Paul Auster, Hector Mann and the Book of Illusions

Paul Auster, Hector Mann and The Book of Illusions Anna Scannavini Introduction I shall address the creation of a feature film and a set of silent shorts in Paul Auster’s novel The Book of Illusions.1 I shall place Auster’s story against the background of American topography and look closely at the narration of the making of the film and the connections the book establishes between films as a form of art and their making. Topography deserves attention in The Book of Illusions because Auster moves the story away from his favorite settings in New York City, marking a break with his previous literary and filmic work. Brooklyn and Manhattan are the quintessential milieus not only of the New York Trilogy, perhaps his best fictional work, but also of Smoke and Blue in the Face, the film scripts that mark Auster as a filmmaker. Smoke and Blue in the Face were released in 1995, about ten years after the publication of the Trilogy, with Smoke directed by Wayne Wang and Blue in the Face directed jointly by Wang and Auster. Both films feature Harvey Keitel as “Auggie” Wren, the owner of a cigar store in Prospect Park that attracts local characters and their stories. The cigar store and Auggie supply a frame and fixed point of view on the surrounding neighborhood life. Although in different ways, both movies are held together by framing and montage.2 In Smoke, framing is provided by photography. Auggie documents his surrounding life by taking snapshots from the fixed vantage point of his store at various times of the day. The snapshots provide continuity to subplots that otherwise might become loose and digressive. Blue in the Face abandons plot altogether and lets different actors/characters perform in front of the cigar store, creating a pastiche of sketches/snapshots linked together only by the memory of Jackie Robinson, the first African American to become a Major League Baseball player. Sketchiness is a common device in the representation of New York City, and Auster’s films are no exception. As a result, Brooklyn performs the same protagonist (antagonist?) role in the Auster movies as New York performs in much of Auster’s writing. In City of Glass (1985),3 protagonist Daniel Quinn leaves his 1 Paul Auster, The Book of Illusions, New York: Henry Holt, 2002. 2 Thomas Elsaesser and Malte Hagener, Film Theory: An Introduction Through the Senses, New York and London: Routledge, 2009, 13–34. 3 Paul Auster, City of Glass, Los Angeles: Sun & Moon Press, 1985. © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ��6 | doi �0.��63/978900430633�_007 <UN> Paul Auster, Hector Mann and The Book of Illusions 81 home to cross Manhattan several times, bringing his point of view with him – East to West, Uptown to Downtown; first by train, later on foot – in search of Peter Stillman and his book. The starting point is similar in The Book of Illusions: David Zimmer, a white adult male mourning the death of his wife and children, is drawn away from his home. His task, however, is to cross not a city but the entire conti- nent. Both novels motivate the crossing by using the detective formula, offering clues that must be decoded and given meaning. In The Book of Illusions, the clues compel Zimmer to seek out Hector Mann, an actor of Hollywood’s silent era, and explore his movies. In both cases, a text (or set of texts) and an evaporating author frame the story: a quasi-lost book in City of Glass, a quasi-lost set of films in The Book of Illusions. With their public circulation and mutual similarities, his novels and films single out Auster as a practitioner of both arts and support his 1989 claim that he intended “to open up the process, to expose the plumbing of writing”.4 I would maintain that the “plumbing of writing” that emerges so powerfully in his writing renders Auster’s work a continuing discourse not only on composi- tion techniques, but also on the American canon. The “plumbing” of cinema is ingrained thematically in the making of The Book of Illusions, revealing how Auster deliberately builds the novel as a metanarrative of the practice and theory of cinema, which he couples with the literary construction of the story. Since the movie world of Hector Mann merges with the emotional life of the male first-person narrator, David Zimmer, Hector’s films become the center around which the narrative develops. But Auster does not cast The Book of Illusions as a “film novel”, or as a piece of writing influenced by the language of films. He is too astute to try to shadow the pace and synchrony of filmmaking. He prefers to make a narrative out of his first-hand knowledge of the movies and film theory – a more concrete and factual knowledge than the simple acceptance of films as a shaping drive, “a major narrative force in the culture” (De Lillo).5 At the same time, the “spatial turn” in The Book of Illusions demon- strates how the American space crossed by Hector Mann contributes to the final meaning of the novel.6 Space is there to remind us that The Book of Illusions is an American novel. Hector’s frantic flight through American space 4 Larry McCaffery and Sinda Gregory, “An Interview with Paul Auster”, Contemporary Literature, 33/1 (Spring 1992), 1–23, 14. 5 Don De Lillo, “What Makes a Novel ‘Cinematic’”, The Hands of Bresson: Sundry Observations on the Art of Cinema and World Film Culture, (March 2009). http://eyeonfilm.wordpress .com/2009/03/11/what-makes-a-novel-cinematic/. 6 Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism. Or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, Durham, nc: Duke University Press, 1991, 154. <UN>.

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