Conversations with Paul Auster

Interview: Paul Auster on His New Novel, Invisible

203 Paul Auster on His New Novel, Invisible Nick Obourn/2009 This interview first appeared in October 2009 on“The Culture Spoke”blog on the website True/Slant.com. It is reprinted with permission of Nick Obourn. Nick Obourn: Why choose the Vietnam era to open this book? Paul Auster: I can never say “why” about anything I do. I suppose I can say “how” and “when” and “what.” But “why” is impenetrable to me. Stories surge up out of nowhere, and if they feel compelling, you follow them. You let them unfold inside you and see where they are going to lead. This one fascinated me. I think I was interested in exploring youth again. My previous three books had all been about older people. I thought maybe I had explored that enough for a while. There were anniversaries coming up too—many fortieth anniversaries were looming as I finished the book in ’08. ’07 had been the fortieth anniversary of the Newark riots, which I had seen. Many pivotal things from my youth are being reexamined now. I was thinking a lot about them as well, and maybe the book came out of that— forty years later. NO: A lot of Invisible is based on memory, on what people remember about the way certain events happened, which, as the story unfolds, has its faults. Memory can have its faults. If you want to speak to it, I’d like to know a little bit about how memory relates to narrative and fiction for you. PA: Let me give you a memory story. It’s not connected to the book, but it’s connected to that time, so it is relevant. One of my teachers at Columbia was Edward Said, who died a few years ago. He was the advisor for my master ’s thesis, which was the last step in my formal education. I didn’t go any farther than that. A posthumous book by Edward has recently been published, On Late 204 CONVERSATIONS WITH PAUL AUSTER Style. It was put together by another old professor of mine from Columbia, Michael Wood, who is now at Princeton and remains a good friend. In fact, Michael is the person who interviewed me for the Paris Review about five or six years ago. So it’s a friendship that has continued. In the book, there is an essay about Jean Genet. I can’t remember what year it was, it might have been ’69, but Genet came to the Columbia campus in support of the Black Panthers. He gave a talk at the Sundial, right in the middle of the campus. Since I knew French, some people who knew about this event asked me if I would be his interpreter for the day, which I gladly agreed to do. I remember walking around with him, and he was in very good spirits. He had a little flower behind his ear, spoke softly, and kept smiling. It was a beautiful spring day. Edward writes in his essay that he recalls Genet’s visit to the Columbia campus. He wrote that he ran into one of his students, who said, “Genet is indeed coming, and in fact, I’m interpreting for him.” I don’t remember running into Said and saying this. Then he said Genet got up and spoke, and his remarks were very simple and very much in support of the Black Panthers and against racism in the United States, but that the student interpreter elaborated all his remarks and made all sorts of accusations against American imperialism and capitalism. I have no memory of whether or not I was the one interpreting for him when he gave his speech. I was very shy then and had great difficulty standing up and speaking in public. If I had been that person interpreting that particular speech of Genet’s, I know for a fact that I would not have added anything of my own. When I saw Michael Wood recently, we talked about this. He said, “You know, it’s quite possible that Edward misremembered everything.” And so we have this giant memory hole: I can’t remember if I did it or not, and he couldn’t remember what actually happened. I’ve been puzzling over this now for the past several weeks. I can’t get a grip on it. Invisible functions a little like this episode. NO: The book is very much about the idea of the...