aren't mere decoration, entertainment, diversion, although decoration, entertainment, etc. certainly have their place in human life. Literature—and by "literature" I mean writing that gets down into the real stuff of life, the guts and sweat and toil and muck and glory of it-—can be all of those things, but it's a necessity as opposed to a luxury. Language is the most elastic, most accessible, most nuanced and durable medium our species has yet developed for understanding ourselves and our experience, and literature embodies language at its most charged and meaningful. Without it we are, quite simply, lost. And a society comprised of people who don't have a clue about who they are or what their experience means is, in my book, pretty much wrecked.
Q: At NewLit (the organization that awards the Joyce Carol Oates Prize annually) we say we teach, we engage, we inspire each other through writing. Care to comment?
BF: All true, but writing can also be used to obfuscate, mislead, discourage, and destroy. It's very much a double-edged sword that requires not just skill and thoughtfulness to be used constructively, but a strong moral sense as well. And so to go one step further and state the obvious, we need teachers and institutions who will do that essential teaching.
To have any chance of success, the American democratic project requires clear seeing, clear thinking, clear expression, otherwise it's doomed. To see reality for what it is, clearly, unflinchingly, and then to articulate that reality in language that fully captures the truth and complexity of a particular aspect of human experience, that's the basis for whatever long-term success we're going to have as a truly democratic country.
Which turn raises another dimension of the democratic project, namely, imagination and possibility. It's the nature of authoritarian or totalitarian regimes to constrict our imaginations, to winnow the realm of possibility down to a very few things that serve to keep the powers that be in power. Whereas a democracy necessarily depends on imagination, both individual and collective. We don't have to be restricted to the present factual. We can keep—we need to keep—imagining more and better, keep expanding the realm of the possible. It's no accident that authoritarian regimes are in the habit of banning and burning books.