Interface News Reporter | Fu Shiye
Interface News Editor | Huang Yue Jiang Yan
Editor's note: According to the New York Times, Paul Auster, an important contemporary American writer, died of cancer on April 30 local time at the age of 77.
Paul Auster was born in Newark, New Jersey in 1947, and his representative works include the novels "New York Trilogy", "Phantom Book", "The Absurdity of Brooklyn", "The Behemoth", as well as the memoir "Loneliness and What It Creates", and the review collection "The Art of Hunger", etc., and has won the Medici Literary Award in France, the Prince of Asturias Literary Award in Spain, the John Clinton Literary Award in the United States, and has been shortlisted for the Dublin Literary Award, the Booker Prize, and the Faulkner Prize for Fiction many times. Haruki Murakami once praised him as a literary genius, while Michael Ondaatje believes that "no matter what form you choose to speak, no matter what kind of story you imagine, Paul Auster is a voice that cannot be ignored." ”
At the end of 2018, Interface Culture interviewed Paul Auster by phone for the publication of the Chinese version of "4321", and now republishes this article to commemorate the writer.
The phone was answered, and the voice of Paul Auster came from across the ocean, as if through the entire century. From pronunciation to timbre, his voice seems a little "old-school", like an announcer on an American radio station in the last century, sounding rich and round, often laughing dryly twice during a pause, and the listener seems to feel the fluttering of his vocal cords. In an interview with The Paris Review, Auster once said of his voice, which had resulted in "that low voice coming from the throat, that little clogged bronchi, that power of the lungs that had disappeared", and that his voice was so magnetic that it "sounded like a piece of sandpaper rubbing against a dry roof tile." ”
"Old school" is more than just sound. Oster still has a habit of handwriting manuscripts and transcribing them on a typewriter, and he doesn't like computer keyboards, believing them to be a disservice to his fingers. He also doesn't have a cell phone, and his wife, fellow writer Siri Hustvedt, recently gave him an iPad. Now, when the New York Times wakes up in the morning, before the New York Times arrives at their home in Brooklyn, New York, a 19th-century brownstone building, Auster spends his iPad browsing the news. "But I must say that I still prefer to read the newspaper. In the newspaper, a lot of information and news are spread out at the same time, and I enjoy that simultaneity, whereas on the computer, you have to pick and click. When asked if he was a "technophobe," Oster boiled his conservatism to a kind of individual freedom of choice: "I'm not resisting computers, I'm just hoping to keep myself and use the privileges of a typewriter." ”
Auster's "nostalgia" and retrospectives are also reflected in his works from time to time. Beginning with the publication of Loneliness and What It Creates in 1982, Oster has written five nonfiction books in which he documents himself and his relationships and memories with his loved ones. And in his fictional works, the reader can always find a shadow of Auster himself. For example, in the 1985 novel "Glass City", the protagonist Quinn is a solitary writer who decides to pose as a private detective named Paul Auster. The novel "The Hermit" focuses on a young poet named Adam Walker, who is studying at Columbia University. In his latest novel, 4321, published in 2017, he fictionalizes a character named Archie Isaac Ferguson, who was born on March 3, 1947, in Newark, New Jersey, in the same place as Oster, just a month after his birth. Oster then goes on to create four Fergusons in the book, all of whom are made of the same DNA but follow completely different life trajectories: one Ferguson went to Columbia, one Ferguson went through the student movement at Columbia University in 1968, and one Ferguson became a writer...... All of the above overlaps with Auster's own experience, in which his own image seems to have been appearing, hovering, haunting, and lingering in his novels.
The English literary critic James Wood, in his essay "Paul Auster's Shallowness," mercilessly pointed out that Auster was suspected of self-repetition, and that the protagonists of most of his works had a common picture: "The protagonist, almost always a man, often a writer or an intellectual, lived a life of seclusion, concerned with a dying man...... Violent and unexpected stories are woven between narratives, both to ensure the persistence of the serendipity of existence and to maintain the reader's interest in reading. In a telephone interview with Paul Auster at Booksandfun, he responded to the above question as follows: "The person who said this is absolutely wrong, and each of my books is completely different and completely new. They are not similar. ”
But there is no doubt that Oster does have some kind of obsession with looking back. This obsession is especially evident when we compare it with the 70-year-old British writer Ian McEwan, who has just come to China. McEwan, who has just finished a novel about artificial intelligence, embraces and loves new technologies and developments, he loves computers, he thinks they have finally freed themselves from the clash of typewriters, and he cares about the future. Auster said he could only write about what he knew, and that he didn't know enough about artificial intelligence and technology to touch on those subjects. "But does it matter? Everybody writes about these subjects. He laughs.
He attributes part of this constant review to a sense of time that comes with getting older. Back in 2003, in an interview with The Paris Review, Auster spoke about this feeling. "Time begins to slip away, and simple arithmetic tells you that there is more time behind you than there is before—much more. Your body begins to deteriorate, there will be pain that you didn't have before, and gradually, the people you love start to die. By the age of fifty, most of us will be haunted by ghosts. They live in our bodies, and we spend just as much time talking to the living talking to them. In a 2009 letter to his friend John Maxwell Coetzee, he noted, "Our chaotic world is falling apart, but the loss of friends and family hurts me far more than the chaos that has erupted across the universe." Today, for Paul Oster, who is now in his 71st year, every day is more moving than the last. "Every day I was still able to wake up, open my eyes and realize that I was still alive and that I still had a lot to do. ”
After completing the tome "4321," Oster wanted to give himself a break and turned to a non-fiction work. He still chooses to go back in time and sink into the world of a nineteenth-century American writer named Stephen Crane in his 19th-century house. "I've written more than three hundred pages, probably halfway there. That's how I live my daily life now, living in Stephen Crane's world. ”
【Interview】
"I chose to write because I wanted to write, but the world doesn't owe me anything"
Interface culture: "4321" recently launched a Chinese version, let's start with this novel. Is it a book of memories or a book of retrospectives?
Paul Oster: No. First of all, this is a novel, and everything in the book is fictional. Of course, that history is real, but the characters are all fictional. The characters in the book have time and geography of my own experiences, and the four Fergusons grew up where I grew up, and they also went to the school where I studied. But from a story point of view, these four different families and different stories, I made them up, and none of those things happened to me. This is very important.
The decisive impact on this book was an experience I had at summer camp when I was 14 years old. One of my companions was struck by lightning right in front of my eyes and died shortly thereafter, an experience I had previously written about in the nonfiction work The Red Notebook. This was the most important thing that happened to me when I was young, and it gave me a new understanding of how the world works. After that, it dawned on me that this kind of thing could happen to anyone at any time, and the presence of the unpredictable ran through my life. So I emphasized this point of view in this novel as well, and I used two perspectives: an eyewitness perspective, where a young man dies in a violent thunderstorm, which happened to one of Ferguson, and an eyewitness perspective, where Ferguson4 witnessed the death of his friend, so that I can see both sides of the story. Other than that, it's really a novel, and it's very important to read it in a fictional way.
Interface Culture: How do you use memory as a clue to move between non-fiction and fiction?
Paul Oster: I've written five books of nonfiction. Beginning with "Loneliness and What It Creates," followed by "Frustration," an autobiographical work of my poor years, a book about money, and a book about no money. Then there's "Red Notes," which is a collection of true stories about myself and people I know, and in recent years, "Winter Notes." In these works, I do my best to tell my own experiences, lives and memories.
Of course, our memories are always full of mistakes. But I don't mean to distort the past in these books, and once a writer starts talking about his past, he needs to be honest about it. So I draw a clear line between fiction and non-fiction. In the novel, although there is time and space in my own past, these are small things, and once they are used as material in the novel, they become the material of the novel, and you can "do whatever you want" - make changes or zoom in and out, you can turn the male in it into a woman, this is the freedom of the novel.
Interface Culture: Is your work often introspective and often reminiscing?
Paul Auster: Not really. We can't live in the present if we don't think about the past, and at the same time, we project the past and the present into the future. And the present is almost non-existent, because it is fleeting. Even if we live in the present, we are constantly being pushed into the future. It's hard for me to think of a novel that doesn't deal with past, present, and future at the same time – that's what storytelling is all about. Every fairy tale begins with "a long, long time ago" and the story is about the past. Occasionally I also write in the simple present tense to deal with what is happening in the moment. My novel Sunset Park is an attempt to write about the present, and it is set in the 2009 financial crisis in the United States, so what happened in the book has only just happened in reality.
Interface Culture: I've seen comments that they think your writing has a tendency to be self-repetitive, that you're always writing about similar topics, and that you're even a little "narcissistic".
Paul Auster: The people who say this are absolutely wrong, each of my books is very different, it's brand new, they're not similar. I don't know who said that, but the person who said it definitely didn't read my book. Over the years, people have said all sorts of bad things about me, some of which are ugly and rude, and there is nothing I can do about it. But at the same time, there are a lot of people who love my work, and they read every book I publish. I can't please everyone. From the point of view of literature and my trajectory as a writer, you are destined to disappoint some people and frustrate. It's part of the rules of the game, and it's something I have to face. I often tell myself that no one asks me to write, that I wasn't born to be a writer, that I choose to write because I want to write, but the world doesn't owe me anything, and I don't expect anything from the world to give back to me. It comforts me that someone likes to read my work. Some people don't like my work, and I gladly accept it.
"To set rules for fiction is to deprive it of the pleasure of reading and appreciating"
Interface Culture: You've said something like, "Every book I write starts with what I call 'buzzing in my head.'" A specific music or rhythm, a timbre. For me, most of the effort of writing fiction is spent trying to stay true to that buzz, that rhythm. It's a highly intuitive job. You can't argue or rationally defend it, but you know it when you hit the fortiss, and you're usually pretty sure when you hit the right note. "You also mentioned that 4321 is like a movement to you, why is musicality so important to your writing, and what is the relationship between music and writing?
Paul Auster: Music has always been very important to me. My writing career began with poetry, and I listen to language like music. For me, music and poetry form the background to my writing. 4321 is beautifully structured, the story progresses like a spiral, and the sentences in the English version are very long, they go on and on, and I want the reader to feel that these sentences are moving with the music, and this kind of language design can propel the reader towards this very long story. I've always thought about music, but this is the first time I've thought about music on such a large scale in this longest book I've written to date.
Interface Culture: Does this make 4321 more challenging to write?
Paul Oster: I think so. It's a huge project, but I actually did it in a state of some kind of "fever". I thought it would take me seven years to finish the book, but it was actually only three and a half years, and I didn't even think about it. I start writing in the morning, write all day, and then continue the next day. Every time I finish a chapter, maybe 30, 40, 50, or 60 pages, I stop and take a break, read it from the beginning, and make revisions. After two or three days, I started the next chapter. So while I'm writing this book, I'm rewriting it. I kept an amazing rhythm and couldn't believe I did it! By the time I finished the last sentence, I was so exhausted that I felt like I was going to fall off my chair, and I had to lean against the wall to keep myself from falling.
Interface Culture: In your opinion, what should a good novel look like?
Paul Auster: There are no standards for good fiction and good art. Goya, a famous Spanish painter in the early 19th century, said, "Art has no rules. "In the same way, there are no rules for fiction. If you set the rules for good novels, you deprive yourself of the pleasure of reading and appreciating different types of novels. Similarly, there are many different types of music. Do you only listen to one type of music? It's unlikely. I'm interested in all genres, just as I like Charles Dickens, but I also like Franz Kafka and Samuel Beckett. They don't have much to do with each other, but they give us an idea of different ways of looking at the world, languages, cultures, and lives.
Interface Culture: I recently reread your correspondence with Coetzee, in which you mentioned that you were saddened by the death of your friends. Seven months ago, your good friend, the writer Mr. Philip Rose, also passed away. Does this parting affect the direction of your work?
Paul Auster: Actually, everything influences my writing. At the end of the day, writers are human beings, and we are deeply influenced by what surrounds us. And as time goes by, we're changing, and so is my writing. My writing is completely different today than it was thirty or forty years ago. As I grew older, I realized that life was counting down. I am 71 years old, and for me, life has become very moving, and every day is more moving. Every day I was still able to wake up, open my eyes, and realize that I was still alive and that I still had a lot to do.
Interface Culture: You've also said in your correspondence that you're a "technophobe" and that you prefer a typewriter to a computer.
Paul Oster: I use a typewriter because I still like to write by hand. I wrote by hand and then typed out the manuscript on a typewriter, which was not the first tool I used to conceive and write, it was just a recording tool. I've also tried computer typing, but don't like it. The keyboard took a toll on my fingers and then I kept making mistakes and didn't get a good grasp of it, so I went back to the typewriter. I'm not resisting computers, I'm just hoping to keep myself up and allow myself to have the privilege of a typewriter.
Interface Culture: You Don't Use a Mobile Phone Either?
Paul Oster: I used to have a mobile phone that I gave to my daughter. I don't have a job, I don't work with others. If I work with other people, I need a computer and a phone to keep in touch. But I don't need to, because I'm working from home alone. If people need to contact me, they can write to me, they can call my home phone, or they can call my agent or publisher. I was in contact with my friends via email, and my beloved wife complained every day, often saying that she was going crazy with these emails. But I just want my life to be quieter and simpler, and I don't want to drive myself crazy. It's not that I live in a barren desert and people can still find me if they need to contact me. So these are personal decisions, and it's a good way of life for me, just like a pen and a typewriter are better for me than a computer.
"Most Americans are not interested in literature, and many people don't read it at all."
Interface Culture: In your correspondence with Coetzee, you also mentioned that Americans have deviated from the essence of fiction and lost their imagination, that they have a hard time believing that novelists can "fictionalize events", and that all fiction has been reduced to implicit autobiographies and non-fiction.
Paul Oster: Actually, there are a lot of good writers in the United States, but there are some very traditional needs for popular publishers and popular books, so there's a lot of demand for crime fiction. I'm not criticizing this phenomenon, but people want to walk on familiar scenes and routes, so some different, imaginative works are frustrating for most American readers.
This has a lot to do with the history of the United States as a nation. Our country has had many great writers in the past, especially in the 19th century. People like to read literature that reflects on social issues, no matter what the specific problem is. Writers also tend to use fiction to explore sociological issues, and there are some first-rate writers who have done good exploration and experimentation in fiction. When I was very young, I used to read the works of Sinclair Lewis, the first American writer to win the Nobel Prize in Literature. His works "Main Street" and "Babbitt" have been called encyclopedias of social life in American towns. He wrote about a small town in Minnesota and made a sociological portrait of the different classes of people in the town. In Europe in the 20th century, in addition to this kind of novelists similar to those in the United States, there were also many European writers who wrote works that were very effective in form, linguistics, and imagination.
Franz Kafka, Marcel Proust, and Joyce have never been in the United States, and Faulkner's novels would not even be published in the United States today. Publishers are busy making money, and they are not willing to take such a risk. The great works and authors in the history of American literature go back a long way, and after World War II, there were very few American writers who I thought were great.
Interface Culture: What are the great works in the history of American literature?
Paul Auster: I'm thinking about 20th-century American literature. You can think of Melville's novels, Emily Dickinson's poetry, Emerson's prose. They were both gifted writers who changed the history of American literature. Before them, we also had literature and books, but nothing remarkable about them. But since then, new issues have begun to emerge, and the lessons they have taught us have begun to fade away. Unfortunately, these writers were not very successful in their lifetimes. Melville was in such a bad position that he eventually gave up writing, and his books could not be sold and could not be continued. When he died in 1891, he was almost forgotten by the masses. Later, a professor at Harvard University found a copy of Moby Dick in a bookstore in Cambridge, only to find out that Melville, the author, was dead. Emily Dickinson did not publish any poetry during her lifetime, she died in 1886, and it was only four years after her death that her poems were published in the form of books, and she was recognized as a great poet.
There are many such stories in the history of American literature, and our literary history has often had problems in recognizing the talent of writers. Of course, this is not a complaint, I am just describing the nature of the country. Most Americans are not interested in literature, and many do not read it at all.
Interface Culture: Has it always been this way, or has it only become like this in recent years?
Paul Oster: It has always been that way. Of course, people used to read more, and when I was younger, like fifty or sixty years ago, there were a lot of magazines on the market, monthly magazines and weekly magazines, which published poetry and novels, but now they don't have them. There used to be a magazine dedicated to reading, and there was a book called the Saturday Review, which was 80 to 90 pages long and was all about books, but now it has also ceased publication. The New York Times Book Review Weekly is the last newspaper in the United States, and there used to be no less than twenty such book review weekly, such as the Chicago Review of Books, the Boston Review of Books, the Washington Review of Books, and so on. When I was younger, Book Review Weekly was usually 64 to 80 pages, and now it's usually 24 pages. It follows that books are talked less and less about books these days—especially the difficult, challenging, so-called pure literature—and are increasingly marginalized in the culture as a whole. Needless to say, in the days when Melville and Poe were writing novels, there were no televisions, no movies, and no computers. People have nothing to do other than go to the theater, so people read. Nowadays, we have so many choices that people would rather do something else than read because reading takes a lot of effort and requires hard work.
Interface Culture: Do you feel bad about this?
Paul Oster: I really hope people read more. But I also understand that there are a lot of factors in this culture that make reading difficult. In addition to this, children do not receive a proper, solid and good education, and children graduate from school without knowing how to read and write properly. If you read the letters that soldiers wrote to their families on the battlefield during the American Civil War in the 19th century, you will find that although these people did not go to college and did not have a good education, they were written in beautiful language and eloquently than many educated people today. Writing was part of everyday life in the 19th century, but not part of everyday life in the 21st century.
Interface Culture: Do you think this decline in writing is unique to the United States, or is it a global phenomenon?
Paul Oster: There's no doubt that it's global, but it's happening much more quickly in the United States. I haven't traveled all over the world, but I've been to some countries, mostly the Western world, like South America and Europe, I've only been to Japan twice, I've never been to China, India, and some other places. But I must say that even in the face of a global decline in reading and writing, Europeans are still far more interested in reading than Americans. For example, in Europe, writers are often featured on television, but in the United States, writers are never on TV, no one pays attention to what writers are doing, and we like to watch movie stars, not writers.
Interface Culture: Why is this phenomenon happening so quickly in the United States?
Paul Oster: America is a young nation, founded on a belief in individual freedom. It is also a country built on the principles of capitalism, and it has been based on a culture of money from the very beginning. When people arrived here from New England and from Europe, making money was the primary goal for most Americans. This may be true elsewhere, but countries such as France or Italy have deeper cultural roots and a sense of respect for specific traditions. But the United States doesn't have that tradition, we like to overturn everything and make a comeback – the past and history aren't that important.