Paul Auster talks to Ed: Identity and 'The New York Trilogy'

On a foggy day, during the enactment of a reverie, author Paul Auster (The New York Trilogy, The Book of Illusions, Invisible) sits down with me and turns the tables on interview conventions. The author interviews the reader.

Auster: Ed, I feel I may call you that. Any reader who’s re-read a book of mine three times in the past seven years deserves to have his name abbreviated. So Ed, why did you decide to read The New York Trilogy for the third time recently when ten million new books are being published each month?

Ed: Mr Auster, you may call me anything you want, but I shall call you ‘Mr Auster’ out of respect and reverence.

A (laughs): Fair enough.

E: To answer your question… I’m a broken record. I get stuck in a groove and keep playing the same chorus. Your books tend to amplify that tendency in me. Besides, there’s something in the third book, The Locked Room, which resonates with me. ‘Resonate’ doesn’t begin to cover it. When I read the words, it’s like the Chinese God of Thunder had struck me with one of His shafts. It woke me up in a rude way.

A: Is that good?

E: I’m still not sure. All I know is the words correspond precisely with what I’ve always thought of my identity. Or rather, identities. You know the passage I have in mind?

A: I think I may have an inkling. It’s the one about deception.

E: Bull’s eye. Here it is: “We exist for ourselves, perhaps, and at times we even have a glimmer of who we are, but in the end we can never be sure, and as our lives go on, we become more and more opaque to ourselves, more and more aware of our own incoherence. No one can cross the boundary into another—for the simple reason that no one can gain access to himself” (243).

A: Why should it be this passage that’s defined your reading experience of The Locked Room, Ed?

E: This passage comes in the last quarter of the trilogy, but I can see you’ve been building towards it, right from the first page of the first book City of Glass. Of the protagonist Quinn, you write: “Who he was, where he came from, and what he did are of no great importance” (3). I surmise that it’s “of no great importance” because, like you said above, “no one can gain access to himself.” The writer, meaning you, could choose to tell any version of Quinn’s background, but in the end, it matters very little. There will always remain an opacity that’s impenetrable.

A: That’s one way of reading it…

E: In that sense, I’m a lot like Quinn, or Blue in the second book Ghosts, or the Fanshawe imitator in The Locked Room. I’m never whom the public thinks who I am. I’m a man of many, many faces, which all add up to some incoherent mess that sometimes terrifies me. On sunny days, when I can see a little more clearly, I’m more understanding and accepting of all these “presences” inside me. The moralising teacher, the introverted writer, the extravagant reveller, the illicit lover, the dutiful son, the cantankerous middle-aged cynic, the idealist, the faithless believer, the humble Asian, the fiery orator – all these personae reside in me, and depending on the time and occasion, one of them would surface and deign to represent me. The spectator who happens to catch sight of a certain persona thinks that I’m all that it portrays. If, for instance, I appear as the moralising teacher to a group of students, that’s what I’ll be perceived to be. There’s no room for the other personae, as social conventions and the limitations of the individual imagination won’t ever allow it.

A: That’s pretty curious, isn’t it? And so, like my creation Quinn, you’re forced to wear an identity that doesn’t represent the entire you.

E: Yes. An even more disturbing element is that even the moralising teacher persona is an artificial construct. It’s been defined by society and imposed upon me, and I merely play along, just so I wouldn’t be seen as an outcast. I have no desire to end up like Camus’ Meursault.

A: It sounds to me like you’re describing some sort of a spiritual prison, or a plot trajectory that keeps winding into itself, one that offers no way out.

E: It certainly feels that way.

A: Here’s a tough question: is there a way, you think, to dissolve these “compartments,” to blur the lines between these personae and to allow them to flow from one occasion to another without repercussions, regardless of their inauthentic nature to begin with?

E: That would be an impossible feat, Mr Auster. The reason for that is modern-day bourgeois living. It’s robbed us of our imagination – the key to all kinds of freedom – and left us as zombies.

A: Bourgeois living? You care to explain that?

E: I’m not judging the bourgeois mentality from a political perspective. I’m not a Fascist or a Marxist. In my book, those two are synonymous. I’m judging it from a spiritual perspective. What I mean by “bourgeois living” is the idea of (sub)urbanites leading pointless lives filled to the brim with trivialities that are mistaken as “essentials.” The neat little gardens, the pampered pets, the endless soirees and dinner parties, the tight circles of like-minded friends, the Sunday family outings… everything’s designed to ensure continuity and conventionality. It deadens the spirit and the imagination, and no-one gives two hoots about it, as long as they can continue having their cutesy afternoon tea. The desire to maintain form, formality, and normalcy gives rise to a culture of intellectual flatness. The man with a dozen faces could never survive in this barren environment should he reveal these faces all at once.

A: And so he’s conditioned himself to reveal the right face at the right time.

E: Yes, so as not to cause outrage and indignation.

A: Is it fair then to blame it solely on bourgeois living? Wouldn’t you say a totalitarian theocracy, for instance, would also have the same effect on the man with a dozen faces? One would suspect he’d fare a lot worse under the yoke of outright ideological oppression.

E: That’s true. But a totalitarian theocracy makes no pretense about free thought, whereas a democratic society purports to propagate it. Herein lies the sad truth: Man is free neither here nor there. The only place where there’s true freedom for him is in his imagination, and that’s precisely what he has to curtail no matter which system he finds himself in. The longer he’s denied freedom, the more confounding he’ll be to himself in time. Just like the Fanshawe imitator. After a while, there’s no telling who he really is anymore.

A: Unless you truly step out of yourself like Quinn and make a clean slate of it…

E: Yes, you become some sort of a Fisher King character, a social reject. But, Mr Auster, how many of us possess the courage to go down that dark alley with our eyes wide-open?

Auster, Paul, The New York Trilogy. London: Penguin Books, 2006.