IBS: As you said the other day when we were talking about Oracle Night, Travels in the Scriptorium is essentially a book about the relationship between the author and his characters. It’s also a story about an old man who wakes up to find himself in a kind of laboratory undergoing an experiment or a treatment he doesn’t understand. He’s seriously troubled both physically and mentally: he can barely walk, he’s uncertain about the correct connection between words and the objects they name. Infrequent flashes of memory haunt him, and he fears the revenge of characters who have suffered at his hands. But Anna Blume is there to look after him. Fanshawe, Quinn, Marco Fogg, Benjamin Sachs, and other protagonists from previous novels also reappear. It all takes place in the course of a single day.
PA: For some reason, I started seeing a picture in my head of an old man sitting on the edge of a bed—dressed in striped pajamas, with slippers on his feet and his hands on his knees. I had no idea what it was about. The image kept coming back to me, and the more I thought about it, the more I came to suspect that it was a vision of myself as an old man, a very old man. That’s how this novel started—out of that image. Yesterday, you said to me, “All your books took years of thinking before you wrote them.” Not this one. It poured out of me.
IBS: Is there any inspiration from real life in this strange setting?
PA: As you noticed, the book is dedicated to Siri’s father, and he inspired some of the things that are in it. Years before he died, a tumor was discovered in one of his legs, and after the tumor was cut out, walking became close to impossible for him. He was still mentally active, but more or less immobilized. He had emphysema, too, which is awful, and that restricted his movements even further. Through it all, he forged on with a number of writing projects—a personal memoir and a family history—sitting in his desk chair in his room in Minnesota, a chair with wheels, just like the chair in my book. Another thing that comes from him is the joke about the man who goes into the bar and orders three drinks. Siri’s father told me that joke, and I used it as a secret homage to him. And also because it’s spectacularly funny.
IBS: Did he know you were going to dedicate it to him? Did he see the manuscript?
PA: No, he was already dead before I started writing it. There’s also a minor autobiographical reference in the book: the little memory Mr. Blank has about trying to kiss the girl while they’re out on a pond ice-skating. That comes from when I was quite young, probably ten or eleven years old. When I tried to kiss her she had no idea what I was doing. “Why would you want to kiss me?” she said. She simply wasn’t old enough to understand. Such a painful memory. Those are about the only private things I can think of.
IBS: Could we argue that, in a sense, there’s an autobiographical dimension to the cast of characters in Travels in the Scriptorium? I mean, they’re all figures you have invented for other novels now revived from your previous work, indeed recalled from your memory—where they still live—restored to life in this new book.
PA: They’re my characters, of course. Which in some way turns me into Mr. Blank. Then again, I’m not Mr. Blank. He doesn’t realize he’s written novels, he thinks he’s sent real people out on dangerous missions, and so fact and fiction overlap—even if it’s all within the world of the book. Still, we mustn’t forget that there’s also a humorous side to all this. And a certain eeriness to it as well.
IBS: Yes, it’s an unusually multilayered narrative. This is very much reflected also in the way the novel was received.
PA: You said there’s a website that has gathered together conflicting reviews and interpretations. This is interesting to me.
IBS: Ah yes, Open Letter Monthly issued an essay reviewing the reviews.57
PA: I think it’s good that a book can inspire many different readings.
IBS: I’ve rarely seen such diversity as in the reviews of Travels in the Scriptorium. Some claim that it’s “a fable about Guantanamo and the CIA’s secret prison networks”; others that it’s an “homage to Beckett” with “nods to Kafka”; still others that it’s an elegantly construed comment on the modern human condition in general.
PA: There’s probably some truth to all of them. Not the Beckett-Kafka business, but the other readings are plausible. As for me, I was primarily thinking about old age and how many people there are like Mr. Blank: elderly people alone in rooms, unsure of who and where they are, living in a kind of haze. I was trying to capture that, but then, of course, there’s a lot more going on, and, yes, there are explicit political references in this book. The horror called “extraordinary rendition” was very much on my mind as I was writing it—one of the nastiest, most brutal things the American government has ever done. And then, buried in the center of the novel, there’s the story about the “Confederation” written by a supposedly young John Trause, which was inspired by my response to the war in Iraq. Empires need an enemy in order to unite their people. If you don’t have a real enemy, you invent one.
IBS: Your readers are also intrigued by the crossing-over of characters from your other novels.58
PA: I kept asking myself, “Will Travels in the Scriptorium be comprehensible to someone who has never read anything else I’ve written?”
IBS: That’s also what the reviewers ask, and some of them argue that it’s actually an advantage not to have read your other novels. But that’s just one opinion among others.
PA: In the end, I don’t think it matters. That was the conclusion I came to, in any case. The book is a work unto itself. Even if it refers to things outside itself, you don’t have to know what those references are. If you do know, well, it only becomes richer.
IBS: Where did the idea come from of bringing characters from previous books back to life? Were their stories somehow not finished?
PA: I don’t know. Or can’t remember. When I realized that Mr. Blank could be an imaginary version of myself at an advanced age, I started looking back at what I’ve done with my life. We were talking about this the other day. Mostly, I’ve made up stories with imaginary people in them. And those characters are going to outlive me. What a strange thought that is. As the narrator explains, without the author
IBS: I see what you mean. The Guardian reviewer59 asserts that the purpose of Travels in the Scriptorium “seems to be to prove that the inside of Auster’s skull can become extremely crowded at times.” Would that be accurate?
PA: Well, it is crowded, yes.
IBS: We’ve talked quite a bit about the special bond between male characters in your books, but here, of course, by far the strongest connection is between Mr. Blank and Anna Blume.
PA: She was his first “charge,” and he has a deep affection for her. Just as I do. And now we learn that Anna was the second wife of David Zimmer, who died of a heart attack in The Book of Illusions, the same David Zimmer who was waiting to hear from her in Moon Palace. Mr. Blank sent Anna on a dangerous mission—to the country of last things—and she suffered terribly because of it. But she’s forgiven him now, and because of that forgiveness, she’s the one who takes care of him, who treats him with the greatest tenderness. There’s also Sophie, whom he likes as well, but it’s a different relationship. He doesn’t feel the same intense attachment to her—even if he does want to touch her breasts [laughs]. Without humor this book would be deadly. It would be impossible to read it.
IBS: That’s true.
PA: Then there’s Quinn. Good old Quinn reappears. Again and again, Quinn comes back into my books, which we noted earlier. But, of course, it’s always a different Quinn. This one says, “I was your first operative.” There’s also the British police detective, Flood, who comes in from The Locked Room. Originally, he was mentioned only in a passing remark—he had no life.
IBS: Exactly. He appears in Fanshawe’s book, Neverland, which is one of the brilliant books we never get to read. And so, he’s the invention of an invention: doubly fictitious.
PA: In fact, he’s not even there as a person—only by virtue of a dream. Oh, here it is: “(Montag’s house in chapter seven; Flood’s dream in chapter thirty)” (The New York Trilogy, 324).
In parentheses only. Then, here in Travels in the Scriptorium, Flood says, “Without that dream, I’m nothing, literally nothing.” (53)
IBS: That’s a very small part indeed.
PA: Yes, the smallest allusion possible.
IBS: But you hadn’t forgotten him, obviously.
PA: No. I thought it would be interesting to bring back the most minor character from all the books I’ve written. I turned him into a cockney policeman [laughs].
IBS: [Laughs] There was no life. There was nothing more than a dream invented by a writer who is himself a figment of someone’s mind—mentioned in parentheses only! That’s really funny.
PA: Given this background, he’s very resentful, of course, and he has evil designs on the old man.
IBS: Flood and the other transtextual characters are referred to as “charges” and “operatives.” Can you possibly see your work as a kind of “operation”? The setting here is almost like a laboratory: there’s a camera for round-the-clock observation, and the narration is written in a very clinical, scientific tone.
PA: Mr. Blank is clearly undergoing some kind of treatment, an experiment of some sort that he himself seems to have initiated. Again, you can read this in different ways: it could be standard treatment for the elderly, it could be a method for recovering or even reliving his past, it could be something else entirely. There are some mysterious things going on. Think of all the difficulties he has with the simplest functions of his body—and his mind.
IBS: As the inventor of all this hardship for your protagonists, do you think you are possibly a little troubled by their predicaments? Do you feel responsible for sending them out on difficult and perilous missions?
PA: Well, that’s what I did. These poor people have suffered, some of them have died, they’ve had injuries . . .
IBS: Suffered losses. Sometimes terrible losses.
PA: Yes, all these different people . . . I’ve put them through their paces, as they say.
The damned specters, Mr. Blank says. They’re back again.
Specters?
My victims. All the people I’ve made suffer over the years. They’re coming after me now to take their revenge. (81)
If you took it seriously, in other words, if these were real people, what a monstrous person I would be. Still, it seems that it was necessary somehow. It’s Sophie who says, “You did what you had to do.” I can’t remember where. Do you know what I’m talking about?
IBS: Yes, it’s when she’s talking about her marriage to Fanshawe and we learn that she had two boys—named after you, I assume: Ben60 and Paul.
PA: [Laughs.]
IBS: Earlier, you said that Mr. Blank is and is not you. I was wondering, given the fact that your work is reviewed, even judged, all the time, do you sometimes feel as if you’re being watched like Mr. Blank? He’s under constant observation. You may not be, but certainly your work is being assessed and weighed all over the world all the time.
PA: Under microscopes and magnifying glasses. It’s true. I never really thought about it in that way.
IBS: Just look at what I’m doing [laughs].
PA: I know. Well, that’s an interesting interpretation. Maybe there’s some truth to it. It may be how the idea came to me.
IBS: If we look at the opening lines:
PA: Yes, the camera clicks every second.
IBS: It’s in the ceiling, so the camera is inside the room. And so, of course, we think, “Aha, there’s somebody operating that camera, somebody outside looking in.” Mr. Blank is being observed—like Black in Ghosts.
PA: I wanted to see if I could write something confined to a small space—something with no geography, so to speak—an entire book set in one room.
IBS: Yes, there’s a kind of claustrophobic feeling to it.
PA: It was intentional. I definitely wanted that.
IBS: What is it about the door? The “eternal enigma of the door” (101). Why doesn’t he just try the door?
PA: Because he keeps forgetting, and then he’s afraid because he doesn’t want to accept the fact that he’s locked in—even if he’s agreed to his confinement. I think the inconsistencies in Mr. Blank’s thinking have to do with the effect of the drugs he’s taking. His judgments are wobbly, uncertain. He has trouble following a train of thought. And then—the discovery about the nailed-shut window horrifies him. After that, he’s too scared to deal with the door.
IBS: Scared of what he might find?
PA: Exactly.
IBS: What he finds inside the room also upsets him. Photos of characters from your previous novels and manuscripts he recognizes but cannot place.
PA: This story, the story within the novel, is something I started working on back in the 1980s. It turned out to be one of those projects I could never quite figure out how to do. But nothing is ever completely lost, is it? It remains in your head, and fragments of earlier, unfinished work can sometimes find their way into later work. We talked about this in connection with the Nick Bowen story in Oracle Night.
This story, originally one of my own abandoned projects, which Trause gives to Sidney in Oracle Night, is then developed in this later novel [laughs]. Without it, Travels in the Scriptorium would be impoverished, I think. You need that material about another imprisonment outside the room in order to give the book a little air. It’s an imaginary exit from the confinement.
IBS: I see, yes, it’s the only thing that points beyond the room.
PA: The political subtext of the novel is reinforced by Trause’s story of that figment country. Every now and then, Mr. Blank thinks he’s being held by government authorities for something he’s done—but which he can’t remember, of course.
IBS: Yes, there is that Kafkian sense of paranoia.
PA: Again, this book isn’t one of those puzzles in which every piece fits neatly together. It’s a collection of different pieces with spaces in between them for you, the reader, to fill in for yourself.
IBS: [Laughs] All right. Speaking of the reader, your narrator addresses his audience directly a few times, for instance, here:
Who delivers the impassive, at times almost scientific account of Mr. Blank’s day in this confined space? It’s somebody who is studying him like a rat in a cage. Who is the coldly objective—and radically omniscient—narrator?
PA: Toward the end of the book, we find out that the author of Travels in the Scriptorium is Fanshawe—don’t ask me what N. R. stands for. Fanshawe never had a first name. Here, he’s one of the people who’ve been observing Mr. Blank.
IBS: This is where the narrative curls back upon itself and repeats the first two or three pages in verbatim repetition: “The old man sits on the edge of the narrow bed.”
PA: Yes, it continues for a couple of pages to the point where:
Then the voice changes, and this is no doubt Fanshawe: “It will never end. For Mr. Blank is one of us now” (143), meaning he’s now a character in a book, “and struggle though he might to understand his predicament, he will always be lost.”
IBS: Has the author now been subsumed or circumscribed or imprisoned by his linguistic creations?
PA: One of those things, surely. It’s interesting that he can now predict what will happen because he is writing the story:
In a short while, a woman will enter the room and feed him his dinner. I haven’t yet decided who that woman will be, but if all goes well between now and then, I will send in Anna. That will make Mr. Blank happy, and when all is said and done, he has probably suffered enough for one day. Anna will feed Mr. Blank his dinner, then wash him and put him to bed. Mr. Blank will lie awake in the dark for some time, listening to the cries of birds in the far distance, but then his eyes will at last grow heavy, and his lids will close. He will fall asleep, and when he wakes up in the morning, the treatment will begin again. But for now it is still the day it has always been since the first word of this report, and now is the moment when Anna kisses Mr. Blank on the cheek and tucks him in, and now is the moment when she stands up from the bed and begins walking toward the door. Sleep well, Mr. Blank.
Lights out. (144–145; closing paragraph)
IBS: So the narrative focus keeps shifting between subject and object?
PA: It’s like receding mirrors. Everything is contained in everything else. At once inside and outside. Remember Thomas Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus, “the tailor stitched”—or “the tailor re-tailored”? Well, here I suppose you could say we have “the writer rewritten.”
IBS: Yes, the passages we have just read are radically self-reflexive. They open to questions your readers and interpreters naturally ask: Does the author, does Mr. Blank, now exist in the book only? Is he being drawn further and further into fictions within layers of fiction?
PA: Yes, because what you finally have is the book: This is the world. And this is the only place where he can be now.
IBS: Even if a page is only two-dimensional, made of ink and paper? The rest is in the reader’s interpretation, isn’t it? Characters come alive, images are conjured up as we read . . .
PA: Ink and paper form a three-dimensional world in our minds. But in the end, books are just paper.
IBS: Yes, I can see why you are intrigued by the idea that imagined beings made of ink and paper outlive real people. Words are stronger than the body in Travels in the Scriptorium. And speaking of words, you play with the relationship between language and the concrete world: at the beginning of the day, they match, but later—just as in In the Country of Last Things—the word is divorced from the object it’s meant to name.
PA: Someone has switched the labels on him.
IBS: This “switching operation” astonishes and upsets Mr. Blank, and he’s desperately trying to understand what’s happened:
PA: Again, it’s the people involved in the experiment. It’s another test.
IBS: What is being tested?
PA: Whether he believes in and is still capable of understanding the coherence of a world in which things have one name and one name only—that “table” can only be a table. It’s not a bed. If suddenly it becomes a bed, then all order would break down. Language would disintegrate into chaos, and Mr. Blank rebels against it. He’s horrified.
IBS: Yes, not unlike Stillman Sr. in City of Glass, Mr. Blank struggles to put signifiers and signifieds back in order. It’s hard work, he breaks three fingernails in the process and suffers an attack of nausea as a consequence. Is there an intimate relationship, in this book, between linguistic and digestive mechanisms: between word movements and bowel movements?
PA: “Word movements and bowel movements.” [Laughs] That’s funny.
IBS: [Laughs] What about his amnesia?
PA: He has some brief flickers of memory. For instance, he remembers holding a little child in his arms—maybe his child? He’s not sure, but he thinks so. Then he can’t remember who the child might have been. It’s the blur of dementia that I was so interested in trying to capture—not in medical terms, but in some kind of interior way. I know it’s a strange book. It can stand on its own, but maybe it makes more sense if you read it as the first part of a diptych. The other is the next book, Man in the Dark.62
57 Sam Sacks, “Peer Review: Paul Auster Perplexes,” Open Letter Monthly, http://www.openlettersmonthly.com/peer-review-paul-auster-perplexes/.
58 Anna Blume and Samuel Farr from In the Country of Last Things; Daniel Quinn, Peter Stillman, Sophie, Fanshawe (and J. P. Flood) from The New York Trilogy; Marco Fogg from Moon Palace; Ben Sachs from Leviathan; John Trause from Oracle Night.
59 Alfred Hickling, “Where’s the Exit?,” The Guardian, October 14, 2006, http://www.theguardian.com/books/2006/oct/14/fiction.paulauster.
60 Auster’s middle name is Benjamin.
61 The Faber and Henry Holt editions mistakenly say “his.”
62 In the United States, Travels in the Scriptorium and Man in the Dark are now available in a single volume: Day/Night: Two Novels (New York: Picador, 2013).