Angol filológiai tanulmányok XVI. [antikvár]

ZOLTÁN ABÁDI-NAGY (Debrecen) A TALK WITH RONALD SUKENICK The interview was conducted in the Enghsh Department of Kossuth University, Debrecen, Hungary, on November 18, 1982. Q: Jerome Klinkowitz wrote in the North American Reviewi/i 1973 that you revitalize fiction "by having it do what it should: to make reality seem less unreal". What does the unreality of reality mean? SUKENICK: It means that phenomena have the feeling of being not meaningful in relation to the ego. How can I put it? It is like you are outside on a rainy day when you are tired and not feeling well and you feel very disconnected from the life around you and the phenomena around you. And on that occasion something may suddenly happen, the sun may come out or you might see a beautiful bird and suddenly the worid comes aUve and becomes reconnected with the ego. Q: So this is something pretty universal, not social primarily. SUKENICK: No. I think it is basically a fundamental psychological mechanism. Sometimes you feel connected with the life around you, and sometimes you feel very disconnected. It is like the way it is said that schizophrenics do not see colors sometimes. It seems to me the function of the imagination, one of its functions, is to vitalize the connection between self and phenomena. Q: What can the imagirmtion do here, how can it make the unreal real? SUKENICK: It reconnects the phenomena in some vital way with the needs of the ego, with the emotional needs of the ego. Emotional in a large sense including a sense of purpose, identity, meaningfulness. Q; Reality becomes unreal and it is irrespective of a given historical time, it is psychological, as you say. Can it become unreal in any concrete social senses that you think the imagirmtion has to deal with in a similar way? SUKENICK: I mean data is data. So the only thing there is to talk about is the way the mind will report it. I suppose there are historical periods