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Paul Auster and Postmodern Quest: on the Road to Nowhere Desire. in the Same Way, in the Country of Last Things Is Studied in Re

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Paul Auster and Postmodern Quest: on the Road to Nowhere Desire. in the Same Way, in the Country of Last Things Is Studied in Re Ilana SHILOH Paul Auster and Postmodern Quest: on the Road to Nowhere New York: Peter Lang, 2002 221 pages. ISBN 0820461679. €6.73 Kathie Birat (University of Metz) Anyone who has tried to teach or to write about the fiction of Paul Auster knows that it is difficult to find a way of getting a critical grasp on texts that provide their own gloss, leaving the critic with the uncomfortable impression that the novelist is making fun of him, mocking in advance his attempts to achieve critical distance. Ilana Shiloh, in her Paul Auster and Postmodern Quest, has set off courageously on the same quest for clarity and perspective. Her critical tools are the quest motif itself and its varying guises in American fiction and culture: the picaresque road story, the heroic quest and the more modern deconstructed avatars of these forms. She also summons philosophical and psychological theories which can be used to shed light on Auster's treatment of the self as the ultimate object of the quest. In this perspective she refers to Freud and Lacan and to Sartre's existentialism. She justifies her choice of these theories on the basis of their capacity to account for the role played by loss, lack and fragmentation in the relation between Auster's characters and the real and intertextual others which enter into the constitution of their "selves." In a logic which reflects her chosen framework, Shiloh begins her investigation with The Invention of Solitude, a book which poses the fundamental question of the relation between the fictional and the autobiographical in Auster's work. She then proceeds to a detailed examination of the three books making up The New York Trilogy, where Auster's subversion of the detective genre reveals his particular way of playing on the theme of the investigation as quest, and ultimately as failed quest of the self. She tries to point out the ways in which Auster's creation of "fragmented, elusive characters" corresponds to typical "postmodern approaches to characterization" while at the same time revealing psychological and philosophical preoccupations which give his fiction its specificity.(44) Through the use of the psychoanalytic frame in combination with the intertextual tools provided by the journey narrative, she observes the story in terms of the repetitions and inversions which allow Auster to use his autobiographical obsessions without being trapped by them. The other two books are examined as variations on the same pattern.: "The quests for logos, for the mystery of the Other, collapse in on themselves, to re-emerge in the two other sections of the Trilogy, where they connect to City of Glass like a Möbius strip." (54) They are all seen as revolving around the loss, exchange or appropriation of identity through patterns that bring into play Auster's knowledge of both European and American cultural contexts. Shiloh continues her investigation by building on the patterns perceived in the trilogy and expanding them to emphasize the underlying dynamics of Auster's fiction while taking into account the specific strategies of the novels. Thus, while Leviathan is seen as an "alternative version" of The Locked Room, it is studied in association with Moon Palace as being built on the dialectics of guilt and desire. In the same way, In the Country of Last Things is studied in relation to Moon Palace as being based on the deferred quest. In these novels the futility of the quest is intertwined with its perpetual renewal and resurrection in ways that can be seen in relation to the myth of Sisyphus, one of the basic metaphors of existentialism, and eating, which is a "psychically ambivalent activity." (142) The final and longest chapter deals with The Music of Chance in terms of the encounter between the picaresque novel and Greek tragedy, the basic paradigms underlying the relation between chance and fate in the novel. Shiloh's use of her theoretical frame is convincing without seeming overly systematic. It owes much of its relevance to the way it enables her not simply to draw geometrical figures relating the characters to each other, but connect their destinies to the contexts of European and American literature which figure so prominently in Auster's work. Her use, for instance, of existentialism in her comparison of Leviathan with Camus's The Outsider places Auster's use of the relation between irrationality and human action in a new and interesting light. Shiloh strikes a judicious balance between the need to explain and develop the theories on which her argumentation lies and its application to the novels. There is no attempt at mystification in her discussion of Lacan, in particular. This preoccupation with clarity permits her to illuminate in interesting ways Auster's capacity to make philosophical dilemmas real, to flesh out abstract questions in narrative form. However, the very clarity and systematic nature of her approach is not without pitfalls. Freud and Lacan have given us keys for reading our lives and the lives of others and seeing them as tangled plots. But Auster is a voracious reader, and he knows what readers are looking for: meaning. He gives us more of that than we know what to do with and he tempts us into trying anything that seems to fit. Thus, the remark that Fogg "starts wearing Victor's suit from the beginning of the year to the end, imagining that the suit is holding him together," hardly appears as an illumination. (124) Inevitably the reading of his novels in any particular perspective, or even several perspectives at once, will yield the payload Fogg was searching for: the father he simultaneously lost and found. The pattern finally wears a bit thin. As a result, much of Auster's irony and his capacity to keep us from falling into the traps he has laid elude us. In spite of Shiloh's awareness of the self- reflexive and metafictional dimensions of Auster's fiction, we lose sight of the ways in which he prevents his parallel and repeated quests from becoming boring. This is perhaps partly due to the fact that the treatment of the novels in succession (although Moon Palace is discussed in relation to both Leviathan and In the Country of Last Things) prevents Shiloh from seeing that she leaves unanswered questions behind her, although they are raised in relation to different novels. There is, for instance, the question of the way in which Auster finds narrative ploys for exploring the palpable reality of the world, Sartre's "Being-in-itself" not as an absence of consciousness, but as a full possession of the present, thus becoming, in spite of his tendency toward abstraction, a powerful realist. Her focus on the way in which the novels illustrate the pattern of the quest for self also occasionally blinds her to the effect produced by the deceptive transparency of the narration. The quest often serves, as she mentions in her discussion of Moon Palace, to point out the "association of private history with public history." (129) But the way in which the narrator tells us this--"the inner and the outer could not be separated except by doing great damage to the truth"—draws its effectiveness from the way it emphasizes the power for self absorption, for placing their private and public selves at the center of the universe, which is a deeply American trait. Auster's seemingly lucid narrators often produce this doubly ironic type of discourse, mocking themselves in the very process of supposedly telling the truth. From a more practical point of view, there is another minor problem in the book, which the attentive reader cannot fail to notice. Certain affirmations, however interesting they may be, are repeated, leading to an impression that the pursuit of repeated patterns is taking its toll in unsuspected ways. We learn in the introduction that "the words 'chance' and 'case' originate from the Latin cadere, which signifies 'to fall.' " (2-3) This remark is repeated once in the discussion of Leviathan and a third time at the beginning of Chapter Seven in relation to The Music of Chance. This is not the only case. A remark made concerning Barber's gluttony and Fogg's "self-imposed starvation" as "inverse aspects of the same obsession with food" (128) is repeated on page 141. And there are others. This is unfortunate in a book which owes its power to its clarity, but which perhaps needed to be reread more carefully. I would like to conclude by commenting on the last chapter, which is devoted to The Music of Chance, for this is the most interesting and original chapter and it makes the book well worth reading. Shiloh looks at The Music of Chance as an ironical intertwining of the American picaresque tradition with Greek tragedy. She sees "the element of unpredictability associated with the picaresque" as being "gradually transformed into the determinism of Greek tragedy." (182) At the center of this transformation lies money, which initially appears to be related to the freedom of the road, but which gradually emerges as the manifestation of fate. Nashe's tragic flaw is that he "mistakenly identifies ethical values—freedom and justice—with a material value that has nothing to do with ethics: money." (172) From that point on an inexorable logic surfaces, which leads Nashe to sacrifice his friend Pozzi while still believing in the redemptive power of financial success. Shiloh's analysis of money as an agent of fate permits her to explore with particular acuity one of the paradoxes underlying American culture: the way in which free will and determinism often prove to be the two sides of the American dollar.
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