Une interview de Jeffrey Ford

[jerome]

Jeffrey Ford est en interview sur Amazon.

La première partie évoque Physiognomy

"Amazon.com: What sparked writing the novel? Wasn't there also a kind of proto-Well-Built City tale before The Physiognomy?
Jeffrey Ford: What sparked the idea for the novels was my discovery of a dusty tome, lying on a bottom shelf in the stacks at the Temple University library. This was Johann C. Lavater’s great work on the bogus science of Physiognomy. It was a facsimile edition of an 18th century book. I have a tendency to be easily side-tracked when in libraries by books people leave out on tables, and works that are mis-shelved. I was looking for a book that would describe to me who St. Cuthbert was for some work I was doing on a dissertation. I blew the dust off that big old book and opened it and discovered a page of beautifully rendered lithograph heads staring out at me. There were pages and pages of them. I read some of the text and it became clear to me what the study of Physiognomy was about--a reading of a person’s physical attributes in order to determine their inherent moral worth. It struck me, while reading, that this reliance on surface to predict depth was an approach to the world that was still prevalent today in our own society. Especially in America, we live and die by our reliance on surface and rarely bother to look beneath it. On that afternoon, the story line for the three books just opened out before me. I had the basic plot for the trilogy before I left the library. I never did find out about St. Cuthbert that day but later discovered that he was often depicted carrying a severed human head. There was no proto-Physiognomy, but there was a short novel I’d written, Vanitas, published by Space & Time Press, and a short story, “The Delicate,” in which I was sort of half-consciously working out the style I wanted for the trilogy. Scarfinati, a character in Vanitas, appears in the books and makes an appearance in some of my other work as well."