Q&A SESSION WITH AWARD-WINNING DAVID MITCHELL AT THE BI-ANNUAL SERVOTTE LECTURE

“Lacking imagination – it’s like saying you’re not properly human.” This is only one of the many memorable quotes David Mitchell graced us with during a Q&A session on May 18 and the Servotte Lecture itself on the 19th. It seems as if he makes them up as he goes, piling up the savoury metaphors. When I ask him about the quote later he is honestly confused. “Did I say that? Oh, well, it does need a bit of work…” Mitchell doesn’t take himself too seriously, which kept the lecture light and easy to digest.

First a few words on the Servotte lecture itself. Herman Servotte was a devoted professor of literary criticism and once vice-rector at K.U.Leuven. After his death in 2004, the Herman Servotte Fund was established to support research on English literature. Every two years, a prize is awarded to a Master’s thesis in the field and one scholarship for a PhD in English Literature is granted to a promising Congolese student. These two awards are given during the biannual Servotte lecture, which hosts an esteemed author who writes in English. After two Nobel Prize laureates – Nadine Gordimer and Derek Walcott – the K.U.Leuven was honoured to receive the award-winning writer David Mitchell. With his 41 years, he is much younger than his predecessors, but already has a record of five novels, many short stories, a few poems and a libretto.

Mitchell delivered a quirky and enjoyable lecture on imagination Wednesday. Ever humble and funny, he was quick to point out that there really isn’t much of a difference between novelists and “normal people” other than the former being “slightly mentally ill”. “I don’t really believe in the artistic imagination,” Mitchell confides, “we’re not genetically different from everyone else.” Perhaps not, but it becomes clear during his speech that he is very gifted with words.

After Mitchell has served the audience with his appetiser, main course and dessert in the shape of a tasty lecture, there is a performance of the e-novel Vanguard by the experimental band The Sedan Vault. The story is partly inspired by Mitchell’s first novel Ghostwritten.

The day before the Servotte Lecture, Mitchell did a small Q&A session for anyone interested in the Lipsius Hall. Lately, he may have written about a Dutchman in Japan, but Mitchell is ever the polite Brit thanking the brave few who ask a question and taking the time to illustrate his elaborate autograph. Mitchell is unassuming, honest and witty, although it is quite difficult for him to stay on topic. The inevitable “Have I answered your question?” follows a lengthy reply, but even if he hasn’t really, it is still a delight to listen to him. He breaks the ice with a joke in his best Vincent Price voice, “would anyone like to raise their hand and ask me a witty, articulate, interesting question that can stimulate conversation.” Of course, we joined in on the fun.

The Voice - You are often characterised as a postmodern writer and stereotypically they lean heavily on intertextuality, especially when it comes to characters. However, you just said that it is your job to know about people in different parts of the world and of different ages. Do you draw from other texts or from real life, or from both in your characterisations?

Mitchell: In a way I wouldn’t put myself on “Mr. Youngish British postmodernist writer” pedestal, so I could only really talk about how I do it, without any reference to other postmodern writers. Yes, it’s a mix. To a greater or lesser degree, all characters are Frankenstein’s monsters, who are stitched up: I got a hand from this person and the face of my history teacher, the voice of Sean Connery. Plot can dictate character as much as the other way around. Personality is a messy ill-defined thing, also in fiction.

The Voice - Many writers don’t like that label of “postmodernism”, what is your own attitude towards it?

Mitchell: Postmodernism hasn’t aged that well, now it mostly implies style over substance. They’re not really interested in the old-fashioned ‘meat-and-potatoes’ of plot-character. It’s an evolutionary dead end, it’s interesting while it lasts, but it doesn’t produce fertile seeds. What I do is a modern, greatly adapted version of what our ancestors did 20 000 years ago. Just sit around a campfire and tell each other stories. The world is so stuffed with themes and ideas, you don’t have to implant them. They’re already in the cake, you don’t have to put them on top, like: “Oh, I’m going to put some existentialism here as a topping”. It’s already in the ingredients.

The Voice - Your novel “Cloud Atlas” is made up of short segments, do you consider them as short stories or do you just consider everything as narratives rather than different genres?

Mitchell: I started writing things like Cloud Atlas in little chunks, because novels are just so long. I used to think that there was this invisible wall and on the other side there was a promised land where the novelists lived. Then I realised that it doesn’t exist. Words are made of letters, sentences are made of words, paragraphs are made of sentences, scenes are made of paragraphs, chapters are made of scenes and novels are made of chapters. Lego, novels are built of lego.

The Voice - You lived in Japan for about 10 years. How did that time influence your writing?

Mitchell: A good definition of a writer may be a “slowly germinating seed store”. In the case of the last book, I found this idea in a museum 18 years ago now. I just got this little seed: this little gateway between locked-up Japan and the rest of the world. You put this seed away, and over all this time it is slowly cracking open. I spent a lot of my twenties in Japan, so many of these slowly germinating seeds are Japanese flavoured. Probably it’s out of my system for a while.

The Voice - In your latest book “The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet”, you’re writing about a Dutch man in Japan in the 18th century, that’s a lot of degrees of alienation. Was it difficult to get into the right mind-set to write this book?

Mitchell: It was murder! My wife was joking: either this book will finish you, or you will finish it. I was horrible to live with.

The Voice - Why did you choose to write about the very end of the East India Company?

Mitchell: There’s the idea that historical novels are always about tectonic shifts, about points in history where status quos begin to crumble. In a way, Edo Japan was the first totalitarian state and the point is to inoculate itself against change. So there were lots of rules and spies to report infringements. Try and set up an illicit romance in those conditions as a writer, it’s really hard work. So I looked for a period where this very tight control over change wobbled a little bit.

The Voice - In your work you often incorporate jokes, is that a conscious choice?

Mitchell: Just as you don’t want to meet any humourless people, I don’t want to spend my time reading totally humourless books. Fiction without humour is like an android without electricity, it just sits there: it’s not animated, it has no soul. So, it’s not so much a conscious decision to incorporate humour into my books, how could I not? |