“No one can say where a book comes from, least of all the person who writes it.” This line was written twenty-five years ago and appeared in Paul Auster’s seventh novel, Leviathan. He insists that it still holds true. But, as always with Auster, there is more than one truth. In this dialogue, we pursue the beginnings, the birth, and the life of Auster’s novels and autobiographical works—books that have entranced and challenged millions of readers across the world in more than forty languages.
Auster is one of the most widely read contemporary writers. He first made his mark on the literary scene in the 1970s as a poet. In order to finance his writing, he worked as an essayist and a translator, but in 1979 he began to concentrate on narrative prose, and with the publication of the innovative memoir The Invention of Solitude and the ingenious novels of The New York Trilogy in the mid-eighties, a space on the international literary scene was irrevocably cleared for this master of stories and purveyor of the intricate workings of their telling. Then, in the 1990s, he explored a lifelong passion for film: he wrote and codirected two movies with Wayne Wang, Smoke and Blue in the Face, wrote and directed Lulu on the Bridge, and followed up with The Inner Life of Martin Frost in 2007.
Today, the body of his narrative prose includes sixteen novels (now seventeen, with the publication of 4 3 2 1) and five autobiographical books. In one way or another, they all bear the imprint of these other artistic activities. Auster’s poems have been described as “brittle as broken glass . . . [they] imbed themselves in the reader’s flesh.”1 This penchant for transparency and brokenness runs as a lyrical subcurrent through almost all his work. It has frequently set a certain tone and inspired an array of recurring themes, which we pursue in these conversations. Movies play an important role in Auster’s plots, especially in The Book of Illusions and Man in the Dark, and different angles on objects and characters seen through the camera lens are folded into the writing. Translations are sometimes part of the texture of his novels, for instance, in Invisible—and the voice of the critic everywhere accompanies Auster’s stories, commenting on the processes and mechanisms of writing.
More than forty scholarly books have been written about Auster’s work. There are a handful of very fine studies among them, but others are saturated with attempts to squeeze this multiform body of writing into predefined categories. However, as our conversations show, every one of Auster’s books is a journey down an unknown road for him—and for the reader. “The music of each book is different from the music of every other book,” he says in our conversation on Sunset Park, and his principal concern, his constant struggle, is always to find the right way to tell a particular story. He is regularly on the brink of failure—or so he feels—and is truly humble in the face of his own doubts. “I’m really stumbling,” he says in our conversation on The Invention of Solitude. “I’m really in the dark. I don’t know.” This is what reviewers and critics often fail to understand about Auster’s work.
I first met Paul Auster when he kindly accepted my invitation to visit our PhD program, TRAMS, at the University of Copenhagen in May 2011. Later the same day, I interviewed Auster at the official ceremony when he received the university’s honorary degree.2 During the break, I talked to him about the need for a strong close reading of his work that is sensitive to the quality of the writing and faithful to the words on the page. A basis for further talks was evidently formed, for when, a few months later, I suggested that we undertake this project together, he agreed. “Maybe it’s time to speak,” he said, and we embarked on what was to become a grand three-year journey through Auster’s twenty-one narrative books, one by one, from a wide range of perspectives.
And so, for the first time, Auster enters into an extended dialogue about his work. Here, he provides background material, most of which is not publicly known, facts about how the stories took form, and discussions of key themes that run through the entire body of his work. We compare and contrast movements across more than thirty years of writing, and in the process, we arrive at new and often surprising insights that, one hopes, will spawn new avenues in future readings of Auster’s books.
Auster had reservations about our project. He was reluctant to engage in intellectual discussions about writings that “come out of the unconscious rather than as the result of reflection” (conversation on Moon Palace). He was also uneasy about repeating information: “I’ve said this before. I can’t remember where,” he would sometimes remark. I was more concerned with questions of how to cover no fewer than nineteen books and two forthcoming manuscripts.3 Especially if one is attempting to do this in collaboration with the writer: Paul Auster, known to be distrustful of reviewers and reserved with critics. A writer, moreover, who in one of our first discussions of the project remarks with some frustration: “A writer can’t analyze his own work!” Would it be possible to bring together the author’s inside point of view with the reader’s outside perspective in a meaningful way?
The collaboration between author and critic is itself an interesting feature. Auster does not preside over his work as an omniscient originator or master of meaning. He is more interested in inquiry than in certainty and has no unequivocal truths to offer: In short, he was genuinely invested in the open exchange of our dialogues—and as his interlocutor I felt greatly privileged.
The book is divided into two parts.
As Auster explains in the prologue, it is important to him that a clear distinction be made between fiction and narratives that invoke his own remembered experiences. In part one the dialogue focuses on the texts that draw upon his life. Our talks about these five very dissimilar books provide much biographical information about the person “Paul Auster,” but they cannot be used as keys to decipher the author “Paul Auster”—nor indeed his writings. As I see it, they add another, perhaps a more descriptive, layer to the body of his texts, subjective and molded by a memory that plays a central role in what Auster calls the “unbroken narrative within ourselves about who we are” (in the conversation on The Invention of Solitude). The author, here, is much like a character—no more “real,” perhaps, no more extraordinary and possibly no more in command of the text than the imaginary narrators of his novels. And so, even if the five books in part one turn on memoir, it does not mean that they have primacy or authority over the fictional narratives. In fact, we could argue that the narration of self is inevitably as apocryphal as that of invented texts.
Placing the autobiographical books together in chronological order, as we have done here, allows us to look at the shifts and development over more than three decades of self-narration. The Invention of Solitude is the first extended narrative in Auster’s transition from poetry to prose, with its description of his father, Samuel Auster, in “Portrait of an Invisible Man,” paired with the strange ensemble of voices of poets and other artists who have had a formative effect on the autobiographical figure of A. in “The Book of Memory.” The Invention of Solitude broke new ground on the literary scene and serves as a kind of gene pool of ideas on language, memory, representation, and the ongoing formation of the self for Auster’s entire body of prose. The autobiographical element in The Red Notebook (1995) concerns not the writer as much as the nature of his writings. It serves as an ars poetica of storytelling without theory and relates a series of true tales about the kind of magic coincidence that informs what Auster calls “the mechanics of reality.” An equally straightforward text, Hand to Mouth (1997), focuses on the trials and tribulations of “the artist as a young man” struggling to keep his head above water and support his family. The two recent autobiographical books, Winter Journal (2012) and Report from the Interior (2013), take a different turn altogether. They set out to explore the history, in the former, of the things that have marked, altered, nourished, or sheltered the author’s physical self, and, in the latter, the landmarks in the development of how he has understood the world around him. They are, Auster says, about “all the things that go into making a person” (in the conversation on Winter Journal). Both of these recent autobiographical books approach their subject through a consistent second-person perspective, which allows the author to look at himself from a point of view in between the closeness of the first person and the distance of the third person. It has the most unusual effect of giving the reader an impression of being taken into the narrator’s confidence, of being almost directly addressed by the author—and then not.
The sixteen novels form a large organic body of fiction informed by Auster’s explorations of the relationship between the world and the word, which often break with literary convention and scout out new paths of representation. Here, as elsewhere, his work is consistently determined by a loyalty to his material and a curiosity that often leads into unexplored territory, thus producing, in each instance, a different kind of story. At the same time, the texts intersect through recurring themes that run across the entire oeuvre. There is fable and myth, realism, comedy, metafiction, The books sometimes draw on elements from an array of modes and genres: memoir, fairy tale, dystopian writing, parallel or alternative history, the detective novel, trauma narrative, geronto literature, bildungsroman, poetry. Parts of novels are written as collages combining film script, newspaper clippings, interpretation or translation of texts by other writers, film analysis, stage directions, footnotes, lyrical monologues. The books often actively interact with one another through allusion, echoes, direct reference, and auto-intertextual characters, thus forming a dense web of entangled themes, places, movements, concerns, and unresolved problems.
Our conversations are structured around a set of eleven principal themes that inform the body of Auster’s writing. The themes were carefully identified partly with the help of Auster’s wife, the novelist and scholar Siri Hustvedt, pursued where relevant, and honed in the dialogue.
Language and the Body
The Word and the World
White Spaces
Ambiguity
Divestment
Enclosure
Abandoned Objects
Narrative Perspective
Male Pairs
America
Jewish Experience
An array of crucial but less prominent themes in the conversations include film, politics, baseball, the city, walking, silence, memory, and the gradual rounding of female characters.
This dialogue, with its abundance of new material, thematically and chronologically ordered, may spawn a series of new questions about Auster’s work and about literature in general and the processes of writing and reading. Let me close this preface by thanking Paul Auster for his generosity and his patience with all my pertinent and impertinent questions. He listened to my assumptions and presumptions, my readings and misreadings of his work, sitting there in Brooklyn at the red table every morning at ten, prepared to enter the dialogue. For this I am truly grateful.
IBS, Copenhagen, November 2016
1 Norman Finkelstein, “In the Realm of the Naked Eye: The Poetry of Paul Auster,” in Beyond the Red Notebook: Essays on Paul Auster, ed. Dennis Barone (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995), 45.
2 See webcast of the ceremony at http://hum.ku.dk/auster/.
3 The conversations took place from November 2011 to November 2013. Winter Journal and Report from the Interior were discussed in their manuscript form.