Two men walk into a bookstore, looking for Nick Bantock’s Griffin & Sabine.

“So what do you know about The Sicmons?” one man asks the other.

“Actually, my wife and I went on our honeymoon there.”

The owner of the store, a friend of Nick Bantock’s, giggles. But the man says it “dead straight,” Bantock explains to me during our phone interview.

“Did he actually believe he had been to The Sicmons?” I ask.

Bantock doesn’t know. Perhaps it was a joke. Perhaps the man was confused. After all, The Sicmons are a piece of fiction, an imaginary place! Aren’t they? For a moment I doubt myself. No, it’s true: The Sicmons are a group of islands in the South Pacific — created by Bantock — where the character Sabine lives.

No one corrected the man, a fact which seems to please Bantock. “What matters is that it had started to enter,” he says. “The unreal world starts to enter into the real world and challenges the notion that... it is, as it were, consistent.”

Whether he describes the unreal and the real, the nighttime and the daytime, the right brain and the left brain, or the image and the text, Bantock’s project is to transgress the boundaries between contraries, to merge them, to expose their mutability, to turn them on their heads. Griffin & Sabine (1991), Sabine’s Notebook (1992), and The Golden Mean (1993) comprise a trilogy that has virtually created a new genre. The books are composed of handmade postcards and letters (yes! you can actually open the envelopes and pull out the folded pages) between Griffin and Sabine, artists brought together by a peculiarity of Sabine’s vision: as Griffin draws and paints, the images are impressed upon her own mind. Their connection intensifies and they fall in love, never having met face to face. Bantock’s newest book, The Gryphon (2001), is the beginning of a second similar trilogy, still involving Griffin and Sabine but now centered around the correspondence of another couple, Isabella and Matthew.

Born and raised in England, Bantock attended art school in London, where he experimented with every medium he could get his hands on. He still uses "anything and everything known unto man" for his artwork, most of which he calls collage: combinations of fragments in themes subtly explored throughout the postcards. Often layered or unusually juxtaposed, images are constantly in dialogue with each other and with the text. In this way, Bantock manages to map the imagination, to explore the textures of interior and exterior travel through the everyday and the fantastic.

Whitney Duncan: How do you normally begin one of the postcards? Do they come from the text?

Nick Bantock: I think it works both ways. Ideas for images come and then text comes from the images, but it works the other way around too: text and the story line are suggested by the images. I use cut and paste when I write; I don’t plan the books out in logical form and then go back and write them through and flesh them out. They kind of grow more from the middle outwards. Maybe there will be a line that I’ll take from one place and put in another, maybe I’ll flip a paragraph. I’m using words and lines in the same way that you would use collage. You would take a piece, sometimes you would lay something over, sometimes you would just rip something out and throw it away. Most writers write in that way anyway, but I think it’s much more so with me, because I come from a visual background. I think the books through visually. I treat the text in some ways visually too. They feed off each other. It really is a marriage, an integration. That’s what I’ve wanted, from early on, to create something that is really a very equal sense of balance between left and right brain.

WD: What do you mean by left and right brain? In terms of creativity and logic?

NB: No, in terms of the part of the brain that perceives and thinks through images. I mean that literally: thinks through images. If you think we don’t do that, just remember every time you go to sleep at night you think in images. You don’t think in words. The use of text that is spoken or written is relatively new to us. And yet it has taken over. It has taken over massively.

The world of images, particularly images that we can’t use directly for purposes of manipulation — i.e. the images we experience at night or any kind of random uncontrollable images — tend to be put on the back burner because we say we don’t understand them. Essentially they are coming from the unconscious.

Because we are a society that is unhappy with the unconscious, and because Western society is driven to making choices between left and right, black and white, you are always encouraged to decide what is right or what is wrong and then discard the other. You are pushed towards polarity. Whereas Eastern thought believes that opposites exist on the same plane and that life is movement along that plane. Accepting opposites at the same time is much more agreeable to the human mind. So in a way you could say that what I am trying to do here is bring back the notion of the visual night experience, or the original building bricks of our perception of the universe, our perception through images. To readdress the balance — because it has slipped so far down — to bring it back up again so that it is equal with the spoken or with the written word.

WD: Psychologically, how do the paintings and the text interact? I remember there is a part in The Golden Mean where Maude gives a psychological description of the paintings. Would you say that it’s accurate?

NB: That’s too literal. I’m kind of toying and playing, but I’m also sort of giving pointers, encouraging people to look at the images again and think about them. If you think too much about images and you break them down into symbols, and then you think about the words that go with the symbols, you’re back to square one. Thinking in images is essentially what intuition is. You move much, much faster and you don’t bother to translate it back into the conscious or the spoken or written word, or even the word that appears in your head, because that’s too slow a process. You simply allow yourself to skip from image to image, like throwing stones across the water.

WD: There is that dreamlike feel but there is also a juxtaposition to very real and detailed everyday objects. How do those two interact? Is that the processing of the daytime experience?

NB: Well, although there is a transient flow, there is also a concentration on things. Sometimes, I think we can hold a lot within them. That’s what symbolism is. In other words, the microcosm is reflecting the macrocosm. It’s not that the universe is directly contained within any given object, but it is mirrored. The way images have been used in books for so many years has been to illustrate the word. I don’t like the word illustration being directed towards what I do, because they are not illustrations, which are subservient. What I’m doing is creating art that is a parallel narrative.

Once you start saying, “Okay, the postcard on the front gives a picture of what is on the back,” then that just becomes nonsense. You might as well not do it. But what you find is that the images flow, like a piece of music, and that certain things come up and disappear, come back again. There are themes like string and rope and knots. That’s one theme that flows constantly through. I don’t expect everyone, or even more than a few people, to necessarily get the references. That’s not the point. The point is that it functions on a mythological intuitive level, so that you pick up a sense of it. Your unconscious or intuitive self will actually click on some of this stuff, and it will take you down the path. I think that’s in some ways why the books have a kind of latent power, even with those people who think they are just reading a cute love story. Why does it stick with them? It sticks with them because there’s also something else going on.

WD: That’s such an accurate description of reading the books, how the images affect you subconsciously while reading it. Another interesting aspect is the strong sense of geography, which the story defies. Like when Sabine says, “Don’t worry about maps, your letters will find me.”

NB: Exactly, because we have the maps of our imaginations. For example, someone said to me, “How come you’re writing this whole thing in Egypt, but you’re not actually going there?” For two very clear reasons. Because I do not want the Egypt that is actually there to interfere with my imagination of Egypt, which is very intense, and I can write that. Whereas if I go there, there will be a whole new input of information that I will then have to absorb and regurgitate. What will probably come out will be a series of pieces, of facts that will simply prove that I’ve done my research. I don’t want that. I wanted it always to be possible that the whole thing could have been conceived by someone just sitting in a room on their own. Going back to the origins of Griffin, the whole notion is that he is just sitting there inventing it all himself. I like that play, the idea that any one of the characters or even someone outside of the characters could really just be inventing this. It undermines the process of believing too strongly in the history of the geography that is placed before us, which is a very healthy thing, as long as it doesn’t disrupt and make you go crazy. It encourages each and every person that takes it in not to necessarily believe what they’ve been told. If you can resist people’s insistence that their perception of reality is the only one, then you begin to become an individual.

WD: That reminds me of a quotation from The Gryphon — it’s my favorite one — in which Sabine says, “But navigation will prove more effective than explanation. Be wary of accepting the viewpoint of those who provide too many answers, and do not believe anyone who says the night is to be outlawed.” For me that is the core of all the books.

NB: That’s exactly true. When people ask me to give them answers, whether it’s about the books or life or anything, I say I don’t know. What I am is a question. I ask questions. I believe that the way you open your mind and your understanding is not to answer questions, but to have each question lead to another better and more significant question. When you can ask questions, people cannot manipulate you. When you are satisfied with an answer, then immediately you become a subject.

WD: I’m interested in what you said about there being maps of our imagination; I was going to ask you: are you mapping the imagination in a way?

NB: Yes, I’m mapping my imagination. Hopefully, if I’ve plugged into the collective unconscious on some level, I’m mapping other people’s as well.