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INTERVIEWERDoesn’t the unseen and unrevealed, the subconscious, have a bearing on the truth about an individual?
O’CONNOR
Joyce, talking about epiphanies, [said] that, in fact, you can never know a character. At some moment he’s going to reveal himself unconsciously, and you watch and then you walk out of the room and you write it down, “So-and-so at this point revealed what his real character was.” I still maintain that living with somebody, knowing somebody, you know him as well as he can be known—that is to say, you know ninety per cent of him. What happens if you’re torturing him or he’s dying of cancer is no business of mine and that is not the individual. What a man says when he’s dying and in great pain is not evidence. All right, he’ll be converted to anything that’s handy, but the substance of the character remains with me, that’s what matters, the real thing. |
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| Authors Mentioned |
| Anton Chekhov, T. S. Eliot, William Faulkner, Katherine Anne Porter, Angus Wilson, Jane Austen, Isaac Babel, Willa Cather, A. E. Coppard, Gustave Flaubert, Ben Jonson, James Joyce, Katherine Mansfield, Guy de Maupassant, Peadar O'Donnell, Sean O'Faolain, Plutarch, William Shakespeare, Francis Stuart, Edmund Wilson, Virginia Woolf, W. B. Yeats |
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