“True fabrication” in research practice. Between experiencing “being in the field” and experiencing literature―a journey with Paul Auster

My goal is to display multi-level relationships existing between the real world and the fictional world. The keystone of these considerations I made an idiom “true fabrication” that appears in the works of a Polish postwar writer, Marek Hłasko. The text begins with the disclosure of a paradox lying in a field of the semantic phrase “true fabrication”. Using this phrase I highlight the ambivalence which I encountered during my own field investigations, stretched between real presence and the presence mediated by thought and writing. In the subsequent parts of the essay, I combine―in accordance with the rule of the preliminary diagnosis―the level of experiencing “being in the field” with the level of experiencing literature. Throughout this process I am accompanied by Paul Auster―cognate to Marek Hłasko in his “true false” intuitions. Reporting to the Reader my reading of Oracle Night (built on the “true false” concept―this is an equivalent of Hłasko’s “true fabrication” in Austerian nomenclature), I take up the challenge of the “game of narration” (a term coined by Jacques Lacan), which enables extending the interpretation horizon with what does not entirely fit within the “truth” or within the “fiction”, occupying a roomy space “between” them. Apart from Auster, Hłasko and Lacan, for such intellectual-experiential journey I am also taking Virginia Woolf, Paul Ricoeur, Rasmus R. Simonsen and Javier Marías.