From Denver Quarterly 28.3 (Winter 1994), 111–22. Reproduced with permission of Mark Irwin.
IRWIN: There is a wonderful obsession with space in your work which begins with early prose writings about Sir Walter Raleigh and the arctic explorer, Peter Freuchen, continues through your most recent novels, and seems to have distinguished you from many of your contemporaries. Your characters vacillate from boxed-in extremes to expansive, often vagrant wanderings. I’m reminded of Pascal’s quote, “All the unhappiness of man stems from one thing only, that he is incapable of staying quietly in his room.”
AUSTER: I’ve never made a conscious decision to write about space in those terms, but looking back over the body of my work now, I can see that it does shuttle between these two extremes: confinement and vagabondage—open space and hermetic space. At the same time, there’s a curious paradox embedded in all this: when the characters in my books are most confined, they seem to be most free. And when they are free to wander, they are most lost and confused. So, in some funny way, there’s a reversal of expectations about these two conditions. In my first prose book, The Invention of Solitude, there’s a long passage about my friend the composer, the man I call “S.” He lived in the tiniest, most minimal space I’ve ever been in. And yet, he probably had the biggest mind of any person I’ve ever known, and he managed to inhabit that space as if he were utterly free. More recently, a character like Nashe in The Music of Chance is a wanderer. He crisscrosses America for an entire year, and yet, in some sense, he’s a prisoner. He’s imprisoned in his own desire for what he construes to be a notion of freedom. But freedom isn’t possible for him until he stops and plants himself somewhere and takes on responsibility for something, for some other person. It’s a paradoxical shuttling between the two, but neither one stands for what you might think it would. I think what excites me about this is not the idea of traveling to a destination that one has picked out in advance—but thrashing out into the unknown. In the way that Cabeza de Vaca did, for example, the first white man to set foot on this continent. It’s a story of being lost, of immense wanderings, of never knowing what’s going to happen next. Just like writing, I suppose, or at least writing as I practice it. Every day, I set off on a journey into the unknown, and yet the whole time I’m just sitting there in my room. The door is locked, I never budge, and yet that confinement offers me absolute freedom—to be whoever I want to be, to go wherever my thoughts take me.
IRWIN: But would you say that you find some comfort in shuttling between two extremes? For example, Moon Palace begins with Marco Stanley Fogg, who inherits box upon box of books from his uncle and creates a sort of modular prison, a bed, a desk, out of the boxes. Slowly he reads the books and then begins a trek, which is a sort of escape to freedom. Whereas The Music of Chance begins with Jim Nashe, who drives randomly across the country, accidentally meets Jack Pozzi, enters a card game, and then agrees to build a wall out of fifteenth-century stones in the middle of a meadow. His is an escape from freedom. Do you find some particular freedom in this shuttling back and forth between extremes?
AUSTER: In some sense, Moon Palace and The Music of Chance are opposite books, mirror reflections of each other. Toward the end of Moon Palace, if you remember, Fogg and Barber begin traveling out west in a red car. Barber dies along the way, and Fogg continues the journey by himself. He gets as far as Utah, at which point the car is stolen and he has to finish the trip on foot. After I completed the book, I realized that I wanted to get back in the car. This was the first step toward writing The Music of Chance. I wanted to get back in the car. I felt I hadn’t been in there long enough. There was something I wanted to explore about this idea. And, logically enough, The Music of Chance begins with a man in a red car. It was red in both cases. Driving around the country with no definite purpose. This idea of contrasts, contradictions, paradox, I think, gets very much to the heart of what novel writing is for me. It’s a way for me to express my contradictions. Unlike poetry, which for me was always a univocal act—a way of trying to ground myself in the very substance of my being and to express, in as articulate, lyrical, and intense a form as possible, what I believed at any given moment. But novel writing is different. Novel writing is a way of speaking out of both sides of your mouth at once. It’s multi-voiced. And I think this suits me better. I can go back and forth, explore different parts of myself and the world in a single work. Freedom, confinement: those are the two sides of a single thought, and the one couldn’t exist without the other.
IRWIN: If poetry summons a certain freedom by imposing a form, would you say that fiction summons this freedom through a poly-vocalness?
AUSTER: I think so. I think it’s helped me to unleash all the different sides of myself, which I was never able to accomplish as a poet. Novel-writing seems to be more generative for me. One book seems to give birth to another. The farther I go, the more it seems I have to tell. It’s very surprising. When I began as a novelist, I thought I had one or two books in me, and yet, here I am, ten years later, still doing it. Beckett compared himself to Joyce by saying: “The more Joyce knew, the more he could. The more I know, the less I can.” As far as I’m concerned, there’s an altogether different equation: The less I know, the more I can.
IRWIN: Let’s talk for a minute about memory and chance. Your characters seem propelled both by chance and memory, buffeted from one to the other. In The Invention of Solitude, you say, “For the story would not have occurred to him unless whatever summoned its memory had not already been making itself felt.” Then you narrate the story of M., who writes his father from a “chambre de bonne” in Paris, only to find that his father had hidden out in that same room, many years before, from the Nazis.
AUSTER: I believe that the world is filled with stories, that our lives are filled with stories, but it’s only at certain moments that we are able to see them or to understand them. You have to be ready to make sense of what’s happening to you. Most of us, myself included, walk through life not paying much attention. Suddenly, a crisis occurs when everything about ourselves is called into question, when the ground drops out from under us. I think it’s at those moments when memory becomes a powerful force in our lives. You begin to explore the past, and invariably you come up with a new reading of the past, a new understanding, and because of that you’re able to encounter the present in a new way.
IRWIN: Continuing on with this notion of chance. … In The Music of Chance there is a great sense of allegory, perhaps “architectural closure” is the phrase, in which a nonsensical, expanding universe contracts to a mansion of terrifying and deductive logic, a mansion owned by two characters, Stone and Flower (the inorganic, and the organic). The castle-like house, with its black-and-white checkered floor, contains Stone’s model, “The City of the World,” the card game, victory, loss, the building of a wall. It all collapses to a terrifying certainty in which Nashe, having obsessively escaped from freedom, now must escape to it. I guess we’re back to this shuttling from one to another. So could you speak a little bit about allegory in the sense that it pertains to this idea of chance?
AUSTER: Allegory seems to imply a specific intention on the author’s part, a plan. I myself never have one. From day to day, I scarcely know what I’m doing. I begin blindly with a few images, a few buzzes in my head—the sound of the voice of a character, a gesture. The story then begins to develop within me, and often it takes years for the thing to form itself to the point that I’m able to begin writing. But allegory, symbolism, and so on—those are words that don’t even enter my head. Nothing in any of my books means anything, as far as I know, except what I’m putting down on the page. There are no hidden meanings. On the other hand, if you’re able to tell a story that resonates with the same power it has inside you, it’s almost as if it’s coming out of your dreams. It comes from a place so dark and inaccessible if it’s done well that it will resonate with the same power for the reader. … Writing isn’t mathematics, after all. This doesn’t equal that, one thing can’t be substituted for another. A book is composed of irreducible elements, and I would almost say that to the degree the writer does not understand them, that is the degree to which the book is allowed to become itself, to become a human and not just a literary exercise. … We were talking about Beckett earlier, which reminds me of something that happened the first time I met him—back in 1972 or 1973. He told me that he had just finished a translation of Mercier and Camier, his first French novel, which had been written a good twenty-five years earlier. I had read the book in French and liked it very much, “A wonderful book,” I said. I was just a kid, after all, and I couldn’t suppress my enthusiasm. Beckett shook his head and said, “Oh no, no, not very good. In fact, I’ve cut out about twenty-five percent of the original. The English version is going to be quite a bit shorter than the French.” And I said, “Why would you do such a thing? It’s a wonderful book, you shouldn’t have taken anything out.” And he shook his head, “No, no, not very good, not very good.” And then we went on to talk about other things. Then, out of the blue, ten minutes later, he turns to me and says, “You really liked it, huh? You really thought it was good?” This was Samuel Beckett, remember, and not even he had any grasp of his work. Good or bad, meaningful or not—no writer ever knows, not even the best ones.
IRWIN: When I was speaking about the wonderful closure in The Music of Chance: the castle-like house, the black-and-white checkered floor, Stone’s model of “the city of the world,” the card game, victory, loss, the building of a wall—this incredible vortex of closure reminds me of something Camus said about the novel. He talks about a “metaphysical principle of unity,” a great density, where suddenly things become inevitable. Did you feel that was beginning to happen at that point in The Music of Chance?
AUSTER: There’s no question that the book took over and had its own life independent of my will or judgment about what should or shouldn’t go into it. There was an interesting example during the poker game. Nashe leaves the table and goes upstairs to look at “The City of the World” again. He stays for an hour and winds up stealing the two little figures of Flower and Stone. I had no idea he was going to do this until I wrote the passage. It was as though Nashe had become entirely real for me and was doing it on his own. I still don’t understand why he did it, and yet it was right that he did it. It had to be that way. Another example would be the ending of the book. When I first started writing, I had altogether different end in mind. And yet, as I began to grapple with the material—when I had a good part of it behind me already—I began to understand things that I hadn’t even guessed in the beginning. I realized that the book had to end in the car, the same place where it had begun. The book had to end before the end, so to speak. I mean, there is no conclusion—something is about to happen, but you don’t know what the result is going to be. Whether Nashe lives or dies is almost unimportant. The important thing is that he has triumphed. By the end of the book, he has transcended everything he had been—he has become, I think, a great figure—a truly powerful human being who understands himself and what he’s capable of (which was not the case in the beginning) and what this means is that he’s willing to take the world as it comes to him. If death is what’s coming, he’s willing to face that, too. He’s not afraid anymore, he’s not afraid of anything. So whether the car crashes or whether he manages to elude the on-coming headlights, whether he dies or whether he lives is much less important than the inner victory he’s won at that moment.
IRWIN: The scene where Nashe gets up from the poker table after his partner Pozzi begins winning—it’s really one of my favorite scenes in the entire novel. I love the “punitive whims” in your work. At times they seem wonderfully mischievous and boyish, which seems to make them more American. Are you aware of this? Often, there seems to be a sense of caricature, a “making fun.” For instance, when Pozzi and Nashe show up at the mansion, and they expect to have a lavish dinner, but they’re served hamburgers with potato chips—is this to you a sense of caricature? Or is this just you having fun, discovering where the novel will go?
AUSTER: Well, no. It’s the characters. It’s the characters, Flower and Stone, and it’s also the unexpected. If my work is about anything, I think it’s about the unexpected, the idea that anything can happen. You never know what’s looming up ahead. Nashe and Pozzi walk into this mansion, they expect to have a lavish dinner, and they’re given a crazy little meal, a kiddie banquet. Flower and Stone are eccentrics, latter-day versions of Laurel and Hardy. And if there’s one thing that distinguishes Laurel and Hardy, it’s their infantilism, the way these grown men in their suits and ties can suddenly turn around and act like seven-year-old boys. The scene in the book is quite surprising, I suppose. Strange. But it’s strange for me too. As strange for me as it is for Nashe.
IRWIN: Again, we seem to be getting back to closure and freedom. We’re in this castle-like mansion and we’re having a kiddie banquet. Both John Ashbery and Marshall McLuhan have said that part of the American-ness of poetry and the novel is “to let everything in” as opposed to the more European notion “to control it.” So you seem very much at one with this idea of letting the world in. You’ve already talked about Tesla, fairy tales, and Laurel and Hardy. There’s great range to your work. So you would agree with that, letting the world in, in the sort of discovering sense?
AUSTER: Absolutely. What’s interesting about fiction is that it can encompass everything. There’s nothing in the world that is not material for a novel. I think that’s been the glory of American writing, as opposed to, say, European writing: the fact that we’ve allowed things in. It gives a kind of flexibility and questioning force to a lot of the American fiction that I admire. I feel that I want to stay open to everything, that there’s nothing that can’t be an influence. Everything from the most banal elements of popular culture to the most rigorous, demanding philosophical works. It’s all part of the world we live in, and once you begin to draw lines and exclude things, you’re turning your back on reality—a fatal mistake for a novelist.
IRWIN: Perhaps for me, one of the most original aspects of your work is the notion that chance, memory, and the act of writing itself, all seek to violate space, both in a physical and in a metaphysical sense. As an example, let me quote a letter from Nadezhda Mandelstam to Osip Mandelstam, in October, 1938, the same letter you quote at the end of The Invention of Solitude. “I have no words, my darling, to write this letter. I am writing it into empty space. Perhaps you will come back and not find me here.” Does it haunt you, this writing into empty space, the terror and grace of the eternal?
AUSTER: At bottom, I think, my work has come out of a position of intense personal despair, a very deep nihilism and hopelessness about the world, the fact of our own transience and mortality, the inadequacy of language, the isolation of one person from another. And yet, at the same time, I’ve wanted to express the beauty and extraordinary happiness of feeling yourself alive, of breathing in the air, the joy of being alive in your own skin. To manage to wrench words out of all of this, no matter how inadequate they might be, is at the core of everything I’ve ever done. What I mean to say is that it matters. And the people in my books are engaged in struggles that matter to them. I’ve never really been able to write about what most novelists seem to concentrate on—what we might call the sociological moment, the world of things around us, the world of tastes and fads. It’s simpler than that, it’s deeper than that, it’s probably a lot more naive than that. It’s about living and dying and trying to make sense of what we’re doing here. All the basic questions you ask yourself when you’re fifteen years old, trying to come to terms with the fact that you are on this planet, figuring out some reason for being here. These are the questions that are driving all my characters. In some ways, I think this is the element in my novels that links them to the work I did as a poet and why I think of my work as a continuous whole rather than two distinct movements. It’s also why I often have trouble thinking of myself as a novelist. When I read other novelists, admiring as I might be of their work, impressed as I might be by what they’re able to articulate and express, I’m struck by how different it is from what I’m trying to do. In the long run, I suppose, I tend to think of myself more as a storyteller than a novelist. I believe that stories are the fundamental food for the soul. We can’t live without stories. In one form or another, everybody is living on them from the age of two until their death. People don’t necessarily have to read novels to satisfy their need for stories. They watch television or read comic books or go to the movies. In whatever form they get them, these stories are crucial. It’s through stories that we struggle to make sense of the world. This is what keeps me going—the justification for spending my life locked up in a little room, putting words on paper. The world won’t collapse if I never write another book. But in the end, I don’t think of it as an entirely useless activity. I’m part of the great human enterprise of trying to make sense of what we’re doing here in the world. There are so many moments of questioning why you do it and what the purpose of it is—it’s important to remember sometimes that it’s not for nothing. This is about the only thing I’ve ever come up with that makes any sense.
IRWIN: This deep sense of despair that you said your novels are birthed from, reminds me of your quoting Faulkner in The Music of Chance. “Until some day in very disgust, he risks everything in the blind turn of a card.” So this sense of nihilism, is that the origin of this personal despair, the break in the narrative thread that fascinates you, that compels you and makes us human in a way?
AUSTER: Perhaps. It’s interesting about the quote from Faulkner. I came across it as I was writing the book—purely by chance—and I couldn’t ignore it. There it was. That sentence seemed to articulate the entire book for me, and so I felt compelled to put it in. You can’t turn your back on what you’re given. … Nashe is a good example of the despair I was talking about, the despair that leads to a terrible kind of nihilism—an impulse to chuck everything at the drop of a hat. It’s a very scary position to be in.
IRWIN: Is that American? Is that distinctly American to chuck everything at the blind turn of a card? It seems American somehow …
AUSTER: I don’t know. I tend to think of it as human. But since we’re a country without a long past, a place in which most people have obliterated their connection to the past, maybe it’s easier for Americans to do such a thing than it is for people from other countries. I wouldn’t want to insist on that idea, though. It’s dangerous to talk in generalities, to make assumptions about national characteristics. On the other hand, we’re all products of a particular place. I’ve grown up here, I’ve spent my entire life here, and undoubtedly America has settled into my very bones.
IRWIN: Your work resembles, or at least shares an obsession with the nomadic road films of the great German filmmaker Wim Wenders, with whom you now work. How do you feel about this relationship and its coincidental nature?
AUSTER: A little over two years ago, I got a letter from Wim Wenders. I’d had no contact with him before. A letter out of the blue, written from Australia where he was shooting his last film. It was such a beautiful and kind and generous letter that my heart melted. He simply said, Dear Mr. Auster, I’ve read all your books, I love them deeply, and I’m very sad that there are no more to read. I make movies. I don’t know if you know who I am. I’ve made X, Y, and Z. I have no plan, nothing to propose to you, simply the idea that someday, if you would be willing, I would like to make a movie with you. And that was it. A letter that dropped out of nowhere. We eventually met and became friends. Now we’re about to begin a project together. I’m going to write something that we hope will one day be turned into a film. I admire his work a great deal. It might prove to be an interesting collaboration. Only time will tell. But there’s an interesting story in all this, which somehow connects with the other things we’ve been talking about. … About six months before I received the letter from Wim Wenders, I was in Paris. I ran into someone in a bookstore who said some nice things about my work. One of his remarks stuck with me for the rest of the day. “You’re the first writer I’ve read since Peter Handke who’s made a real difference to me,” he said. It was a flattering thing to say. Peter Handke is an excellent writer, but I’d never thought of my work as having any connection with his, and so for the next few hours I walked around thinking about him. Then, as I was rushing back to my hotel at around eight o’clock to see some friends, I saw Peter Handke on the street. It was unmistakably him, I recognized him from photographs. It was one of those weird moments. You start thinking about someone—an absolute stranger—and then, after a few hours, he materializes before your eyes. Several months later, I went to Vermont with my family for the summer. About two weeks before Wenders’s letter turned up in the mail, my agent called. She’d just received a message from Elle magazine in France. They were planning to do a series of articles of conversations between men and women, and they wanted me to participate in one of them. “The question is,” my agent said, “what French woman do you want to meet?” I thought it was a joke. I burst out laughing and said, “Well, if you put it that way—Jeanne Moreau, of course,” and then promptly forgot about the whole thing. Two weeks later, Wenders’s letter arrived. A couple of days after that, my agent called back. “Jeanne Moreau was out of the country,” she said, “so it took them a while to track her down. She says yes, Elle magazine says yes, and it’s on. You’re going to meet her in Paris in October.” So in October I went to Europe—first of all to Germany, where I met Wenders for the first time. We got together on October 3, the day of German unification—an historic moment. While we were eating dinner, I mentioned that I was going to go to Paris to meet Jeanne Moreau. He found that very amusing, since it turned out that she had just played a major part in his last film. Another strange twist. At the moment I mentioned Jeanne Moreau’s name to my agent, she was in Australia with Wim, who was just sitting down to write a letter to me. And neither one of them knew what the other was up to. So—back to the dinner in Germany—Wim wrote out a short letter to Jeanne Moreau, put it in an envelope, and asked me to give it to her in Paris. When I saw her a few days later, the first thing I did was hand her the letter. “Here’s a note from Wim Wenders,” I said. She opened it up, read it, and broke into a big smile. “Do you want to read it?” she said. What Wim had written was this: “Dear Jeanne, It’s no accident that you’re meeting Paul Auster today. There is no such thing as chance. Love, Wim.” A perfect little note. So we started talking, she and I. And I found her remarkable in every way, an extremely intelligent, well-read person who has many interests in life besides her own career. Naturally enough, we talked about Wim for a little while. That led to something about Peter Handke (who’s worked with Wenders on some film projects), and I mentioned that I had seen Handke on the street earlier that year. “Oh yes,” she said, “Peter Handke had just moved to France then. As a matter of fact, he was staying as a guest in my apartment.” I felt as if I’d been hit on the head with a hammer. The story had come full circle, a chain of unlikely coincidences that had traveled around the entire globe. It seems that things like this are happening to me all the time. You think about someone and he suddenly appears. Then, months later, you meet someone else who can tell you what he was doing on that street at that particular moment. And on and on it goes.
IRWIN: I like this music of chance. Two days ago, after I had finished writing these interview questions (there were seven of them, I believe, at 8:00 in the morning), I walked upstairs to dial your number and the phone rang, and you in fact gave me the time that you would arrive in Denver. (Laughter). And I think, we all feel like Wim Wenders, that there’s a certain sadness … there are not enough Paul Auster novels.