A.S. Byatt: I chose Orhan Pamuk’s ‘The White Castle’ as a book of the year when he was almost unknown in Britain

In a recent interview, American novelist Philip Roth predicted that the novel would become extinct as a genre in 25 years at the most. As one of the most important novelist of our age, what is your opinion of his prediction and how do you foresee the future of the novel?

I don’t see the novel disappearing. It represents a prolonged communication from one person to one person and it uses language, still the most complicated method we have devised for talking to each other. It may well change its format -- become electronic, for instance -- but it will take a long time for it to disappear. All the blogs and Facebooks we now have are in fact evidence of our need to read and write. Commonplace novels may be replaced by these methods. Good novels will still be needed. And good writers will need to pay attention to the blogosphere and to Twitter, et al., to see what is happening to the medium.

In one of your interviews you mentioned that in your childhood you read because you had no other alternatives. In today’s world there are a lot of alternatives for a child to entertain herself and learn something. How do you foresee the future of reading in this context? Does this “progress” or “change” frighten you?

I do think children in general read less. But those who can, read all sorts of things on the Internet and thus learn to be interested in language and in thinking. My grandchildren are interested in books and read steadily -- though one of them is more interested in fashion and the visual world. I think we have a profound need for stories, and novels satisfy that need in a way nothing else does -- there are films and TV narratives, but in the past films of books have just fed the need for the books. After seeing the film, people rushed out and bought the book. We can take pleasure in all these forms.

In most of your novels you criticize the Victorian age in terms of Victorian doubt. For instance, in “Possession” Randolph writes, “The truth is, my dear Miss La Motte, that we live in an old world, a tired world, a world that has gone on piling up speculation and observations until truths that might have been graspable in the bright Dayspring of human morning are now obscured…” Do you think uncertainty and doubt are preparing the end of progress, and what do you foresee about the role of religion in the future?

I used to be sure I was living in an increasingly secular world -- but looking at Christian fundamentalism in the USA, and at certain forms and practices of Islam here, and at phenomena like Scientology, I am no longer sure. I do myself believe in reason and in science and was happy to inhabit an agnostic world, even though reasonable people make terrible mistakes. Only science can rectify the mistakes -- or unexpected hazards -- of science. Scientific advances and population increase got us into the dangerous situation of global warming -- but IF we can get out of it, it will be through science and its methods. I am afraid of a religious backlash, yes. It is clear that religion is an intrinsic part of human nature -- in ways both moving and terrifying. I don’t think I have ever believed in progress, only in attempting to be reasonable and observant of natural forces, against the odds.

In some of your novels, and most recently in “The Children’s Book” you make use of the fairy tale tradition. What is the role of the fairy tale in your fictitious world and what is its role in your text?

I use fairytales because realist narrative alone is not a perfect way of describing the world, or of telling stories, or of using language. Fairytales are ancient forms of talking about humans in the world and can express our sense of destiny, or doom, or being trapped, or strangeness, or metaphor -- they have recognizable patterns and always slightly new versions of those patterns. The fairy tales in “The Children’s Book” are part of the story -- they are metaphorical descriptions of the mind of the storyteller I have made up, and of the world she told her stories in -- they are stories of the end of the 19th century/beginning of the 20th, as those in “Possession” were earlier high Victorian [mid-19th century]. The reader of my novel will know things about Olive and her world that can be learned only in the form of the tales she tells.

You say that writing a novel should be like constructing a building. It includes intense research, analyzing the data you gathered and doing homework, in a way. So where do you put “the muse” in your literature? Do you see literature just as a structure that you can deconstruct?

I think muses are mythological and therefore almost religious. The image I use for the workings of the brain when I am writing is the lighting of lamps on a three-dimensional circuit -- neurons and synapses, connections forming like lightning when the thing is in an excited state. This state of excitement is not dry or pedantic -- it is the opposite, it is wild and somehow self-sustained. You get there by seeing connections between things, people, worlds, words. There are single connections at the beginning of a work -- between a particular fairy tale [“Peau d’Ane,” say, the father who wants to marry his daughter] and the forming plot. But it isn’t a muse that drops them into the mind -- it’s the brain, so to speak, free-wheeling, because it’s full of things. A lot of thinking is not done by the conscious brain, but in the dark.

In one of your interviews you said, “A good novel tries to understand what the world is.” In other words you oppose the self-centered or autofictional method used by some of your contemporaries. Considering the fact that especially the women writers of the last generation such as Herta Müller and Doris Lessing have a tendency to reinterpret their own life and make it the subject of literature, how do you evaluate the relationship between the writer’s life and the writer’s works?

This is turning into a curiously religious interview. I was brought up by the Quakers, whose very simple and deep ideas of human goodness I do greatly respect, and they taught me not to bother about myself, but to look out at the world. Consequently I dislike the idea of “self-expression.” And of autofiction -- though if you look at the whole oeuvres of Lessing and Toni Morrison, only a small part of what they do is autofiction -- they write about all sorts of people in all sorts of worlds, with all sorts of rhythms. They write as well about men as about women. Both aspire almost to writing myths. I haven’t read Herta Müller but am initially worried by what I read about how she constructed her novel. In general, I am very wary of biographical criticism, or explanations of fictions. The biographical explanation is NOT more the truth than the reader’s reading. It often diminishes the artistic power of a fiction. I am eternally grateful that despite all our research we really know nothing much about Shakespeare.

In “Possession” the efforts of literary scholars to find the literary truth about past poets turns out to be in vain. But at the end of the novel the readers are one step ahead of the literary scholars in reaching the truth. So who do you think possesses the text and how do you locate the reader and the scholar in terms of reading? Do you find the scholarly ambition of these “detectives” ironic?

Maybe I’ve almost answered this question. It is the biographical truth, not the literary truth, that eludes the scholars in the novel. Roland can read the poems because he is a good reader, even though the biographical truth -- or some essential elements of it -- remains hidden. But I, as a novelist, am allowed to know what I do know -- and the novelist tells it to the readers, who share it, as they would in a Victorian novel. The writer can only guess at how each individual reader reads -- what she brings to the text, how she perhaps distorts it for her own needs -- also what she needs to know and perhaps doesn’t, about the 19th century, about the English language. But The Reader, in the abstract, is the person for whom the work is written.

In your novels history is an important aspect, but we can’t define your novels as historical novels as they extend somehow to our age. You make a connection between the past and the present. Can we say that you are transforming the past for the future? And how do you evaluate the impact of tradition in your writings? In terms of style, can we think some of the traditional usages in your novels as parody?

This is a very good and interesting question -- I particularly like the idea of transforming the past for the future, which does describe very well what I think and hope I am doing. I myself, like everyone else, am made what I am by the past -- including what I have read that was written in the past. There are various ways in which this happens. I grew up on Victorian poetry and literature – and, of course, on Shakespeare -- so much of what I think is thought in words, and forms of thought, learned from them. My latest novel is about a time I knew much less well -- the time just before the First World War -- and doing my research on the politics, the art, the social changes of that time, I understood the world my parents grew up in and that I inherited -- and that changed the idea I have of the present. The “historical novel” as a genre makes “another world” for readers to inhabit the imaginary past. I do that, too -- but I am trying to understand human beings in history, past and present.

I like your idea of traditional usages as parody. In a sense I write parodies of 19th-century novels, as well as of 19th-century poems. But the parodies are not done mockingly -- they are done in order to understand, to use earlier forms of thought and language in a modern world. I am not a nostalgic person. I like living now. But now is what it is because of human history and the history of the earth.

As you know Eastern literary tradition is very rich in terms of tales. Are you interested in Eastern literature? In this context are there any Turkish writers you read?

I am interested in Eastern literature, but I do not know a great deal. I have written various essays on the Arabian Nights and I have read a great deal about them -- I immensely admire the work of Robert Irwin, a scholar and novelist who really does know about Eastern literature. My modern fairy tale, “The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye,” is set partly in İstanbul and begins with a “parody” of a traditional Turkish fairytale -- my Djinn is a Turkish djinn. I owe a great deal to my long friendship with Cevat Çapan -- we were students together. I can read his poems in French and English translation. I admire all the work of Orhan Pamuk. I chose one of his early books -- “The White Castle” -- as a Book of the Year when he was almost unknown in Britain.