PAUL LAFARGE

November 20, 2003

Paul LaFarge is the author of two novels: The Artist of the Missing (1999) and Haussmann, or the Distinction, a New York Times "Notable Book" when it was published in 2001. His stories have appeared in Story, Conjunctions, and McSweeney's. LaFarge was a 2002 Guggenheim Fellow. He is currently working on his third novel, about aviators, stand-up comedians, and languages not in general use. He lives out of his car.

Introduction

I’d like you to welcome Paul LaFarge to Buffalo this evening. The author of two novels, Haussmann, or the Distinction, and Artist of the Missing, as well as numerous short stories, LaFarge’s project immerses us in the rich and polifilamental tapestry of the (plausibly) historical narrative. In, for instance, his most recent book, Haussmann—a novel that takes as its subject that 19th century civil servant (the so-called "architect of Paris"), Baron von Haussmann, the man who transformed Paris into the modern city we know today—the reader is steeped in the bountiful logic of the Baron’s imagination, his penchant (and downright obsession) for designing boulevards and arcades, aqueducts, even the city’s sewer system. Yet, while LaFarge’s gaze appears focused on resurrecting history (in living in "the past as though it were the present, and the present as though it were the past," as one fictional critic remarks in the prologue to the novel), it is on the imagined past that the reader’s attention is directed with equal deference. Narratives blend and merge in LaFarge’s fictions—the evidently encyclopedic abuts with the patently fabulous—so that a new history begins to arise in his work, one that emerges, as the reader learns, from the mind of a poet, puzzle maker, and inventor of languages, a narrator named Paul Poissel, whose garb Paul Lafarge appears to don at times in order to present for the reader’s consideration the difficulty of negotiating the possible truth that arises in fiction, and the evident fiction that can be found in our common conception of truth. Language is not just a medium in his work (a lens for making meaning in other words), but a catalyst that both presents and undermines the very ideas it brings into being. In fact, who has language—who uses it, resists it, promotes it—is an apparent preoccupation in these fictions. In Haussman, for instance, the Baron garbles on his deathbed a possible renunciation of his life’s work (mumbled, however, the renunciation is never confirmed); his lover, Madeline, meanwhile, doesn’t speak until late in her childhood (but then, once giving voice, like Scheherazade, she skillfully weaves her way into an aristo’s bed); their daughter, finally, barely speaks at all, and only in a minimalist cant that Poissel, the eavesdropper, embraces as a possible new poetic. Having overheard the child say, "Greeks sailors…Greeks home," for instance, Poissel is struck by the possibility of a new language in which "one could say perhaps things that had never been said before."

"Why, Poissel thought, the child was amazing! She’s practically told the stories of the Iliad and the Odyssey in four words. He was taken with the fancy that this was what all language would become, or ought to become; stripped of everything unnecessary, of everything which came with reflection, complication, abstraction, all the paths by which the world was lost. What an interesting thought! He took a small notebook from his breast pocket and tried to think of a succinct way to write it down."

Of course the logic of Haussmann, and of LaFarge’s work in general, functions to counter this notion, written as it is in a whimsical, often speculative prose style that corrals an idea before it pins it to the page. There is little that’s reductive in these fictions and so Poissel, in the end, if misdirected in this particular effort, is right to chide those "sad scribblers who said that history had exhausted itself, that there was no going on" (365). History, in LaFarge’s fictions, is always in excess: there is always space for another story to spin—whether it’s a history of a particular asparagus field, the composition of Paris Hand Rolled Best cigarettes (made, we’re informed, from the detritus of cast off butts collected and re-rolled by urchins), or, finally, the miraculous works of Saint Grimace, the patron saint of unwed, pregnant women. Without a doubt, there are always more stories here. Fiction, as LaFarge proves, is nothing less than a situation. It is a "world within a world"—or as William Gass remarks to similar effect, a "world within the word"—that it’s our good fortune to encounter tonight.