Robert Stone: The Art of Fiction (The Paris Review Interviews, Vol. 1)
Robert Stone
The question of realism:
Robert Stone: I began A Hall of Mirrors as a realistic novel, but my life changed and the world changed and when I thought about it I realized that "realism" was a fallacy. It's simply not tenable. You have to write a poem about what you're describing. You can't render, can't dissect. Zola was deluded.
Interviewer: Those remarks suggest an affinity with writers like John Barth and William Gass and Donald Barthelme. But I don't really see you in that camp.
Robert Stone: My difference with those writers is that they take realism too seriously and so haveo react against it. I don't feel the necessity of reacting against it. I don't believe in it to start with. Realism as a theory of literature is meaningless. I can start with it as a mode precisely because I don't believe in it. I know it's all a world of words -- what else could it be? I had the curious luck to be raised by a schizophrenic, which gives one a tremendous advantage in understanding the relationship of language to reality. I had to develop a model of reality in the face of being conditioned to a schizophrenic world. I had to sort out causality for myself. My mother's world was pure magic. And because I had no father I eventually went into a sort of orphanage when my mother could no longer cope. So at the age of six I went into an institution, which taught me to be a listener. I had to deal with all the ways people were coming on to me, had to listen to all their trips and sort them out. Realism wasn't an issue because there wasn't any. I always had a vaguely dreamlike sense of things. There was no strong distinction for me between objective and imaginative worlds.
Interviewer: Life was failing to provide you with coherent narrative.
Stone: That's right. Life wasn't providing narrative so I had to. I had very little personal mythology of my own.
Robert Stone is the author of numerous novels, two short story collections, and a memoir about the Sixties counterculture. These include: A Hall of Mirrors (1967), Dog Soldiers (1974), Children of Light (1986), Damascus Gate (1998), and Prime Green: Remembering the Sixties (2007).
The Paris Review interview took place in 1985.
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