An Interview with Peter Carey

Abstract

Peter Carey was born May 7, 1943, in Bacchus Marsh, Victoria, Australia, to two car dealers. He attended Geelong Grammar School and Monash University. He is the author of a short story collection, The Fat Man in History, and Other Stories, published in 1981 by Picador Books, and five novels. The first three were published by Harper: Bliss (1982), Illywhacker (1985), and Oscar and Lucinda (1988), which won the Booker Prize. Carey's two most recent novels were published by Knopf: The Tax Inspector (1991), and The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith (1994). He has helped to write two screenplays: Bliss, an adaptation of his novel, and Until the End of the World. Carey lives in New York City with his wife, theater director Alison Summers, and their two sons. The following interview took place in June, 1995. LISA MEYER: Do you see the position of an artist as always one of self-exile, of being on the outskirts, since you are an expatriate in many ways? PETER CAREY: Part of me wants to reject that as a romantic notion, but yet I suppose if I look at the story of my life, I've always been an expatriate in one way or the other, so it's certainly consistent with my life. LM: Much of your work deals with the dynamics of our present post-colonial world. You investigate these dynamics in imaginary worlds, avoiding direct correlation to any one country. What are the advantages and disadvantages of transferring such an investigation into an imagined context? Does this displacement help highlight one of your major points in your fiction, that all belief systems are imaginary? PC: The last bit let's deal with later. I'm not even sure I know what to say about that. But for the first part, it's funny - for me, it's always been very boring to report. One of the things that I most enjoy about fiction is that it really is an imagined world. If I can say to somebody that something is very made up, to me that's a great compliment. In the case of the most recent book, The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith, I was interested in how I might write about America. And of course I couldn't do it, because I don't know nearly enough. But I thought I was free to write about an idea of America. And so it was that: the notion of wanting to write about this, but not feeling entitled to do it, that led me to think that I could make an invented America. Then the most important point, in this journey that ends up with this book is being in Disney World - and seeing Mickey and Minnie walking around like royalty through the crowd, and trying to see this in a new and sharp way, and then thinking, Well, maybe in my imagined America, I could have creatures like these having some kind of mythic significance, wandering the streets like holy men and women. So once I started to think that, I began on a journey, which is to make something that relates to my ideas about America, but it's already on the way to definitely not being America. I don't wish that to be a cute parallel, where one can say - oh, that's America and that's Australia - I set out to prevent an easy closure. LM: Do you believe your latest book, The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith, is a cautionary tale about the harms of post-colonialism? Or rather, an investigation of the dynamics of post-colonialism? PC: The dynamics, yes. A cautionary tale - well.... LM: I saw Tristan's deformed body, as perhaps symbolizing the damage caused by economic, political and territorial colonialism. PC: I think you're right about that. If I might dodge the first part of that question, and we can come back to it - I was not blind to the possibility of that reading: this monstrous little body representing, at least in my Australian readers' minds, something to do with the damage done. LM: Do you see Tristan yearning for the world to like him but being rejected by that world, on a very personal level, reflecting the dynamic of a colonized country? PC: It's very much the Australian condition: the passion to be loved by the parent that's rejected you. …