INTERVIEWER
Is the role of ideas in fiction subordinate then?
STEINER
What a very difficult question you ask. There are
novels that one would call great but that will live because of their
ideological, intellectual content. A lot of Thomas Mann might strike one that
way. Musil's Man without Qualities is written about by as many philosophers as
literary critics. But this is rare. Don't ask anything like that of the most
extraordinary fictive shaper — don't laugh at me — in our time, who is Georges
Simenon. I can take from my shelf ten or twelve Maigrets and it doesn't take five
or ten pages, as in Balzac, or twenty, as in Dickens (who is really slow in
getting going; so is Balzac): Simenon does it in two or three paragraphs.
There's a Maigret novel which opens with a loud noise. At three in the morning
in Pigalle, the old Paris red-light district, a nightclub owner is pulling down
the metal shade, to close up. Out of that single noise, focused against the
first milk cart, focused against the steps of those who go home to sleep at
that time and those who start coming into Les Halles to get the food ready for
the day, Simenon gives you not only the city, not only something about France
which no historian can surpass, but the two or three people who will matter in
the story are already before you. Simenon somehow notes that the steps of the
man who pulls down the shade, as they go away from the nightclub, have a
curious hesitant drag. And there you are, that's the first important clue in
the story. Now that is the mysterium tremendum of the creation of the
autonomous persona. But yes,
there can be ideology. (...).
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