Paris Review Interview: Anita Brookner

At the same time you say that existentialism is the only philosophy you can endorse. Now existentialism with its emphasis on personal freedom seems the opposite of determinism.

BROOKNER

I don’t believe that anyone is free. What I meant was that existentialism is about being a saint without God: being your own hero, without all the sanction and support of religion or society. Freedom in existentialist terms breeds anxiety, and you have to accept that anxiety as the price to pay. I think choice is a luxury most people can’t afford. I mean when you make a break for freedom you don’t necessarily find company on the way, you find loneliness. Life is a pilgrimage and if you don’t play by the rules you don’t find the Road to Damascus, you find the Crown of Thorns. In Hotel du Lac the heroine, Edith Hope, twice nearly marries. She balks at the last minute and decides to stay in a hopeless relationship with a married man. As I wrote it I felt very sorry for her and at the same time very angry: she should have married one of them—they were interchangeable anyway—and at least gained some worldly success, some social respectability. I have a good mind to let her do it in some other novel and see how she will cope!

INTERVIEWER

You also said that existentialism is a romantic creed. How so?

BROOKNER

Because romanticism doesn’t make sense unless you realize that it grew out of the French Revolution in which human behavior sank to such terrible depths that it became obvious no supernatural power, if it existed, could possibly countenance it. For the first time Europeans felt that God was dead. Since then we have had Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot, whose activities make the French Revolution seem like a picnic. The Romantics tried to compensate the absence of God with furious creative activity. If you do not have the gift of faith, which wraps everything up in a foolproof system and which is predicated on the belief that there is a loving Father who will do the best for you, then, as Sartre said, you have to live out of that system completely, and become your own father. This is a terrible decision, and, as I said, in existential terms freedom is not desirable, it is a woeful curse. You have to live with absence. Nowadays I wonder if it is really possible to live without God, maybe we should dare to hope . . . I don’t know. I’m not there yet.

INTERVIEWER

Perhaps this is the reason some people convert to religion at the last minute. Even Voltaire called a priest just before he died!

BROOKNER

Ah, but Voltaire accepted the priest on his terms: When the priest asked him, “Monsieur de Voltaire, do you believe in the divinity of Jesus Christ?” he replied, “Don’t talk to me about that man!” He rejected the divinity of Christ but accepted him as the Perfect Man. But not everyone is as brave as Voltaire.

http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/2630/the-art-of-fiction-no-98-anita-brookner