Chronology Entry
Year
1988
Text
Fowles, John. The Art of Fiction. In : The Paris review ; no 109 (Winter 1988). Interviewed by James R. Baker.
http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/2415/the-art-of-fiction-no-109-john-fowles.
John Fowles : A year to two years ago my Chinese translator wrote and asked me if he could ask me a very important literary question, which all his Chinese readers would like answered. I agreed—there then came this very important literary question: What was Meryl Streep really like? I did not, and will not, answer, not because I in the least despised or disliked Meryl in The French Lieutenant’s Woman—she made a very good effort at a very difficult, for an American, part—but because the Chinese were showing themselves just as foolish as the Americans and the British, totally under the tyranny of the fashionable art form, of the visual. Something in the cinema and television wants to usurp the novel totally. It will fail, I believe; in any case these visual arts will receive no help from me in their encroachment on my own art.
http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/2415/the-art-of-fiction-no-109-john-fowles.
John Fowles : A year to two years ago my Chinese translator wrote and asked me if he could ask me a very important literary question, which all his Chinese readers would like answered. I agreed—there then came this very important literary question: What was Meryl Streep really like? I did not, and will not, answer, not because I in the least despised or disliked Meryl in The French Lieutenant’s Woman—she made a very good effort at a very difficult, for an American, part—but because the Chinese were showing themselves just as foolish as the Americans and the British, totally under the tyranny of the fashionable art form, of the visual. Something in the cinema and television wants to usurp the novel totally. It will fail, I believe; in any case these visual arts will receive no help from me in their encroachment on my own art.
Subjects
Literature : Occident : Great Britain