JC: I was wondering if that fear of presumption is what was so inhibiting in the writing of Austerlitz.
WGS: Well, it’s always there. I think certainly for a German gentile to write about Jewish lives is not unproblematic. There are examples of that, writers attempting this in Germany in the 1960s and 70s, and many of these attempts are — one can’t say it really otherwise — shameful. In the sense that they usurp the lives of these people. Perhaps not consciously so; they might be done with the best of intentions, but in the making it comes so that it isn’t right, morally not right. That is, something is spun out of the lives of these victims which is gratifying for the author or for the author’s audience. It’s very, very difficult terrain. I don’t know whether I succeed in this, but I was certainly conscious from the beginning that even in talking to the people who you perhaps might want to portray, there are thresholds which you cannot cross, where you have to keep your distance. It’s difficult and every case is different. Yet at the same time, of course, the likes of us ought to try to say how they receive these stories. But there isn’t a self-evident way of going about it. It’s a more acute variation of a problem that all writers have. So one has to be very careful.
JC: You’ve said that After Nature was very freeing because you could do it more or less by yourself. Were Vertigo and The Rings of Saturn also free writing experiences?
WGS: Certainly with Vertigo I had hardly any trouble at all. The last section of it, I wrote in very agreeable surroundings without consulting anything particularly, just wrote it down. But as I go along it seems to get more difficult. And pretty much in the same measure. The Emigrants was more difficult than this, and the last one I could hardly do, so I dread to think what the next one will be like. [Audience laughter.] I’ll have to wait and see. But it’s not like being a solicitor or a surgeon, you know: if you have taken out 125 appendixes, then the 126th one you can do in your sleep. With writing it’s the other way around.
JC: One thing we’ve discussed a couple of times, which is in The Rings of Saturn, is the degree to which the writing process is self-contained or illusionary for the writer as well as for the audience. Michael Hamburger and the narrator — Michael Hamburger also happens to be the translator for After Nature and he’s in The Rings of Saturn as a character — Michael Hamburger and the narrator are discussing the writing process. From the noveclass="underline"
For days and weeks on end one racks one’s brains to no avail, and, if asked, one could not say whether one goes on writing purely out of habit, or a craving for admiration, or because one knows not how to do anything other, or out of sheer wonderment, despair or outrage, any more than one could say whether writing renders one more perceptive or more insane. Perhaps we all lose our sense of reality to the precise degree to which we are engrossed in our own work, and perhaps that is why we see in the increasing complexity of our mental constructs a means for greater understanding, even while intuitively we know that we shall never be able to fathom the imponderables that govern our course through life.
This seems to be a theme that’s all over your work, which is that the part of the world that we know is minuscule. And the part of the world that we don’t know is enormous. Yet within the part that we do know — there’s such a great deal of agonizing in your work over getting that part right and getting the voice true. And yet, it may be that we’re trying to do this just to convince ourselves that we do know something about the world after all.
WGS: I think that’s pretty much how it is. You can’t always see, I think, the reality of what we’re doing in the pathological variant, because all modes of behavior have pathological variants. And writing and creating something is about elaboration. You have a few elements. You build something. You elaborate until you have something that looks like something. And elaboration is, of course, the vice of paranoia. If you read texts written by paranoiacs, they’re syntactically correct, the orthography is all right, but the content is insane, because they start from a series of axioms which are out of synch. But the degree of elaboration is absolutely fantastical. It goes on and on and on and on. You can see from that that the degree of elaboration is not the measure of truth. And that is exactly the same problem because, certainly in prose fiction, you have to elaborate. You have one image and you have to make something of it — half a page, or three-quarters, or one-and-a-half — and it only works through linguistic or imaginative elaboration. Of course you might well think, as you do this, that you are directing some form of sham reality.
JC: Two more things I want to get into before we close. One is — and this is that same theme again — in The Rings of Saturn:
The invisibility and intangibility of that which moves us remained an unfathomable mystery for Thomas Browne too, who saw our world as no more than a shadow image of another one far beyond. . And yet, says Browne, all knowledge is enveloped in darkness. What we perceive are no more than isolated lights in the abyss of ignorance, in the shadow-filled edifice of the world. We study the order of things, says Browne, but we cannot grasp their innermost essence.
There’s something in that quote which reminds me of a passage from The Brothers Karamazov, Father Zossima saying,
Many things on earth are hidden from us. . and the roots of our thoughts and feelings are not here but in other worlds. That is why philosophers say that it is impossible to comprehend the essential nature of things on earth. . what grows lives and is alive only through the feeling of its contact with other mysterious worlds. .
One other connection would be to the work of Czeslaw Milosz, Adam Zagajewski, and Joseph Brodsky. Do you see yourself as writing in a similar vein, thematically?
WGS: Well, what I think some of these people have in common is an interest in metaphysics. Certainly in Dostoyevsky this is evident. I think the best sections in Dostoyevsky’s writings are those which are metaphysical rather than religious. And metaphysics is something that’s always interested me, in the sense that one wants to speculate about these areas that are beyond one’s ken, as it were. I’ve always thought it very regrettable and, in a sense, also foolish, that the philosophers decided somewhere in the nineteenth century that metaphysics wasn’t a respectable discipline and had to be thrown overboard, and reduced themselves to becoming logicians and statisticians. It seemed a very poor diet, somehow, to me.
So metaphysics, I think, is a legitimate concern. Writers like Kafka, for instance, are interested in metaphysics. If you read a story like “The Investigations of a Dog,” it has a subject whose epistemological horizon is very low. He doesn’t realize anything above the height of one foot. He makes incantations so that the bread comes down from the dinner table. How it comes down, he doesn’t know. But he knows that if he performs certain rites, then certain events will follow. And then he goes, this dog, through the most extravagant speculations about reality, which we know is quite different. As he, the dog, has this limited capacity of understanding, so do we. And so it’s quite legitimate to ask — and of course it can become a parlor game, as it did in Bloomsbury — these philosophers said, “Are we sure that we’re really sitting here at this table?”