| Saturday, April 28, 2007 4:39PM | | | | Auster and Arriaga | Posted By: Luke Epplin
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Whoever paired the Brooklyn novelist Paul Auster with the Mexican screenwriter/novelist Guillermo Arriaga should be given a promotion. It’s exactly this sort of odd mixture that makes the PEN Festival worthwhile.
Paul Auster is somewhat of a curiosity in the United States to begin with. Most of my book-loving friends have read at least one novel by Auster, usually The New York Trilogy, and have every intention of reading more; but the standard comment when discussing Auster tends to be: Did you know that he sells significantly better in Europe than he does here. Indeed, Auster’s popularity in Europe is so extensive that Americans are often left to ponder why he isn’t equally as popular here (though his books are always critically well-received). He’s the type of American writer that evidently speaks to much of the world, just as Guillermo Arriaga’s intricately structured screenplays for Amores perro, 21 Grams, and Babel have clearly struck a chord across continents.
The evening kicked off with Auster asking how Arriaga began as a writer—what came first for him: novels or screenplays? Neither, Arriaga answered, I started with love letters (as I imagine most writers do). Arriaga admitted that he started as a novelist but hasn’t written a novel for ten years, a time when he’s been dedicated solely to screenplays. The conversation turned to film, and Auster talked at length about his excursion into the film industry. Two of his screenplays have been made into movies, and he’s just finished directing his first feature, The Inner Life of Martin Frost, which will be released in the US later this year. Making films provided Auster with a break from the isolation of novel writing: “Writing novels is a solitary business: you get up in the morning, lock your door, and write. But filmmaking is a communal activity, performed with a large cast of creative people. It gave me a chance to recharge my batteries after so much solitude.”
One of the most interesting discussions arose from a disagreement that the two had about how to write a screenplay. Auster claimed that, for him, writing a novel is distinct from writing a screenplay. “A film is a choppy experience, there are so many cuts, edits, scenes, and changes in pace. It’s a completely different rhythm than a novel, where you can sometimes digress for forty pages before returning to the primary storyline.” But Arriaga remarked that he writes screenplays almost exactly as he writes a novel, continuously and descriptively. The movie 21 Grams, for instance, is famously disjointed, jumping back and forth in time, forcing the reader to construct the pieces of the narrative jigsaw puzzle. The critics hailed the editing of the movie, but Arriaga exclaimed, “Editing?! I wrote the damn thing that way!” Indeed, Arriaga said that the script for Amores perros was 180 pages, while his new, soon-to-be-produced screenplay is 90 pages. “As you can see,” he quipped, “I’m still learning how to write these things.”
At the end of the event, both writers talked about the craft of writing, and focused on the significance of death in their work. Arriaga told a beautiful story that sums up what a writer does. I’ll attempt to paraphrase it. In a certain part of Africa, there’s a group of people that believe that humans have two souls: a light and a heavy soul. The light soul can leave the body at any time—when one faints, the light soul has left the body, and when one dreams, the light soul has temporarily fled. But the heavy soul stays with you until death, when both souls depart the body. Three years before death, however, the light soul begins to leave at irregular intervals, since it must blaze the trail that the heavy soul will then travel after death. The light soul first has to identify the trail and then travel further and further along it until it finally reaches the precipice that separates life from death. The light soul peers down into the precipice and comes back to tell the heavy soul about his journey and all that it has seen on the border of life and death. “That,” Arriaga said, “is what writers do. They travel to this precipice and then come back and write down all that they’ve seen for their readers.” Auster said simply, “That’s beautiful.” Amen.
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1 Comment | Add a Comment |
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| 4-29-07 12:51AM: alejandro said...
I wondered why neither Auster nor Arriaga touched upon the significance of the story of Babel in their work–Auster in "New York Trilogy and Arriaga in "Babel". I think the conversation could have benefited greatly by a moderator.
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