Tom Wolfe Interview (page: 4 / 5) America's Master Novelist	Print Interview

In your most recent novel there's a description of a science experiment. At first it seems like non-fiction. It takes the reader a while to realize it's fictional.

Tom Wolfe: That's right, and it's one that I think metaphorically is quite accurate. Only I gave my man the Nobel Prize for it. I don't expect to get that one. I made it an integral part of that novel. I'll give you very quickly the premise of neuroscience. There are two quick examples. Edward O. Wilson is probably the dominant theorist in neuroscience today. He once said in an interview -- he probably would never write this as clearly -- he said every human brain is born, not as a blank slate waiting to be filled in by experience, but as a negative -- as in the film, negative in a camera -- that is waiting to be dipped into developer fluid. And the idea is, it can be developed well, it can be developed badly, according to the environment. But no matter how it's developed, you're not going to get any more than is on that negative at birth. Which, of course, gets into the whole theory of genetics and things like hard-wiring of the brain and so on.

Is Wilson active today?

Tom Wolfe: Yes, he's at Harvard. His field is actually zoology. He's the great expert on ants. He invented the term "sociobiology," which is a combination of the social factors, whether it's among ants, or macaque monkeys. As we know, there's lots pecking order among animals, the pecking order among chickens. There is this interaction of status and genetics.

Before it hops out of my mind again, I'll give you the other example from neuroscience. I do not know who first said this, but one of the principles of neuroscience is that if you took a rock and you threw it, and in mid-flight of that rock you gave it consciousness and the power to reason, that rock would give you, until the day it hit the earth, the most cogent and absolutely ironclad logic as to why he's going in this direction, and why he hasn't chosen another direction, and why he's happy with his choice. Young neuroscientists in particular believe we're machines, and according to which other machines we run into, we act in a predictable way. And they feel if they had enough computer power -- so-called "parallel computers" -- that they could predict what you're going to do five seconds from now. They could predict that you're going to suddenly hit your forehead with the tips of your fingers five seconds from now. That's how sure they are about this kind of determination that goes on.

That's a little bleak, isn't it?

Tom Wolfe: It is. It actually is bleak. I already see people believing in what I call "the lurking force." The whole 20th century has trained us to think that things happen because of "the lurking force." For example, Marxism, which had a huge influence on the 20th century. The theory says that the class you're born into is your destiny. In other words, you were born into this certain class, and the forces that come from that have shaped your life. You don't have any choice. Freudianism, which was so powerful as a way of thinking about human behavior in the 20th century, holds that your destiny is an Oedipal battle that took place in your family when you were between the ages of three and six and were totally unaware of anything that was going on in any large sense. So these are both external theories.

Then there are many other theories, that were never quite individually as powerful, that say society shapes you in a certain way. Theodore Dalrymple, the prison psychiatrist, tells of how he was questioning a prisoner for psychiatric treatment, and asked him -- he was in for 18 years for aggravated manslaughter -- "How did this come about that you killed this man?" And the prisoner says, "Well, we were at this table. We were having a few drinks. We got into an argument. And the next thing I know, he's standing up and he's got his fists clenched, and I think he's gonna hit me. So I stood up and I pulled out my knife. And then we yelled at each other some more, and things got worse. And I don't know, and then the knife went in." Believing, of course he'd read it, that if you had a chaotic childhood, and you were in the wrong end of society, these forces impel you to stick knives in people's midsections. This is part of it.

And now neuroscience has made the threat seem even worse. If your genetic makeup at birth is determining so many things, I think it causes people to kind of give up on their children. "He wasn't born a student. Why knock my brains out trying to make him into something he isn't?" When most people just need a counselor who'll kick him in the slats every now and then when the motivation drops. But I think it's enervating to be constantly told that there's a lurking force that is determining your life.

In your career, you've written fiction that's very realistic, and non-fiction that employs some of the tools of fiction. How did you come to these hybrid forms?

Tom Wolfe: When I was in college, like almost everybody who was serious about writing and thought they might themselves be writers, I thought that writing was 95 percent genius. You had to write about something, so the other five percent was just this clay that you fooled around with. That's why I think there are so many terrific young poets, because poetry is the music of literature. Just playing with words can do just marvelous things, when it's used as music. But then you reach a certain age and you realize that the ball game, in terms of prestige in literature is not poetry, it's prose. Whether that's good or bad, that's the way things are. And at that point, you find the young writer cannibalizing his life -- let's say he's 22, 23, 25 -- and he writes his first novel. And it may be great too.

Everybody's life has great material. In fact, Emerson said, "Every person on this earth has a great story to tell, if only he can figure out what is his unique experience." But he didn't say everyone has two. He said everyone has one.
[ Video ] Low High    [ Audio ] Quicktime

So now the second novel comes along, and that's when you get this kind of pathetic novel. It's about a young novelist who had a great critical success with his first book but he really didn't make any money, and he's living in this four-story walk-up in the Clinton area of New York, and he doesn't have a girlfriend, can't go out to dinner. And this is not really a terrific novel. Nobody really cares about his fate after his great critical success.

The writing programs, where you get the Masters of Fine Art in writing, are always telling people to "write what you know." And students interpret that to mean your own life. Unless you're Count Tolstoy, there's not that much in your own life. I'd be out with a cup if I had to write surely what's based on my own life. But in the 19th century, where there were so many great realistic novelists, they understood. You had to go outside of your own life to get new material. Even Dostoevsky, we think of him being such an internal, psychological creative force. When he wanted to write about the student radicals of his era, he went to the archives. And then started going -- he'd hear about a meeting of some of these groups, he'd go attend, to just get the material. Dickens was, of course, famous for this. Zola did it just time after time after time, going to a new area of life. He wanted to get all of France into a series of novels, and he pretty well did. He'd go from farming to warfare, to whatever he thought he really hadn't covered yet.
[ Video ] Low High    [ Audio ] Quicktime	[ Key to Success ] Preparation

Tom Wolfe Interview, Page: 1   2   3   4   5