Public Personae and the Private I

Dimovitz 613 PUBLIC PERSONAE AND THE PRIVATE I: DE-COMPOSITIONAL f ONTOLOGY IN PAUL AUSTER'S THE NEW YORK TRILOGY Scott A. Dimovitz Let everything fall away, and then let's see what there is. Perhaps that is the most interesting question of all: to see what happens when there is nothing, and whether or not we will survive that too. —Paul Auster, In the Country of Last Things Unless the dog-narrated Timbuktu deconstructed the author- function in a posthuman episteme, Paul Auster's work of the last decade bears little resemblance to his earlier works' complicated explorations of language and identity—explorations that usually get Auster labeled postmodern. Auster's postmodern credentials arise primarily from the first work of fiction published under his own name, The New York Trilogy (1987), comprised of three separately-published novels: City of Glass, Ghosts, and The Locked Room. Eager to find fictional corollaries to the Continental theories imported throughout the 1970s, American postmodern critics quickly adopted Auster's early works as manifestations of one form or another of postmodern and poststructuralist theories. In light of his subsequent fiction, however, this construction of a postmodern Auster seems premature, even if traces of these theories echo throughout the texts, and these later MFS Modern Fiction Studies, Volume 52 number 3, Fall 2006. Copyright © for the Purdue Research Foundation by the Johns Hopkins University Press. All rights to reproduction in any form reserved. 614 Public Personae and the Private I novels invite a reinvestigation as to how theory functions in Auster's work in the first place. In this essay I will argue that Auster's works deploy the argu- ments and concerns of postmodern theories not in a desire to validate those theories, but in an effort to generate a creative space outside of those theories' logical conclusions. More specifically, I propose that The New York Trilogy enacts a philosophical and aesthetic refu- tation of the art of Samuel Beckett, the main influence on Auster's writings in the 1970s, and one of the main factors, he claimed, that prevented him from writing fiction.1 Finally, I will suggest that rather than exploiting traditional detective fiction to stage epistemological problems, The New York Trilogy in reality exploits the already exhausted antidetective genre to explore dimensions of ontology, ultimately reaffirming a metaphysical system in which chance over- rides all questions of postmodern indeterminacy. In the early 1970s, two influential studies by Michael Holquist and William V. Spanos claimed that a certain form of abortive detective fiction most clearly highlighted the thematic concerns of postmodernism. Spanos called this genre the "anti-detective story" (Spanos 154; Holquist 135), a concept that Stefano Tani more fully developed in his 1984 study The Doomed Detective. These theorists argued that in the tradition established by Edgar Alan Poe and developed by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Raymond Chandler, and others, detective fiction stages fundamentally epistemological problems. A person commits a crime. The crime must be solved. An investigator serves as master interpreter, and he reconstructs the crime by sift- ing through evidence, using inductive logic to re-present the event. Ideally, this leads to a kind of Scooby-Doo moment ("I would have got away with it if it weren't for those meddling kids"), in which the criminal validates the correct interpretation through confession, for nothing would darken a mystery like the possibility that our society convicted an innocent man. Described in this way, detective fiction obviously has clear metafictional implications, playing as it does on such notions as evaluating evidence, plotting, and reading a person's character. As the detective sifts evidence to reveal a single unified meaning of an event and to discover the criminal, the reader sifts through textual evidence to reveal a single unified meaning of the text and discover the authorial intent.2 Ultimately, no matter how much the detective may construct or find himself as an outsider to the society he protects, he remains to the end a defender of the social order as he eliminates all uncertainty and chaos. In contrast, the postwar, postmodern antidetective fictions of writers such as Robbe-Grillet and Borges use these conventions to Dimovitz 615 challenge the genre's very philosophical foundations. These texts highlight dispersal over accumulation, indeterminacy over conclu- sion. Not only might there not be a single event or crime, no crime or criminal may exist at all. Congruently, this style metafictionally implies that the text of the real has no ultimate, stable meaning. In- terpretation always mediates reality. The fiction exposes the detective as just as motivated a reader as any other, not a master interpreter. The amount of choices of evidence reaches information entropy, in which selection becomes impossible because of the proliferation of nonhierarchic or falsely hierarchic information. The epistemological questions to keep in mind when examining Auster's fiction in terms of postmodern antidetective fiction are: What is the status of evidence throughout the text? Is evidence always mediated? If it is always mediated, can there never be provisional meaning? Is truth asymptotic or indeterminate? If evidence is not always mediated, what are the conditions for knowledge? Is there an event? Is there a noumenal reality to phenomenal perception? Beginning with Alison Russell's 1990 article, "Deconstructing The New York Trilogy: Paul Auster's Anti-Detective Fiction," most critics read The New York Trilogy as manifesting one form or another of this antidetective fiction label.3 Russell's article most exhaustively and compellingly reads The New York Trilogy from an earnest poststructuralist paradigm. Like many articles of its type, it quickly moves from an exercise in a variety of reading "amenable to the deconstructive prin- ciples of Jacques Derrida" (71) to one that claims Derridean priority over the text: "City of Glass illustrates Derridean dissemination" (75). Russell's argument moves so quickly and forcefully from "amenable" to "illustration" that by the end of her article it sounds as though the novel served no other function but to literalize Derridean theory: "By denying conventional expectations of fiction—linear movement, realistic representation, and closure—Auster's novels also deconstruct logocentrism, a primary subject of Derrida's subversions. In each volume, the detective searches for 'presence': an ultimate referent or foundation outside the play of language itself" (71–2). Russell's article is probably the most cited text from this per- spective, and several critical pieces have viewed Auster's novels of detection with the antidetective lens.4 This approach makes sense, as even a quick first reading of The New York Trilogy suggests. The Trilogy's constant meditation on heavy-hitter ontological and epistemological questions makes it read at times like a postmodernism primer. Long sections of the elder Peter Stillman's attempt to find a prelapsarian language by way of locking his infant son in a room do, in fact, read retrospectively like Derrida for Dummies, and indeed City of Glass would seem particularly "amenable" to seeing Derrida in action. 616 Public Personae and the Private I More than Derrida's work, however, these scenes in City of Glass seem lifted straight out of Surprised by Sin, Stanley Fish's 1967 study of Milton's Paradise Lost.5 At the time of Fish's writing, Milton studies roughly divided into two major camps. The first was the "pious" school from Addison to C. S. Lewis that took Milton at his word. The second was the "perverse" school that claimed, as Blake first did in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, that Milton wrote with liberty about the Devil because he was "of the Devil's party without knowing it" (353). Fish transformed Milton studies and sidestepped these readings by proposing that "Milton's method is to re-create in the mind of the reader (which is, finally, the poem's scene) the drama of the Fall, to make him fall again exactly as Adam did and with Adam's troubled clarity, that is to say, 'not deceived'" (1). Milton accomplishes this re-creation, Fish argues, by using words that signify in multiple ways, the negative denotation only possible after the fall, thereby implicating the reader in the negative reading. Polysemy becomes in this reading a direct function of the fallen state of humankind. Milton shows no anxiety about this, however, for he wants his work to recreate this fallenness in the reader, not to wish for or strive nostalgically for a prelapsarian form of language. This desire for a prelapsarian language structures The New York Trilogy's entire background. In the first novel, City of Glass, detective fiction writer Daniel Quinn mistakenly receives a call for the Paul Auster detective agency from Peter Stillman, a young man whose father locked him in a room from age three to twelve in an attempt to discover if this would lead to the ur-language. For subterranean reasons, Quinn impersonates Auster and takes the case, monitoring the elder Stillman, just released from prison for his crime and whom the younger Stillman fears will try to kill him. During the course of his background research, Quinn reads the elder Stillman's dissertation, The Garden and the Tower: Early Vi- sions of the New World, which Stillman divided into two parts: "The Myth of Paradise" and "The Myth of Babel." The first section of the dissertation treats the view of America as a second Garden of Eden by New World explorers from Columbus to Raleigh, while the second section concerns the problem of language in its fallen state as pre- sented in Milton: "Stillman also dwelled on the paradox of the word 'cleave,' which means both 'to join together' and 'to break apart,' thus embodying two equal and opposite significations, which in turn embodies a view of language that Stillman found to be present in all of Milton's work" (52).

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