Write yourself into being
Today: Zach Rabiroff, a writer on books, comics, and culture living in Brooklyn, New York.
Issue No. 248
The Long Memory of Alan Moore, Part II
Zach Rabiroff
Long Memory of Alan Moore, Part II
by Zach Rabiroff
Today we’re presenting the second part of Zach Rabiroff’s interview with Alan Moore, whose novel The Great When, first in a series of a projected five books, arrived last October. Moore is currently at work on the next volumes, and spoke to Zach about language, magic, and the persistence of Gormenghast.
This interview has been edited and condensed for length and clarity. Read the first part here.
Do you think that we're in some way doomed to keep repeating the same cycle of trying to sever ourselves from the past while claiming to be preserving it?
Well, without giving too much away, that is a major issue of the entire series. I don't see it cyclical in quite that way. I forget who it was who suggested1 that there were six codes by which we may read a novel, and one of them was the cultural code, which means that any book, whatever it professes to be about, will inevitably be an outgrowth of the culture surrounding its author at the time that he or she wrote it. So yes, although I'm starting off with 1949 and then moving up through ’59, ’69, ’79, and then a 20-year leap to 1999 for the last book—and although I'm writing it about the last 50 years of the 20th century—it is inevitably about our century, in a way. It's trying to trace how we got here and what it means, and it's using a register of fantasy because fantasy is particularly good at enabling you to present big, powerful symbols as characters.
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