The Smile on the Dog

JM: It’s a pleasure to be conducting this virtual Q&A – although I have a lurking suspicion that our friends at the Jewish Quarterly have cast me, the Everything is God guy, as Felix Fidley to your Cass Seltzer, a role which I am uniquely unqualified to play.  As the title of my book suggests, my own theology is closer to pantheism (or panentheism) than it is to the relatively primitive classical theism debunked in your (and Seltzer’s) appendix.  So I’d like to start there: Given the way you frame the book’s climactic debate on ‘Does God exist?’ do you agree with today’s neo-atheists that the ‘God’ in question, the ‘God’ that is most relevant to our contemporary moment, is really the old time religion God of providence and punishment?  Personally, I’ve always felt that Dawkins, Hitchens, et al, are setting up a straw man, that only fundamentalists believe as they describe.  Is your sense that the real ‘atheism versus religion’ debate today is indeed between old time religion and rational, scientific philosophy, with no significant role for panentheist Hasidim, Tielhard-style Christians, feminist theologians, or the myriad of other religionists with more contemporary theologies?

RG: It’s nice to make your virtual acquaintance, Jay, and I’ll try to answer your questions as best I can, while maintaining a novelist’s prerogative of ambiguity. Trained as I am as a philosopher, a field in which we battle against imprecision and ambiguity, I’m hyper-sensitive the deliberate application of ambiguity in literature.  A novelist has to create spaces into which the reader’s own point of view moves so that it can inhabit the work and make it into an experience of its own—one hopes pleasurable, though no novelist can secure this for every reader. That is the diceyness of the game. A novel is not an argument but rather a template for experience.  This difference between argumentation and literary experience is the subtext that runs through this novel, which takes as its backdrop the contemporary reactivated atheist/religion debate.  It’s one of the themes of the novel that the binary choices presented in the debate hardly exhaust the possibilities.  That’s why Cass says about the arguments and counter-arguments in his Appendix, which I reproduce at the back of my novel, that they don’t capture all that there is to the matter.  The Appendix is only the Appendix, and the text of the matter, our lived experience,  is something else. Read more

This Thread of Life

DG: When I write I want to be invaded by the people I’m writing about. What does it mean to be another human being? What does it mean to be you or to explore this filament, this thread of life and light and warmth that goes through another human being? I can reach it only through writing.

PA: Having worked in film a bit over the years I feel that writing is akin to acting — there is a similar psychological process. An actor is trying to embody another human being, to become someone else. The actor has his or her body whereas the writer has his pen. If you can do it successfully I think there’s a conviction that a reader will automatically feel. It’s a mysterious process, one which connects to the idea of play, of being a child again. Read more