Literature Is a Voyage of Discovery: Tom Bishop in Conversation with Donatien Grau

By Tom Bishop and Donatien Grau

A blend of theory and stories from an extraordinary life by a leading cultural figure.

Tom Bishop has, for over sixty years, helped shape the literary, philosophical, cultural, artistic, and political conversation between Paris and New York. As professor and director of the Center for French Civilization and Culture at New York University, he made the Washington Square institution one of the great bridges between French innovation and a New York scene in full transformation. Bishop was close to Beckett, championed Robbe-Grillet in the United States, befriended Marguerite Duras and Hélène Cixous, and organized historic public encounters—such as the one between James Baldwin and Toni Morrison. He was also a scholar, a recognized specialist in the avant-garde, notably the Nouveau Roman and the Nouveau Théâtre.
 
In 2012, Bishop invited Donatien Grau to give a talk at NYU. This invitation led to conversations—many of which are presented in this book—and a friendship. Literature Is a Voyage of Discovery gathers their dialogues, retracing Bishop’s career, his own history, his departure from Vienna, his studies, his meetings, his choices, his conception of literature and life, his relationship to the political and economic world, and the way he helped define the profession of “curator” as it is practiced today, offering a thought-provoking look into one of the leading minds of our time.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Diaphanes
• Release date: Jul 30, 2021
• ISBN: 9783035804768

Book preview

FIRST TAKES

DONATIEN GRAU: Tom, you have given your life to literature, to a certain idea of literature. I feel there’s a starting point to this journey: when you were nine years old, you left Austria in 1938 and came to Paris without knowing French. You learned French on your own at the Lycée Janson de Sailly, where—though you didn’t know it at the time—you were classmates with a boy whose itinerary was the same as yours: George Steiner.

Within a few months you mastered French, only to leave again in June 1940, on the last boat setting out for the United States. Could you tell me about your relationship to literature in these three languages: German, which is the language you were born into, French, and English?

TOM BISHOP: German will go the quickest, because I have a rejection of German. I don’t have a habit of speaking German, or at any rate I didn’t keep the habit for very long. That has fallen away a bit since I was nine. I made my peace with the German language quite a long time ago. German, for me, was my native language, obviously, so it was the language I spoke at home, with my parents. But my relationship to it has been conditioned by history.

This was in Austria in 1938—that is, at the moment of the Anschluss, the moment when Austria was reclaimed by the Germans. I’m not sure reclaim is the right word, but that’s how it felt at the time. My family was Viennese. I would write anti-German poems. My family thought I had a very materialistic side, because I used to sell these poems to my family members, taking into account what each of them could afford. It wasn’t that I particularly wanted to write in German: it was the only language I had. I didn’t know any others.

In late 1938, we left Vienna for Budapest, illegally in fact. German was a kind of imaginary space, like literature, like poetry: it wasn’t made for a nine-year-old child, but I was already reading a lot in my parents’ library. I took to it, and writing these anti-German poems became an absolute necessity.

D G: Anti-German poems, in