Mr Writer Man

Paul Auster
TRAVELS IN THE SCRIPTORIUM
120pp. Faber. £12.99.
0 571 23255 8

Travels in the Scriptorium, Paul Auster’s most recent work of fiction, is a slim homage to the novels of Paul Auster. A writer, Mr Blank, imprisoned in a bedroom, his memory gone, is visited by his own fictional creations – all of them characters who have appeared in Auster’s novels. They are tortured by the kind of metaphysical crisis that will be familiar to readers of 1960s metafiction, about whether, if they exist only on the page, they can “really” exist. (No.) Some of them hate Mr Blank, blaming him for their suffering (for it is the novelist’s job to get characters into trouble). But Mr Blank is also visited by other Auster characters – clearly the more sagacious – who come to express their gratitude to the novelist who gave them life: “You do what you have to do, and then things happen. Good things and bad things both. That’s the way it is”. This is the writer as God, life-giver and life-destroyer; and also as the Christ. One of Auster’s most lamentable heroines, from his apocalyptic In the Country of Last Things (1988), here tells the novelist who she says ruined her life – who starved her, killed her baby, pushed her through a window: “You’re not like other men. You’ve sacrificed your life to something bigger than yourself, and whatever you’ve done or haven’t done, it’s never been for selfish reasons”.

In Flann O’Brien’s At Swim-Two-Birds, the question is raised whether novelists ought to pluck their characters from other novels, whether all of literature “should be regarded as a limbo from which discerning authors could draw their characters as required, creating only when they failed to find a suitable existing puppet”. By so doing, novelists could avoid cluttering their prose with tedious explanations, while safeguarding their books for the elite who can decode their references. In Auster’s story City of Glass (1987), the first book in his New York Trilogy, a writer called Quinn (one of Auster’s old reviewing pseudonyms) considers that “What interested him about the stories he wrote was not their relation to the world but their relation to other stories”. In Travels in the Scriptorium – where even the title is a reference to another Auster novel, a film title in The Book of Illusions (2002) – the narrative universe is even more narrowly constrained. All authorial concern is limited to the relationship between this new story and Auster’s old stories, so that Travels in the Scriptorium calls to mind a Christmas special, with all the old guest stars flown in.
Some writers fantasize about meeting and talking to their characters as a kind of exercise, a way to think about the larger work in which those figures will appear. Here those interactions have become the work itself. In 1970, in an introduction to an English translation of Knut Hamsun’s Hunger, which features a writer who becomes unwilling to write, Auster wrote, approvingly, of Hamsun’s having created “first of all an art that is indistinguishable from the life of the artist who makes it”, a novel about the struggle to make the novel, “an art that is the direct expression of the effort to express itself”. Hunger is not a novel about the difficulty of the writing of Hunger – it is a larger exploration of irrationality, pride and madness – but Auster’s reduction of it is really a description of his own project. With few exceptions, Auster’s novels take as their climax the protagonist’s finally managing to write a book, with the conceit (charming only the first time this trick is experienced) that the character/narrator is revealed to be the writer of the very book that the reader is just finishing.

There have been diversions: a fascinating essay about Auster’s father, who never told his son that his grandmother had murdered his grandfather (“Portrait of an Invisible Man”), a tiresome novella about a poet’s dog (Timbuktu, 1999), workmanlike translations of Modernist French poetry. Auster also writes feelingly about family life, with frequent sentimental tributes to his second wife, the writer Siri Hustvedt (“Siri . . . a tall, thin blonde, radiantly beautiful, with an energy and happiness that seemed to make everything around her invisible”. Though sometimes the “dazzling blonde presence” with “the deepest, merriest blue eyes to be found between heaven and hell” is called “Iris”, an anagram intended to be no more obscure than the initials of the character “Peter Aaron”). But the mainstay of Auster’s literary career is the subject of literary careerism. Even an attentive reader of his work would have trouble matching the following closing lines to the novels that contain them: “I handed him the pages of this book”; “I came to the last page just as the train was pulling out”; “If and when this book is published, dear reader, you can be certain that the man who wrote it is long dead”; “I will try to write to you again, I promise”; “I was rescued by the idea of writing this book. I can’t really say how it happened. It just hit me one morning as I climbed out of bed, and less than an hour later I was sitting at a desk in the upstairs parlor with a pen in my hand, scratching away at the first sentence”. This gambit transcends the form. The film Smoke, for which Auster wrote the screenplay, stars William Hurt as a novelist called Paul, who is failing to write a novel – until the end, of course.

Fiction that calls attention to its own artifice, critiquing its own methods as it moves along, congratulating itself on its own success, always risks accusations of narcissism and self-indulgence. When, in Travels in the Scriptorium, the beautiful heroine of In the Country of Last Things expresses her gratitude for her existence by performing a sexual act on Mr Blank (fully described), it is probably not the reader’s pleasure that is paramount. The best metafictions – works by Borges, Calvino, Flann O’Brien, Vonnegut, and Auster’s own Ghosts and The Book of Illusions – are rarely guilty of such solipsism. They expose the limitations of narrative and language because, in so doing, they are making arguments about the representation of life, which means, about life. And so it is wrong of Quinn to think that he can write stories by ignoring the world and being interested only in stories. When Middlemarch interrupts itself –“One morning some weeks after her arrival at Lowick, Dorothea – but why always Dorothea? Was her point of view the only possible one with regard to this marriage?” – George Eliot is making an argument about fiction-writing, but one that has weight because it is tethered to a larger one about society: “I protest against all our interest, all our effort at understanding being given to the young skins that look blooming in spite of trouble”.

In his most recent novels, Auster has been playing for only the smallest stakes, seemingly seeking to prove no more than that writing is a difficult business and that popular writers have great power, or, as the novelist-narrator Peter Aaron boasts in Leviathan (1992), “without even knowing it, I enter the lives of strangers, and for as long as they have my book in their hands, my words are the only reality that exists for them”. In Travels in the Scriptorium, in the fortress bedroom, Mr Blank, still amnesiac, finds the start of one of his manuscripts, which he tries to complete. It is, pointedly, a story that Auster has already told, in his 2004 novel Oracle Night; though if Mr Blank is Mr Auster, then such a replay is fair – why shouldn’t the manuscript Mr Blank discovers be already completed and disseminated? It is a fable about a country whose people think themselves at risk from barbarian tribes, explained (Auster usually provides his own glosses) in Oracle Night as a “political parable” that is “really about the early nineteen fifties . . . the idea is that governments always need enemies, even when they’re not at war. If you don’t have a real enemy, you make one up and spread the word”.

For Travels in the Scriptorium, the story is retold in order to be the means by which Auster presents this novel’s central question – not to do with today’s political situation, but about the morality of fiction-writing: if to “tell a good story, you can’t show any pity”, with characters who must be “subjected to unbearable suffering and/or death”, how can novelists be good people? Are the fictional characters who hate Mr Blank (some of them try to kill him) right to think him and his profession pernicious? Such spurious questions are not deserving of book-length answers. And Auster’s style offers few compensations: a wicked essay by Craig Raine once suggested that the reason why Auster is more popular in France and Germany than in Britain and America is because translation strips his prose of its clichés. Although it is at its tightest here, Auster’s language has grown no more imaginative.

In Travels in the Scriptorium, the usual Auster joke is reversed. We learn that the novel “Travels in the Scriptorium” is being written not by Mr Blank but by one of Mr Blank’s characters, Fanshawe from The New York Trilogy. The novelist has been turned into a fictional character himself: “I believe I speak for all his charges when I say he is getting what he deserves – no more, no less. Not as a form of punishment, but as an act of supreme justice” . The potency of literature is once again affirmed. Because he is rendered in a novel, we are told, Mr Blank “will never die, never disappear”. Auster is echoing his preceding novel, The Brooklyn Follies (2005), about a life-insurance man cum writer who intends to become the creator of a work that “would outlast us all”, and who claims – in a sentence, given its own paragraph for emphasis, ready for emblazoning on totebags – that “one should never underestimate the power of books”. But one should not overestimate the power of books either, particularly the power of one’s own books. Like anything else they must earn their keep.