NM - This idea that one carries around with oneself, knowingness... It’s a state of mind of being open, alert, to what is going on, it is not saying, Oh I know what I know, and being able to pin it down, because once you've done that you've killed the listening, the watching, being alert. It’s something which you can’t put your finger on, because you’re both open to what it might be and, at the same time, you’re trying to hold it. There was a very good image for this that I came across by chance way back in the 1960's, an image of a thing which you can draw in two dimensions but which can’t exist in three. I think people now know what an impossible object looks like. There's an impossible triangle in which each side is drawn so that it makes sense, but all three sides don't add up, this thing can't exist in three dimensions. It goes forward where it should go back and it goes back where it should go forward; it doesn't all tie up. But, at the same time, it is there, and in order to make sense of it your eye has to go round, and, in fact, you don't exactly make sense of it. It could be drawn in two dimensions but one's mind couldn't exactly hold it all at once, couldn't grasp it in one static concept. It was something that you looked at and your eye had to go round and round [gesturing]. You have to move in order to grasp what this object is, and even then you actually don't quite grasp it. So, you just say this is there, this is a thing which I can only comprehend by realizing that it is both there and, as it were, not there at the same time. It's something I have to be in a moving relationship with, moving and looking at. 

   So I thought this was an extraordinary symbol of the kind of state of mind that I was trying to show my characters held, and also of the style I was trying to write in, so that my readers would not feel that they were being told something, they were not sort of being informed, I was not preaching at them - God knows, I hope not - but I was trying to write in a style in which their minds would have to be in movement with what I was saying, be in some sort of sympathetic movement with what I was saying, so they would say, Oh I see, I see that, then that [gesturing]. They wouldn't exactly be able to pin down what it was they saw, just as I wouldn't be able to pin down what I was seeing. My characters weren't pinning down what it was that they were on about, but there was something lively, there was this liveliness in an impossible object, which is what I felt I was trying to say about life - you know, love, one's relationships with the people one loves, one's children, it's there and it's not there - the love's there and then something else is there; there's this and then there's that; you always have to be in movement, to be flexible with them. The very good image for this sort of love was the impossible object. And then there's all these nice words, you know, the impossible object as a thing and 'object' being the aim of life, the aim of life being something impossible, but then when you say, Ok, it's impossible, then it is there. 

   And then I think that by trying to write in this way about these impossible predicaments that life seems to put one in - or one finds oneself in - and the style of trying to deal with them, then I think things began to alter: the very fact that one got some ease in carrying this state of mind, trying to understand this state of mind, one became a bit more at home in all this. I think things do alter. I suppose it's because I became more at home in thinking in this way, therefore an awful lot of the sort of agony and hopelessness that I had at times felt did, in a way, become less potent. Not that life ever becomes easy, that one ever [overcomes] the predicaments of life, but they become less potent to hurt or to stultify. I suppose. Although even in one's saying that, you see, one's apt to get it wrong: once one start saying that, one has the feeling that it is then that the roof suddenly falls on one’s head. [smiles] And I think that's true, not the superstition that you say that and then the roof falls down, but that as soon as one starts saying that then one stops being in the state of mind of openness and quietness and listening. 'Oh I've solved that problem!' - then you actually haven't; if you think you've solved it then you haven't solved it, because the only way the problem is held at all is by not nattering on about it, by being sort of respectful to it, by listening and seeing, and so on. 

JB – To me, the magical thing is that a book, something written – drawn, as it were - in two dimensions, gives the idea, not by saying so, by putting it on a platter, but generates the idea of life as something that's impossible unless it's tipped into another dimension. So the book is tipped into another dimension through your understanding, and that isn't something you can articulate very much, it's just a sense of life as a certain kind of motion. 

NM - Well I certainly wanted this. The way that I wrote those books, like Impossible Object, was that I was talking to the reader, I was talking about my characters, and my characters were sometimes talking. The point of a book, obviously, is the matter of its collusion with the reader, that's what a book is. And so there had to be knowingness about that, one had to face the fact, admit the fact, that the book was a matter of being in collusion with the reader; so ok, write like this. And the reader is sometimes saying Aha! and sometimes saying Oh, God; he's in a changing relationship with the book, as the characters are in a changing relationship with one another. They're saying, How wonderful! and Oh, my God! and then the reader's saying, hopefully saying, Oh, how wonderful! every now and then, and then he's saying, What's happening here, what the hell? As long as he doesn't say, My God, this is such a load of old something or other that I'm going to throw it away! then you're in a working relationship with him. In the end he can say that; so ok, a lot of people do, a lot of people say that to one another - I'm not in a working relationship with you anymore, I'll throw you away! [chuckles] But that is life. And so many forms of writing novels, of sort of fixing a story, aren't like life at all, it's like writing about robots, leaves blown in the wind; it isn't like human life. 

JB - That would be a good place to pick up Faulkner, having to get to the clearer recognitions, the resonances... 

NM  - Yes, well, one of the great influences in my early writing was William Faulkner, who as a young man I loved more than any other writer. And I think Faulkner struggled with these two ways in which I wrote, what I started from and, in a way, what I went on to. Anyway, there's one aspect of Faulkner, that he is this voice talking and talking, shouting through the fog. There's this great fog of experience, and Faulkner's voice is shouting through it - as indeed Faulkner himself said in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech, which is marvelous. He talks about the voice of man going on in its indomitable way, through all the chaos, and so on. So I think I felt both the power and the potency of Faulkner's rhetoric, as a voice that wouldn't just accept the fog but was shouting through the fog. But then, of course, also in Faulkner, very vital to Faulkner, are the extraordinary recognition scenes, extraordinary scenes where the reader suddenly sees the whole story all in one: they've been in a fog, there have been voices shouting through the fog, and then suddenly the fog clears and you see in a flash of illumination what the whole story is all about. This occurs particularly in that extraordinary book called The Sound and the Fury, where you go on for pages not knowing what the hell is really happening. You get vivid images, bits of the story here and there - the first eighty pages or so of the story is told through the mind of an idiot who can't piece things together - and then around page one-hundred and eighty or so there's a flashback scene and a fair bit of the story and you suddenly see! That's it, the fog has totally cleared. So you don't just see what is happening now, you see what has been happening in the whole story, and that's an extraordinary moment. And I think that's what life is like, that struck me as being the way things happen: we all go along in a fog, and then, if you’re lucky, you do have moments of illumination. This is all to do with love, too: there's this feeling of illumination, you've met someone who understands you, you've got through onto some level of illuminations. You can't quite put into words what it is, you just have this feeling, this experience. So Faulkner had played this double role with me: there was his very romantic, powerful, heroic way of voices shouting through the fog, and also these moments of complete stillness, of illumination. And I still love Faulkner. But after a time I wanted to do something different, I wanted to hold these moments of illumination, I didn't want to end there, and I didn't want to lose them. I wanted to [ask] what's the style of life, what's the style of behaviour, once you have these moments of illumination. That is, knowingness; we must now write about people knowing. You know love flourishes in time of war, so...[gestures] what? And that's what I wanted to write about in recognition of this knowingness. 

JB – Well, your character Greville [Natalie, Natalia] gets himself into an impossible triangle. 

NM - He gets himself on a tightrope. This is my imagery of being on a tightrope on a one-wheeled bicycle trying to keep a whole load of clubs and balls in the air like a juggler. It's a tangle, because he starts dropping balls and clubs, and one or two fall on his head, right. J - But it's a triangle. N - Oh, yes, he gets himself into an impossible triangle, yes. And then he gets himself into... you know there's that further impossible object of the two impossible triangles superimposed on one another. And in a way he's in this because one of the people he's in love with has her triangle, and his wife has her triangle. I mean, all these people have their own triangles. So one moves from the question of how one deals with one’s own impossible triangle, on one’s own one-wheeled bicycle (to mix the images), then one moves on, eventually, as I think I did after a time, in a further stage of [writing]. I wanted to try to write about this next thing, when you realize that there are all these interlocking impossible objects, that there are all these interlocking impossible predicaments which people are involved in, which one is involved in oneself. So life isn't just simply a matter of learning to keep one's own juggling act up in the air, it's the realization that the whole of humanity, the whole world, is a series of juggling acts, everything is being kept up in the air, by weird, impossible means, as it were. 

JB - Holding them has something to do with love, care... 

NM - Yes, holding them has something to do with keeping one's eye open..., and loving them, yes, and loving what life is. I think this further stage is [something] you sort of learn as you grow old, grow older. You don't feel so much that what matters is being in love with one person, the predicament of wanting to grab someone and also to let them be themselves. You see that love is really a matter of recognizing the wonder of everyone. What is liveliness is this struggle to keep things up in the air, to see the impossible and thereby make it possible. And this is a feeling of great wonder, which moves sort of out of the personal grab for love, wanting to hold it, wanting to possess it. It really becomes a trust much more, a trust that, ok, if you love, ok, you actually don't have to grab. You're no longer in a predicament of trying to juggle between grabbing and saying, Ok, be free. You say, Ok, I trust it, I trust; sometimes I'll have it, sometimes I won't. You actually trust the impossible triangle. And then you realize that everything's an impossible triangle. And then you get this sort of vision of the world with everything being juggled up in the air; and this is marvelous, this is a very good feeling. That's love, then you love. You love, and then you feel tired and exhausted and you think, Oh hell! [laughs] You think, what am I on about? Sure, one does all that. But you have some trust established at the center. At the center what has been established is some trust with this way of looking at things... however ill one sometimes feels, or low, or thinking everyone's being horrible to one or whatever, you know, so what! 

JB - There's also that line, if you always think you know where you are, how can you trust? 

NM - Yes, well, if you always think you know where you are, how can you learn anything, how can you discover anything. If Christopher Columbus had always wanted to know exactly where he was he wouldn't have started out from Cadiz [chuckles]; he wanted to know where he wasn't. In all voyages of discovery you actually don't know where you're going; you may have some idea of where you're going. He thought he was going to hit India and he hit the West Indies or whatever it was. Ok, in all voyages of discovery, you don't know where you're going. How can you learn to trust, yes, that's the other thing. You don't know where you're going and you trust. There's no meaning to the word "trust" if you know it all: if you have it all in your grasp, you aren't trusting anything. So that's the sort of miser man who just wants to make his hundred million and hold it all. Well, if you want that sort of life, you can have it, but there's not much love or trust in it, as far as one can make out.