James Morrow | Interviews

Morrow: About 20 years ago I had a mind-boggling encounter with a single sentence in Masks of the Universe (1985), a marvelous history of science by the physicist-astronomer Edward Harrison. In characterizing the demon-haunted zeitgeist of 15th- and 16th-century Europe, Harrison asserts, "The supposed Renaissance was a disordered interlude between sane universes, a bedlam of distraught world pictures terrorized by a witch universe created by leaders with fear-crazed minds, an age in thralldom to a mad universe on the rampage, which would have destroyed European society but for the intervention of science." And I said to myself, "Good God, if that isn't a great subject for a novel, then wishes are horses!" Even if Harrison was overstating the case, I knew that I would eventually explore via fiction that flabbergasting thought: the near-destruction of a civilization by its own theology, the passing of the "witch universe" and its replacement by the scientific picture of reality.

A second tributary feeding the cataract that became Witchfinder was the creeping theocracy, gimcrack spirituality and anti-Enlightenment irrationality that saturated my native republic during the '80s and '90s. These tendencies are flowering fully under George W. Bush, but they go back to the Reagan era. Then, as now, the American affection for nonsense was ubiquitous. On the one hand, you had postmodern academics dismissing the Enlightenment because it supposedly places destructive technologies and specious arguments at the disposal of oppressors. On the other hand, you had religious conservatives detesting the Enlightenment because it leads to secularism and the satanic Mr. Darwin. On the third hand, there were the New Age mysticism-mongers, who hated the Enlightenment for allegedly engendering a cosmically clueless scientism. My satiric bone began to vibrate. I postulated that if you ever got the postmodern left, the religious right and the mystic fringe agreeing on anything, it couldn't possibly be true—and so I resolved to write a novel celebrating the Enlightenment.

It's an interesting coincidence that The Last Witchfinder is being published so soon after Neal Stephenson's Baroque Cycle—in both cases, an SF writer venturing into historical fiction in order to explore the origins of the modern scientific worldview in the age of Isaac Newton. In what way would you say your technique and agenda differ from Stephenson's? And why, in your opinion, are many SF writers increasingly interested in the past as a fictional setting, rather than the future?

Morrow: A remarkable confluence indeed. I suppose we should add J. Gregory Keyes' recent quartet called The Age of Unreason, which also employs Newton and Franklin as fictional characters, though those novels were frank alternative histories. In all three cases—Stephenson, Keyes, Morrow—you have the phenomenon of an SF writer taking leave of his native genre, "fiction extrapolated from science," and playing within another category, "fiction that philosophizes about science."

Why is this phenomenon happening today? Perhaps it's because, now more than ever, people are desperate to know what the scientific revolution was all about. Why did the mathematically based "natural philosophy" that began to emerge in Christian Europe during the 17th century reshape the world in ways that earlier kinds of science did not? Was this transformation largely to the good, or was it a devil's bargain? Are the postmodernists within their rights to "relativize" the achievements of Western science? Are modernity's more articulate critics—Lewis Mumford, Jacques Ellul, Ivan Illich—among those voices we ignore only at our peril? Are religious conservatives on to something when they cast Darwin's epiphany as a sterile and impoverished understanding of humankind? Even as we speak, millions of people are wrestling with these questions.

In the final years of my labors on The Last Witchfinder I kept hearing rumors that Neal Stephenson was working along similar lines. As the Baroque Cycle volumes came into my hands, I found myself dazzled by their intelligence, scope, scale, ambition and accomplishment. My own attempt to chronicle the birth of science is certainly an epic, but Stephenson has given us something considerably more, an exponential epic, the sort of splendid insanity that critic Northrop Frye calls "encyclopedic form"—a deliberate eschewing of the novel's conventional comforts in the attempt to capture the totality of a culture: the sort of madness Thomas Pynchon was up to in Gravity's Rainbow and Ross Lockridge in Raintree County.

The Last Witchfinder is compared in its publicity material with John Barth's famous picaresque epic The Sot-Weed Factor (1960). Was that novel in fact an inspiration for Witchfinder? Is Witchfinder a celebration of the picaresque tradition in general?

Morrow: My first editor—the late Donald Hutter of Holt, Rinehart and Winston—was a remarkably literate gentleman who nurtured mainstream and science-fiction authors with equal enthusiasm. He published Heinlein, Niven and Sheckley at various points in their careers, and he greeted my inaugural attempt at fiction, a satiric SF fable called The Wine of Violence, with the prediction that I would have "a major career in the field of imaginative literature." During one of our dinners in Manhattan, Don said to me, "I assume that, given your sensibility, you're a fan of The Sot-Weed Factor?" And I had to confess that I'd never read a word of John Barth and didn't even know what that strange title could possibly mean.

I dutifully acquired a copy of The Sot-Weed Factor, and while the damn thing impressed the hell out of me—it is a tour de force, a tour de farce and a performance without precedent in American letters—I didn't come away saying, "I simply must try to do something like this one day." It was only after I became committed to writing Witchfinder on other grounds, most especially my desire to celebrate the Enlightenment, that I turned back to Barth's masterpiece, trying to figure out how he got his characters to speak in period locutions that, for all their strangeness, the reader nevertheless understands intuitively.

As for the picaresque novel in general—yes, I definitely wanted to play that game. Henry Fielding's Joseph Andrews, which I first encountered in high school, was certainly a major influence, likewise Voltaire's Candide and Daniel Defoe's Moll Flanders. And of course I revisited Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy, though it's not of the picaresque persuasion.

The overtly fantastic device you utilize in The Last Witchfinder is employing another Book as narrator—Newton's Principia Mathematica, which addresses the reader directly at intervals. You're obviously commenting here on the way in which one book inspires the writing of others; but are there further reasons for this unusual narrative strategy? I suppose one might simply be that using the Principia's "voice" is a lot of fun. ...

Morrow: I've been describing The Last Witchfinder as a celebration of the Enlightenment, but let me hasten to add that it's a qualified celebration of the Enlightenment. God knows, I'm the last person to defend scientism and what Jacques Ellul calls la technique, and I like to believe I'm no mindless cheerleader for the Age of Reason.

So from the very first, I wanted the Witchfinder text to somehow acknowledge—forgive my wordplay—the dark side of the Enlightenment, most especially its naïve notion that Newton's wildly successful "system of the world" might be relevant to human institutions, as if people were really just bodies in motion. At one point during the planning stages, I had a major character composing a long visionary poem in which she foresees the French Revolution and Blake's "dark satanic mills," but this solution proved unworkable, mostly because such prophesying was at odds with the novel's ratification of Reason.

Eventually I hit on the conceit of the book as narrator. It was indeed fun to play with this voice, especially after I realized that the Principia would have mixed feelings about his "father," Isaac Newton, and the Enlightenment legacy in general. He admits that Newton is "not the noblest person" who ever walked the earth, and at one point he physically possesses a French priest at the height of the Terror—my Principia narrator moves freely through time and space—and allows himself to be guillotined in the Place de la Révolution. At other times, though, the Principia is rather peevish and defensive, lamenting what he regards as facile critiques of Reason. The reader can decide for himself which of my narrator's points are valid and which are merely the complaints of a curmudgeon.

Although your heroine, Jennet Stearne, and her misguided father and brother are imaginary figures, actual historical personages play important supporting roles in The Last Witchfinder—Newton, Robert Hooke, Benjamin Franklin, the Baron de Montesquieu and so on. How intensive was your research into the history and biography of the times? How readily were you able to reconcile recorded facts with the fictional demands of your plot?

Morrow: The historical research was indeed extensive. At one point I even waded into Andrew Motte's famous English translation of the Principia Mathematica. Thanks to a rigorous high-school calculus class, I more or less understood what was going on.

The real fun was the legwork I did on both sides of the Atlantic. My wife and I made fact-finding trips to Philadelphia, Boston and Salem, and we also spent a week in England, following in Jennet Stearne's footsteps as she encounters Robert Hooke at Cambridge University, witnesses her Aunt Isobel's execution behind Colchester Castle and tracks down Isaac Newton in London.

For all this, I can't pretend I've become a formidable armchair historian of Restoration Europe or Colonial America. I seem to recall that, shortly after The Sot-Weed Factor was published, a journalist praised John Barth for his scholarly expertise in the 17th century. And Barth modestly replied to the effect that, no, The Sot-Weed Factor was like an inverted iceberg: Everything he'd learned about the period was plainly on view in the text—he didn't know anything else. I'd have to make an analogous disclaimer regarding Witchfinder. A serious historical novelist is not necessarily an expert historian. His real mission lies elsewhere.

Even as I ferreted out fascinating nuggets of actual history, wondering how might I work this or that chunk into the story, I remained mindful of a dictum that John Irving ascribes to T.S. Garp: "He wrote that the worst reason for anything being part of a novel was that it really happened. ... The only reason for something to happen in a novel is that's it's the perfect thing to have happen at that time." I believe that, up to a point, the Irving principle holds even in the case of historical fiction. Throughout the Witchfinder composition process, what I really cared about was my central theme: that astonishing transition from the witch universe to the Enlightenment, the indispensable distinction between the pseudo-science of the heresy-hunters and the genuine insights of experimental "natural philosophy." My job was not simply to dramatize history but to reimagine history with a philosophical and humanistic purpose—as Shakespeare did so brilliantly, and as a handful of playwrights managed to do centuries later: Bertold Brecht in Galileo, Jean Anouilh in Becket, Peter Barnes in The Bewitched.

That said, I must admit I was continually delighted by how much real history I could effortlessly incorporate into The Last Witchfinder. Were I a man of mystical bent, I might even say the book was asking to be written. It was as if all these glittering shards of the past were lying around in a field, and all I had to do was glue them together into an urn of my own design.

At one point the plot required Jennet to be abducted by Algonquin Indians from her home in Haverhill, Mass. Well, it turned out that the Abenaki tribe really did attack Colonial Haverhill in 1696. When Jennet puts herself on trial for witchcraft, I thought it would be interesting if the Baron de Montesquieu came forward to defend her. So naturally I was pleased to discover that, not only had Montesquieu denounced the conjuring statutes, he was a world traveler and could easily have landed in colonial Philadelphia at this time. Even the climactic courtroom battle has a rough historical counterpart. In a 1730 issue of The Pennsylvania Gazette, Benjamin Franklin reported on a witch trial that had supposedly occurred across the Delaware River—in Mount Holly, New Jersey. The article is clearly a hoax, but I decided to take Ben at his word.

Is The Last Witchfinder a feminist novel? Reversing the customary emphasis the history of science places on Famous White Males and their "inherent" gift of Reason, you make Jennet and her Aunt Isobel the brave pioneers of scientific understanding and her father and brother the apostles of irrationality. Newton and Hooke don't come off too well either ...

Morrow: Any dawn of the week, rain or shine, I'd be happy to climb atop the henhouse and loudly crow that The Last Witchfinder is a feminist novel. I've always enjoyed creating strong female protagonists. As some SF Weekly readers may recall, my fourth novel, Only Begotten Daughter, recounts the adventures of Jesus Christ's divine half-sister in contemporary Atlantic City. The Eternal Footman centers largely on a female protagonist, Nora Burkhart, and her struggles to rescue her son from an existential pestilence.

By placing a woman at the center of Witchfinder, I believe I made the Renaissance-to-Reason transition more engaging than if I'd opted for a male protagonist. Obviously a woman would face an uphill battle convincing the world that she'd discovered a Newtonian, scientific argument against belief in witches. And I thought there would be a certain poetic justice in having a heroine, as opposed to a hero, put the witchfinders out of business, since women endured a disproportionate amount of persecution for alleged devil-worship. Indeed, the main reason Jennet goes on her great quest is that, early in the novel, her beloved Aunt Isobel is publicly executed as a satanist.

In my view, what makes a novel "feminist" is not the presence of a plucky heroine, but rather the author's willingness to take women seriously in general—as plenary human beings. I can best make this point in reference to Theodore Roszak's The Memoirs of Elizabeth Frankenstein (1995), an ostensibly feminist novel that in my view is nothing of the kind. I came away from Elizabeth Frankenstein feeling that Roszak was merely using women as convenient props for shoring up the argument he really cared about: his sledgehammer assault on Godless Reason. As I remarked several years ago, in an interview with Samuel R. Delany, "The whole thing is a minstrel show, with women instead of darkies." On nearly every page of Elizabeth Frankenstein, Roszak is saying to women, "There, there, dearie, don't you worry your pretty little head about science and the Enlightenment. You're too good for those awful things. Now run along and dance naked in the woods, like the spiritually superior being you are." The day I meet God, my first question to Her will be, "How the hell did The Memoirs of Elizabeth Frankenstein win a Tiptree Award?"

Taking the previous question further: Is The Last Witchfinder consciously a catalogue of alternative perspectives on the past—not only an exploration of the neglected role of women in history, but also of that of Native Americans (as seen in the lives of the tribespeople who abduct Jennet in the frontier raid) and that of blacks (the escaped slaves and their utopian island society)?

Morrow: To borrow a phrase from J.R.R. Tolkien, The Last Witchfinder is a book that "grew in the telling." What started out as a typically Morrovian satire targeting the witch-hunting phenomenon gradually transmuted into a picaresque epic about the nascent Enlightenment. As the novel got out of hand, it came to embrace two additional tragedies beyond the campaign to exterminate heretics: the plight of native Americans and the institution of chattel slavery.

There are postmodern academics who will tell you with a straight face that the Enlightenment should be called to account for both abominations, but it seems to me that something like the opposite is the case. From my admittedly parochial perspective and selective research, I would argue that these two pathologies—violence against Indians, enslavement of West Africans—trace far more directly to Revelation than to Reason. Certainly it's no accident that the only Founding Father who stood foursquare against the slave trade, Benjamin Franklin, was also among the most religiously unorthodox.

As The Last Witchfinder makes clear, the methods the witch-hunters used were bizarre, both their ways of assembling "evidence" and their notions of what constituted legal proof in court. However grotesque these details are, aren't they also grimly hilarious—ideal fodder for a satirist such as yourself?

Morrow: The witchfinders' repertoire of "proofs" was indeed bizarre—at least, it was bizarre from our perspective. What fascinates me about this period, however, is that few contemporary thinkers saw any contradiction between the heresy-hunters' agenda and the new experimental science. Many members of the Royal Society—Henry More, Joseph Glanvill—believed that demons were factual. Robert Boyle, the man who set us straight about gases, thought that one particular narrative, le démon de Mâcon, had pretty much proved that witches were among Satan's favorite modus operandi.

Once you accept the premise that demons drive the world, the whole witch-hunting enterprise starts to look weirdly rational—almost Aristotelian. How do you detect a witch? Well, it's logical to suppose that Satan would provide the female heretic with a teat for suckling her animal familiar, and so you should scan the suspect's flesh for superfluous excrescences. And, of course, such a protuberance will not bleed when pricked with a needle. (It will be "cold as a witch's tit.") Pure water, the medium of baptism, will naturally disgorge any disciple of Lucifer. Hence the practice of "swimming the witch"—tossing the accused into a stream and, if she floats, declaring her a satanist. And, of course, because witches can "transvect" themselves, flying about on brooms and coal shovels, it makes sense to place a suspect on one pan of a granary scale and a big fat Bible on the other. The Apocalypse will inevitably outweigh any given apostate.

Today we would prefer to regard the demon hypothesis as a minor aspect of the Christian narrative—but that's simply not the case. As Elaine Pagels points out in The Origin of Satan, the New Testament is chock-a-block with devils, wicked spirits and other agents of darkness. The witch-hunters were not lunatics, fanatics, hysterics, crackpots, cranks or sadists. They were rational men practicing solid Christian theology.

Point taken. Yet the matter of history-as-burlesque remains: You are renowned as a humorous writer, and much of The Last Witchfinder is very funny indeed—the greatest highlight for me being Robert Hooke's extraordinary address to the jurors in the guise of Isaac Newton. Is history naturally a tapestry of farce? Was your material simply handed to you by the record of the times you revisited in Witchfinder?

Morrow: I, too, am fond of the moment when Hooke, posing as Newton, addresses the jury in an manner designed to sully his rival's reputation: "Heed now the Principia Priapica! Law one: a virile member at rest rarely stays at rest! Law two: the speed of the semen is directly proportional to the force of the orgasm! Law three: for every illicit ejaculation there's an equal and opposite story to tell your wife!"

The dimension of the Enlightenment that I most value is the one that its detractors—whether we're speaking of postmodern academics, religious conservatives or New Age mystics—always seem to miss. I'm speaking of its glorious impertinence, its mischievous skepticism, its refusal to bow before received wisdom and consecrated nonsense. If I've done my job properly, the reader will sense the spirit of Voltaire hovering about Jennet Stearne's adventures, even though Voltaire is mentioned only a few times in the text. It's no accident that two of the historical figures I use as fictional characters, Franklin and Montesquieu, were consummate satirists. At one point, I have Franklin reading Montesquieu's Persian Letters, and I also managed to quote extensively from one of Franklin's sardonic anti-slavery pieces.

Given my satiric proclivities, it was perhaps inevitable that I would one day turn to the Age of Reason for inspiration. True, most of the frankly comic episodes in Witchfinder are invented, but I would argue that they're of a piece with the zeitgeist. Beyond a couple of self-indulgent lapses, I believe I've remained true to the period.

There probably isn't a single epoch that can't be made to seem ridiculous in retrospect, as Monty Python never tired of demonstrating. As you might imagine, I regard this kind of farcification as salutary. It can keep us from taking the hallowed institutions of our own time—monopoly capitalism, the Christian church, the cult of professionalism, the Bush notion of democracy—more seriously than they deserve.

In Part II of The Last Witchfinder, you add Walter Stearne to the side of the prosecution at the Salem witch trials of 1692; in Part III, Jennet is herself tried for witchcraft, with a number of the key figures in the Salem events—Judge Hathorne, Abigail Williams—present again. In retelling the events of Arthur Miller's famous play The Crucible, and then extrapolating from them, sequelizing them, were you consciously re-evaluating what Miller wrote, perhaps adding a new note of redemption to his dark assessment of the witch trials?

Morrow: It seems as if every decade or so scholars offer us a new and different understanding of the Salem witch trials. Over the years, we've been given a psychological interpretation (the "bewitched" children were merely seeking attention), a sociological interpretation (it was all about feuds among neighbors), an anthropological interpretation (the villagers were projecting their fears of Indians onto one another), a postmodern interpretation (the proceedings were a forum for competing narratives, none of them privileged) and even a pharmacological interpretation (the girls had eaten bread contaminated with ergot). And, of course, we also have Arthur Miller's famous political interpretation, whereby the whole affair prefigures the McCarthy era, with its premium on betraying one's own and "naming names." Miller also adds a dollop of psychology: Abigail Williams was a woman scorned, romantically rejected by the upright yeoman John Proctor—though to make this conceit work Miller had to advance the historical Abigail's age from 14 to 17.

Now, these multifarious interpretations of Salem are all very interesting, but in the novel I'm saying something like, "Hey, wait a minute, people. What about the whole problem of groundless demonology and psychotic theology in the first place? What about the manifest continuity between the Salem witch trials and 300 years of witch burnings on the European continent? Doesn't that count for anything? Hello?"

So, to answer your question, I guess I am re-evaluating what Miller wrote. Don't get me wrong: I think The Crucible is a masterpiece. Properly staged, it provides a devastating theatrical experience. But I sometimes wonder whether, as a Jew, Miller felt obligated to pull his punches when it came to critiquing the dark consequences of Christian theology. As a lapsed Presbyterian—if there can be such a thing—a WASP who has spent most of his writing career deconstructing organized religion, I felt no such inhibitions when composing Witchfinder.

I'm glad you mentioned my attempt to "sequelize" the Salem story. Here again, the actual facts of history fell into my lap. If we imagine Judge John Hathorne living into his 80s, he could easily have presided over my hypothetical Philadelphia Witch Court of 1731. And nobody knows what ultimately happened to Abigail Williams, so I have her resurfacing to prosecute and persecute Jennet at the last Colonial American witch trial.

Of course, you're also a notable short-story writer—your excellent collection The Cat's Pajamas was published by Tachyon in 2004. Let's look at some highlights there. Take "The Wisdom of the Skin": what suggested to you the concept of public copulation as a major art form?