I've an enormous respect for James Morrow, and this particular interview was a little dream come true. Amongst some of the books I've read, Towing Jehovah, remains one of the most enduring reads I've ever experienced. It's certainly not Mr. Morrow's best work (I think that accolade goes to Blameless in Abaddon
), but I feel it to be one complete experience. I think that makes sense.There's also an eeriness to Towing Jehovah (Harvest Book)
now, as the oil spill continues in the Gulf of Mexico.But that's the way Morrow's been - a quasi-Nostradamus that is on the cutting edge of the human factor (or lack thereof). Whether it is post-theism (which in many respects our world has plunged) or 3-D technology, Morrow's been able to spin a yarn that touches the heart, the soul, and offers more than a few laughs. He's one of the best writers writing today.
Some know him for his Godhead Trilogy, which is made up of Towing Jehovah, Blameless in Abaddon, and The Eternal Footman
. Others know him from his Bible Tales: Only Begotten Daughter (Harvest Book) and Bible Stories for Adults
. Still, others are only recently discovering Morrow with his most recent books: The Last Witchfinder: A Novel (P.S.)
, The Philosopher's Apprentice: A Novel (P.S.)
, and Shambling Towards Hiroshima
(which was recently nominated for this year's Nebula award). Oh, if I could discover James Morrow for the first time again.
James Morrow didn't win the Nebula this time around, but it appeared he had a speech ready:
“The day before Kathy and I boarded the train for Orlando, I received a letter from an attorney in Tokyo representing ToHo Productions. The company is claiming that, in writing Shambling Towards Hiroshima, I plagiarized some obscure ToHo character named Godzilla. The attorney insisted that all copies of the novella be immediately destroyed, and I must cease and desist from using the character in my fiction."
You can read more on his website: http://james-morrow.livejournal.com/
I was honored to get a chance to discuss giant monsters with James, as well as faith in fiction, advice to aspiring writers, and movies (a passion we share). I've also got a very cool gift for a lucky Authors Speak fan at the end. Read on.
Eric Mays: Jim, thank you for taking the time to answer a few questions. It seems that I’ve been talking to a few authors about daikaiju films (giant Japanese monsters) and how, with the abundance of horror and pulp out there, there doesn’t seem to be much of a market for daijaiku lit. You did it, though, with “Shambling Towards Hiroshima”. Why aren’t more dabbling in this genre?
James Morrow: The dearth of Daikaiju stories is indeed puzzling, since dragons enjoy such a venerable place in the literature of the fantastic, from BEOWULF to the NEIBELUNG saga to THE HOBBIT to countless Tolkien-influenced epics of recent vintage, some sophisticated, some sludge.
The mystery deepens when we realize that Godzilla is not merely a temporally displaced or artificially enlarged real-world animal of the sort found in the classic Anglophone SF movies: THE BEAST FROM 20,000 FATHOMS, THE GIANT BEHEMOTH, THEM!, THE DEADLY MANTIS, EARTH VS. THE SPIDER, THE GIANT GILA MONSTER, THE BLACK SCORPION, GORGO, and so on. Godzilla is not essentially a dinosaur. He’s a mythic monster, a demonic being spawned by that dark god called the Bomb, with resonances that reach back to the deepest roots of both Eastern and Western folklore.
The dearth of Daikaiju fiction might be explained by noting that the Godzilla films, like their American counterparts, are at base visceral visual spectacles, an effect that’s extremely difficult to replicate in prose. I suspect that, as a literary sub-genre, an homage to Japanese movie monsters would be valuable to the degree that they offer postmodern commentary on the phenomenon. That’s what I tried to do in SHAMBLING TOWARDS HIROSHIMA, and that’s evidently what’s going on in the recent Australian anthology DAIKAIJU from Agog! Press, edited by Robert Hood and Robin Pen, though I haven’t seen the book yet.
http://www.asif.dreamhosters.com/doku.php?id=daikaiju
EM: Do you have a favorite giant monster? Do you think there’s a classic piece of literature that would have been much improved by the addition of a fire-breathing iguana?
JM: As displayed on my parents’ crummy little low-def TV set in the late fifties, the periodic broadcasts of KING KONG on local Philadelphia television were pretty murky affairs. And yet the movie is so well made, its images so strikingly composed, that the film instantly resonated with my pre-adolescent sensibility. KING KONG will always be my primal giant monster experience.
I’m tempted to say that PRIDE AND PREJUDICE could sustain a monster or two, but pointless, one-joke, Jane Austen mash-ups are not my thing. One day I might insert a fire-breathing iguana in the opening chapters of Genesis. YHWH has given the monster to Adam and Eve as a pet, and when He threatens to expel them from Eden, they sic it on his Almighty ass.
EM: Many of your books deal with issues of Faith. Why is Faith such an undying theme?
JM: I would say my preoccupation is not so much with faith per se as with the abominable things that faith often inclines people to do. As a satirist, I’m bewildered by the seeming gullibility with which my fellow Homo sapiens embrace supernaturalist explanations of the universe’s inner workings – a rubric under which I would include Karl Marx’s notion of a transcendent, teleological force driving human history. Why aren’t people more curious about the manifestly non-divine, non-privileged origins of Judaism, Islam, Christianity, Hinduism, Dialectical Materialism, and the rest? Shouldn’t the mutual incompatibility, internal contradictions, and bald-faced lies built into these systems tell us that they are nothing more than human contrivances?
I’d have to say, Eric, in recent years “faith” has become one of my least favorite words, right up there with “spirituality” and “patriotism.” It’s a knavish word, a scoundrel’s word. Whenever you hear the word “faith” in a sentence, brace yourself for a second-rate thought. (Of course, I would exempt the present conversation from that prophecy.)
EM: It’s no secret TOWING JEHOVAH is one of my favorite books. The idea presented is pretty amazing [God dies]. After all, by the Bible’s admission, we were made in His image. So, I’d wager that if we can die, so too can God. Did you catch any flack for dealing with this idea?
JM: On the whole, the people who would be offended by TOWING JEHOVAH on first principles – right-wing evangelicals, conservative chuckleheads, professional dissemblers like Ann Coulter – don’t read literary satire and couldn’t care less what secular novelists have been up to in recent decades. My fiction flies below the radar of the conventionally pious, which is probably just as well. If Benedict XVI took the trouble to condemn TOWING JEHOVAH, the resultant media attention would not make me a better writer, and it certainly wouldn’t make him a better Pope.
Many of the more sympathetic and sophisticated believers who’ve encountered my Godhead Trilogy – and I’m always pleased to discover that my readership includes churchgoers – wonder why I settled for such a literal-minded notion of the Deity. But as you point out, the Bible invites us to think of God as very much like ourselves in form, face, mind, and psyche, and vice-versa. It’s all there in Genesis. The irony, of course, is that the world is full of people who are far more thoughtful, forgiving, compassionate, and life-affirming than the Supreme Being of the Western religious tradition. I’ve never met you, Eric, but I strongly suspect you’re one of those people.
By the way, I definitely include the allegedly loving God of the Gospels in this indictment. I take great delight in the moment in Doug Wright’s extraordinary play, QUILLS, when the Marquis de Sade spits on a Bible while telling the Abbé, “This monstrous God of yours, He strung up his very own son like a side of veal – I shudder to think what he’d do to me.”
Whenever you come upon someone explaining why God had no choice but to slaughter Jesus – atoning for our collective sins and all that – listen very carefully. You will be hearing a rationale for evil.
EM: Have we plunged into a post-theistic world?
JM: I believe our world is post-theistic in the sense that these days almost everybody in the political-cultural sphere feels empowered to speak for God. There’s a palpable sense in which Sarah Palin, Pat Robertson, Benedict XVI, Glenn Beck, Ann Coulter, Rush Limbaugh, and other such scoundrels are indulging in an essentially atheistic discourse. When you are privy to God’s opinions concerning any and all matters of consequence, you really have no personal need of Him – do you? – except as a bully to call upon whenever your own bullying fails. So He might as well not even exist, right?
But in another sense, of course, we are living through a plague of theism such as the world hasn’t seen since the Great Awakening of the eighteenth century. I shudder to imagine where it will lead. At least we have 9/11 to remind us that a belief in God guarantees nothing, and I mean nothing, desirable in the moral realm.
EM: Chris Moore and I were talking religion a little while back. He’s got a cut-and-paste system where religion is concerned. Do you subscribe to a certain religious belief system? What do you have Faith in?
JM: The word “religious” maps into my psyche only if we use the word in the loosest and most metaphorical manner imaginable. One might say that I experience “religious” feelings – that is, a rush of awe and appreciation – toward humankind’s great achievements in music, cinema, painting, literature, and natural science. Etymologically, “religious” points to the act of binding – and who doesn’t want to be fastened to the world and other people in a nourishing way? But to bind a person can also mean to shackle him, and too often that is what organized religion – that wild beast the Enlightenment so wisely sought to domesticate – has done to the human mind and spirit.
As I suggested earlier, I feel that the word “faith” has become almost useless in serious conversation, unless we’re talking about Sartre’s notion of “bad faith.” These days I prefer the concept of “fidelity.” I like to believe I am holding true to those things that make the world a better place: love, art, reason, doubt, curiosity.
EM: Many of your books deal with religion. Heck, you even wrote BIBLE STORIES FOR ADULTS. Do you have a favorite Bible story?
JM: My favorite part of the Bible is that astonishing poetic drama called the Book of Job, which I ultimately recast as BLAMELESS IN ABADDON. The subtext of Job is quite complex: the ways of God are not the ways of men – and yet, paradoxically, those who would rage against God from a dung heap are well within their rights to do so. Unlike the three primary comforters (and also the one who shows up late), and unlike today’s men and women of “faith,” Job calls God to account for His manifest indifference to human suffering. And while God is not happy to be placed in the dock – He’s not a very good listener, and His response to our hero’s anguish is woefully beside the point – He ultimately tells the comforters that blasphemers like Job traffic in truth, “the thing that is right,” as they do not.
It’s as if God is actually admitting that the problem of pain has no satisfactory answer within a context of conventional piety. So if you throw away the dopey framing story – that ridiculous fairy tale concerning the wager between Jehovah and the Satan, so obviously added by a redactor – you will find in the Book of Job the most potent indictment of the Supreme Being prior to Elie Wiesel’s THE TRIAL OF GOD.
EM: Not to delve too deeply into politics and religion (two subjects I’ve always been wary of approaching in a bar), but you’re one of the few people, it seems, that has actually read the Bible. I own six different copies of the “Good Book”. And, I’ve read your thoughts on Genesis, which you claim should be changed to “Genocide”. Care to make any comments on the linking of the world then and now?
JM: I suppose I should be grateful for the Bible. Were it not for Holy Writ, I’d be out of a job.
That said, I think we’d be better off if all the world’s Bibles turned to vanilla milkshakes tomorrow. Over the centuries, humans have devised all sorts of diabolical institutions – genocide, slavery, misogyny, child abuse, homophobia, heretic hunts, witch cleansings, anti-Semitism – and you’ll find each and every one of them endorsed in Scripture, and almost no unequivocal denunciations of these evils.
If it’s really the case that an omnipotent and omnibenevolent entity exists somewhere out there, I would have to conclude that the Bible is the “word of God” the way THE ILIAD is the autobiography of Cole Porter.
I don’t mean to pick on Judeo-Christian revelation only. From what I’ve read of the Koran and the Book of Mormon, we could easily get by without those books, too, but that is another day’s discussion.
EM: Another of my favorite Morrow novels is CITY OF TRUTH. I’ve heard people compare it to the Ricky Gervais movie THE INVENTION OF LYING. Both are their own entity, by far. However, INVENTION OF LYING didn’t work for me. I think because we all tend to lie and are an ethically-compromised world. CITY OF TRUTH worked back in 1994, when manners still existed. Wow, Jim, have we dropped that far into the abyss? Why is your novel – dealing with the “faith” of lying – so much more effective?
JM: I appreciate you appreciation for CITY OF TRUTH. Like you, I was not enamored of THE INVENTION OF LYING, which I found to be tedious and generally unfunny. And I share your bewilderment with Ricky Gervais’s assumption that, if humankind were translated into a universe of mandatory candor, the resultant zeitgeist would be puerile impoliteness.
For me the biggest flaw of THE INVENTION OF LYING is that we never learn how this technologically advanced but truth-obsessed society came into being. Our Western civilization is in large measure a product of the very lies – war, religion, alleged historical necessity – unknown in Ricky Gervais’s society, and yet the two worlds are totally isomorphic. That conceit simply makes no sense, and it prevents the film from being genuinely shocking or thought provoking. Gervais can be an amusing fellow, but this time around he didn’t do his extrapolative homework.
That said, I should come clean and admit that CITY OF TRUTH represents my second venture into the truth-telling dystopia known as Veritas – I first explored it in a short story, “Veritas,” published way back in 1987 in the SF anthology called SYNERGY. Only the second time around did I manage to fit an emotionally engaging situation into my cryptic city and its subterranean dopplegänger. So perhaps, if Rick Gervais were to revisit the world of THE INVENTION OF LYING, he might do something thematically resonant with it.
EM: Also, your book CONTINENT OF LIES deals with enhancing the entertainment experience. Um, that’s a little where we’re at today with 3-D technology in our homes, and things that are meant to drown us in “experience”. What kind of prophetical Kool-Aid did you drink? Are you kin to Nostradamus?
JM: Some people regard science fiction as rationalist divination, but that’s not where my heart lies. I prefer the argument that the most valuable sort of SF holds a mirror – often a funhouse mirror – up to the present, as opposed to predicting the future. That said, I haven’t done too badly as a prophet. Arthur C. Clarke once praised THE CONTINENT OF LIES for its prescience. And in TOWING JEHOVAH, I managed to anticipate, through rudimentary extrapolation, the current dreadful oil-spill in the Gulf of Mexico.
EM: You’ve won huge accolades, including the Nebula and the World Fantasy Award, but what is your biggest achievement?
JM: BLAMELESS IN ABADDON includes an homage to my tenth-grade World Literature teacher, James Giordano of Abington Senior High School, north of Philadelphia. Shortly after my induction into the Abington Hall of Fame, I sent the novel to “Mr. G” with an inscription celebrating my debt to him. I won’t go into the details, but evidently it greatly helped his mood to realize that his syllabus and his teaching style so profoundly shaped my sensibility. Saying “Thank you” in that way to such a generous and passionate mind was perhaps my greatest literary achievement.
EM: What is your guilty pleasure, Jim?
JM: Despite my being an atheist – or maybe because I’m an atheist – I’m a connoisseur of old Hollywood movies about Jesus, especially THE ROBE, DEMETRIUS AND THE GLADIATORS, BEN-HUR, KING OF KINGS, BARABBAS, and THE GREATEST STORY EVER TOLD. As I like to say, “The teachings of Jesus are truly remarkable. Somebody should start a religion based on them.”
EM: Many aspiring, published, and soon-to-be published writers read this. Many authors say the same commonsensical things when offering advice: write everyday, read, marry rich. What one nugget would you offer to all the writers reading this?
JM: Don’t count on the publishing industry or the marketplace to vindicate your labors. Figure out how to make fiction writing its own reward. The vivid character, the graceful sentence, the successful epigram, the riveting moment, the astonishing plot turn: learn to value these things per se, not just because they might make you famous.
EM: One thing I have an unhealthy obsession with is researching famous last words. I’m just sick like that, I suppose. Did you know, for example, that John F. Kennedy said, upon arriving in Dallas: “If someone’s going to kill me, they’ll kill me.” And supposedly, Pancho Villa said: “Please don’t let it end like this. Tell them I said something.” That’s my favorite. As morbid as it is, what would you wish your immortal words to be?
JM: I hadn’t heard those lines before. My favorite is probably Oscar’s Wilde’s alleged last words. “Either that wallpaper goes, or I do.”
I’m not sure what I’ll say on my deathbed. Perhaps I’ll paraphrase Goethe and cry, “More art!” Or maybe I’ll be thinking of my contrarian oeuvre and proclaim, “If God exists, why didn’t He kill me sooner?” Or perhaps a variation, such as, “There must be easier ways to learn whether God has a sense of humor.”
EM: And finally, if there’s one thing you want readers to get out of your books what is it? For readers who have never cracked open a Morrow book, why do you want them to?
JM: Beware all persons who presume to speak for eternity. In the grand conflict between reason and revelation, revelation will almost always win, being answerable only to itself, but it will invariably be wrong. That is probably the übermessage of my fiction.
EM: Thanks, Mr. Morrow.
JM: You’re very welcome.
If this interview didn't, at least, spark a creative interest in Mr. Morrow's work, I'm not sure what will. His books are masterpieces (each and every one). I'd like to say more, but my rambling will do no justice to his works. The best I can do is offer a complimentary taste (great, now I feel like a pusher).
The Last Witchfinder by James Morrow. How would you like a signed, first-edition hardcopy of this wonderous book? It can be yours! In this interview, James Morrow referenced a funny little thought about a daikaiju in the Garden of Eden, given to Adam and Eve as a pet. Well, write a short poem or a short story using this as a theme. Entries will be posted here on the Authors Speak and one will win.
RULES
No more than 1500 words;
Must be received by July 9, 2010;
Entrants must be a "fan" of the Authors Speak on facebook.com;
Email your entry to ericm@witty.com with the subject I LOVE MORROW
Until then, keep reading.
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