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An Interview With David Duncan
| Article
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20609 |
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Section : |
BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
Date : |
10 / 1992 |
2,616 Words |
| Author
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Clark Munsell
Clark Munsell is a Book World editor at THE WORLD & I. |
It seems David James Duncan has been struggling with "the big questions" all his life--the nature of life and death, the meaning of family, and the existence of God. In his first novel, The River Why (1983), he describes his struggle to understand man's relation to nature, animals, and the "divinity."
Duncan, born in Portland in 1952, has been a lifelong resident of Oregon. He describes his father as blue-collar and his family, as he was growing up, as constantly but comfortably broke. He graduated from Portland State University with a B.A. in English in 1973 and has been writing fiction on a subsistence income ever since. "I've been a bartender, gardener, recycling truck driver, caretaker of a farm, caretaker of a tiny wilderness resort, and so on," says Duncan. "I've always preferred blue-collar work to free-lance writing for journalism: For me, it's less confusing to indenture the body than the imagination and pen. I am now able, for the time being, to write almost full-time."
Duncan grew up during the turbulent sixties in a family somewhat similar to the one in his latest novel, The Brothers K. THE WORLD & I asked Duncan about these similarities and what he hoped to accomplish in his latest offering.
THE WORLD & I: What or who has had the greatest influence on you as a writer: any current or past events, your parents, or other writers?
Duncan: Autobiographical questions inspired by a work of fiction give me pause. So before answering yours, I'd like to state my general reservations about them.
To my mind, a work of fiction is like a symphony score. The author is the composer. The reader is the conductor. The orchestra, for both author and reader, is the imagination. And to me, the primary magic of literary experience is that someone who's never met the author or come within a thousand miles or years of a novel's actual time or place can nevertheless pick up these bound pages of inert black and white marks and conduct them--perform them just as vividly and validly as did the "composer" himself--bringing language, thought, suspense, joy, pain, and epiphanies to life, all with an orchestra made of nothing but the page, eyes and mind, and the imaginative effort.
Compared to this virtual miracle, any question of "How much is made up?" versus "How much is real?" seems almost beside the point. Not one note of a symphony is a record of a "genuine
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