The Mythos of Gumbo: Leon Forrest Talks About Divine Days
- The Mythos of GumboLeon Forrest Talks about Divine Days
This interview was conducted at the Arts Club of Chicago in April 1994.
Let’s begin with the most immediately striking aspect of Divine Days—its length. Did you consciously set out to write a novel of epic scope, or did the novel expand as you were in the process of writing it?
Well, I certainly set out to write a novel of epic scope, but I didn’t know it would have to be this long. Actually the comedy and humor kept me going, in terms of just interest, and I thought that since I was interested in it, maybe a readership would be interested in it as well.
Was there an initial conception or seed in your mind from which the novel took shape?
Well, sure there was. One was that it would be over a seven-day period. I had been reading and rereading in recent times Ulysses, with the great power that book has over one day, so I thought that might be intriguing to try over seven days. Also the character of Sugar Groove was one that fascinated me throughout the course of the novel. And I would say Ford. And then I was quite fascinated later in the novel by the possibilities of the character Imani. It seems to me many major novels center on at least three major characters, so I was driven along by fascination with each of these characters, but each in a different way.
Did the novel change as you were writing it—your idea of what you wanted to achieve in it?
No, it seemed to expand a lot. One of my concerns was to try to write a novel that would capture the complexity of African-American character, so that I wanted to see characters in sustained series of development. Well, you need a long novel to do that. But that’s one of my criticisms of much of just modern fiction anyway, that you rarely get characters who are developed in depth.
Did you write the novel in a linear fashion, beginning with what is now the beginning of the novel, and going straight through until the end? [End Page 588]
Oh no. One of the first scenes that I wrote would have been the one in the barbershop, when they’re telling this long tall tale about Sugar Groove.
Throughout the novel, the narrator, Joubert Jones, who is himself an aspiring writer, remarks on the temptation of imposing a simplistic order on the chaos of experience. And clearly the structure of Divine Days resists that kind of temptation. Is it accurate to say that the structure of the novel is modeled on a jazz method of composition—a method which allows you to give shape to chaos without imposing a kind of reductive order on it?
It is. Chaos is a great driving force in all life. It’s a driving force in just the basic things of life, because when we get up in the morning we’re faced with chaos . . . I guess though that for me the first connection with jazz is that I will take just a fragment of a story, or a fragment of a character, or a confrontation, and then build on it, build on it, riff on it like a jazz musician or a solo performer. So in fact a lot of scenes just start off with me working on a little riff, and then that develops into a scene. As far as the larger thing goes, I always try to orchestrate a scene so that it starts off in one way, gets involved with some other things, and then comes back to that—a little fugue-like method. But I’m always trying to both orchestrate a scene and orchestrate the novel really, as well as do those individual solos. And they’re all through there—remember the long one with Beefeater, for instance, and the one we were talking about in the barbershop. And there are many others.
In fact, I think...
