by Paul Auster
Much as I hate to admit it, however, this is not a particularly terrible time for the Western world. A ridiculous time, perhaps, a frustrating time, but by no means one of the worst. Witches are not being burned at the stake, French Catholics and Protestants are not tearing out each other’s throats, America is not fighting a civil war, millions of Europeans are not dying in mud-filled trenches or concentration camps. Hitler is dead, Stalin is dead, Franco is dead. The monsters of the twentieth century are all gone, and if pygmies tend to be in power now throughout the West, far better to laugh at pygmies than to cringe from murdering tyrants.
But yes, America is a sad place to be right now. So many problems to be dealt with, and for the next two years nothing will be done about them, which will only make the problems worse. And then the battle will begin all over again. Meanwhile, I sit here in Brooklyn watching the great carnival of stupidity that has become our public life and shake my head, hoping the pendulum will eventually swing in the other direction.
The “mean vision” you talk about has been with us a lot longer than since 1970, I’m afraid. And contrary to the view I held when I was young—that people vote out of economic self-interest—I have now come to feel that many voters’ choices are entirely irrational—or ideological, even if that ideology goes against their economic well-being. In 1984, during Reagan’s reelection campaign, I was going somewhere in a Brooklyn car service. The driver, who had been a welder at the Brooklyn Navy Yard, had lost his job when the union he belonged to was crushed by management. I said to him: “You can thank Reagan for that—the greatest union-busting president in history.” And he replied: “Maybe so, but I’m voting for him anyway.” “Why in the world would you do that?” I asked. His answer: “Because I don’t want to see the fucking Commies take over South America.”
An indelible moment in my political education. It was men like this, I imagine, who voted Hitler into power in 1933.
To return to reading and writing for a moment, in light of your very interesting comments about empty cubes, Nabakov’s floor plans, and the “back stories” of characters in plays and movies. You talk about your spatial sense as a writer, but I’m also curious to know what you “see” in your head when you read a novel or short story—or, better yet, a fairy tale. If you read the following: “Once upon a time, there was an old woman who lived with her daughter in a hut at the edge of a dark wood,” what images do you conjure up for yourself, if any? Not much is given here. No names, no ages, no precise place, no physical descriptions, and yet somehow, for reasons that are entirely mysterious to me, I myself tend to fill in the blanks. Not in any elaborate way, perhaps, but enough to imagine a short, bulky woman with an apron around her waist, to imagine a thin adolescent girl with long brown hair and a pale complexion, and to imagine smoke rising out of the chimney of the hut. Does the mind abhor a vacuum? Is there a need to flesh out what is vague and formless, to concretize the action, or can you content yourself with the words on the page, in and of themselves, and if so, what happens to you when you read those words?
No, I didn’t mean to imply that Breaking Away is a cinematic masterpiece. Just that it is the only film I have seen that pays so much attention to cycling—and that I found it amusing. Of course, the triumphant race at the end is Hollywood claptrap. But the final, final shot of the film is genuinely funny—when the boy, who for months had pretended to be an Italian, meets a pretty French girl on campus, and then shouts out to his bewildered father: “Bonjour, papa!”
Something to ponder. In the past few weeks, I have done roughly a dozen interviews with American journalists about Sunset Park, which has just been published. Many of them, in particular the female journalists (all of them female journalists, now that I think of it), are shocked, even scandalized, by the affair of my twenty-eight-year-old character with his seventeen-year-old love. “Underage sex” seems to set off every alarm bell in contemporary American culture. On the other hand, when I talked to journalists about Invisible, almost no one mentioned the incest between brother and sister. Quite frankly, I am stumped.
Any thoughts?
With big hugs to you and Dorothy,
Paul
November 29, 2010
Dear Paul,
“Two inches forward, one inch back”—that’s the phrase you use to describe social progress in your country, a country which, inasmuch as it is a world-hegemonic power, is in an important sense my country too, and everyone else’s on the planet, but with the proviso that the rest of us don’t get to take part in its political processes.
My own somewhat jaundiced view, as a lifelong member of the class of the ruled, is that it is naive to look to our rulers to conduct us to a better future. They have more important fish of their own to fry. Therefore so long as they settle among themselves the problem of peaceful succession, I will make no further demands on them. By the problem of succession I mean simply passing of power from one of them to the next without subjecting the populace to violence.
One has only to look at states that haven’t solved the problem of succession to realize what an achievement that is, and conversely what misery it is to live in a country in which contenders resort to arms to win power.
So two cheers for the United States on that score.
I suppose that the stability of the U.S. comes largely from the reverence with which you Americans have been taught (and have learned) to regard your foundational documents. Which raises interesting questions about fundamentalism. As I understand it, there are people in your country who believe that the Constitution and Bill of Rights mean one thing and one thing only, while other people believe that these documents need to be reinterpreted from time to time in the light of changed historical circumstances. This difference on the issue of interpretation (what a written text means or can be said to mean) closely mirrors the theological difference between Christian fundamentalists and their progressive opponents, and no doubt differences within other text-based religions like Judaism and Islam.
I don’t know what your opinions are on interpretation and the limits of interpretation. My own feeling is that the spectacle of scholars (or judges) trying to tease out what two-thousand-year-old texts have to say about stem cell research is more than a little comical. When we come to modern times, I do feel that the failure of the Founding Fathers of the United States, back in the eighteenth century, to spell out unambiguously what they meant when they asserted the right of citizens to bear arms was no less than culpable; and, considering the hundreds of thousands of people who have been killed over the years as a direct consequence of literalist interpretations of that statute, successive political administrations in the United States have been culpable too for not having the resolve to scrap the statute and replace it with more specific wording.
A comment from Nietzsche (Twilight of the Idols) that I have just come across: “How is freedom measured in individuals as well as in nations? According to the resistance which has to be overcome, according to the pains it costs to remain uppermost. The highest type of free man would have to be sought where the greatest resistance is continually to be overcome.” One corollary: even if one may, in theory, be born free, one’s freedom soon wears off. Another corollary: there is unlikely to be such a place as the land of the free.
In your last letter you push forward the discussion of fictional spaces, asking what I see before my inner eye when I read in a book that there was an old woman who lived with her daughter in a hut at the edge of the forest. Compared with you, I seem to have a pretty paltry visual imagination. In the normal process of reading, I don’t believe I “see” anything at all. It is only when you come along and demand a report that I retrospectively assemble a rudimentary old woman in my mind’s eye, and a daughter, and a hut, and a forest.
What I do seem to have, in place of visual imagery, is what I vaguely call aura or tonality. When my mind goes back to a particular book that I know, I seem to summon
up a unique aura, which of course I can’t put into words without in effect rewriting the book.
You confess you are stumped when you try to understand why critics don’t complain about incest between brother and sister (in Invisible) but are outraged by sex between a man of twenty-eight and a girl (a woman?) of seventeen (in Sunset Park).
I am stumped too—particularly since in the latter case the intimacies are so discreetly represented. Fundamentally baffling is the question of what kind of historical age we live in: a puritan age or a permissive age. For it seems to have features of both. On the one hand parents don’t object when their sixteen-year-old daughter brings home a boy for the night. They may even offer breakfast to the sated couple the next morning. On the other hand, a grown man who snaps a photograph of a child wearing a swimsuit on the beach finds himself in the lockup.
My tentative hypothesis is that the temper of our times is hostile to desire and wants to punish it. At the same time, however, we are not prepared to punish children, who are by definition blameless. Therefore, a redoubled punitiveness gets directed at the adult who desires a child.
A Freudian would focus on the question of why we have stopped punishing children, and in particular have abandoned corporal chastisement, which used to be the norm but is now virtually tabooed. My guess is that the Freudian would spot a connection between the increasing sexualization of quite young children and the sexual or sexualized coloring that corporal punishment of children inevitably takes on in these circumstances. The intolerable logic would go something like: This child is trying to seduce me. But if I punish her for it I am giving in to her seduction. So what do I do next?
There was an interesting case in Australia a year or two ago. A respected photographer had an exhibition which included photographs of a nude model (female) aged (I believe) twelve. Prompted by vigilante groups, the police closed down the exhibition. The prime minister, Kevin Rudd, was asked in the course of an interview what he thought of the photographs (which had of course been spread on the Internet). For whatever motive—probably he thought it would win him votes—he pronounced the photographs “disgusting” and wondered aloud why we couldn’t leave children alone to be children.
There are many things that could be said about this response, the kind of response only to be expected from a politician nowadays who is attentive to public opinion. One would be that it assumes that if we are naked we are sexual, i.e., that the naked, the nude, and the sexual are more or less the same thing.
I remember, a few years ago, writing an essay on pornography in which, as what I thought of as a winning rhetorical move, a reductio ad absurdum, I asked aloud whether we were going to require filmmakers to certify that the actors they used in sex scenes were in no case minors. And, lo and behold, filmmakers are today required to sign declarations of precisely that kind.
Warmest wishes,
John
December 3, 2010
Dear John,
You ask if I have any opinion on interpretation or the limits of interpretation, and the first thought that comes to mind (my dim-witted, associative, hyperactive mind) is a passage I read many years ago in an English translation of selected portions of the Talmud. Several rabbis are discussing the possible circumstances that might prevent a person from reciting his daily prayers. One rabbi mentions shit as an impediment. If you find yourself standing next to a pile of shit, it would be blasphemous to invoke the name of God, wouldn’t it? The other rabbis agree. But what is to be done? Go somewhere else, of course. But what if you are unable to go somewhere else? One rabbi suggests covering the shit with a cloth or a piece of paper. As long as the shit is out of sight, he says, you can proceed as if it weren’t there. The other rabbis agree. Then the youngest rabbi brings up a vexing point. What if the shit is on the sole of your shoe—and you aren’t aware of it? Are you allowed to pray or not? The next sentence, I remember, was the following: “To this they had no reply.”
Meaning, I suppose, that interpretation can go just so far, and sooner or later you will come upon a question that cannot be answered. If you are compelled to give an answer (as judges are compelled to), it will necessarily be arbitrary, that is to say, personal, a product of who and what you are, a reflection of your private beliefs about how the world should be run. In the case of the aforementioned rabbis, I can easily imagine the conversation continuing—although thankfully, and beautifully, it does not. A liberal-minded rabbi would tell his young colleague to go ahead with his prayers. As long as he doesn’t know there is shit on the sole of his shoe, how can he be held accountable? God will understand and forgive him. But a fundamentalist rabbi would say just the opposite. Shit is shit, he would argue, the law is the law, and since it is forbidden to pray in the presence of shit, you would be committing an offense against God if you recited your prayers with shit on the sole of your shoe.
To go on a little further with this, since you talk about the peaceful transition of power in the United States and the reverence of Americans for their “foundational documents” . . . You have lived here long enough and often enough to understand American life as well as I do, but at the same time you stand apart from this place (and why shouldn’t you?) in ways that are not possible for me. You look at yourself as one of the “ruled,” and given the mischief America has created around the world these past umpteen years, a certain dose of skepticism about the American project is not unwarranted, is in fact perfectly understandable. I feel that skepticism too, but I am also of this place and deeply attached to it, and whenever America blunders (far too often), my pain is intense. Never more terribly (if we are on the subjects of government succession, interpretation of texts, fundamentalism, and foundational documents) than with the Supreme Court decision following the 2000 presidential election, the Gore versus Bush fiasco. I’m sure you remember what happened. To me, the remarkable thing about it was how quickly—and eagerly—supposedly fundamentalist interpreters of the law were willing to betray their so-called beliefs and convictions to put their man in office. One rarely gets to see intellectual frauds in action on such a large stage, and the hypocrisy of what I witnessed during those weeks has left me feeling bitter, still bitter ten years after the fact. So much for our reverence for America’s foundational documents. In the end, ideas count for little or nothing when it comes to the struggle for political power. The Supreme Court pulled off a coup d’état for the Republican Party under the guise of perfect legality.
Gore won. But his victory was not decisive enough to prevent that victory from being stolen from him, and one of the reasons why he didn’t have an overwhelming number of votes, perhaps the only reason, was that Bill Clinton got caught with his pants down. (A joke of the day: Why does Bill Clinton wear underpants? Answer: To keep his ankles warm.) Again, no need to rehash the facts, but here we come to the last part of your letter and your assertion (your correct assertion) that we are living in a punitive time when it comes to sexual matters. Tremendous license on the one hand, yes, but also the same old puritanical judgments that have been with us since the first colonists set foot in New England. Without the Clinton sex scandal, probably no Bush. And with no Bush, perhaps no 9/11—which would mean no Iraq, no Afghanistan, no illegal torture. For want of a nail . . .
All the points you raise in your letter seem to come together in this one dismal story.
Must run, but I wanted to dash off a few words to you before leaving. I’ll be back in New York on the sixteenth. In the meantime, I offer you an American military expression from World War II, which I recently came across for the first time: FUBAR. (Translation: fucked up beyond all recognition.) Not bad, eh?
Warmest best,
Paul
January 19, 2011
Dear Paul,
I stumbled on a little thought experiment the other day that has alternately been troubling and amusing me.
I was reflecting on my situation in life, on how I got to
be where I am (namely in the suburbs of a small city in Australia), and on the various accidents, including the accident of my birth—being born to particular parents on a particular day—that led to my being not only where I am but who I am. It occurred to me that it was all too easy to contemplate a world in which this fellow John Maxwell Coetzee, born February 9, 1940, was not present and had never been present, or else had lived a completely different life, perhaps not even a human life; but at the next instant it also occurred to me that it was impossible to contemplate a world in which I was not present and had never been present.
