Press - Interview with Zinovy Zinik, novelist and BBC Russian Service Broadcaster   cont...   Zinik: According to Robert Graves he was more interested in an opportunity to perform in the underworld than in saving Eurydice. The pseudo-Utopian Soviet society I came from was a permanent nightmare that denied its own ending. Every member of it was officially deprived of the idea of death; society should perpetuate itself endlessly. As a kind of reaction to this, members of society became obsessed with death precisely because they weren't allowed to talk about it publicly.   McCarthy: Yes, the denial of death is very interesting. In the course of our society's research I've come across one group called the Extropians. Their idea is that you can use technology to download all of your memories to disk and that in so doing you're actually saving your identity. Now I see them as a) utterly humourless and b) totalitarians, almost fascistic in their attempts to totally deny death. They're not interested in entering a dialogue with death; they want to exclude it from any ontology. The model I propose, and that most poets propose, is the one best expressed perhaps by Tony Harrison when he says, 'Days have nights around them like a rim/ Life has a skin of death that keeps its zest.'   Zinik: That's the notion of death as adrenalin, to hasten life.   McCarthy: Yes. But the real, deep horror in Beckett for example comes not from the fact of death but from the inability to die, like Estragon or Vladimir in Waiting for Godot, or the characters in Endgame who want to get out of time but can't. Immortality is a greater horror than death.   Zinik: That's the Buddhist notion of karma, to get rid of the fear of longevity.   McCarthy: But that's something very Western as well. Tragic heroes want to get out of time - you see this especially in Faulkner's novels. Time is the space of decay whose ground zero is death.   Zinik: This brings us to issues of history and of circumstances of birth or geography. Historical circumstances enslave people; the attempt to jump out of them is the attempt to see yourself from the outside. That's why I call emigration exile.[a literary device] Exile doesn't have to be physical - it can mean exile from your own family. And that effort to jump out of your former condition divides your life into the past and the present, and you start a new life; your past becomes an old country. In your interviews, who was aware of this process of death being present at each step of self-liberation?   McCarthy: Perhaps Nandita Ghose, the playwright. Her plays also deal with exile, or dual nationality, emigration. We also showed certain films during the residency. The film which best dealt with the issue was Solaris by Tarkovsky, which is about death and memory, death and time. An understanding of history via a type of death is central to our project.   Zinik: The 20th century was fertile ground for Iron Curtains: people became obsessed with death rather than life. There are optimistic ages and pessimistic ages - that's clearly so. Early Victorians wanted to find ways to make life brighter, while we are always on the lookout for the darker side of our consciousness. I don't know a single optimistic philosopher, except for Tom Kirkwood who, in a recent Reith Lecture, suggested that we are not programmed to die. Perhaps that's the first hint of the optimistic age to come; at least people are not talking about how to die.   McCarthy: I don't see a preoccupation with death as being gloomy. It is the sine qua non of any creative project. You say the Victorians were more optimistic but they had diabolical social circumstances in which people were endlessly worked to death in a factory system which was itself a forerunner of the concentration camp industrial slave labour system. And consider their literature: the Gothic strand is still strong in their novels. Or Tennyson: In Memoriam, Maude: 'Echo there, whatever is asked her, answers 'Death'.' We have to ask: what are we talking about when we talk about death? I was talking with Rob la Frenais who runs the Arts Catalyst, a science-meets-art organisation. He was asking the typical questions about our project: is it an art piece? Is it a metaphor? I said: no, it's a construct. The IMF is a construct, the Catholic Church is a construct. The International Necronautical Society is a construct too. It's configured. It has a structure, which is arbitrary and will change and morph. Frenais was saying that the International Space Agency is a construct and a space station is a construct but gravity's not a construct. Very good point. Gravity is a given. Well, so is death. And that makes it fascinating within any system of meaning, whatever you try to assess. It's not a space that can become metaphorical. As Ted Hughes wrote when translating Alcestis: 'The dead are dead are dead are dead are dead.' A nice iambic pentameter. But at the same time death is different from gravity; it can't be inventorized. It does retain its mystery. There's a double move in death itself: it is something that can provide a rational basis for activity but also stands as the cipher for everything that can't be rationalized. It's untranslatable.   Zinik: We must consider the religious aspect. John Donne, for example, regarded the death of Jesus Christ as a suicide. The act of will to death is the way of overcoming death, through resurrection etc. He praised death as a creative religious act.   McCarthy: This subject came up particularly in conversation with the artist Margarita Gluzberg in connection with the difference between symbol and matter. In a performative or creative act there is the symbolic side and the material. What Gluzberg found amazing about Catholicism is that it's not a shamanic, symbolic thing; you're not simulating drinking the blood of Christ and eating his flesh. According to Catholic doctrine, you actually are eating his flesh. So there's a collapse of matter and symbol into what she called, pace Deleuze, 'a plane of consistency'.   Zinik: Of course, this had its forms in primitive societies in cannibalism and the belief that you can overcome death by eating live or cooked flesh, depending on your taste. But I want to return for a moment to the subject of exile, with which I've been obsessed for many years. After emigrating in the 1970s it was clear that I couldn't go back; the past seemed dead. I left the Soviet Union in 1975, and it seems to me that I'm now 26 years old. The fact is that now that I can go to the past and all the physical and political obstacles have been removed, I still cannot go back to it because I lived then in a different time. I have in a certain way become entrapped in that past. Only the ancient Greeks have been able to give a different model for this attitude. They have two models. One is Tithonus, with whom the goddess of dawn fell in love. The goddess asked Zeus to bestow the gift of immortality on him but she forgot to ask for eternal youth, so Tithonus lives for ever and is finally turned into a cricket. In another example, the case of Endymion, the hero is immortally young; but he's constantly asleep. So you either remain eternally young but asleep or you're forever wise but getting older. People like me resemble Tiphonus - they sing the same song. They cannot die but they're getting older. On the other hand, if you're eternally young like Endymion, you can have no memory.   McCarthy: Yes, it all comes down to memory; that's the essential thing in all this. Another film we showed was Tarkovsky's Nostalgia which is about exactly the situation you're describing, of a man who has left Russia for exile in Italy. There's the recurrent memory of his dacha which ends up, as he dies, being transplanted into a massive, ruined cathedral. It's the most beautiful image. Or take Fitzgerald's Gatsby: he's trapped in an idealized past. Or Krapp's Last Tape by Beckett in which a man is moving forwards, getting more and more decrepit, and he's obsessed by this old tape of himself when young, a beautiful pastoral memory of being in a punt with a woman, floating up and down. It's a very moving play but it's not a depressing play; it's an extremely affirmative one because via memory you can manage all of these things. I don't think you can resolve them but memory is a way of managing the past, nostalgia, death, life.   Zinik: We're coming back to the beginning: death as a kind of creative force that makes you able to see your past as a kind of novel, as a tape - emigration as a literary device and death as a form of emigration as a literary device. Because of death your life is shaped and made unique. That's all fine. But why do we try to avoid death? Why fear? It's all very well to talk about exiles who can write about their past life as if it was a novel, but basically people don't like to be exiles. People don't like to die.   McCarthy: Yes, men fear death as children fear to go into the dark, as Bacon said. But I don't think we should try to avoid death. Hollywood film stars who try to stay forever young or Extropians are seriously misguided people. We should embrace the very fact that we are going to die; that's what enables life to begin.   Zinik: Do you have any practical suggestions for any little deaths, rehearsals for the great event?   McCarthy: One of my guests over the last two weeks was the artist Paul Perry. He's embarked on a large film project called 1000 Deaths in which he injects himself with ketamine, which induces a near-death experience. Some actors, a sort of Greek chorus, perform a dialogue around his body while it's in this suspended, near-death state. My own feeling is that applied Necronautism is impossible. I sort of hope it's impossible; if it turns out to be possible, then great, but I'll lose interest in it and go and do something else straightaway.   Zinik: So what's the next step for the INS - Russia, maybe?   McCarthy: The next two planned stages are firstly to give an address in the Map Room at the Royal Geographic Society about the residency. Secondly, I heard recently about the Communist Party headquarters in Paris, which is apparently a very beautiful building. I'd like to do something there. Maybe that will lead me gradually to Moscow, to the East, back to the source of all death.   The Interview took place on April 20th 2001   [Top]