Paul Auster: The Art of Fiction (The Paris Review Interviews, Vol. 4)
Paul Auster (photo by Dmitri Kasterine)
"The anecdote as a form of knowledge."
-- Paul Auster, from The Invention of Solitude
Paul Auster on the purest, most essential form of storytelling:
So many strange things have happened to me in my life, so many unexpected and improbable events, I'm no longer certain that I know what reality is anymore. All I can do is talk about the mechanics of reality, to gather evidence about what goes on in the world and try to record it as faithfully as I can. I've used that approach in my novels. It's not a method so much as an act of faith: to present things as they really happen, not as they're supposed to happen or as we'd like them to happen. Novels are fictions, of course, and therefore they tell lies (in the strictest sense of the term), but through those lies every novelist attempts to tell the truth about the world. Taken together, the little stories in The Red Notebook present a kind of position paper on how I see the world. The bare-bones true about the unpredictability of experience. There's not a shred of the imaginary in them. There can't be. You make a pact with yourself to tell the truth and you'd rather cut off your right arm than break that promise. Interestingly enough, the literary model I had in mind when I wrote those pieces was the joke. The joke is the purest, most essential form of storytelling. Every word has to count.
Given Auster's interest in both the anecdote and the joke, it is not surprising that he developed what became the National Story Project with NPR. For him, the aim was a true representation of American life, something difficult to achieve due to celebrity/star fixation.
Interviewer:
Did you feel you were performing a public service?
Auster:
To some degree, I suppose I did. It was an opportunity to engage in guerilla warfare against the monster.
Interviewer:
The monster?
Auster:
The "entertainment-industrial complex," as the art critic Robert Hughes once put it. The media presents us with little else but celebrities, gossip, and scandal, and the way we depict ourselves on television and in the movies has become so distorted, so debased, that real life has been forgotten. What we're given are violent shocks and dimwitted escapist fantasies, and the driving force behind it all is money. People are treated like morons. They're not human beings anymore, they're consumers, suckers to be manipulated into wanting things they don't need. Call it capitalism triumphant. Call it the free-market economy. Whatever it is, there's very little room in it for representations of actual American life.
Interviewer:
And you thought the National Story Project could change all that?
Auster:
No, of course not. But at least I tried to make a little dent in the system. By giving so-called ordinary people a chance to share their stories with an audience, I wanted to prove that there's no such thing as an ordinary person. We all have intense inner lives, we all burn with ferocious passions, we've all lived thorugh memorable experiences of one kind or another.
Auster's work includes The New York Trilogy (1987), The Book of Illusions (2002), The Brooklyn Follies (2005), and my favorite, Leviathan (1992). His Paris Review interview was published in 2003.
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