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In Search of Self: Explorations of Identity in the Work of Paul Auster

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In Search of Self: Explorations of Identity in the Work of Paul Auster In Search of Self: Explorations of Identity in the Work of Paul Auster THESIS Submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for the Degree of MASTER OF ARTS in the Department of English at Rhodes University, Grahamstown, South Africa by Andrew Edward van der Vlies 1998 II ABSTRACT Paul Auster is regarded by some as an important novelist. He has, in a relatively short space of time, produced an intriguing body of work, which has attracted comparatively little critical attention. This study is based on the premise that Auster's art is the record of an entertaining, intelligent and utterly serious engagement with the possibilities of conceiving of the identity of an individual subject in the contemporary, late-twentieth century moment. This study, focussing on Auster's novels, but also considering selected poetry and critical prose, explores the representation of identity in his work. The short Foreword introduces Paul Auster and sketches in outline the concerns of the study. Chapter One explores the manner in which Auster's early (anti-),detective' fiction develops a concern with identity. It is suggested that Squeeze Play, Auster's pseudonymous 'hard-boiled' detective thriller, provided the author with a testing ground for his subsequent appropriation and subversion of the detective genre in The New York Trilogy. Through a close consideration of City of Glass, and an examination of elements in Ghosts, it is shown how the loss of the traditional detective's immunity, and the problematising of strategies which had previously guaranteed him access to interpretive and narrative closure, precipitates a collapse which initiates an interrogation of the nature and construction of ideas about individual identity. Chapter Two develops a suggestion that City of Glass was written in response to particular emotional concerns of the author by turning to an examination of the memoir-novel, The Invention of Solitude. This chapter examines the extent to which Auster's Jewishness is implicated in his understanding of identity, and in the techniques with which he expresses his concerns. It is argued that Auster's engagement with texts and memories important to him in order to find a voice adequate to the task which he assumes in The Invention of Solitude, reveals the ethical imperative of recognizing and accepting a relationship to alterity. The influence on Auster of certain Jewish writers, like Edmond Jabes, is considered in the course of the chapter. The third chapter addresses the issue of the description of Auster's work as postmodernist, in the light of what the study has presented as Auster's ethical engagement with alterity. Critical responses to Auster's texts are canvassed, before it is suggested that aspects of 111 the ethical phenomenology of Emmanuel Levinas may be useful in considering these important issues in Auster's oeuvre. Chapter Four returns to a consideration of The New York Trilogy, examining its final part, The Locked Room, before discussing In the Country of Last Things and Moon Palace. All three novels are narrated by first-person narrators who, in very different situations, come (consciously and unconsciously) to negotiate their own identities in relation either to other people or to adverse circumstances. The chapter thus considers the manner in which these texts figure Auster's concern with relationships between individuals and otherness. Chapter Five seeks, as a means of concluding the study, to consider aspects of Auster's presentation of the manner in which identity is connected to perception, and to an engagement with that which is other than the self This chapter focuses on Auster's figuration of necessary responses to the otherness of the objective world and to chance as a radical alterity. Beginning with a consideration of an early essay, the chapter explores relevant aspects of Moon Palace, The Music of Chance, Leviathan and Mr Vertigo, considers elements in Auster's poetry, and demonstrates the usefulness of exploring the influence on his work of the 'objectivist' poets and aspects of Dada and Surrealist poetics. The seemingly punitive severity of the fates of some of Auster's protagonists is shown ultimately to be positive, and (potentially) redemptive, reflecting Auster's profoundly ethical conception of the responsibilities and possibilities of selfhood. IV CONTENTS Abstract. .......................................................................................................... .ii Contents .......................................................................................................... .iv Abbreviations, Editions used .............................................................................. v Acknowledgements ........................................................................................... vi FOREWORD Auster's Identity ..................................................................................... l CHAPTER ONE Auster's Detectives: in Search of their Selves ........................................ 10 CHAPTER TWO The Invention of Solitude: Writing the Self, Remembering the World ...................................................................... 43 CHAPTER THREE Self and Other: Auster, Theory, Ethics and Alterity ............................. 75 CHAPTER FOUR "The story .. .is in the struggle": Three Witnesses Record ...................... 94 CHAPTER FIVE "looking for a place to enter the world", or "how things really work": Perception, Pattern and Chance in Auster's Mysterious World ........... 119 WORKS CITED......................................................................................... 156 v ABBREVIATIONS, EDITIONS USED During the course of this study, several abbreviations will be introduced in the text. In addition to these, the following abbreviations are used to indicate the titles of texts by Paul Auster. CG City of Glass CLT In the Country of Last Things G Ghosts GW Ground Work: Selected Poems and Essays 1970-1979 lIM: Hand to Mouth: A Chronicle of Early Failure IS The Invention of Solitude Lev Leviathan LR The Locked Room MC The Music of Chance MP Moon Palace MrV Mr Vertigo I have used the editions of Auster's texts published by Faber and Faber as these are the most readily available in South Africa. Ground Work and The Red Notebook reprint all of the interviews, and most of the prefaces and essays included in The Art of Hunger, published in the United States by Penguin~ those not included in the former volumes are cited from this American edition. I have retained the spelling of the editions from which I quote, whether British or American. I cite the titles of Auster's essays, and specify the sources in the list of works cited; I have not included individual poems in this list, however, and I cite the relevant page numbers in Ground Work using the abbreviation specified above. vi ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I wish to record my gratitude, as ever, to my parents, and also to my sister, for their continual love and support. My sincere thanks to my supervisor, Dr Gareth Cornwell, for his encouragement and support, perceptive criticism and useful suggestions, and for his rigorous proofreading. As if to validate Auster's belief in the power of chance, several fortuitous encounters with Mr Christo Doherty greatly aided my research, for which I thank him. My thanks also to Dr Wendy Jacobson, who was constantly interested and helpful, and kindly read my discussion of Auster's Iewishness. Thanks also to Professors John Gouws and Paul Walters for their encouragement and suggestions. The interest, support, suggestions, and proofreading skills of two friends, Undine Weber and Grant Olwage, were invaluable, and are here inadequately, but greatfully acknowledged. The financial assistance of the Centre for Science Development (HSRC, South Africa) towards this research is hereby acknowledged. Opinions expressed and conclusions arrived at are those of the author and are not necessarily to be attributed to the Centre for Science Development. 1 FOREWORD Auster's Identity All novels, of every age, are concerned with the enigma of the self. As soon as you create an imaginary being, a character, you are automatically confronted by the question: What is the self? How can the self be grasped? It is one of those fundamental questions on which the novel, as novel, is based. (Milan Kundera, The Art of the Novel 23) What, then, is [Austers] purpose? ... The answer .. .is held in the poses that [he] has struck for us. The figures he has cut....The only disservice we do him is when we fail to take his figures seriously. He is speaking to us, in his awkward way. Let us at least listen. (Curtis White, liThe Auster-Instance: A Ficto-Biography" 26) Identity is a difficult concept to define in an age in which the dominant intellectual discourses no longer admit of vague references to will, reason, soul, or the idea of a general, essential human nature. Our sense of a 'self, of an inwardness which constitutes a sense of identity, is generally accepted to be a function of cultural, linguistic and historical processes. The Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor has, in Sources of the Self, charted the development of the Western sense of the private self from Plato to the present. He makes it clear that the modem notion of selfhood is "a function of a historically limited mode of self-interpretation, one which has become dominant in the modem West... but which had a beginning in time and space and may have an end" (111). Elsewhere Taylor writes that "an individual is constituted by the language and
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