A LIFE IN WORDS

IBS: The New York Trilogy is probably your most widely read book, principally, I think, because it breaks new ground through the unique combination of exploration, captivating story, and reflection that characterizes much of your work. The reader is at once drawn into the world of detection and obsessive surveillance only to find him- or herself thoroughly taken in by the existential and literary mysteries you put before us in the three short novels—City of Glass, Ghosts, and The Locked Room—that form the Trilogy. Jan Kjærstad is quite right to describe it as a “crystal that refracts light into colors that have rarely been seen before.”²⁰ What prompted these strange stories?

PA: They come out of material I’d been thinking about and working on for many years. In The Red Notebook, I describe the phone call I received from the person who wanted to talk to the Pinkerton Agency. It triggered the first novel, City of Glass. The idea of a wrong number intrigued me and, because it happened to concern a detective agency, it somehow seemed inevitable that my story should have a detective element to it. It’s not in any way a crucial part of the story, and it was always irritating to me to hear these books described as detective novels. They’re not that in the least.

IBS: No, not at all. Even if the protagonist in each of the stories at some point devotes himself to an investigation, the element of detection here concerns linguistic and existential issues rather than criminal ones. Did you deliberately set out to experiment with the detective genre or was it simply useful to you as a form?

PA: It was useful to me in the same way old musical hall routines and vaudeville were useful to Beckett in writing Waiting for Godot. Or the way romances were useful to Cervantes in writing Don Quixote. You could also say Crime and Punishment is a detective story, I suppose. Many novelists have used crime fiction forms to write about other things. I’m hardly the first to do this. So, I didn’t feel I was setting out to explode anything. I was just curious.

PA: I just wanted to remain loyal to the inspiration prompted by that phone call. It was a challenge I set for myself. There are sources of much greater importance to this book. At a strictly intellectual level, one of them derives from my intense reading of John Milton when I was an undergraduate. I had a brilliant professor, Edward Tayler, who taught the famous Milton course at Columbia. It completely altered my way of thinking about literature. I was young and impressionable: a sophomore completely immersed in the reflections on language that come out of Milton. They informed my ideas of the New Babel and triggered the mad theories I ascribe to Henry Dark in City of Glass. At the personal level, City of Glass is also a kind of shadow autobiography or biography. I imagined, in an exaggerated way, what might have happened to me if I hadn’t met Siri. In some sense, it’s an homage to her. I truly felt she saved my life when I met her.

PA: Maybe, maybe. Other crucial sources of inspiration were the wild child stories, which opened on to all the questions about language that have always interested me. I wrote a great deal about these linguistic issues when I was younger. They were integrated into an earlier project that was somehow a combination of Moon Palace and City of Glass—one enormous work, far too big for me to handle. Many of the ideas in City in Glass come out of those embryonic writings, for instance, forming letters with the steps of a person walking through a city and the conversation about Don Quixote with the “Auster” character. It’s a completely mad reading of Don Quixote, by the way, and I have to insist that I was making fun of myself. Almost everything “Auster” says is the opposite of what I believe.

IBS: I can see that [laughs]. He’s also described as an unreliable person and unpleasant.

IBS: There’s a moment toward the end of The Locked Room where the narrator suddenly injects this somewhat astonishing declaration:

These three stories are finally the same story, but each one represents a different stage in my awareness of what it is about. (346)

PA: No. This is how it started: as I was working on City of Glass in 1981, I realized that I’d written something similar about five years earlier in a play entitled Blackouts,²² and I revisited the play to see if it could be reconfigured as a piece of narrative prose. So, I went back, adapted ideas from the older material and, indeed, Blackouts became the origin of Ghosts. Once I was writing the second volume, I knew there had to be a third. And so, it became a trilogy.

PA: The issue that runs through all of them is ambiguity. Ambiguity and uncertainty. If I had to boil it down to one phrase, it’s this: “learning to live with ambiguity.” This is the essence of The New York Trilogy. That explains why, at the very end, the narrator of The Locked Room throws away Fanshawe’s manuscript.

All the words were familiar to me, and yet they seemed to have been put together strangely, as though their final purpose was to cancel each other out. Each sentence erased the sentence before it, each paragraph made the next paragraph impossible. (370)

PA: It’s about uncertainty, and the fact that there are no eternal givens in the world. Somehow, we have to make room for the things we don’t understand. We have to live with obscurity. I’m not talking about a passive, quietistic acceptance of things, but rather the realization that there are things we’re not going to know.

I have been struggling to say goodbye to something for a long time now, and this struggle is all that really matters. The story is not in the words; it’s in the struggle. (346)

PA: It is about writing, but at the same time it’s about accommodating the unknown.

IBS: Well, if this book is where some of your major realizations concerning knowledge and truth were consolidated, might we not see The New York Trilogy as one of your most important books, if not the most important? The reviewers and critics do.

PA: I don’t know. I think there’s a tendency among the journalists to regard the work that puts you in the public eye for the first time as your best work. Take Lou Reed.²³ He can’t stand “Walk on the Wild Side.” This song is so famous, it’s followed him around all his life, and he’ll always be best known for having done that. Similarly, no matter how many movies he made afterward, Godard will always be best known for Breathless. It’s true for novelists; it’s true for poets. Even so, I don’t think in terms of “best” or “worst.” Making art isn’t like competing in the Olympics, after all.

IBS: I’m not suggesting The New York Trilogy is your best book but that, generally speaking, it may be your most important work.

PA: Most important in the sense that it’s the most read and most studied of my books, perhaps.

PA: I don’t know, I don’t know. It seemed to have struck a lot of people as innovative.

IBS: It is innovative. Very much so, and, for one reason or another, what’s new about it concurs with the ideas that emerged in French theory and hit the literary scene round about the time you published The New York Trilogy.

PA: I have a feeling that, as the years go by and as French theory diminishes in importance, people will stop reading my books in that way. At least I hope they will.

IBS: Perhaps. Still, I think some of your early work will go down in history as quintessentially postmodern. I know you’re not happy about being placed in this category.

PA: The New York Trilogy is always going to be attached to my name, no matter where I go, no matter how many other things I write. There’s nothing I can do about it.

PA: The fact is that I don’t even know if I think The New York Trilogy is very good. To me, it seems rather crude. I think I’ve become a better writer. These are youthful texts that mark the end of a certain phase of my life.

IBS: Even so, you experimented with literary convention, opened new possibilities in fiction, explored ideas. These early books, especially The New York Trilogy, raised very important questions about truth, about language, about being in the world. They prompt reflection about issues that were absolutely pivotal in contemporary literary theory.

IBS: More so than The Invention of Solitude, I think, even if it also invites a great deal of reflection.

PA: In the second part of The Invention of Solitude, I explore many of the same questions, but more from a historical perspective than from a purely philosophical one.

IBS: Both The Invention of Solitude and The New York Trilogy have captivated audiences all over the world. My students absolutely love them. I taught them again (probably for the tenth time) last week and after the lecture one of my students came up to me and asked me to give you this letter. It says that your work has changed his life and now he wants to become a writer!

IBS: It has that effect. He was overwhelmed. He could hardly breathe, and he had to stay behind to talk about his experience.

IBS: Well, they’re in their fourth or fifth year. Just before they finish their MA. I’ve had several students with similar reactions over the years.

IBS: I think it has to do with your special combination of enchanting storytelling and intellectual challenge: it opens up new ways of thinking about how we try to make sense of the world. It addresses issues we all grapple with, perhaps especially when we’re young. One of the most striking features, not just in your early work, is the fact that your questions only ever open to more questions. Answers are rarely provided. You are so interested in the processes and mechanisms of writing that you lay them bare and weave your thoughts about them into the stories themselves.

PA: Most writers are perfectly satisfied with traditional literary models and happy to produce works they feel are beautiful and true and good. I’ve always wanted to write what to me is beautiful, true, and good, but I’m also interested in inventing new ways to tell stories. I wanted to turn everything inside out. I suppose it’s a tremendously ambitious stance: not to be satisfied with conventions, to play with them sometimes, then to expose traditional norms and stretch them beyond their limits.

IBS: With a view to laying them bare or just to see what happens when you probe?

PA: I want to turn things inside out. Like an architect building a house with all the plumbing and wiring exposed. I’m fascinated by the artificiality of literature. We all know it’s a book: when we open it, we all know that it’s not the real world. It’s something else. It’s an invention. I think that’s why I found it so interesting to put my own name in the first volume of the Trilogy. The name is printed on the cover and then, well, wouldn’t it be curious to have the same name also inside the book—and then see what happens? I was playing with the split between what I call the “writing self” and the “biographical self.” Here I am, I’m still sitting at the red table with you, I take out the garbage, I pay my taxes, I do everything everybody else does. That’s me. At the same time, there’s the writer who’s living in another world altogether. I somehow wanted to connect those two worlds.

PA: It’s a third person. It’s not Quinn, it’s not Auster. It’s another character who is nameless.

I returned home from my trip to Africa in February, just hours before a snowstorm began to fall on New York. I called my friend Auster that evening, and he urged me to come over to see him as soon as I could. (157)

PA: Suddenly, there’s an “I.” Suddenly, the whole thing is shaken up, right at the end, and we can’t be sure about anything. He has just arrived from Africa. I’ve never been to Africa, but in my mind, it was always the mystery continent, the unknown place—“darkest Africa” [laughs].

IBS: I see, so he remains unnamed, unknown—ambiguous, as you said earlier. I was wondering about this in connection with Stillman’s insistence that names are synonymous with the bearer. As we gather from the three introduction scenes in chapter nine, Stillman registers only a name, not a person’s appearance, and so, when Quinn introduces himself as Henry Dark—Stillman’s pseudonym—Stillman simply accepts Quinn as his own invention without batting an eyelid. Even more astonishingly, it never occurs to him that something is amiss when Quinn introduces himself by the name of Stillman’s own son:

Oh. You mean my son. Yes, that’s possible. You look just like him. Of course, Peter is blond and you are dark. Not Henry Dark, but dark of hair. People change, don’t they? One minute we’re one thing, and then another another. (101)

For Stillman, the name invokes the essence of the person bearing it. The two are identical.

PA: The same goes for name and object. Part of him can’t recognize that Quinn isn’t his son, part of him is just pretending.

IBS: The linguistic theory he has developed dictates that he must accept Quinn as who he says he is, despite the fact that he has introduced himself three days in a row each time under a different name without changing his appearance.

PA: Yes, but Stillman is mad. He’s lost in his own thoughts, and he can’t be understood in any rational way.

IBS: I know, but readers are detectives too, and we think about all these details and try to make sense of the mysteries. The thing is that Stillman’s ideas about the transparency between word and object actually correspond to what you’re doing in the book. That is, up until the whole thing is obscured by the disappearance of basically all the central characters. So even if he’s mad, or if you think of him as mad, some of his ideas are congruent with the nature of the fictional world you have constructed for him.

PA: For me, the important thing here is that Stillman’s project will finally destroy language. He doesn’t realize it, but, essentially, what his ideas are leading to is this: everything would have to have a different name. We talked about this the other day—in connection with the red table.

IBS: You’ve also filmed this idea in Smoke, haven’t you? The tobacconist takes a photo every morning at the same time from the very same angle. Even so, the pictures are never identical.

IBS: Also in Moon Palace, when Marco is wheeling Effing around in the streets and is required to describe the nuances in a brick wall.²⁴ No two bricks are the same.

I was piling too many words on top of each other, and rather than reveal the thing before us, they were in fact obscuring it, burying it under an avalanche of subtleties and geometric abstractions. (Moon Palace, 123)

PA: I’m interested in things that butt up against the limits of language. As you can see in “Notes from a Composition Book,” I was grappling with questions about language, reality, literature, and the world when I was just twenty.

The eye sees the world in a flux. The word is an attempt to arrest the flow, to stabilize it. And yet we persist in trying to translate experience into language. Hence poetry, hence the utterances of daily life. This is the faith that prevents universal despair—and also causes it. (Collected Poems, 204)

When I started writing novels, there seemed no point in writing them unless I took a different approach.

IBS: It seems to me that you weren’t really looking for answers. It was the process that mattered.

PA: Because I knew to begin with that we can never arrive at any stable truth. There is no one answer. Once you think you have one, that’s the moment when you begin to drown. This is the problem of epistemology, isn’t it? There’s a bit of dialogue in Smoke that captures it in a humorous spirit. Let’s see where it is, yes, scene 55—it’s when Auggie is talking to Jimmy, his mentally retarded assistant, and the scene begins with this:

If it happens, it happens. If it doesn’t, it doesn’t. Do you understand what I’m saying? You never know what’s going to happen next, and the moment you think you know, that’s the moment you don’t know a goddamn thing. That’s what we call a paradox. Are you following me?

Sure, Auggie, I follow. When you don’t know nothing, it’s like paradise. I know what that is. It’s after you’re dead and you go up to heaven and sit with the angels. (Collected Screenplays, 109–110)

IBS: [Laughs] Could we say that City of Glass is principally about the ambiguity of language?

PA: No doubt, the central questions in the book, even the action, revolve around it.

IBS: Peter Stillman Jr., here, is one of the most astonishing examples of a character who embodies language:

The body acted almost exactly as the voice had: machine-like, fitful, alternating between slow and rapid gestures, rigid and yet expressive, as if the operation were out of control, not quite corresponding to the will that lay behind it. (17)

There’s complete correlation between physical movement and speech here—both as broken as Peter’s mind.

PA: Speech is a physical activity. Mental as well, of course—how else could I summon up the words I want to say?—but as I speak, my mouth is moving, my tongue is moving, my lungs are involved. It’s happening in the body. The words are going out into space, hitting your eardrum, you’re hearing them. It’s physical.

IBS: Sure, but here you have a person moving in perfect accordance with the cadence of his own speech. That’s taking it a step further, I would have thought.

It seemed to Quinn that Stillman’s body had not been used for a long time and that all its functions had been relearned, so that motion had become a conscious process, each movement broken down into its component submovements, with the result that all flow and spontaneity had been lost. It was like watching a marionette trying to walk without strings. (17)

The mastery of language and the mastery of bodily movement are finally the same. Stillman Jr. has had to learn both very late in childhood.

PA: Not only has Peter been physically abused, he’s been deprived of language. He’s doubly damaged.

IBS: As I read it, he embodies the transparency his father was trying to reinscribe in the modern world. Hence the title: City of Glass, right? In a sense, he’s fixed between the pre- and postlapsarian worlds, stuck between the Adamic principle and the confusion of tongues in Babel. He is what he says at any given time, and the grammar of his sentences determines his movements. At the same time, he utterly fails to communicate.

IBS: Yes, speech is nothing but sound to him. His grasp of the semantic side of language is less than firm, isn’t it? There are signifiers but no signifieds. He doesn’t understand the meaning of words.

This is what is called speaking. I believe that is the term. When words come out, fly into the air, live for a moment, and die. Strange, is it not? I myself have no opinion. No and no again. (19)

Even if, in appearance, he’s transparent, pale, dressed in white, innocent, and would therefore seem to embody the language of Eden, the speech he produces is radically postlapsarian: one word cancels out the one before it and there’s no stability of meaning whatsoever. As he says to Quinn:

What are these words coming from his mouth? I will tell you. Or else I will not tell you. Yes and no. (18)

PA: Yes, he has failed. At the same time, Stillman Jr. is an ambiguous character: his connection with language has been damaged but not completely destroyed. He can speak, and he can reflect on his own utterances: “This is what is called speaking.”

IBS: He sort of stands back from language and looks at it from a different perspective from the rest of us, I think.

PA: He likes to flaunt common expressions such as “You bet your bottom dollar.” He’s picked up these phrases, but he doesn’t understand their idiomatic meanings.

IBS: He defamiliarizes them, doesn’t he? He dislocates them from their normal context.

IBS: This is one of the tremendous appeals of this book: the way you play with the relationship between language and meaning, explode truisms, turn everything inside out, as you said. I was stunned when I first read The New York Trilogy. It still amazes every new generation of students and other readers.

PA: I know you insist on a theoretical reading, and the correspondence between language and movement is obviously there in the text, but I have to let you know that the monologue by Peter Stillman is one of the rare times when the first draft was the finished draft for me. I didn’t revise a word. It came out in exactly the way it is in the book. I simply got into it—I was him. For the hours and minutes it took to write that passage, I was Peter Stillman.

IBS: That’s very strange. I’m wondering about sources of inspiration here. You mentioned Milton earlier, and I know you’ve read extensively about biblical notions of language: the Adamic principle, the Tower of Babel, the Fall of Man, the Fall of Language.

PA: They were crucial. Especially the idea of Adam naming all the plants and animals and objects in the world. This is the human enterprise, this is what God gives man as his central task: name the world!

PA: And so, words and things were the same, interconnected, as Stillman says. After the Fall, they were severed from one another. They become arbitrary signs and no longer express the essence. It’s a fable explaining something about human life.

PA: Or tries to. We mustn’t lose sight of the emotional content of the book. It’s not just a philosophical puzzle. There’s a real story here, and Quinn is a real character: a man with a body and a life. The question of the child in City of Glass is essential, and the loss of Quinn’s son resonates throughout the story. We must also think about the role of the city in all of this, too. It’s no accident that during the long passage when Quinn is walking around New York and sits down to record his observations, he’s mostly writing about the broken, down-and-out people on the streets. He’s sitting in front of the United Nations, which, in several ways, is the modern Babel—in New York City. I didn’t make a big point of it, but the location was deliberately chosen to forge that link.

IBS: You are right, we must talk about Quinn. One of the most striking features of this character is his ardent devotion to the case and to walking. He walks tirelessly, without direction or purpose. Is he a flâneur, a peripatetic?

By wandering aimlessly, all places became equal, and it no longer mattered where he was. On his best walks, he was able to feel that he was nowhere. And this, finally, was all he ever asked of things: to be nowhere. (4)

PA: I think the aimlessness of it is what attracts him. He doesn’t want to have a fixed destination. He’s a man in pain, a man with sorrow in his heart. He’s disconnected from life because of his losses. I think these walks are ways to forget. They’re an escape from himself. Wandering brings him a kind of peace. He’s doing it to keep himself going. Some people drink, some people take drugs—Quinn walks.

IBS: So, walking here isn’t an appropriation of urban space? It’s not a way of taking in the city as when Auggie in Smoke takes that same photo every morning of his little corner?

PA: His little corner of the city, yes. These things are related to each another.

PA: They’re arbitrary. They document whatever is happening at exactly seven a.m. every morning—click. That’s it. It’s one way of organizing reality for yourself. We all have to bring order to the chaos of our daily lives, we all have to figure out a way to keep ourselves from going mad.

IBS: Then, what about Stillman Sr.’s walks? They take the physical shape of letters, which spell four words that are key to the story:

Quinn then copied out the letters in order: OWEROFBAB. After fiddling with them for a quarter of an hour, switching them around, pulling them apart, rearranging the sequence, he returned to the original order and wrote them out in the following manner: OWER OF BAB. The solution seemed so grotesque that his nerve almost failed him. Making due allowances for the fact that he had missed the first four days and that Stillman had not yet finished, the answer seemed inescapable: THE TOWER OF BABEL. (85)

This is mind-boggling! I was completely stunned the first few times I read it. Is it really happening, I mean in the reality of the narrative, or is Quinn merely interpreting or imagining this crucial connection between walks and words?

PA: Whether Stillman is doing it on purpose or whether it’s purely random—who knows? As the author, I can’t give you an answer. Maybe yes, maybe no. The point is that Quinn attaches meaning to Stillman’s cryptic routes through the city. That’s the important thing here. He’s getting sucked up into something that might not be real.

IBS: So, he finds meaning in it, and whether it’s real or not doesn’t really matter?

PA: There’s the other curious thing that happens to Quinn, probably the most enigmatic occurrence in the book: toward the end when Quinn is alone in the room, someone slips in trays of food for him. We never know who does that.

PA: Perhaps. To me it seems perfectly normal that an author should want to feed one of his beloved characters.

IBS: So, once again, you have the author crossing the ontological barrier between the three-dimensional world and the two-dimensional. You can’t do that.

IBS: So, the “nowhere” Quinn finds is not just a kind of equilibrium? It’s also a space where he’s at peace—and indeed safe if the author, his maker, is looking after him: “Quinn was nowhere now. He had nothing, he knew nothing, he knew that he knew nothing.” (124)

PA: It’s a kind of exorcism. An emptying out. He had set up a life for himself that allowed him to be no one. He writes under a pseudonym, his central character is a detective, Max Work, he has an agent he’s never met in person. In more senses than one, he’s been able to erase himself. Even so, he’s not passive. He goes to the opera in the winter, he goes to baseball games in the summer, he takes his walks and he writes his books. And he reads. He reads a lot.

Quinn no longer had any interest in himself. He wrote about the stars, the earth, his hopes for mankind. He felt that his words had been severed from him, that now they were part of the world at large, as real and specific as a stone, or a lake, or a flower. They no longer had anything to do with him. (156)

Then he disappears, naked in that sterile room. Even if there’s an author who feeds him, Quinn disappears. Where to? Into language? Flesh become words? Or back to some prelapsarian beginning?

PA: As I see it, he evaporates out of the story. So, whatever happens to Quinn, he’s in the next phase of his life. He’s out of the story now. As the narrator says at the end, “And wherever he may have disappeared to, I wish him luck.” I wish him luck, too.

PA: No, Quinn pops up again in The Locked Room—if it’s the same Quinn—and Anna finds the passport of a man named Quinn in In the Country of Last Things, and Dan Quinn, a university professor, turns out to be Walt’s nephew in Mr. Vertigo, and then, in Travels in the Scriptorium, Quinn reappears as Mr. Blank’s lawyer. But we can’t be certain if all these Quinns are the same person. Perhaps. And then again, perhaps not. It could be another Quinn. It probably is another Quinn.

IBS: At first, we think Ghosts is a perfectly straightforward detective novel: Blue is hired by White to watch and report on Black. Then, suddenly, the tables are turned and we don’t know what to believe anymore. Nor does the protagonist:

Blue no longer knows what to think. It seems perfectly plausible to him that he is also being watched, observed by another in the same way that he has been observing Black. If that is the case, then he has never been free. (200)

PA: Ghosts is a more direct engagement with the detective novel than either of the other two parts of the Trilogy. As I said earlier, it derives from the play, Blackouts. It’s the first book I wrote in the present tense, and it’s the first time I left out quotation marks to indicate direct speech. The narrative voice in the beginning is first-person plural, “we,” but then, for the most part, the story is told in the third person. It has an altogether different tone from anything I’ve ever written before or since. There’s a comic feel to the narration, to the whole tone, in fact. Blue is a kind of ridiculous character, but, at the same time, everything is described in a deadly serious way.

IBS: The fact that you’ve named each character after a color adds to the sense of artificiality?

PA: I wanted to create a fable-like effect and emphasized this by giving untraditional names to the characters. It could have been X, Y, and Z, but I decided on colors: Green, White, Black, Brown, Blue. They’re all real names, but artificially grouped like this, we see them as colors, and they cease to refer to human beings but become indications of something else. We can read this as a comment on the defeat of Stillman’s theory, and the questions of language raised in City of Glass are opened again here in Ghosts. I’ve always been fascinated by the question of color, philosophically, visually, emotionally. Words cannot convey color. I cannot describe to a blind person what red is. Color must be experienced. You only know what red is when you see it. In the same way, you only know a human being by interacting with that person. It’s a kind of tautology, but that’s what motivated me to use those strange names.

IBS: So, could we say that these color names explain the title? They indicate that the individual character is unimportant; he’s merely a form with no real substance: a ghost.

PA: Perhaps, but we must also take into account the real ghosts in the story: Lincoln, Thoreau, Whitman—and all the famous dead people who walked down Orange Street in Brooklyn. They’re all ghosts. So, in a sense, are writers:

Writing is a solitary business. It takes over your life. In some sense, a writer has no life of his own. Even when he’s there, he’s not really there.

Another ghost.

Exactly. (209)

IBS: This is where Blue has become desperate to leave his solitary room and to be taken off the case. In fact, he wants out of the story.

[T]his book offers him nothing. There is no story, no plot, no action—nothing but a man sitting alone in a room and writing a book. That’s all there is, Blue realizes, and he no longer wants any part of it. But how to get out? How to get out of the room that is the book that will go on being written for as long as he stays in the room? (202)

PA: Blue is stuck, a prisoner of the case he’s been hired to work on. So, how to get out? He can only get out by breaking into the room opposite, smashing things, shaking it all up. It becomes extremely violent at the end.

IBS: Yes, it does. You said earlier that this is a book about reading a book, but it’s also a story about writing, isn’t it?

PA: Yes, of course. You’re reading a book about a man writing a book, which creates the impression of what it means to read a book. There’s hardly any action in Ghosts. The narrative is propelled by myriad digressions—for instance, the reference to Walden and the story about Whitman’s brain, which is a true story, as are all the stories about the Brooklyn Bridge.

IBS: They have a strong effect on the reading. All these surprises, we don’t see them coming, and you offer no explanations.

PA: No, because in fables you don’t explain. People just are, and they act. Think of Mr. Vertigo. There’s no explanation about Master Yehudi. Other books of mine, the so-called more realistic ones, go into great detail about who the characters are, their motives, their pasts, the places they come from. In Ghosts, I didn’t want to give away too much. Blue is everyman, he’s any man. Black hires Blue to watch him, as if driven to live out the Berkeleyan principle, “to be is to be perceived.” He needs a witness to confirm his existence in the world. The pivotal moment is when Blue steals Black’s papers and discovers that

they are nothing more than his own reports. There they are, one after the other, the weekly accounts, all spelled out in black and white, meaning nothing, as far from the truth of the case as silence would have been. (224)

IBS: And so, we realize, it’s the surveillee, Black himself, who has ordered the surveillance. Black is also White, isn’t he?

PA: It’s one person. He comes in disguises. Later, he also wears a mask at the post office.

IBS: Oh yes, postbox no. 1001, alluding, I assume, to Scheherazade’s fables in Arabian Nights. This is where the boundary between factual reports and fiction becomes completely blurred.

IBS: The Locked Room tells the wonderful story of an asymmetrical male relationship in which the nameless protagonist is drawn into an intricate web of loyalties and obsession spun by his childhood friend, Fanshawe. The story both opens and ends with the uncanny proximity of Fanshawe. In this way, I think, he is a “ghost.”

For if I could convince myself that I was looking for him, then it necessarily followed that he was somewhere else—somewhere beyond me, beyond the limits of my life. But I had been wrong. Fanshawe was exactly where I was, and he had been there since the beginning. (344)

Fanshawe regularly places himself in these confined empty spaces: the cardboard box, the grave, the locked room.

Fanshawe alone in that room, condemned to a mythical solitude—living perhaps, breathing perhaps, dreaming God knows what. This room, I now discovered, was located inside my skull. (345)

The impact of that realization is so strong that the narrator loses track of himself.

PA: Precisely because he has imagined Fanshawe so vividly. This is the essence: “Fanshawe was exactly where I was.” This is the obsession. It makes perfect sense to me.

IBS: Each of the protagonists of the books in The New York Trilogy has a similar obsession with another man, which prompts the grinding surveillance, the intense observation of the other, the endless scrutiny of clues.

PA: Yes, there are quite a number, in fact. In this book, more than with any of the other novels I’ve written, I took things from my own life and used them. It’s not something I normally do. You will see as we go along that in most of my books I’ve used little bits and pieces from my life, but never in such a concentrated way as here. There’s no particular reason for it; it’s just material that was close to me and that I found interesting. For instance, the narrator and Fanshawe come from a town very much like the one I grew up in in New Jersey. I worked on an oil tanker and lived in Paris—just as Fanshawe does. I was a field worker for the 1970 census, and the old composer Fanshawe gives the refrigerator to, Ivan Wyshnegradsky, was a real person. Ivan was my friend. He was a quarter-tone composer; he owned one of three quarter-tone pianos in the world. (I have to say, just in parentheses, that when I was in Toronto last week, I found a recording of Ivan’s quarter-tone pieces for piano. I was thrilled, positively overjoyed.) And the incident in the graveyard the day Fanshawe’s father dies is something that happened to a friend of mine. He was sixteen, he lived in Chicago, his father was dying. He went down into an empty grave, the snow was falling in his face. When he went back home afterward, he learned his father had died that day. He told it to me so vividly, I remember every detail. What else? I have a feeling I’m forgetting things. Ah yes, Norwegian Christmas, that’s from my own experience, too. At the same time, everything is make-believe. It’s a novel. There was no Fanshawe in my life.

PA: Yes, but that’s a book. I don’t know if you’ve ever read it. It’s not very good.

IBS: I haven’t, but I know the story of how Hawthorne tried to burn every copy that was printed.

PA: The point here is that the moment you use autobiographical material in a novel, it becomes fiction. So it doesn’t really matter where it comes from.

He had answered the question by asking another question, and therefore everything remained open, unfinished, to be started again. I lost my way after the first word, and from then on I could only grope ahead, faltering in the darkness, blinded by the book that had been written for me. And yet, underneath this confusion, I felt there was something too willed, something too perfect, as though in the end the only thing he had really wanted was to fail—even to the point of failing himself. (370)

PA: I imagined Fanshawe’s book as something Blanchot might have written, but even more difficult and obscure, the kind of writing that cancels itself out, almost with every sentence, every thought, so that, ultimately, it’s confusing. It seems to have a beautiful, coherent surface, but as you penetrate the text, it starts to make no sense at all.

IBS: Fanshawe self-destructs in much the same way as his writing. Is the text correlated with its author?

The entire story comes down to what happened at the end, and without that end inside me now, I could not have started this book . . . I have been struggling to say goodbye to something for a long time now, and this struggle is all that really matters. The story is not in the words; it’s in the struggle. (346)

PA: The narrator of the third book. He’s the author of all three stories. The first two are metaphorical enactments of what he’d been living through, and now he’s able to tell his own story straight.

PA: No, not necessarily, because it’s a fiction. The first two novels are fictions, and the third is supposed to be “reality.” The truth in the fiction.

IBS: This paradoxical relation between “truth” and “fiction” is prominent in each of the novels in the Trilogy. At the beginning of this conversation, you said that all three stories illustrate the passage toward “learning to live with ambiguity.” It seems to me that this process is determined by a form of self-effacement in relation to language and being and that, in a sense, all three stories turn on precisely this erasure. At the risk of repeating myself, if we go back to the description of Fanshawe’s writing in The Locked Room, the narrator says:

All the words were familiar to me, and yet they seemed to have been put together strangely, as though their final purpose was to cancel each other out. I can think of no other way to express it. Each sentence erased the sentence before it, each paragraph made the next paragraph impossible. (370)

This lucidly describes the peculiar way in which Peter Stillman speaks in City of Glass:

My name is Peter Stillman. Perhaps you have heard of me, but more than likely not. No matter. That is not my real name. My real name I cannot remember. Excuse me. (18)

Similarly, in Ghosts, Blue is disturbed by the ephemerality of meaning in language:

It’s as though his words, instead of drawing out the facts and making them sit palpably in the world, have induced them to disappear. (175)

PA: That’s an interesting point. I think I said something to that effect in The Invention of Solitude:

The rampant, totally mystifying force of contradiction. I understand now that each fact is nullified by the next fact, that each thought engenders an equal and opposite thought. (The Invention of Solitude, 61)

IBS: Yes, one thing cancels out the next: “My name is Peter Stillman; yes, no; it is and it isn’t.”

PA: And Fanshawe, who has been canceling himself out, writes a book that nullifies itself. Right. As for Blue, nothing makes sense to him anymore, he’s completely lost. The more he writes, the less he understands.

IBS: This movement of self-erasure, or nullification, is key in all three stories, isn’t it?

PA: Yes. They’re all going over similar ground, but in different ways, each one in a different tone of voice. They belong together. It’s a group. That’s why it’s a trilogy [laughs].

²³ Auster made two films with Lou Reed, Blue in the Face and Lulu on the Bridge.