"Mike Rogers - gibson interview" - читать интересную книгу автора (Gibson Walter)

political reasons which kind of led into a permanent expatriate
existence. Canada isn't... it isn't a country. One doesn't... I don't
think one comes to feel Canadian. It sort of isn't. It's never really
been...

MR: So much wasteland? Empty except for the cities?

WG: Well, no. It's never been a requirement of... ... ... It's never been
a requirement of their culture with regard to... immigrants, you know?
The American metaphor is the Melting Pot for a generation and then
they'll become... When they come out of the pots... they'll be American
and that really isn't... That hasn't been the Canadian experience. The
fashionable government metaphor during the sixties was the... the
Cultural Mosaic. That's what they consciously took to be their version
of the Melting Pot. Where people would immigrate, keep their cultures
intact and just, you know, fit them into the grid of the country. I
mean, you can't, you know, the concept of becoming Canadian, it doesn't
you know, it doesn't compute. It's not... in a sense it's an artifical
construction. Really, I mean there's a distinctive Canadian culture
but you know... ... you'd almost have to, I think, have to be born
right into it so I've never felt, living in Canada for twenty years...
Well now I'm truly becoming more and more Canadian. I mean, I'm still
a guy from Virginia and my wife is Canadian and I'll never... I'll
never really be... I'll never really be Canadian.

MR: Yet the character Rydell in _Virtual Light_ seems much more definitely
a Southerner than any others of yours?

WG: Oh yeah. Specifically...

MR: He rediscovers his Southerness after being reproached by a Northerner
for not having enough essence of gothic.

WG: Yeah. Well... I think that was partially inspired by having read a lot
of Cormac McCarthy during the time I was writing the book. I hadn't
discovered McCarthy before. McCarthy's from Knoxville Tennassee, which
is, like, a few hundred miles from the part of Virginia where I grew
up and the voices in a lot of his books, particularly his early books,
were very relevent to my own childhood and so I thought I'd create...
Also, I had the sense when I grew up in the South of growing up in some
sort of time lag.

MR: Agrippa has that same tone.

WG: Yeah.

MR: The timelessness.

MR: Yeah. It's like, so it's like... I felt when I remembered my childhood
in the fifties and the sixties in Virginia that in some ways it's more