CBC-1’s Shelagh Rogers: The Last
Chapter 23
April 2012,“It’s about the ghosts of family”.
April 2012,“It’s about the ghosts of family”.
Some of Alexi Zentner’s thought on
myth, belief and faith…
Ne Je’schijchte dee fonn oole Tiede staumt, jleewe onn en Gloowe
 |
| Alexi Zentner (c) Peter J. Thompson |
(Note that this is not a complete transcript
– to review this material, please reference the CBC link archive: http://www.cbc.ca/thenextchapter/popupaudio.html?clipIds=2225014592
(downloaded 23 April 2012).
Roger’s questions are
approximations. The answers are as
accurate as possible.
Alexi Zentner is the author of Touch.
“It is
impossible to determine what is myth and what is Truth” says Steven, an
Anglican priest in Zentner’s debut novel Touch.
“Memories
are another way to raise the dead.” Quoting Zentner from People Magazine.
“It’s about ghosts of
family … it’s really sort of a book about the way in which stories become myths
and become legends and the ways that families pass them down, not only within families
but within countries and nations…”
What interests you
about family stories?
“… my parents were
story tellers and one of the things I loved about them is trying to figure out
what part of them are actually true… and I think that that is something that
does happen within families – an event happens, and it’s true, and its told and
retold and passed down… by the time that it gets down to the grandchildren,
they become these big fish stories… but we tend to forget that there is usually
something true at the heart of them … and it’s interesting to me which of those
family stories survive and why.”
Can you apply this to
the nature of myth….?
… I think some of them
started as sort of cautionary tales, but most of those cautionary tales are
built in some sort of reality… we dress them up in larger stories… Myths start somewhere and they have a
resonance for a reason and I think that most myths are very specific stories
and because of that specificity they become universal.
…
 |
| Mythic Mural, Juneau, Alaska |
I think that if you
spend too much time in the city, you forget how incredibly dangerous the
outdoors are … [and that] there are still places where if you make a poor
decision, you will die. …
You write about a
great blizzard that dropped 30’ of snow – did that really happen?
I am not actually sure
of that… my goal as a writer is to do the exact minimum amount [of] research I can
get away with … Every writer is different with this but for me the more
research that I do, the more it becomes a book report. There have storms of that sort in certain
parts of the country, but as for the actual timeline… I am not sure … I did not
base it on that.
…
I think its important
to have enough research so that details are accurate… but the world I invented
is a world complete in and of itself. I
think that people, … people read fiction for human concerns, not for pure
information.
What does the term
Mythical Realism mean?
… it seems that I’m
parsing a term a little bit, but when we talk about magical realism, magical
realism is very firmly rooted in the cultures and traditions of Central and
South America or parts of Europe. I
think that if you take those forms and just place them onto of own landscape,
you end up with a sort of palimpsest where sort of the ghostly traces of those
cultures shows through… and I do think you can create good work that way,
interesting work, but I was trying to create something new and different. To sort of write about mythology in a very
North American way, to talk about the way that we as Canadians … and
even as Americans and Canadians, the way that national mythology affects us
because it does affect it us differently that it affects these other countries.
… for me one of the goals is to have that myth really entwined throughout the
lives of the characters that it becomes almost a background. It was important to me to not have magic be
just a parlor trick – you know, moments of magic to just suddenly come out of
the blue and feel as if … I didn’t want the reader to say, “Oh here is Alexi
doing something dazzling and fun,” … they need to feel organic and part of the
story. I think that it’s important for
us to understand that we can borrow from other literary traditions, but if we
do more than that, then we are writing those literary traditions instead of
making our own.
Do you think that we
have a national myth that binds us together in this country?
Absolutely. I think that it’s funny when I was growing
up, you know, one of the big questions was … what it means to be Canadian and
when I was growing up the answer to that was that it meant to be not
American. And I think that defining
ourselves by an absence is problematic, but I think that the other problem is
that we’re looking for a simple answer and there is no simple answer as to what
it means to be Canadian. There’s sort of
a thousand answers that come together, but part of that is there is a national
mythology. It doesn’t matter if you’ve
spent your entire life in the city or not, you understand sort of the
importance of canoeing. … You don’t have
to ever set foot in a canoe to understand the importance of canoes to Canadian
culture. In the same way that most
Americans have never ridden a horse and they understand how important sort of
the cowboy mythology is. There are
things that sort of by dint of breathing the air we understand a part of our
tradition as a whole even if they are not part of our personal tradition.
Where did that image
of the ice come from?
 |
| Henri Rousseau, Sleeping Gypsy, 1897 |
…
Can I go back to
magic for a moment? … are you saying
something about spiritualism here?
Uh… yes, but I don’t
know what. … I think that we lose sight
a little bit of … where we are coming from – that it really wasn’t very long
ago that everybody believed, deeply believed in some of these myths and whether
the myths were sort of Aboriginal myths or they were religious myths in terms
of church or whatever religion you were, … we’re really not that far away from
believing that when you saw a map and on the edge of the map it said, “Thar be
dragons”, it was not that long ago that we thought “Thar be dragons.” … even now for modern Canadians, most of us
hold multiple levels of belief. …
Whether we hold religious beliefs or other beliefs we juggle sort of all of
these belief around. Umm, and I think
that we don’t think about that that often and why we believe what we believe
and why we used to believe something and no longer do.
…
Les neiges éternelles
Le Monde Article paru dans l'édition
du 02.09.11
| Sol
gelé au cimetière. Il faut attendre que la neige ait fondu pour enterrer les
morts de l'hiver. Avec les premiers beaux jours peuvent commencer de boueuses
funérailles... Triste temps du redoux. Mais, à Sawgamet, d'une saison à
l'autre la forêt, le fleuve, le froid, emportent, à chaque fois, leurs parts
de vies humaines. Stephen le sait bien, lui qui, l'année de ses 10 ans, a vu
disparaître sous la glace encore fragile d'octobre sa petite soeur et son
père. Prêtre anglican, il est revenu à présent dans ce bourg de bûcherons et
d'orpailleurs du Nord canadien, pour y reprendre l'église et pour y voir
mourir sa mère. Les Bois de Sawgamet est un livre de réminiscences et
de correspondances. Dans le labyrinthe des grands arbres se cachent les
esprits des légendes et des anciennes histoires. Et Stephen de se rappeler
celle de son grand-père, de son chien volé à une presque sorcière et de son
amour fou pour sa femme. Ce premier roman d'Alexi Zentner est d'une
effrayante beauté. Tant que dure l'hiver, la neige à Sawgamet recouvre les
secrets. Xavier Houssin |
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