Tom Robbins

TOM ROBBINS

Interview excerpts by Gregory Ego

Tom Robbins and Gregory Ego

Looking back at your early life, what spurred your gift for storytelling?

Tom Robbins: I’m descended from a long line of preachers and policemen. Now, it’s common knowledge that cops are congenital liars, and evangelists spend their lives telling fantastic tales in such a way as to convince otherwise rational people that they’re factual. So, I guess I come by my narrative inclinations naturally. Moreover, I grew up in the rural South, where, although television has been steadily destroying it, there has always existed a love of colorful verbiage. My father was a hillbilly raconteur. My mother dabbled in prose and was an avid reader. By the age of five, I was so smitten with the magic of words that I’d already made up my mind to be a writer. A good little boy gone bad.

Your novels bubble with humorous one-liners — twists of the language that double as punch lines. Do you think of those wisecracks as you research a subject and then include them later at appropriate spots in your story? Or are they thought of spur-of-the-moment as you sit with a chapter in progress and try to finish it?

TR: Usually, my witticisms are composed on the spot. They’re simply intrinsic; an inseparable, integral, organic part of my writing process—doubtlessly because humor is an inseparable, integral part of my philosophical worldview. The comic sensibility is vastly, almost tragically, underrated by Western intellectuals. Humor can be a doorway into the deepest reality, and wit and playfulness are a desperately serious transcendence of evil. My comic sense, although deliberately Americanized, is, in its intent, much closer related to the crazy wisdom of Zen monks and the goofy genius of Taoist masters than it is to, say, the satirical gibes on Saturday Night Live. It has both a literary and a metaphysical function.

Why, in your opinion, is fiction still an important art form?

TR: Much more than an entertaining set of exaggerated facts, fiction is a metaphoric method of describing, dramatizing and condensing historical events, personal actions, psychological states and the symbolic knowledge encoded within the collective unconscious; things, events and conditions that are otherwise too diffuse and/or complex to be completely digested or appreciated by the prevailing culture. The human race has always defined itself through narration. That isn’t going to change just because we’ve gone electronic. What is changing is that now we’re allowing corporations to tell our stories for us. And as I write in my new novel, the message of the corporate story is always the same: “To be special, you must conform; to be valid, you must consume.” Real fiction will prevail, however, because at its best it’s an enchantment that refreshes the wasteland of the mind.

[Originally appeared in High Times, June 2000.]