Nicholas Royle is Professor Emeritus of English at the University of Sussex, England, where he has been based since 1999. He has also taught at the University of Oxford, the University of Tampere (Finland), and the University of Stirling; and has been a visiting professor at the universities of Århus (Denmark), Santiago del Compostela (Spain), Turku (Finland), Manitoba (Canada), and Lille (France). He is a managing editor of the Oxford Literary Review and director of Quick Fictions.

He has published many books, including Telepathy and Literature (1991), E.M. Forster (1999), Jacques Derrida (2003), The Uncanny (2003), Veering: A Theory of Literature (2011), How to Read Shakespeare (2014), and Hélène Cixous: Dreamer, Realist, Analyst, Writing (2020), as well as the novels Quilt (2010) and An English Guide to Birdwatching (2017), and Mother: A Memoir (2020). In addition, he is co-author with Andrew Bennett of three books: Elizabeth Bowen and the Dissolution of the Novel (1994), This Thing Called Literature: Reading, Thinking, Writing (2015), and An Introduction to Literature, Criticism and Theory (Sixth edition, 2023). Royle’s current projects include a detective novel, a collection of essays about new approaches to narrative theory, and a collaborative work with Timothy Morton on Covid-19. His latest book, David Bowie, Enid Blyton and the Sun Machine, is due to be published in November 2023.

Mother: A Memoir

Pre-word In my mind's eye she is sitting at the circular white Formica-top table in the corner. Morning sunlight fills the kitchen. She has a cup of Milky Nescafé Gold Blend and is smoking a purple Silk Cut. She is dressed for comfort in a floral bronze-and-brown blouse and blue jumper with light gray slacks and blue slippers. She is absorbed in a crossword (The Times) but not oblivious. She does what always takes me aback. She reads out one of the clues. As if I would know the answer. Her gift for crosswords is alien to me. I get stuck at the first ambiguity or double-meaning. Whereas she sweeps through all illusions allusions red herrings and anagrams and is done most days by lunchtime. But her fondness for crossword puzzles is inseparable from my interest in words. Where they come from. What they might be doing. Earliest recorded use of 'In my mind's eye': Shakespeare's Hamlet (around 1599). Referring to the Ghost.

My mother died years ago. What has induced me to write about her after all this time remains mysterious to me. It is connected to the climate crisis. As the natural historian David Attenborough says: 'the collapse of our civilizations and the extinction of much of the natural world is on the horizon.' In ways I cannot pretend to fathom I have found that writing about my mother is bound up with writing about Mother Nature and Mother Earth. And no doubt it has to do also with my own aging and the buried life of mourning. The strange timetables of realization and loss. A memoir is 'a written record of a person's knowledge of events or of a person's own experiences'. 'A record of events written by a person having intimate knowledge of them and based on personal observation.' So the dictionaries tell us. But this memoir of my mother makes no attempt at a comprehensive record.

THE CREATIVE PROCESS

How do you think that the English language has influenced your imagination and thinking about the world?

NICHOLAS ROYLE

I feel in a strange way as if my whole life has been condemned to this little space called English. And at the same time, English seems to me to be an extraordinary and magical language. And one of my great concerns, and I suppose a kind of source of dismay over the last few years, has been the sense that English is dying out as a university subject. And that's a good thing. It should. And this is something, which the spirit of that idea is one that obviously has complex dimensions and a range of different heterogeneous sources, causes, or what have you. Some of them laudable, such as decolonizing the curriculum, and some of them not at all laudable, which I think are more ideological elements of a kind of calculated degradation or destruction of the humanities.

In so far as the humanities is a space for imaginative and creative endeavor and curiosity. So the idea of English as something which should, as it were, die away, I think is madness. On the contrary, for me, we've hardly begun to think about English. We've hardly begun to read it or write it. And, obviously, there is a fair collection of texts that we can go to to be amazed by what English can do. But it seems to me that English is an extraordinary space of promise and possibility still.

THE CREATIVE PROCESS

I'm interested in how a lot of the themes present in your narrative work, this wordless communication or telepathy and underlying less tangible element.

NICHOLAS ROYLE

In relation to the book that I've just completed, which is called David Bowie, Enid Blyton, and the Sun Machine. And this is a book which I started writing during lockdown, and so in some ways, it's a kind of pandemic memoir, but it's also a book which I wrote while dealing with really quite major financial difficulties within the university and in many ways very painful for me. When academics end their careers, generally speaking, they're never asked to give a final lecture or to kind of attempt to sum up what they've learned or what they've understood or what they've most appreciated, or what they've been most moved by in their years of teaching. I suppose the creative is essentially to do with the unforeseeable. I think it's so much to do with chance, with what you don't see coming, and what turns out or what befalls.

David Bowie grew up in Bromley. There's a great song it's called "Memory of a Free Festival." And it's a song about a concert that he organized in Beckenham in August 1969, the same weekend by chance of Woodstock. He wrote this song about that concert. And in August 1969, also, his father died just 10 days or so before the concert. And his funeral took place days before.

So the song that Bowie wrote is, I think, deeply resonant of the death of his father, as well as about the concert itself. And it's an extraordinary song about the end of the 1960s as well. I think there's a sort of critical consensus that it's with this song that Bowie really started coming into his own. And if you listen to the song, it's the seven-minute version on the album David Bowie, which is now usually called Space Oddity. It's a song that divides into two parts. The first part is about the concert. And the second part is just kind of chorus.

"The Sun Machine is coming down, and we are going to have a party." And it's kind of demonic. It's an extraordinary refrain, which really, it's hypnotic. It's mesmerizing. And I found myself trying to think about this idea of a sun machine. What is a sun machine? How might we describe a sun machine? What do we feel about the idea of a sun machine? Something affirmative but strange that is arriving, that's coming down, and that we are going to celebrate. We're going to have a party. So the sun machine in the book is in part an attempt to think about what music does to me, or what music might do to people more generally.

And that's, that's another key way, I suppose, in which I'm interested in the wordless. The power of listening. The power of music. The capacity that music has to transport and to transform, but also the power of music. And this is something that David Bowie realized very early on. I think the power of music and its links with memory.

So the relationship between music and mourning, but also the way in which our memories of our lives are bound up with music and how listening to music can be like opening a portal into the past. And into particular ways of thinking about memory. 

THE CREATIVE PROCESS

As you think about education, what are your reflections on the future and the kind of world we’re leaving to the next generation?

NICHOLAS ROYLE

I think our students are the greatest source of inspiration. We learn from them a great deal more than we probably manage to teach them. In many ways, it's an amazing thing to be able to teach. It's a great responsibility, but it's also an enormous opportunity. And although I'm not teaching at the moment, that's why I'm missing it, I suppose. And that impulse, the desire that is there in teaching to talk to people, but also to listen to people is something that I never stop valuing and appreciating.

This interview was conducted by Mia Funk and Indigo Pinder Magaña with the participation of collaborating universities and students. Associate Interviews Producer on this episode was Indigo Pinder Magaña.

Mia Funk is an artist, interviewer and founder of The Creative Process & One Planet Podcast (Conversations about Climate Change & Environmental Solutions).