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INTERVIEWER
Since over the years you’ve acquired a reputation for avoiding interviews, particularly those which address your work, let me ask why you are submitting to this one?
WILLIAM GADDIS
I suppose because I’ve got some illusion about finally getting the whole thing out of the way once for all. In the past I’ve resisted partly because of the tendency I’ve observed of putting the man in the place of his work, and that goes back more than thirty years; it comes up in a conversation early in The Recognitions. That, and the conviction that the work has got to stand on its own—when ambiguities appear they are deliberate and I’ve no intention of running after them with explanations—and finally, of course, the threat of questions from someone unfamiliar with the work itself—“Do you work on a fixed schedule every day?” “On which side of the paper do you write?”—that sort of talk show pap, five-minute celebrity, turning the creative artist into a performing one, which doesn’t look to be the case here.
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