Robert McLiam Wilson was born in Belfast on 24 February 1966 and studied English at St Catharine's College, Cambridge. He is the author of the novels Ripley Bogle (1989), winner of the Hughes Prize, a Rooney Prize for Irish Literature, the Irish Book Award and the Betty Trask Prize; Manfred's Pain (1992); and Eureka Street (1996), winner of the Belfast Arts Award for Literature. He is also the author, with Donovan Wylie, of The Dispossessed (1992), a non-fiction book about poverty. In 2003, Robert McLiam Wilson was named by Granta magazine as one of 20 'Best of Young British Novelists'. Mcliam Wilson has written for numerous publications. He is a regular contributor to Charlie Hebdo.
This conversation took place in the chapel at the Centre Culturel Irlandais de Paris and Café de la Nouvelle Mairie. It is an abridgement of a 10,000 word interview which will be published across a network of university and national literary magazine in the coming months.
THE CREATIVE PROCESS
The first line in your third novel Eureka Street is "All stories are love stories." So do you think being a novelist a romantic profession?
ROBERT McLIAM WILSON
Well, I'm working class, so, I'm very engaged with the reader. I'm a much bigger reader than I'm a writer. That's how I came to literature and I'm still learning.
On how in his book Ripley Bogle he transformed poverty and life on the street into something romantic. A quality shared with other Irish writers:
I would suggest that is because quite a lot of writers and artists come from backgrounds that are very, very poor, so they spend their childhoods there. So that is a very important moment because as a child you're prone to find beauty in everything. So if all you've known is a shitty housing estate, you will find beauty there and that capacity will never leave you. I still get excited around awful housing estates. I still find not just beauty but glamour there. Seriously.
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On humour and the English language:
Basically in England you're not allowed to be not funny.
THE CREATIVE PROCESS
But the Irish are pretty damn funny.
McLIAM WILSON
The Irish are pretty funny, but it's a less surprising kind of humour. Monty Python could never have been Irish.
THE CREATIVE PROCESS
Yes, Python is a kind of absurd humor. I also think it's very English, but it also seemed very European. In that sense of surrealism, the Theatre of the Absurd.
McLIAM WILSON
Yes, except that that everything in the English language is driven towards the joke. It's the English, they need to be funny because they're not very good at the abstract. The French do that. The Germans do that. They're not very funny. A lot of it is linguistic, and it's why Americans are funny and Australians as well because it's not a very precise language in lots of ways. It is about things and feelings, much less so about abstract concepts, which is why philosophy in English is political philosophy. Whereas philosophy in French or German or Greek is a much more abstract thing. Or that kind of stuff is more successful in that language.
[...]
In French you can constater and arreter. You can just do it and then stop. In English that's an act of aggression. You have to make it whimsical or charming or make an excuse for it. You have two tables of ten people and they have to explain a concept. The French ten people will do it as quickly as they can. The ten English will build bridges towards it and they'll do it metaphorically. The English way of saying, well, you meet a new person and what was he like? "What was he like?" is a very strange thing to say. It's saying: don't tell me how he was. Tell me what he resembles.
THE CREATIVE PROCESS
That's fascinating.
McLIAM WILSON
Isn't that weird?
THE CREATIVE PROCESS
It's almost suspicious.
McLIAM WILSON
Tell me a story. It says: tell me a story.
