Issue 41 / February 2012
Jeffrey Eugenides Interview
"Austen novels are comedies, but as the 19th century goes along
marriage plots follow the women into the difficulties of marriage, and
become darker. Those novels - Middlemarch, The Portrait of a Lady, even Anna Karenina - are the ones I love."
On the face of it, The Marriage Plot is more conventional - and far less experimental - than Jeffrey Eugenides' previous two novels, The Virgin Suicides (1993) and Middlesex (2002), though they all deal - to various, startling degrees - with mixed-up youth. How did this a campus novel, with its themes of 19th-century romance, manic depression and the search for religious truth, come about? Mark Reynolds investigates.
I was writing another novel, about a rich family that was throwing a debutante party, and I suppose even that idea was less outrageous than Middlesex. But out of that book three characters appeared who, the more I thought about them, didn't belong in that novel. That was Madeleine and Mitchell, basically, and Madeleine's boyfriend Leonard, and at the start I wasn't sure how important a figure he was going to be. And I took those characters out of that novel and gave them their own novel.
Madeleine's story began with the sentence "Madeleine's love troubles began at a time when the French theory she was reading deconstructed the very notion of love." So she came with semiotics attached, and she came in the midst of a romantic predicament. And then later on I realised she was a devotee of 19th-century fiction, especially Austen and Elliot and James, and in a way was trying to emancipate herself from the romantic illusions those books had fostered in her.
I'm not an Austen scholar like Madeleine, but The Portrait of a Lady is my favourite Henry James novel, and probably more than any book that Madeleine reads looms large in my affection and looms large in my conception of the marriage plot. If you think about the Austen novels they always end in weddings and they're comedies, but as the 19th century goes along marriage plots follow the women into their marriages and into the difficulties of marriage, and they become darker. Those novels to me - Middlemarch and The Portrait of a Lady, even Anna Karenina is a marriage plot - are the ones I love from that era.
I think it's possible to convey meaning with a novel, to say true things about people and society. I'm not with Derrida that all texts have apparent contradictions that will render them incoherent or meaningless. Maddy's old professor says that "the novel had reached its apogee with the marriage plot" and it's certainly a valid position to hold, but perhaps a reactionary and outmoded one. It's one I've toyed with, but I don't share it. I began reading novels because of James Joyce and the modernists, so I came in long after the marriage plot was dead and it didn't bother me, so it's not something that has been central to my conception of the novel. But obviously I was playing with the idea of the marriage plot here, and the extent to which what we read affects our actual life. It's not just the marriage plot: Mitchell reads many mystical books that affect him; Madeleine reads both Victorian novels and French theory that affect her. And, especially for people in college, what you read gets into your bloodstream like a drug and affects your life, and that's really what I was trying to examine in this book.
Deconstructivism and semiotics were coming into play in America in 1978 when I got to college, and it was causing a great disturbance in the English department, so you had a schism where some professors either were ignorant of it or distrustful of it, and others who were enthusiastically adopting it. So if you were a student then, you were kind of a child of divorcing parents, and perhaps had an affection for both parents, but would shuttle back and forth between the houses, and that was my own experience as an English student. And that's why I gave Madeleine this predicament of being both attracted to the new, hip philosophy of semiotics, and also rooted in a more traditional pedagogy of literary preferences. I was just trying to reflect the time.
I've been influenced by French theory and Foucault. One of Foucault's books led me to write Middlesex. There are certain post-modern elements in my fiction, but I resist the notions that the author's dead. Again, I resist the idea that text can't convey meaning, and I resist some of their more doctrinaire positions. And I love narrative, I love storytelling, and I believe in creating characters with whom the reader can identify or whose story is compelling to the reader. So I have affection for a lot of traditional elements of novel writing, as well as many theoretical agreements with the semioticians.
It seems like there's lots of social conduct that tries to keep us from behaving badly, and many of the things that are so-called PC are probably good sense. At its heart it means trying to be sensitive to the feelings of other people, especially disadvantaged people or people who have been discriminated against. So it doesn't seem in the main a wrong emphasis. Is it against human nature? Yeah, it's perhaps against male nature not to go and grab every woman that looks attractive to a man, but it wasn't PC that got men to behave a little bit better than the brutes that they are in the jungle; it's not so different from the many religious teachings that have formed our culture.
I remember graduating and seeing that people were going off to interviews with investment banks, and I had no idea what that meant. Now that's partly because I'm stupid, partly because I was an English major, but also because in general people weren't talking about it that much. And this entire move to Wall Street on the part of our best and brightest hadn't quite begun. It was a much smaller part of the economy. Since then it's grown and grown and grown so that a place like where I teach at Princeton, something like 40 to 60 per cent of the graduates might end up working for Wall Street in one way or another. You know, you have the 'quants', the brilliant mathematicians, being hired to do that instead of figure out how to run NASA. This has nothing to do with my novel, but in my opinion the financial sector has grown far too large. It's a necessary thing to have in a capitalist society, but the fact that so many of our smart kids are going into a line of work that is really not innovative, creative or productive, but necessary in some way, doesn't seem to be a great trend. But it hadn't quite started at the time I'm writing about at Brown.
When Madeline leaves college she has the summer with Leonard, taking care of him, that is difficult. It was important to show both the neediness and magnetism of the manic-depressive. I was trying to imagine what such a person would be like, and the difficulties of being in love with someone like Leonard: from both sides. I was trying to show Maddy's point of view and Leonard's to the best of my ability. Had I not conveyed that, I don't think I would have conveyed the essence of the problem at the heart of their relationship.
I think there's been a lot of attention to depression, but not to mania, so I felt that, in writing the scenes where Leonard becomes manic, I hadn't read an account like that before. And going back to this novel seeming more conventional, I found that some of my most experimental writing ever occurred in trying to map and describe Leonard's overheating mind in Cape Cod. So I think in so-called realistic novels, there are many places where the novelist is called upon to work experimentally, just in order to try and describe how a person's mental processes are working, and that the labels realistic and surrealistic sometimes don't do justice to what is actually going on inside a book.
Mitchell I think discovers a certain amount of truth in his searches. I mean he's someone who was not brought up religiously, and embarks on a real investigation of religion through his studies, and then is not content just with academic knowledge, but wants to try and have an actual mystical experience and goes about that as many people do at that age, and little by little he comes to the conclusion that the only validity of any religious dogma is if it changes how you behave in life and how you conduct your affairs. So he tries to be the best possible person he can become when he goes to work for Mother Theresa and joins the Quaker group. He's defeated in his attempt to become a saint, but I think he does gain a certain measure of self-understanding through that process. At the end of the book he's making another step toward being a better person when he's understanding that Madeleine is not going to be the woman he's going to be with, and that he has to give her her freedom as easily as possible and not cause any scenes. There's a line at the end when he's feeling a little better about himself, where I think he makes a step toward the kind of person he wants to become. And I think it's being with the Quakers, and having thought about all these things over the years, that allow him to do that.
The Marriage Plot is published by Fourth Estate.
Mark Reynolds is a freelance editor and writer, contributing editor to Untitled Books, and Literary Editor of The Drawbridge.
Tuesday, 6 December, 2011
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