With an elegant gait, slightly stooped and that deep, wide-eyed look, Paul Auster entered the multipurpose room on the Cantoblanco campus at eight past eleven on Thursday morning – protocol commands and slows down – to accept the honorary doctorate from the Autonomous University of Madrid.
Considered, to his discomfort and annoyance, to be the most European North American of his generation, Auster (Newark, age 75) deserves a place in the narrative Olympus of his country, which has travelled, trekked, treaded and channeled the characters and themes from works such as The Moon Palace, Leviathan or Mr Vertigo. “As a critic and a writer, he represents the values of humanism,” sums up Professor Laura Arce, Auster’s godmother at the event, justifying further recognition for the New Yorker. Translated into more than 40 languages, the author has earned him the Prince of Asturias Prize for Literature in 2006 and was appointed Knight of the Order of Arts and Literature of France in 1992 for his universal work.
The Invention of Solitude (1982) marks the beginning of a narrative career that will also go through the translation of great French authors (Facet der Jugend, with which he later showed himself tired), poetry and cinema (Smoke or Lulu on the Bridge). A total of 26 novels and nine essays with identity, the ultimate meaning of being American or destiny as main themes. Coincidence is not one of its main traits of identity (despite the title of the excellent and obscure La Música del Azar) but, as he has so often explained, “necessity and contingency”, aspects reflected in the monumental 4. 3,2,1 (Seix Barral) his last novel yet, a narrative thrust capable of defeating any writer and which he shortly afterwards completed with Stephen Crane’s (also Seix Barral) hybrid The Immortal Flame, an exploration of creation as one life force. Two books in which the author left an immortal seal and, like this Thursday, proved his fitness after a career spanning more than 40 years.
Paul Auster just before the start of his Samuel Sánchez speech
Concerned about looking good in the photo, a smiling oyster got dressed and patiently waited his turn. After receiving the symbols that accompany the awardee’s cap (a ring, white gloves and the science book) and before the speech, he joked about the deed, the honor of being there, the grandeur of the occasion. “Look at me, I never thought I’d wear something like this,” he commented, laughing.
believe in wolves
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The New York Trilogy author had prepared a gift for the academic audience that filled the room. A text written at the beginning of the pandemic that linked his family tradition to Ukraine. That’s how he introduced it. “In 2017 I was invited to Lviv to take part in the International Congress of the PEN Club. I accepted the proposal for various reasons, including personal ones. My grandfather was born in a town two hours south of Lemberg and emigrated to the United States around 1900. This was my opportunity to visit this place. Formerly known as Stanislau or Stanislav, it was renamed Ivano-Frankivsk in 1962 and has grown into a prosperous city of more than 200,000 people. Two years ago, in the early days of the pandemic, I sat down to write the following article, which tells about the extraordinary day I spent in Ivano-Frankivsk in 2017. Now that the Russian invasion of Ukraine has entered its fourth month, unleashing horror and devastation on a scale not seen in Europe since World War II, I consider this little essay a foreshadowing of what is to come.”
Richard L. Kagan (left) in conversation with Paul Auster, this Thursday Samuel Sanchez (EL PAÍS)
As he read the speech in a deep, melodious voice, he paused for a moment as the noise of protest erupted outside. “We’re doing our best but we have a lot of competition out there,” he joked. “They’re tireless, let’s see if they take a break for lunch,” he asserted a little later, to the delight of the workforce.
The text, more than a chronicle of a day in a foreign country, is a story within another story, a search for its roots, a small taste of the Austrian universe applied to reality. It is entitled The Wolves of Stanislav and ends with a brief reflection on what he has heard from the mouth of a poet in these hours. Something about the story is wrong, the facts are wrong, they dangerously lean towards legend, but it doesn’t matter: “What are we to believe if we cannot be sure whether an alleged fact is true or not? In the absence of information that can confirm or refute the story the poet told me, I prefer to believe him. Whether they were there or not, I choose to believe in wolves.” Then sustained applause at the magnitude of the gift.
“Live alone. Others are around us, but we live alone. Sometimes we manage to peer into the mystery of the other, to penetrate it, but this is very rare. It is mainly love that makes these encounters possible” , he said aptly and farsightedly to Gérard de Cortanze in an interview in New York included in the dossier Paul Auster (Anagram) in 1995. On this hot morning on the Cantoblanco campus, a few kilometers from Madrid, Auster was not alone, and all his readers and the few dozen people who saw him being awarded by the Autonomous University are lucky.