Cecilia Ticciati: I find your first novel's title Cowboys&Indians very interesting, but what does it actually allude to?

Joseph O'Connor: On one level it's simply an ironic title, of course. Movies of the Cowboys and Indians genre encapsulate a certain kind of fervent machismo which Eddie Virago couldn't help but admire (despite his "new man" rhetoric). On another level it's way of importing into the fabric of the text the notion of tribalism which conditions Ireland's political discourse. The problem in the north of Ireland, for example has never been a religious one but a tribal one.

C.T. In your work The Salesman it seems as if you wanted to stress the importance of memory in the respect of history. The rewriting process has a connotation of " Recovery". Does this fact allude to that revisionist idea of rewriting history in order to free it from mythologies?

J.O. Well, I think the revisionist project in Irish Historiography has sometimes gone several steps too far. Certain revisionist historians have tried so hard to overturn the sacred mythologies and idols of nationalist Ireland (many of which should indeed de overturned) that they have ended up creating new idols of their own: among them the idea, which is obviously ridiculous, that British governments never did anything unjust in Ireland. This fiction is often practised in the name of objectivity, but as I get a little older I become more deeply aware with every day that passes that objectivity is only another form of bias, if a cleverer and subtler one than some of its rivals. I think Ireland's only future is to remember the past authentically and then to move on from it as quickly as possible.

C.T. The problem of identity and nationalism has been the main cause of conflict in Ireland ( and not only..) you say that the concentration on heroism and idealism, practised by each "group", has in fact stopped a true progress of Irish society. A possible solution it seemed to be Europe, that is a wider dimension. Don't you think that this process could bring a sort of cultural political and social homologation?

J.O. No, no, I think our future to be as European as possible. I would see it as leading to a vibrant multiculturalism which would be more healthy, more rich and essentially more honest about realities of contemporary life than was the dreary monoculture in which I grew up.

C.T. What about culture? In the last few decades Irish literature has been incredibly flourishing? Which could be the main reasons?

J.O.. My own view is that Ireland is changing very rapidly than any other society in western Europe and rapid social change often accompanies or brings about a flowering of artistic or cultural activity. That was the case in the dying years of the 19^th century, and also, as it turned out, in the dying years of the 20^th. In the last ten or fifteen years we've seen the destruction of the political power Catholic church, sexual liberalisation, scandals in the world of politics and business, the election of deeply ideological political parties of the right and of the left, the election of women to the office of Presidency for the first time, the end of mass emigration, the beginning of immigration to our country by refugees and asylum seekers, the beginning of peace in the North of Ireland and an economic boom which has created full employment but also a more acquisitive society than we had before. Ireland is being truly shaken up: the writers and artists are chronicling the change, but they are also a symptom of it.

C.T. In other interviews I read that one of your purposes in writing some of your novels has been the one of putting down the boundaries between high literature and entertaining literature. Which are these boundaries?

J.O. Oh well, people say all kinds of reductive and silly things in interviews!!

Anyway I just think that sometimes a notion of over-academic exclusiveness hovers around the text of literary novel. There's an idea that it is the job of the reader to work hard enough to understand the mighty writer , and I think that's rubbish: a hangover from the 19^th century conception of the writer as recipient of art from the gods or the muse. I think, as a writer, that I should do the work and the reader should the reading. Too many of us were taught, and are still taught now, to approach the literary novel on our knees, and that is the process in which novelists have been deeply complicit. It should be destroyed.

C.T. What can distinguish then a work of art from a common novel? (I know this is an insane questions)

J.O. The separation is a very European idea. In America, for example they see these things differently, perhaps because of a democratic tradition that has informed movies and music as well as literature. From the era of the American "Noir" novel right up to today, no American truly recognises a novel as a genuine work of art unless it can appeal to a wide broad audience. For me, I think it's absolutely possible for a common novel to be a work of art. (Roddy Doyle's "The Commitments" is only one of many examples I could give you).

C.T. In one of your essays I have read: "Postmodernism is dead". What have we got today then?

J.O. I don't know. Possibly a return to earlier notions of the novel as participant in the political discourse of the society in which it arises.

C.T. In your novels you change often registers, from bitter irony to lyrical tones. Why do you consider this strategy so important?

J.O. Because I think it is vitally important to keep the reader reading , and one of the strategies that is useful brining this about is to vary the tone of the text. I often think of a line from the great Scottish poet Hugh Mac Diarmid, that writers should celebrate "the drunkenness of things to be various".

C.T. Today the world is still afflicted by numerous conflicts,(what's wrong in human beings?!!) what do you think literature could do, if it had a possibility to have a role?

J.O. I don't always know what's wrong with human beings. I suppose we are every bit as stupid, venal greedy, proud, bullying and ignorant as our ancestors ever were. And beneath it all we are so deeply afraid. But we are also loving caring, full of solidarity and empathy, and life is full of extraordinary miracles if you know where to look for them. Literature can do nothing except what it always does: change the world, every day, in small, private ways.