Will's Students, Brennan
WillL at fieldschool.com
WillL at fieldschool.com
Wed May 15 22:06:12 CDT 1996
Date 5/15/96
Subject Will's Students, Brennan
>From WillL
To Pynchon List, Wallace List
Will's Students, Brennan
Dear Listers,
Here is the promised first dispatch from my high school seniors. Kathleen has
chosen to write generally about the question of what's "true" in a piece of
recent fiction, using Paul Auster's "Leviathan" as an example. Even if you
haven't read it, please feel free to respond to her, and feel free use other
works in your response, particularly "The Crying of Lot 49," which the students
also read. I plan to collate the various responses and discuss them with the
students in a seminar. Thanks for your help!
-- Will Layman
********************
Authors have often explored the difference between what's being said and what's
actually taking place, but recently authors are taking this relationship between
truth and fiction further. Paul Auster's "Leviathan" is a novel which attacks
this relationship in a series of ways from the traditional "unreliable narrator"
to actual discussions about the discrepancy between truth and fiction. From the
moment we are told our narrator's name, Peter Aaron, the warning bells begin to
sound. The similarity of the author's initials and the initials of our
narrator, also a writer, is hardly accidental. While the plot of the story
itself seems primarily fictional, we begin to wonder about the small details
included about the narrator's own life. Auster exacerbates this questioning of
the verity of details. For example, at one point Aaron is producing a first
class fib for a few FBI's, and "To illustrate my point, I gave them several
examples -- all of them true, all of them taken directly from my own
experience."
While we're fumbling around trying to figure out which parts of the story really
belong to Auster (searching unsuccessfully for an "About the Author"), we're
pushed farther and farther forward into Auster's truth-fiction game. Our
narrator tells us that he is unreliable. He tells us that he's basing his story
on other people's stories and on his assumptions. He tells us that in talking
to two different people you can get two different truths. "In other words,
there was no universal truth. Not for them , not for anyone else." So, is
that it? Has Auster taken us through this fun house of connections and
contradictions only to set us down with these five words, "there was (is) no
universal truth"? So is this an incredible insight into the balance in which
we live? Under this premise then truth is interpretation. You see it your way
and I'll see it mine. History is malleable. But I don't know, I'm rather
partial to facts. So maybe it's a cop-out answer, one of those responses from
the sullen kid at the back of the class who is sick of everyone's thoughts on
the matter and even of thinking about it himself; so he gives an all
encompassing response. But I'm not so sure about that either. I have a hard
time believing that Auster is a cop-out, that he's just tantalizing his readers
with the prospect of an answer. So my question is this, which one of these is
the truth? Or isn't there one because Auster's not lying and there is no
universal truth? Oh, but does that mean that that's the true answer, which
means that he's wrong, which . . . .
-- Kathleen Brennan
More information about the Pynchon-l
mailing list