IBS: In Invisible we follow the life of Adam Walker by way of the relationships that form him: the intense bond with his magnificent sister Gwyn and the ties with their dead brother, the disturbing alliance with Rudolf Born, and his sexual obsession with Margot. The stories are told through a prism of shifting perspectives set in very different types of writing. The New York Times names it the finest novel you have ever written. It really is an unusually absorbing story of violence, loss, sex, and difficult love firmly set in the political climate of 1968. You were a student in those days. Did you take part in events similar to those you describe in the book?
PA: The facts are that Adam Walker is my age and he’s a student at Columbia University. He has the same job in the library that I once had. The Paris hotel is based on a hotel where I stayed: a dump that cost seven francs a night, which was the equivalent of a dollar and forty cents back then. I was there in 1965, he goes there in 1967. It was a difficult time in my life, amply illustrated by the letters I’ll be publishing in my next book.66 The West End Bar, where certain things happen in the novel, was a real place. It still exists in a different form. It was famously one of Dylan Thomas’s watering holes, and it was the bar to go to in those days. I spent most of my undergraduate years hanging out in there.
IBS: So, in many ways, this book is a walk down memory lane?
PA: I wrote Invisible in 2007 and 2008. The previous year, we started celebrating fortieth anniversaries of many of the crucial events from the late 1960s: the Six-Day War, the Newark and Detroit riots, the nationwide student strike against the Vietnam War. And then, of course, even more of these fortieth anniversaries occurred the following year—after all, 1968 was the year of years. You were probably just a little baby then.
IBS: I was born in 1961.
PA: Well, it was an important time. It was the year of the Tet Offensive, which greatly intensified the fighting in Vietnam; it was the year Johnson announced his decision not to run for reelection. The country had split down the middle. It was a crazy time, an impossible time. It was the year of the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy. It was the year of the violence at the Democratic convention in Chicago. I don’t know if these long-ago events ring any bells for you.
IBS: Absolutely, but more from a European perspective.
PA: So you know it was the year of immense student upheavals in Europe as well. Politically, there were radical things going on in Germany and France. There was the Russian invasion of Prague. All the media attention in connection with the anniversaries made me want to go back to those days. That was one of the inspirations for this book. We had our big demonstrations at Columbia, where the university was shut down during eight days of sit-ins. There was a police riot on campus, and seven hundred of us were arrested one violent night at the end of April. In April 2008, there were fortieth anniversary events at Columbia—a weekend of panel discussions, readings, and films. I went to a couple of those gatherings and met people I hadn’t seen in decades. It was very moving, I have to say. One always hears about how the student radicals of the sixties sold out to become bankers, stockbrokers, and corporate lawyers, but with my Columbia classmates that wasn’t true. Most of the people I saw that weekend had maintained the ideals of their youth. They were community organizers, legal aid lawyers, people still fighting the good fight. I mention all these things because it’s important to know the historical context in order to understand my protagonist, Adam Walker. He’s one of those people: he becomes a lawyer and a community activist, mostly in poor black neighborhoods. Walker is a product of that time. So is the Frenchman Rudolf Born, but in a radically different way, since he’s older and has lived through France’s misadventure in Algeria as a soldier, an interrogator, and, finally, a torturer. When I lived in Paris in the early seventies, I had many conversations with people of Born’s age and older about the Algerian War. How bloody it was. The Paris police were continually rounding up people, arresting people, and there were many murders in the city, political murders of Algerians, whose bodies were dumped in the Seine. It was a dangerous time, the assassination attempt on de Gaulle, dark mayhem everywhere. Born is someone who emerges from that darkness.
IBS: Yes, he certainly is ominous.
PA: Anyway, that’s the background of the novel. The book itself, of course, doesn’t dwell much on those things. But they’re all there, hovering around everything that happens.
IBS: Are there any autobiographical elements in your narrator, James Freeman? He’s a mature celebrated writer.
PA: Freeman is a shadowy character. Not much information is given about him, but I imagine him to be someone rather like myself.
IBS: Also: Adam Walker is trying to write something about George Oppen. Oppen is one of your favorite poets, isn’t he?
PA: Yes, and he later became a friend. The reason Oppen is in the book is because he was one of the few American poets of that time who managed to take the personal and integrate it into the political. He’s both a private and a public poet. His work is impregnated with a kind of wisdom that is rare in American poetry. My character, Walker, is very attracted to this.
IBS: He’s also attracted to the medieval poet, Bertran de Born,67 whose work celebrated war and violence.
PA: One of the finest poets who ever lived, the man who appears in Dante’s Inferno holding his own severed head. I’ve never read poetry like his. It’s the most savage call to battle I’ve ever come across. I translated his poem for the book myself because I wasn’t satisfied with the existing versions in English. It was very hard work. I don’t know Provençal, but I managed to get hold of some French translations, and those helped me.
IBS: In the novel, you attribute the translation to Walker. You also have the young girl, Cécile, struggling with her translation of Lycophron.68
PA: Lycophron you probably remember from The Invention of Solitude. In “The Book of Memory,” I discuss the translations of Lycophron’s long poem about Cassandra. Q., here, is Pascal Quignard, now a well-known novelist and essayist in France. When he was about twenty years old, he did an extraordinary translation of Lycophron into French, a masterpiece of translation. Pascal told me there had been only one English translation of this poem. It was by a certain Lord Royston, the Earl of Gloucester. I tracked it down in the Columbia University Library. This was in 1974. I found the Lord Royston translation amazing: a brilliant, wild English poem based on Lycophron’s poem—another masterpiece of translation by another young man. Lord Royston, it turned out, drowned in a shipwreck off the Swedish coast in 1808 at the age of twenty-three or twenty-four. He would have been a great English writer, but this translation is pretty much the only major thing he did. It’s a poem that has stayed with me all my life, and I wanted to reexamine it in the novel. So, both of the translated texts in Invisible are dense and difficult poems by largely forgotten writers. It’s impossible to produce a literal rendering of them. As Walker says about Lycophron, “It’s like trying to translate Finnegans Wake into Mandarin” (215). So, yes, there’s quite a bit about translation in Invisible.
IBS: I think you said to me the other day that you took up Bertran de Born on impulse?
PA: Because of the name, first. Born. What a good name that is. And then I remembered that he was a poet. And then I remembered that he appears in Dante. And then . . . all those things became a part of the book. But Born began as Rudolf Born for me, not Bertran de Born, the poet.
IBS: So you weren’t trying to resurrect Bertran de Born from Dante’s Inferno and “put him back together again”? There are so many “broken” people in Invisible.
PA: No, I was interested in Born’s violence. The man in my novel is such an ambiguous character. He’s a villain, brutal and unpredictable, but not evil. He’s also very intelligent and slightly crazy. More disturbed than wicked, I would say. The imbalance is in his character, but exacerbated by experience: I think the Algerian War unhinged him. Margot more than implies this. That’s why he can take out a knife and stab a boy to death. He reacts like the soldier he once was: he’s under attack, so he kills.
IBS: Why does he seek out Adam in the first place?
PA: Gwyn’s theory is that it was a homoerotic attraction. It’s possible.
IBS: You don’t really get a sense of that, though, do you?
PA: Not really, no, but then, why is Born offering to set up the magazine for Walker? He’s certainly not doing it because Margot has asked him to.
IBS: No, he’s the older man playing God to his Adam. He wants to see what happens. It’s just an experiment.
PA: Walker, in retrospect—how naive he was, how stupid, how in the world could he have allowed himself to get sucked up into all this? But these are the kinds of things that happen to us when we’re young and inexperienced.
IBS: It’s in Invisible that you first introduce the second-person narrative and begin to play with shifting points of view across the four heterogeneous parts that constitute the novel:
The perspective changes more radically than ever before in your writing, and you have both Adam and Jim comment on the implications:
This is also an allusion to The Invention of Solitude. Is it a key to understanding the composition of Invisible?
PA: As I told you a long time ago, I started “The Book of Memory” in the first person as a natural outcome of the first part, “Portrait of an Invisible Man.” Then it suddenly came to me that I had to write about myself in the third person. Once I did that, I was able to complete the project.
IBS: Later on, in Sunset Park, Winter Journal, and Report from the Interior, you add a striking new dimension to your writing through second-person narration, but it’s here, in Invisible, that you first begin to fully explore the mechanisms and effects of altering perspectives, isn’t it?
PA: All the novels I’d written up until Invisible had one narrator only. The overall perspective never changes, even if, inside the novels, there are many first- and third-person shifts, say, in Moon Palace or Leviathan or The Book of Illusions. There’s an “I” who’s telling the story about himself and his relation to the other characters, then, suddenly, he’s telling the story about someone else in the third person. For instance, you get Effing’s story in the third person in Moon Palace. The same goes for Benjamin Sachs’s story in Leviathan, and in The Book of Illusions, Hector’s story is also narrated in the third person. So, there are shifts in the earlier novels, but it’s not as extreme as in the last two books.69
IBS: Multiple perspectives make the narrative more complex, don’t they?
PA: Yes, probably.
IBS: Not just with regard to the narrative perspective, it also affects the structure. Maybe the two go hand in hand?
PA: It’s possible. This was the first time I felt the need to use multiple voices. It was also my first foray into writing in the second person, something I found so intriguing that I’ve used it now in Winter Journal and Report from the Interior.
IBS: The effect of the shift in Adam’s narrative from first to second person is dramatic. It’s like watching a cubist painting, where all angles are represented within one frame:
PA: Without this kaleidoscopic perspective, I didn’t think it would work. The passage you just quoted would be no good in either the first or the third person. It needs another point of view. Then, of course, you don’t know if Walker is telling the truth or not.
IBS: That’s right, we don’t know that. He refuses to tell us.
PA: Freeman, the narrator, says, “Everything has been invented, and the reader can be assured that Adam Walker is not Adam Walker.” I can’t remember the page, oh, here it is:
Not even Born is Born. His real name was close to that of another Provençal poet, and I took the liberty to substitute the translation of that other poet by not-Walker with a translation of my own, which means that the remarks about Dante’s Inferno on the first page of this book were not in not-Walker’s original manuscript. Last of all, I don’t suppose it is necessary for me to add that my name is not Jim.
Westfield, New Jersey, is not Westfield, New Jersey. Echo Lake is not Echo Lake . . . (260–261)
IBS: Ah, so even “real” places in the fiction like Westfield, New Jersey, and Echo Lake, where Andy drowns, or your “real” interest in Bertran de Born are twisted here?
PA: Yes, very twisted.
IBS: The narrative structure of Invisible is also twisted as the final of the four sections sets itself apart from the other three: it’s in diary form, and it’s not named after a season. Was there a reason for leaving out “winter”?
PA: Walker’s narrative is in three parts, and the fourth part, Cécile’s diary, is a kind of epilogue to the book.
IBS: Still, it’s quite strange because it so radically breaks the rhythm and the mood.
PA: I’ve done this once before—in the screenplay for Smoke.70 Nearly every American film is devised in three acts. It’s considered to be the one foolproof method for writing successful scripts, and there’s not a man or woman in Hollywood who doesn’t accept this structure as the bedrock premise of all filmmaking. I don’t believe in any rules, so when I wrote Smoke I operated with a completely different structure of interlinking parts. The ending of the movie has nothing to do with what comes before, but without it the movie wouldn’t make any sense. I remember how worried Wayne was about this. He said, “They’re going to kill us. No one will understand what’s going on, the structure is so unusual it’s going to be attacked.” I said, “Don’t worry. It hangs together, it’s going to work.” And it did. No one ever made a fuss about it. As I see it, the fourth and final part of Invisible is similar to that last part of Smoke. It appears to have little to do with what comes before, but if it weren’t there, the book would lose its sense of fullness. So, Cécile is essential here. This is the first book in which I have three narrators. The first book to shift so radically between past and present tense, first-, second-, and third-person narration. It’s a narrative collage. The material seemed to demand it: the way the story was evolving, the way the characters were developing—I simply needed these different perspectives to be able to tell the story.
IBS: It’s strange how the book emerges from the material and takes form as you go along, when, from the reader’s perspective, a novel like Invisible comes across as very carefully structured: part one, first person, past tense; part two, second person, present tense; part three, third person, back to present tense.
PA: I have to tell you, I kept running into problems with this book. The original idea was to structure the novel around three encounters between Walker and Born, each one twenty years apart: 1967, 1987, and 2007. I finished the first part (which stands in the book as is), but then I started writing the second part and didn’t like it. I didn’t like it at all. I wasn’t sure if I could continue with the project. I put everything away and spent several months rethinking the book. Finally, I managed to find a new structure, but it was a rough go there for a while. So much doubt, so much confusion. Some books resist you. Others take you by the hand and tell you everything you need to know. This one was a struggle, but once I found my way, I sprinted to the end.
IBS: In Invisible, the word is not just representative and creative, it’s also resurrective. Hence, I assume, your interest in Dreyer’s Ordet71:
I realize that it’s Dreyer’s film version and not Kai Munk’s play that had such an effect on your central character, but the extent of the impact still surprises me. What is it that’s so powerful here?
PA: I looked up Dreyer a few months ago in my film encyclopedia and found that we have the same birthday. I was very pleased [laughs]. Have you seen the film?
IBS: I think all Danes my age and older have seen it. It’s based on Munk’s work, and everybody knows about Kai Munk, certainly. He was the wild visionary vicar from Western Jutland, killed by the Nazis during the war.
PA: What I describe in the book is Adam’s experience of watching Dreyer’s film adaptation in the New Yorker Theater on Broadway—which happens to be where I saw the film for the first time myself.
IBS: But the film is ancient.
PA: It’s not ancient. It’s from the fifties. That’s not old.
IBS: [Laughs.]
PA: I think I saw it in 1966. Just as I describe in Invisible, most of the audience burst out laughing when Inger sits up in her coffin. I didn’t laugh. I thought it was extraordinary.
IBS: They laughed?! I thought it was generally perceived as uncanny and haunting.
PA: I agree. Nevertheless, half the audience responded with derision and hoots of laughter.
IBS: It’s very simple, the film, don’t you think? The play, too, it’s unbelievably naive.
PA: There’s that wonderful line when the other pastor comes to the house and says to the husband, Johannes’s brother, “What’s wrong with him?” and the husband replies, “Too much Kierkegaard” [laughs]. Anyway, going back to Invisible, Adam sees the film at a time of great emotional distress, and the resurrection scene gives new life to something inside him, or lifts something inside him, and he walks out of the theater in better shape than before.
IBS: Of course, there’s also an element of resurrection in the annual celebrations of the deceased brother’s birthday. In a sense, Andy is brought back to life every time Adam and Gwyn exchange memories of him; even more so when they begin to invent the life he would have lived had he not drowned at the age of seven. They’re rather obsessive about these rituals, aren’t they?
PA: Yes, the protocols have been firmly established. First dinner, and then a series of three conversations: one about Andy’s past, one about the present, and one about the future.
IBS: Exactly. This is a way of keeping him alive, isn’t it?
PA: Definitely. But then the moment comes when Gwyn can’t take it anymore. It’s over.
IBS: She feels that words can no longer bring Andy back, and she loses contact with him. “He’s gone now, and we’ll never find him again” (140), she says.
PA: Yes, too much time has passed. He’s been dead longer than he was alive. The space is too great to cross. She can’t go back anymore.
IBS: From this moment, the bond between brother and sister is no longer predicated on grief, it seems, but on sex. We cannot be certain that they actually have an incestuous relationship, but it’s more than likely, and the focus of the book shifts quite radically from “the word” as the principal medium of communication to “the body”: “Sex is the lord and the redeemer, the only salvation on earth” (181).
PA: Andy’s death has destroyed their mother, and in some sense Gwyn and Adam have been orphaned. They spend their lives in the attic of the house and are more or less on their own.
IBS: Can you say something about the connection you make between verbal and sexual communication?
PA: This is in connection with Margot. My dear, damaged Margot . . .
IBS: She’s mysterious . . .
PA: Very mysterious. In any case, Adam is feeling awful, and he doesn’t want to have loveless sex. But then they go ahead and do it anyway:
IBS: Sex plays such an essential part here, probably for the first time since The Book of Illusions.
PA: There’s a lot of sex in The Book of Illusions, of course, but in Invisible it’s much more explicit.72
IBS: Why is that?
PA: It’s so difficult to write about sex. Sex in novels is almost always inaccurate and uninteresting. In films it’s usually terrible. I’m rarely swept up in it. Maybe you feel differently? It took me all these years to find the courage to write about it in such an open way.
IBS: You were so preoccupied with the properties of language in your earlier work, you still are, but now, it seems to me, a shift has occurred where the senses are much more directly in focus.
PA: Well, let’s see. In thinking about my past books . . . there’s actually some fairly vivid sex in The Music of Chance between Nashe and Fiona. In Leviathan, also, eroticism plays an important role in the story. It’s not described at length, but there’s the scene of Maria posing as a prostitute, Sachs’s affair with Lillian, and Aaron’s affair with Fanny. Now that I think about it, I would say it starts with Mr. Vertigo. That book signals a shift toward the body.
IBS: Lady Marion?
PA: Yes, but also Walt’s incessant masturbation during puberty. As a grown-up, he becomes quite a randy fellow, Walt. When he encounters Mrs. Witherspoon in Chicago, he actually walks out on a business opportunity because he doesn’t want to be late for his hotel tryst. Sex dominates him. Timbuktu is a very physical book as well. We’re inside the dog, we’re inside Willy. The senses are prominent here: think of the olfactory experiment, the symphony of smells. What comes after Timbuktu? It’s The Book of Illusions and, of course, at one point Hector becomes part of a sex-show porn act. What I’m saying is that, over the years, the physical has become more and more important in my stories. In a book like City of Glass there’s one kiss, that’s it. No sex. Even in Ghosts, Blue picks up a prostitute, Violet, but it’s not discussed. My characters make love, but it’s not central to the story in any way.
IBS: When I ask about a gravitation toward the body, I’m also thinking about a new interest in the aging and ailing body in your last six books.
PA: Well, I’m not getting any younger, am I? [Laughs.]
IBS: I suppose one pays more attention to the body as one gets older?
PA: I don’t know, I don’t know. Part of it is my desire to keep pushing into new realms, to explore new things.
IBS: Ah, but the word and the body have always interacted in your writing, all the way back to White Spaces. It’s there from the very beginning: the strange bond between verbal and physical communication. It has been explored in many, many different ways and it takes many different forms in your writing—but it’s always there.
PA: I think you’re right.
IBS: This new, sharpened focus on the impaired or aging body often has to do with movement, I think, the distressing decline from agility to restricted activity.
PA: Yes, pains and pleasures.
IBS: Exactly. It seems to me that while previously your characters experienced the world principally through language, now it’s as if reality is mediated more acutely through the senses. I don’t know . . . this is probably a gross simplification that doesn’t quite make sense.
PA: No, it makes a lot of sense. Maybe when you’re young, you don’t think about your body at all. Your body is working. Your appetite is good, your sexual potency is at its peak, you can stay up all night for days on end. You’re young! You don’t inhabit your body in the same way you do when you’re older. I guess the older I’ve gotten, the more I’ve come to realize that we are our bodies.
IBS: Earlier you would have said, “We are our words.” Think of Stillman Jr., he is his own speech. He’s nothing more than the vocables he utters.
PA: Yes, but this is because his body has been mistreated, abused. So, it’s a physical thing for him as well.
IBS: At any rate, words, your words, bring to life and keep alive. In Invisible, Adam has a posthumous life through Jim Freeman’s completion of his shorthand drafts:
In more senses than one, he’s made “visible” as Jim is filling in the blanks of Adam Walker’s life. Just as he and Gwyn were filling in the blanks of Andy’s life.
PA: But then, isn’t that what human beings are doing all the time? Isn’t that what you’re doing, what we’re both doing, in these conversations? Filling in some—but only some—of the blanks.
66 Report from the Interior was not yet completed when this conversation took place.
67 The Provençal troubadour Bertran de Born (1140s–1215).
68 Classical Greek poet, Alexandria, third century.
69 Invisible and Sunset Park.
70 Smoke, 1995, dir. Wayne Wang.
71 The Word, dir. Carl Th. Dreyer, 1955, winner of the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival, 1955. The film is based on the play by Kai Munk, Ordet, 1932.
72 Later, in Sunset Park, Bing is actively exploring his own sexuality and Ellen is haunted by hers in a somewhat extreme manner.