Paul Auster: Even a writer like Beckett has doubts about himself

Paul Auster looked a little uneasy. We stand in the lobby of manchester's HOME Centre, where the writer has just experienced a VR showcase of a theatrical adaptation of his novel City of Glass. The installation in the hall takes the viewer into a slightly terrifying 3D real environment, where you can sit at Paul Auster's desk, sit in front of Paul Auster's typewriter, type out passages from Paul Oster's New York Trilogy, and feel the falling snowflakes.

He took off the VR headset and whistled. "Just the experience, we would say in New York is 'very strange thing.'" But it should be pointed out that these strange things were originally his own ideas. "Oh no," he replied, "these people have done far more than I could have imagined." ”

These people refer to 59 Productions, which is made up of designers, animators and video producers. They have produced video content for the opening ceremony of the London 2012 Olympic Games. The production company is known for its collaborations with director Katie Mitchell's "live film" performances, which are a way for photographers to shoot actors live on a theatrical stage in real time. However, "City of Glass", in collaboration with HOME Arts Center and Lyric Hammersmith, is the first theater project that 59 Productions has been involved in from scratch.

Leo Warner is the director of City of Glass and co-founder of 59 Productions. He explained that the desire to bring Oster's dark and gloomy thriller to the stage was his long-standing ambition, and the problem was simply waiting for the progress of technology. "What attracts us is the fact that this work cannot be adapted." Warner said, "At least, this is not possible within the framework of traditional theaters." However, we can already transform the environment of the stage into what Paul Oster conceived. ”

City of Glass was published in 1985 as the first book in the New York Trilogy. Its opening is arguably one of the most convincing openings in a late 20th-century novel: "It all started with a wrong phone call." On that dead night, the phone rang three times, and the person on the other end of the phone was not him. The scene was inspired by a wrong phone call when someone called Paul Oster's apartment with the intention of contacting a detective. Auster adapts the story into an alternative existential story: a suspense novelist named Quinn is mistaken for a private investigator named Paul Oster.

"Interestingly, Paul didn't have an email address, he only communicated by phone," Warner said, "so I called him and he invited me to his apartment." This made me feel strange because I began to wonder if I had called the Paul Auster at the beginning of the novel. ”

Oster recalls their first meeting: "Because I've moved, it's not the same phone number anymore," he says, "but almost 10 years after I finished writing the novel, I got a call on the same phone from a strange Spanish accent asking if I could talk to Mr. Quinn." This just shows that the novel will never end, and the novel will continue to write on its own. ”

Oster liked the grandeur of Warner's ideas, but still thought That City of Glass was not suitable for theatrical adaptation. Paul Auster has also directed films like Smoke, Blue in the Face, Lulu on the Bridge, and even then he never tried to adapt the New York Trilogy into a movie. "Someone has tried," he said, "and other movies, with the exception of sci-fi movies, automatically build a sense of reality, which is hard to break through." Only a very good director can navigate this film, and the grotesqueness of everyday life in it is difficult to capture. ”

The task of adapting the screenplay fell to screenwriter Duncan Macmillan. We met at rehearsal, and the screenwriter had exhausting eyes and an irregular beard on his face as if to pay homage to Quinn's messy image in the novel.

His two-year-old was also one of the reasons for his lack of sleep, but it also had an important impact on his changing jobs.

"When I first read the trilogy as a very typical young man, I thought the series were three unique and postmodern detective stories," he said, "but the way I interpret this story now is from the perspective of a father." In fact, Quinn's most notable thing is that he lost his wife and three-year-old son and has lived a walking dead life ever since. The existential crisis he endured turned into an almost trance-like state of pain. ”

Does Paul Oster agree with this interpretation?

"Over time, I became more and more interested in people's responses," he said, "and losing a young child can be the worst tragedy." My son nearly died of pneumonia when he was two years old, just about a year after I started writing City of Glass. In a way, the book is like an autobiography of another of my lives: What would I have become if my son had died, or if I hadn't met my current wife? ”

Before becoming a professional novelist, Oster wrote poetry and also wrote skits. In parallel universes, is it possible for Auster to become an experimental screenwriter in New York?

"I don't think so," he replied with a smile. "I don't have the talent to write a screenwriting. But one of the plays I wrote did get put on the stage, called Laurel and Hardy Go to Heaven, about two burlesque actors, Stan Lowey and Oliver Hardy, who were constantly building a stone wall between the audience and themselves. The script was heavily influenced by Samuel Beckett. ”

In 2006, auster carefully studied every detail of Beckett's work while editing the four-volume complete collection of Beckett's works in the Centenary Anniversary Edition. In the early 1970s, Auster was a destitute Translator of French poetry, but he still managed to invite Beckett to his apartment. "We talked about the problems he had with translating his novel Mercier and Camier into English," Oster recalled, "and I told him how much I admired him, and about ten minutes later he suddenly asked me: 'Do you really think this book is well written?'" It's hard to imagine that my literary idol would want to know what my American kid thinks of his work. But it also taught me that even a writer like Samuel Beckett would have doubts about himself. ”

So is it possible to see the theatrical version of City of Glass as a tribute to the absurdity of fate in Beckett's work?

"I'm not sure at the end of the novel, Quinn is really dead," he said, "it seems to me that he evaporated from the story." ”

But does the constant ringing of the telephone on the train coincide with the classic tragicomedy depiction of the uncontrollable and spontaneous events of fate?

"I wrote in the first paragraph at the time: 'After a long time, he came to the conclusion that nothing was real except by chance.'" Since then, a lot of the discussion of my work has revolved around 'contingency', which I don't think is entirely fair. I now prefer to replace the word 'accidental' with 'accidentality', that is, every minute and second of our lives is filled with possibilities. ”

It's like walking into a British theater and being presented with a New York apartment?

"That's right."

(Translator: Li Sijing)

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