Interview With David Plante
Introduction
David Plante is the author of more than a dozen novels, including the acclaimed Francoeur trilogy: The Family (a finalist for the National Book Award), The Woods, and The Country. He is also the author of Difficult Women: A Memoir of Three, and of American Ghosts. His work has appeared in The New Yorker and The Paris Review. He teaches at Columbia University and divides his time between New York and London.
© Eric Boman
In creating the narrative of ABC, which came first for you—the narrative of grief and obsession that begins with Gerard, who loses his son in the opening scene, or the fascination with the alphabet and its mysterious origins?
I’ve long been fascinated by the alphabet—in a very particular way. It occurred to me, many years ago, that we take the arrangement of the letters for granted, never questioning it. Why ABC? I thought I would one day write a novel that would have that question as its central inspiration, and that I would have a set of characters who would, meeting one another, form a little society united in a quest to find out why. They believe that the original arrangement had a meaning that is lost, and they become possessed by the need to discover the meaning—possessed, that is, by the need for meaning. This was my original idea. I tried many versions, then realized I needed some motivation behind the characters to impel them on this search, some tragedy that made life itself meaningless. I wanted very much to avoid self-indulgence in the characters, so I made the outside world, and not some internal failing, break them. They are made helpless by the tragedies that have occurred to them, and can only ask why? why? why? – and so to the question: why is the alphabet arranged as it is?
The intricacies of philology and the history of the alphabet are explored in such beautiful detail and with such intelligence in the person of Charles Craig, the don at Cambridge. How did you do your research for the novel? You yourself speak French and Italian, along with a little Greek, Russian and Spanish. Has the alphabet and language long been a topic of interest to you? And is there a real Charles Craig?
Charles Craig is based on a don at King’s College, Cambridge, who is an expert on Persian, but made into a fictional character in the novel. Most of the research for the novel came haphazardly. So, for example, I was reading Plato’s Cratylus and, coming across the dialogue about letters, I extracted it. Reading the Koran, I was amazed to find that the letters beginning each chapter have a meaning only to God, so of course put this in. I found in a newspaper article an account of the latest discovery of letters in a wadi in Egypt, and noted this, without actually quoting from it.
The equation of letters and images I got from different sources. A Chinese friend told me about the radicals in Chinese. Almost all the information comes from the book l’Histoire de l’Ecriture, which I found some thirty years ago in a bookshop in London, as Gerald finds it in the novel, in a bookshop in Manchester. I didn’t do detailed research because I didn’t want the novel stilted by information.
As for languages, I wish I knew many more! My Greek is coming along, but Russian is now reduced to a few words. I can read Spanish. I can babble away in French and Italian, and I do babble in English!
There is a sense of otherworldliness in the novel—the passages where the dead are present in the air around the living; the incidences of coincidence (an old alphabet book that reappears multiple times, the graves in Boston bearing the same names as those in one character's family, the reappearance/disappearance of a bombed car); the idea that the characters need the dead as much as the dead need them. What did you see as the atmosphere of the novel? Why did you include these elements of the mysterious? There is a sense of otherworldliness in the novel—the passages where the dead are present in the air around the living; the incidences of coincidence (an old alphabet book that reappears multiple times, the graves in Boston bearing the same names as those in one character's family, the reappearance/disappearance of a bombed car); the idea that the characters need the dead as much as the dead need them. What did you see as the atmosphere of the novel? Why did you include these elements of the mysterious?
One of the “subjects” of the novel is: the dead need us, need us to give THEM meaning. I risked having them appear to make their demands, increasingly, until, in the end, disappointed, they retreat, leaving the characters to themselves. I suppose the very presence of the dead in the novel gives a sense of other-worldliness to it, but I’m aware that there is a haunting quality to my writing, which I felt made it possible to bring in ghosts, the style itself allowing for their presence.
As for the mysterious events—I wanted in this novel, as in no previous ones (one might say, a new departure), to risk the strangeness of coincidence, always, however, keeping it within the realm of the possible.
I wanted the atmosphere of the novel to be on the very edge of the real, suggesting more than the real—or, perhaps, on the very edge of the possible, suggesting the impossible.
The novel as a whole strongly illuminates the idea of grief as a journey—in the sense of obsession and exploration, but also in a physical sense, as we follow the characters from a small New England village into Boston, then to England, Greece, and Syria. Why did you have Gerard travel so far from home, through so many countries, encountering other cultures and languages?
Another “subject” of the novel is the mysterious sense one can have of wholeness among differences. Gerard is very aware of connections among differences, and wonders how it is possible that such differences should be united in that sense of wholeness one does have. I wanted to choose characters who embody differences—cultural differences—united, however, in a mutuality that makes a world. That we are able to “divine” wholeness from disparateness is a metaphysical quandary that occurs in all my work, as I think the ability to do so is at the heart of the mystery of awareness. What else is “global awareness” but a spiritual, a mysterious concept, as we cannot in fact have experience of the entire globe? To think “globally” is, in essence, to think spiritually, and the sufferings of the world make us think “globally” all the more acutely, and therefore all the more spiritually.
Grief, it seems to me, makes us acutely aware of disconnection and the need for connection.
The idea of historical events tearing apart individual lives builds throughout the novel, as new characters enter with escalating grief. There is the question of how we measure grief and if it is possible to weigh one's own small suffering against other disasters. You seem to suggest that some characters are able to survive their grief—albeit in different ways—while others are vanquished by it. What is survivable?
: I wanted, in the novel, to expand the grief with each character, to bring it closer and closer to grief for the world. In the end, I wanted, very much, to have an account of suffering that was not fictional, but of the real world, so I based one character’s story on a factual account of the Chechen horrors, a larger picture that I wanted to overwhelm all personal grief . Really, all the characters are vanquished by grief.
What is survivable? I would say—and I hope this is implicit in the novel—we can cling to the wonder of the awareness I mentioned just above, the wonder of letters, words, sentences, which wonder may offer us a sense of possibility, a sense of wholeness in the midst of chaos, in the face of events that would otherwise not be survivable at all.
Peggy, Gerard's wife, believes that meaning resides in the inner world; he, different from her, believes meaning is all in the outside world. Where do you think we generally search for meaning and what were you getting at in setting up this distinction between them?
A very personal answer to your question—I was brought up a Catholic, though a rather special kind of Catholic, for whom God was all on the outside, objective, whereas, as I imagine, the Protestant God is all on the inside, subjective. Peggy is Protestant; Gerard Catholic. My sense of the “meaningful” remains Catholic, however much I have ceased being Catholic, in that the “meaningful” is beyond me, far beyond me, and, so far beyond me in its objectivity, unknowable.
This is connected to my sense of “historical secrets” whose meaning is outside me, in history. “God” is in history, in the historical secrets of religion, which can never be known.
If it may be asked, is there private grief of your own that drove you to write this novel?
Though Nikos, my partner of 40 years, died three years ago, and I have been in a state of deep grief ever since, I conceived of this novel long before he died. No doubt my grief has entered into it, but I did not write the novel to express my grief. I have done that in another book, which I have, on completing it, put away.
It's notable that Gerard is French-Canadian; his companions are a Chinese woman raised in South America who now resides in London, and a Sephardic Jew whose first language was Greek and was married to an Armenian. Can you talk about why you were drawn to create characters who represent a global village? Is there a healing element suggested in the connections between the different characters here, with their diverse backgrounds, or a suggestion that pain and grief cannot be shared across borders?
I’ve thought hard about this question. Perhaps the novel can be called tragic, in that the meaning the characters crave is not realized—on the contrary, ends in despair, in helplessness. And yet, a sense of defeat by the world’s horrors, giving way to helplessness, can, I believe, inspire tenderness, compassion, love, all of which are inspired also by tragedy.