The Paris Review - Fall 2016

INTERVIEWER
How did it violate your opinions, and which opinions did it violate?
PRYNNE
Well, in the era of The White Stones there is a certain implicit metaphysical
idealism and quasi-religious vocabulary, with which in retrospect I have
not been altogether comfortable. The tendency is recognisably English; it’s
difficult to avoid vocabulary of that kind. The Kazoo Dreamboats venture
pushed me into this other territory quite strongly, and opened some areas
of contradiction that were unavoidable. I’d already been seriously thinking
about dialectics as a method of confronting certain kinds of opposition or
contradictory structures of thought.
The one major thing was this extremely unexpected and forceful presence
of Langland and the Piers Plowman enterprise. He just appeared. I took
that very seriously. Partly because the structural contradictions in Langland’s
thought were so central to the whole idea of his being a poet and doing the
tasks of poetry. The Franciscan idea of a sacred poverty was so important
to him and was so visibly violated by everything in the social world around
him. He cares deeply, and is worried stiff by what kind of answers he can find
to the questions of human conduct, the questions of equitable justice, the
questions of honorable satisfaction of one’s sacred religious duties. The line
movement and the whole structure of these rather long lines that Langland
writes are movements of profound worry. He suffered this poem, and didn’t
avoid what writing it seems to have thrust upon him.
At the same time, there were other thematic elements that came into
this poem of mine, unexpectedly and without preparation, one of which was
Parmenides. When Parmenides swam into view, it was partly because of the
way in which this great poem of his, this philosophical treatise, is presented
as a strange voyage in which the speaker mounts a chariot into the heavens
and makes a celestial course across the sky. I was able, because I had this
laptop with me with fortunately all the right connections, to access a whole
translation of Parmenides and to reread it pretty thoroughly right there on
the screen. To my surprise, I more or less identified what I thought was the
main thrust: the Parmenidean argument about being, and the vocabulary
used to describe the questions of being and non-being. I found myself in
quite rigorous disagreement with that argument. Well, I had never thought
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