John Banville
The Booker Prize winner reveals his favourite literary line...
There’s a line from Wallace Stevens’s great poem Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction which has stayed in my head since I read it I don’t how many decades ago and I find myself repeating it like a mantra.
The line is “life’s nonsense pierces us with strange relation”.
I’m not quite sure exactly what it means, I know what it means in poetic sense, I think tactically it may not be absolutely accurate but poetically it’s absolutely true and I feel that I might be kind of a motto for my own work because readers see me as terribly serious and terribly solemn but in fact I see myself as a kind of comic writer.
I think all novels in a way are comic novels at a certain level. And this line of Stevens’s catches that wonderfully, “life’s nonsense pierces us with strange relation”.
