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 sur- rounding 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 protago- nist (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.
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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.