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'Everything … As a Gloss on Everything Else': Life and Work in Paul Auster

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'Everything … As a Gloss on Everything Else': Life and Work in Paul Auster !1 ‘EVERYTHING … AS A GLOSS ON EVERYTHING ELSE’: LIFE AND WORK IN PAUL AUSTER by MEIPING ZHANG DISSERTATION Submitted in Partial Fulfilment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy Goldsmiths, University of London, 2018 !2 Declaration of Authorship I, Meiping Zhang , hereby declare that this thesis and the work presented in it is entirely my own. Where I have consulted the work of others, this is always clearly stated. Signed: _______________________ Date: 07/12/2017 !3 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS The thesis was supervised by Josh Cohen. I am immensely grateful to him for his interest in the project, for his insightful comments and valuable suggestions, and for guiding the project to its completion. Thanks to Aliki Varvogli and Tim Armstrong for their constructive and challenging comments and questions as thesis panel members. Thanks to Carole Sweeney and Rick Crownshaw for giving generously of their time in commenting on various aspects of the project. I also wish to thank the Department of English and Comparative Literature at Goldsmiths for its consistent support. The project benefited greatly from the bursaries awarded to me by the Department. My deepest gratitude goes to my parents, whose unconditional support has always been incalculable. A version of chapter 2 was published on Cambridge Core in Journal of American Studies. Copyright 2018 by Cambridge University Press and British Association for American Studies. Used by permission of the publisher, Cambridge University Press. !4 ABSTRACT The thesis examines a variety of philosophical implications in Paul Auster’s works, crossing American culture with Continental thought. Focusing on such subjects as solitude, community, the idea of America, the idea of the work (of art), the ontology of film, the disastrous and the ordinary, it aims to develop intersections of Auster’s works with the thoughts of Stanley Cavell and Maurice Blanchot. Blanchot has already been introduced into recent Auster criticism. But this is not the main reason why I use Cavell, instead of Blanchot, to set the tone for my study. Contrary to past research, which tends to divide into discrete areas, emphasising either Auster’s postmodern textuality or critical engagement, his American roots or European affiliations, my study is concerned with how these divisions can be reassessed and negotiated. A Cavellian reading of Auster is valuable not only because the themes Cavell discovers in Thoreau and Emerson (such as Moral Perfectionism) provide insight into Auster’s engagement with American Transcendentalism, but also because his way of reading is indissociable from his interests in Continental tradition, as well as in film and literature. I share these interests in my own reading of Auster; they help reconstruct the pictures of life and work, of self and other, of singularity and commonality, of ordinariness and extraordinariness. Additionally, I look at certain Blanchotian aspects of Auster’s writing, highlighting what has not been previously noted, such as the withdrawal and exigency of community in Moon Palace. Blanchot’s ideas of unworking (désoeuvrement) and disaster further define the ethico-ontological dimension of being. This does not essentially counter Cavell’s emphasis on the ordinary but rather reveals its difficulty. On the whole my reading suggests a logic of eternal return that underlies the entwinement of Cavellian and Blanchotian strands in Auster, which reflects both human vulnerability and responsibility. !5 TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction: Recounting the Experience of America 6 1 Experiencing as Knowing: Writing Solitude in Ghosts 34 2 Pen and Bomb: A Transcendentalist Reading of Leviathan 59 3 An Education of Sincerity: Visiting Moon Palace 80 4 Confession as a Therapy: Revisiting Moon Palace 102 5 The Image of Loss: Writing Cinema in The Book of Illusions 125 6 What Becomes of the Everyday: Reinventing Communal Life in Smoke and The Brooklyn Follies 146 Conclusion: The Imperative to Go On 170 Bibliography 196 !6 INTRODUCTION Recounting the Experience of America The New York Trilogy is widely regarded as Paul Auster’s magnum opus. No wonder the three volumes, in particular City of Glass, have attracted untiring attention from critics. Whether it has to do with the concurrent ascendency of postmodernism and poststructuralism is a question to be assessed with hindsight and yet, I think, not necessarily intrinsic to the work per se. Perhaps there is nothing really intrinsic to literature, that is, nothing essentially causal to, or inevitably associated with, the birth of the work. If anything, its origin remains too complicated and obscure to be deciphered. This is not the same as saying nothing empirical can be retrieved, say, some biographical elements here, some historical references there. Or, something speculative could be added or applied, say, certain thematic, stylistic comparisons here, certain literary, cultural theories there. These attempts and threads are informed by histories and influenced by the vicissitudes of taste (to use a rather old-fashioned word) in critical reception, not only of literary texts but of theory in general. Thus, though The New York Trilogy is a milestone as well as a turning point in Auster’s career — before that he was known for his poetry, translation and prose — and arguably in the history of American contemporary fiction, it seems that more and more Auster critics have become dissatisfied with a somewhat hackneyed postmodern and/or deconstructive analysis of this Austerian arche-text, however sophisticated and compelling this kind of analysis and text looked decades ago.1 Yet one thing is for sure, namely, a tacit consensus among the critics that Auster, as with many of his contemporaries, is undoubtedly a postmodern writer or, more precisely, novelist. This thesis departs from the above consensus. By rethinking (and even questioning) the postmodern thread in Auster’s writings, my first task is to trace their genesis through a reassessment of past research, to pull together Auster’s European affiliations and American inheritances, his textual experiment and critical engagement. This helps us identify key issues and divisions residing in Auster scholarship; furthermore, it indicates what can be achieved through an alternative to previous readings. Let me say in anticipation that the alternative I propose is chiefly based on Stanley Cavell’s philosophy. His philosophical way (which he calls ‘reading’) — and notably his 1 See Stefania Ciocia, ‘The Career and Critical Reception of Paul Auster’, Literature Compass, 9.10 (2012), 642-53. !7 attempt to splice American and Continental traditions — motivates me to reinterpret Auster’s works. A literary-philosophical line across borders will be constructed to support my Cavellian approach. It basically suggests a different cultural matrix in which the experience of America is recounted and reconceived. I sequence the chapters according to a set of topics concerning this experience. These topics, from solitude to community, from the ordinary to the disastrous, follow a logic of eternal return that redefines the doubleness of human existence. An important task of this thesis is to uncover the ethico-ontological dimension of this doubleness, deriving its rich senses from a Cavellian reading of Auster. I thus select some of his works that best suit the purpose: Ghosts, Leviathan, Moon Palace, The Book of Illusions, Smoke, The Brooklyn Follies, Sunset Park, and The Invention of Solitude. Interpretations of these works are so organised as to optimise the effectiveness of my philosophical approach. This of course does not mean that Auster’s other works must fall outside of the purview of this thesis, but, to ensure depth of exploration, I focus on the group of works that as a whole has the greatest potential to engage with Cavell’s thought, which in a way also implies the possibility of recombining European influences (for instance, Maurice Blanchot) with American experience. It is then conceivable that the development of my reading is not simply progressive; interruptions are an essential part of it, signifying, among other things, the interrupted myth of America, its unfulfilled dream. Meanwhile, alongside those interruptions, one’s life and work — which in Auster’s stories are never just one’s own — persist. It is on the basis of this persistence that one, as a finite, partial being, continues to change, and to renew one’s infinite relations with other beings. This relates to the message already present in The Invention of Solitude (‘Everything, in some sense, can be read as a gloss on everything else.’), from which the title of this thesis is derived. Postmodern Origin(ality) after Postmodernism: A Conspectus of Auster Scholarship The term ‘postmodernism’ has become a cliché, rigidified and normalised; a tag conveniently attached to many things in our time. This rashness in thinking (postmodernity) — namely, the impulse to reduce and pigeonhole things and phenomena once and for all — is not quite, I should say, ‘postmodern’; in fact, it is always embedded within human history. Thus, when poststructuralists and deconstructionists were dethroning metaphysics, it did not occur to them that later their followers would, consciously or unconsciously, put them on the very pedestal they wanted to destroy. Or, perhaps some of them foresaw the consequences, not least an unavoidable risk of helping foster certain postmodern metaphysics. This is not irrelevant to the reception of Auster’s fiction, which more
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