We narrate the story of our lives to ourselves. We narrate it in linear fashion. And I know many writers have played with time in all sorts of amazing ways, but we're storytellers. This is what we do. And if you give the brain a story, a prepackaged story, you're giving a cheesecake. That's what it wants. That's why it loves stories. That's why our society is just built on stories. Politics is nothing but stories. Everything you do in the evenings – we sit down, we're watching Netflix – just stories. We consume them all the time. We are just machines for belief.
Paul Lynch is the author of five novels. His most recent novel, Prophet Song, won the 2023 Booker Prize and the Dayton Literary Peace Peace Prize for Fiction, and other prizes. Prophet Song presents a dystopian vision of Ireland and a mother’s determination to protect her family as her country slides towards totalitarianism. The Booker Prize Jury said, “It’s a remarkable accomplishment for a novelist to capture the social and political anxieties of our moment so compellingly.“ In 2024, Lynch was elected to Aosdána, the Irish academy for the arts, honoring distinguished artists. He was the chief film critic of Ireland’s Sunday Tribune newspaper. His novels have been translated into 35 languages.
THE CREATIVE PROCESS
Your writing is now celebrated all over the world, and I believe that you writing was embraced by France early in your career. What do you think it is about your writing that resonates in different parts of the world as you've traveled and spoken with people?
PAUL LYNCH
I'm hardly the first Irish writer to be recognized in France before being recognized in their their homeland. It's not an uncommon thing. I think if I'm to venture here, what the French saw on my writing was, what was new about it was, the writers that I was putting together, sort of pushing together to form “the Paul Lynch project” was perhaps two different traditions clashing, which was the fiction of Faulkner, McCarthy, O'Connor from the Southern Gothic, that sort of stylistic dance, gnostic fiction of dark and cosmic themes.
And at the same time, then a more lyrical tradition coming out of Ireland and writers like Heni and Yates and that ability for there to be an intense kind of beauty to the sentence. And richness too. I was working from both of those pools and coming up with my own work, but the French immediately articulated it.
They spotted what it was. And you know, I think early on they started saying that I was the heir to Faulkner and McCarthy, which I thought was kind of a ridiculous claim. I still kind of do, but you know my career took off there first. And there was definitely traction in America, but it wasn't huge. Absolutely nothing in the UK. Just nothing. But that's the road. You never know. When you write fiction, when you publish books, you just don't know where you're going to find your audience and how people are going to read you. Also, I think to a large degree, I was misunderstood. That's not a bad thing. We all know Emerson's great line about being misunderstood, but the kind of fiction that I was pushing is a tradition that's maybe not recognized all that much.
I wrote an essay about this last year, and I call it cosmic fiction. When I say cosmic, I'm referring to writers such as Melville, Dostoevsky, Conrad, Faulkner, and many others—writers who are really crafting fictions as though it's a cosmic eye in the sky, looking from a great distance at what we are as human beings. What is the human condition? But at the same time, it's fiction that has the ability to get down to the furniture in the room, to describe the texture of the wood in the table, to describe human beings in extraordinary detail. To have that sense of scalability, to have that sense of the absolute within reach, always that sense of the cosmos, that sense of the human condition, our alienation, just our position in this vast universe, while at the same time capturing the heat of life, the wants and desires and needs, the foolish aspirations and the emotions that tangle us up—all of these things, and to get them down into one place.
This kind of fiction always has within reach a sense of the infinite. I think it is a tradition. I don't think it's been articulated properly by anybody, but I'm trying to articulate it. I think it's something very specific.
THE CREATIVE PROCESS
You mentioned a few things there—a sense of the cosmic, of the universe. Authors who have a kind of gnostic tradition and others for whom language is almost an article of faith. You were born into Catholic Ireland, but I don't know if you're Catholic. You mentioned earlier that you meditated this morning, so what role does a sense of the spiritual play in that? How do you find its echoes within you?
LYNCH
I have no faith. I belong to a generation that's come out of what could be described as Theocratic Ireland. The Catholic Church had an incredibly strong, vice-like grip on this country. It was insufferable, and the grip was such that Freud once joked that the Irish are the only nation impervious to psychoanalysis.
I often wondered what he meant until I realized you go to psychoanalysis to have whatever shame you're grappling with internally taken out of you. But you can't have the shame taken out of you if the shame is actually structural, if it's what society is built out of.
That's what the Church did to Ireland. I belong to what you might call Post-Catholic Ireland now. But the question of the spiritual is very interesting. I have no faith, but I view the word spiritual in a different kind of way. I don't view it in a religious sense, but I do think there is a very important aspect of self to be recognized, which is our place within the cosmos, within the world we inhabit. Not everything is political. Unfortunately, we live in a time where our society believes that everything can be solved by and within society. This is a really dangerous thought because it's just not true.
When Robinson Crusoe washed up on that desert island and confronted himself within the empty world he inhabited, he was confronting himself, his God, and his cosmos. That's a very private conversation that everybody needs to have.
Our relationship to life, to the moment we're in, and the unfolding moment are all very important things. These have always been religious ideas, but they're also not religious ideas; you can call them spiritual if you like. They're a huge part of my writing. I think that locating the reader in the moment of unfolding is something I try to do. I write in the present tense. I'm very interested in the texture of life, the feeling of life, the heartbeat of life, and, at the same time, the alienation that one feels every moment in life.
The unknowing—the sense of being up against “what next?” When you write in the past tense, which is the default mode of fiction, something has been lost. I think that is found when you write in the present tense. Obviously, I think the present tense is something I've borrowed heavily from cinema, but Dickens did it; there were other writers who wrote in the present tense before the domination of film.
Something within the present tense that I love is how you can create the feeling of the unknown, of our alienation, in this very moment of just not knowing. Life is darkness; life is what Virginia Woolf called that small flame in the dark. We move through life step by step, casting this small bit of light, while the rest is unknowing. That's how it is.
That's a very metaphysical thing. For my sentences, whether you want to call it metaphysical or spiritual, there is that sense of pushing into the moment—pushing into the known, but also pushing into the unknown—taking the reader right up to the edge of that because the character lives on the edge of that. When you do that, you take the reader into that moment with the character. The reader begins to feel entirely alongside that character, entirely a step with that character.
THE CREATIVE PROCESS
I feel that when I think about faith and Ireland, it's as much about the theater of it. It’s not one of pure belief, but maybe I have that wrong—this is my feeling.
I find it liberating. When people visit Ireland, they talk about the warm welcome and all that, but it's also this kind of familiarity or this mix of high and low, or lack of reverence for things that is interesting. Now, with the Celtic Tiger, it might be vanishing. I have a certain sense of nostalgia about that. I know it hasn't totally vanished, but it has changed a lot in the last few decades. What are your reflections on that? What are we losing? What should we hold onto? How does this change literature—the injection of money, and, you know, less of these characters that I see walking around?
LYNCH
The country spoke Irish largely before it spoke English. Grammatically, the structure of Irish is different from English. As Ireland adopted the English language, this sort of hybridization started to occur, where the English language was placed on top of Irish grammatical constructions.
You get this slipperiness, this ability to move sentences, to place words in interesting places, and to use constructions that you just wouldn't find in England, for example. The thing about being an Irish writer is there isn't a reverence. There’s a sort of implicit freedom to use the language however we like. So long as you have mastery and command of the language, you can push it to the edges. We've got writers who've done that. Of course, Joyce would be the endpoint of that. A writer like Joyce is a writer of the scale of Shakespeare.
A writer at that level transmits energy into the culture, changes the language, and transmits just this sense of freedom to try things that I would hazard that English writers, for example, just might not feel as free to do—they might feel a greater responsibility with the language. But Irish writers just take brazen risks, and the risks I see are always in pursuit of truth. The project is always to try and seize hold of reality in some way.
Reality isn't just what you see; it can be internal, it can be dream, it can be the full depth of human experience, which could include the gnostic. You have to push language into spaces and places. You have to bend it and break it to articulate or convey feelings that otherwise might be beyond description.
THE CREATIVE PROCESS
Guest co-host, Henie Zhang, a student at the University of Chicago now joins the conversation to ask a question.
I'm asking these questions because, as a young writer, I am currently trying to write about a particular history that took place a few hundred years ago. I'm trying to work through all of these archival materials and place my life in relation to the historically indifferent lives of others.
It's not quite cosmic, but I'm definitely feeling, as you say, the sense of trying to find my shape within the indifference of this historical architecture that has come before me. I’m very young—I have been told—but this is proving to be very difficult because history, not even cosmic history, just this hundred-year span I'm trying to write about, feels so enormous and so rigid. Specifically, my research—everything I read seems like events that happened in all caps. It feels impossible to get inside with a vehicle that says, I guess, fluid poetry or maybe fiction.
Once I isolate a moment, I know that I'm lying; that moment is not alone—it’s inflected by what comes before and what comes after. I feel beholden to context, and I have to give more and more context, and my poetry becomes just context. It’s possible to even find my so-called voice within it. So, in a more grounded sense, I was wondering if you could speak to your relationship with your historical research—how you go about your research, how that has changed over the years, because I know that some of your novels, like Grace, are historical. What does that research practice mean to you?
LYNCH
There’s a quote from Ingmar Bergman, the great film director, that’s very important to me because he articulates precisely what it is you're supposed to do as a writer. He says that intuition is the spear you throw into the dark, and intellect is the army you send in afterwards. Writing has to come from the place of intuition; it has to come from a place of authenticity.
I'm a big believer in what the Greeks called the demonic—that sense of creativity that is not something within you, but external to you. When you’re creative, your personal daemon communicates with the gods; that's the channel through which inspiration comes. But we know that's an internal process, something that occurs when you enter the deepest flow—moving past the intellect, entirely into the intuitive sphere.
You're writing from a place that's hard to describe. I'm a meditator, and it's a higher mind, a higher level of consciousness—a sense of self that sits outside of time. It has a fuller sense of what it wants to express or explore. I write from this place. For me, research only comes in later; it's something I do to add physics to the universe that I'm writing. For me, writing begins first and foremost with problems of the spirit, problems of the person, problems of being alive, of being in the world.
I move forward from that place. It’s always intuitive. There’s always some kind of problem I need to resolve. I bring the intellect in afterwards. I know exactly what I’m doing. I know the ideas I’m chasing, the ideas that are under the line, so to speak. But the fundamental driver is the intuitive self. It’s really important not to intellectualize your writing—don't overthink it. Don’t subject it to academic thought, because you're just going to hobble yourself. It has to come from the other side, the dark side of your mind. Meditation is one of the great ways to get to that place, or any kind of practice that elevates you into that space where flow or the demonic can be accessed.
THE CREATIVE PROCESS
You mentioned Ingmar Bergman and film. For those who don’t know, you were a film critic for the Sunday Tribune for a number of years. So, I'm just wondering, helping you get to that place of intuition, not explaining things but just experiencing them in the present moment—how do you feel all those years being immersed in thinking and writing about film provided that sense of momentum and those other things that move beyond logic into a living imaginative world?
LYNCH
I ended up being the chief film critic for the Sunday Tribune in Dublin, which is a newspaper that no longer exists, but it was a very serious broadsheet, a center-left paper. It was a really cool thing to do, and I reviewed over a thousand films in that time, many of them essay-length. I suppose I learned something very fundamental: even the most fractured art, film, is still fundamentally telling a story. The story is inescapable; it is fundamental to what we are as human beings.
This is backed up by modern neuroscience. Think about how we view the world—there’s data around us all the time. We see A, we see C, and we infer B. We're constantly narrating reality to ourselves. We narrate the story of our lives in linear fashion. I know many writers have played with time in all sorts of amazing ways, but we are storytellers, and this is what we do. If you give the brain a prepackaged story, you're giving it cheesecake—that's what it wants. That's why it loves stories. Our society is built on stories. Politics is nothing but stories. Everything we do in the evenings—we sit down, and we're watching Netflix—those are just stories. We consume them all the time. We are belief machines.
THE CREATIVE PROCESS
I think you said that we are storytelling machines, and now we’re at a new frontier where there actually are storytelling machines. This is threatening us as artists. You also mentioned that your newspaper is no longer in operation. We've seen the rise of AI, which is accelerating the demise of local newspapers and, in turn, our ability to have healthy democracies. These are things that we need to keep alive—human storytelling, and then human storytelling in the form of journalism, which is very important to prevent the rise of fascism. I'm curious about your reflections on the future of journalism and then the future of storytelling by humans for humans, and why that's so important.
LYNCH
AI, in itself at this moment in time, is not all evil. It does some very interesting, useful things, but I deeply disagree with, in fact, I abhor the fact that thousands of writers have had their work fed into the machine without their permission. I think it's outrageous; it's a disgrace to feed the learning capacities of AI.
Do I fear for storytelling? I don't think so, because I spoke about the demonic earlier, which is the authentic self. The daemon comes from a lived life; it comes from the pain of experience. It comes from all that truly makes up a person, and while AI can seek to manipulate it, there's something incredibly unique about how words are expressed by a human being, with all the imprint of a life in the choice of words, the imprint of life in the sentences. That expression of feeling comes from the authentic self—someone who has lived in the world and understands suffering or pain or whatever it is that makes a person, a person.
When you transmit that into the words, when you have somebody who is a genuine artist, a genuine voice on the page, it's incredibly unique and incredibly difficult to recreate artificially. Sure, AI will get to a point where it’s probably going to script low-rent Hollywood thrillers for us, and it might do better than what we've been getting for the last 20 years, frankly. But in terms of art, I'm not that worried. Art, I think, will ensure its survival.
THE CREATIVE PROCESS
You talked about stories inspired by the land, with so many of your stories having this sense of longing for the sea and what lies beyond. As someone who grew up in a very rural, remote region, what are your reflections on the beauty and wonder of the natural world, and how that may continue to inspire you in your writing?
LYNCH
There was a time of the Romantic poets when you would go out into the world and seek a landscape of great emptiness and beauty. You would encounter the sublime—the vast terror and unknown of being in the world—but you'd also meet a mirror to yourself. You could encounter a silence with which you could actually hear your own authentic self speak. That small, quiet voice within.
I think that's pretty much gone. It's very difficult to experience that anymore; most people are never going to go for a walk in the mountains without their phones, for a start. It’s extremely difficult to experience that. Beyond the Sea, my fourth novel, presents this grim irony: they are at sea, adrift in the Pacific for months and months at a time. This idea of a 19th-century pastoral, pristine universe just doesn't exist anymore because what they’re living off is the detritus and filth and refuse of human beings floating in the ocean.
So, even the vast expanse of the ocean is completely corrupted by human beings. There’s nowhere left at this point to experience that. I mean, I'm probably exaggerating to some extent, but I'm an artist, so that's what I’m going to do. Yeah, I think if you want to have the experience of that authentic self, you're going to have to work it out a lot harder now.
