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Identity As Alterity in Paul Auster's the New York Trilogy and Martin Amis's London Fields

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Identity As Alterity in Paul Auster's the New York Trilogy and Martin Amis's London Fields Identity as Alterity in Paul Auster's The New York Trilogy and Martin Amis's London Fields Tesis Doctoral Autora: María Dolores Rueda Montero Director: Brian Crews Programa de Doctorado: Doctorado en Estudios Filológicos Línea de Investigación: Literatura y Cultura en Lengua Inglesa Identity as Alterity Rueda 2/209 Identity as Alterity Identity as Alterity in Paul Auster's The New York Trilogy and Martin Amis's London Fields 0. Introduction 5 1. Identities and Alterities 13 2. Postmodernist tendencies: Auster and Amis 52 3. Postmodern personalities: revisiting Walden and El Quixote 96 4. Woman as the darkest Other 148 5. Conclusion 184 6. Bibliography 6.1. Works Cited 196 6.2 Works Consulted 206 Rueda 3/209 Identity as Alterity Rueda 4/209 Identity as Alterity 0. Introduction Do we normally look at the sky above our heads? Do we notice the ever changing colors of it at all times in our everyday life? For most people nowadays the answer is no (except maybe if you are thoughtful, and check the weather to dress accordingly); however, there are many other reasons for this which we will be exploring in the following chapters. For example, unlike us, some major characters in The New York Trilogy by Paul Auster and London Fields by Martin Amis do look up; they have no option left but to do so. Moreover, the titles of these novels are telling us that these are the stories of two cities, two very populated ones, and it is well known that in cities such as these it is sometimes hard to even see the sky and harder still to watch the stars at night; the buildings are so tall, the rhythm is so fast, the luminescence so bright, the soil so nonexistent, not to mention cloud cover and pollution. But the characters that both Auster and Amis have created are facing the end of the world, at least the end of their world, which they are forced to contemplate: when they look up and elsewhere they are looking for signs and what they see is more frightening for us than it is for them. Nature is not accessible for us anymore and we ask, therefore: what is the nature of the world they are forced to contemplate? What kind of reality do they face and, for that matter, and more importantly, what is reality? To answer these questions, these characters will all put their own identity to the test in search of something real and stable. During this journey of self- determination, they will learn the importance of other people in this process too and they will struggle to actually find any trace of reality in what they once called themselves, which is a situation they will either succumb to or totally reject, as we will see. Ultimately, these characters will be searching for their true identities, for the others who are the same, and for those who are different from them, and all these, combined with the circumstances in which they find themselves, will interact in the novels in the most bizarre and sometimes unnatural ways. However, the novels are telling us that it has become clear that finding Rueda 5/209 Identity as Alterity one's identity is not all only about one's self (or oneself), as there is no way to be one without the others, an attitude that is highly influenced by the theories of Derrida, Levinas, Lacan and others, which testify to that1. We will explore their ideas and relate them to the representations of character in the text. We will also be analyzing discourses of ‘identity’, ‘othering’ and ‘alterity’, which inherently complement notions of the subjective formation of the self, notions that have perhaps inevitably become displaced and even dismissed as no longer feasible in a postmodern universe, replaced by the certainty that our sense of self comes from without and not from within. People are meant to be with other people, characters are bound to mingle with other characters and the absence and/or presence of interlocutors, the impossibility of really connecting with those ‘others’ and therefore with themselves, will drive our characters into homelessness, oblivion, solitude and madness. Nevertheless they are postmodern fictional characters, they inhabit a dystopian present (in the second half of the already past 20th century), which, although represented through striking techniques and meticulous linguistic choices made to bring about a sense of defamiliarization or even brechtian alienation, paradoxically seems very realistic to us living our life after the end of their world. As it will be argued throughout this paper, there are serious impediments for twentieth- century individuals (and even more so today) to find the means to satisfactorily achieve self- definition, or identification with or by anything that can be called ‘real’ (furthermore, we will examine whether this has ever been possible in history). Related to this search is our interest as a species for the earthly elements, which are utterly necessary for our survival, such as water, earth, air or something so human as fire, which has always, as the evidence suggests, been parallel to our curiosity about those entities, physical or ‘divine’, above the clouds, and looking at the sky has brought more than one epiphany to the human race. Cities have expanded all over the world designed to contain our lives and interactions, tons of 1 Lacan suggests that we only come to know ourselves through the gaze of others; alternatively, Derrida points out the subjective self is a linguistic construct, and Levinas argues that the notion of the self is only known through the other but is always outwith our reach. We will provide further references in chapter 1. Rueda 6/209 Identity as Alterity concrete and cement covering original soil. Every trace that we once were animals in the wild has been erased from the city except for the sky; the forest, shore and land in general have disappeared from our sight, but the sky is not removable by the concrete giant. It is there and it reminds us of our ancient, true nature. No matter for how long these characters have looked the other way, the sky has presented itself to them, and it carries meaning. In Amis's end of the millennium London, and worldwide, the sun is “out of joint” (LF: 202), diseases and allergies run wild and the weather is literally burning. The heavens reveal an apocalyptic message; they say the earth is on the edge of collapse and Samson, the character-narrator-author, is sure humanity is to blame: “all this stuff was man-made, not acts of God but acts of man” (276). The New York in Auster's trilogy is, on the other hand, a far more peaceful place. It seems so like the real twentieth century New York we all know (mostly from TV, films and magazines) that it should not imprint such a feeling of displacement on the readers at all, as London Fields clearly does. Nonetheless it proves to be as hostile to the characters inhabiting it as Amis's London. The sky here conveys a different message, though. It only catches the characters' eyes in moments of extreme isolation and distress and it is in this solitude that the city, as part of a larger system, unfolds itself to the characters as unnatural, and also inescapable, in ways it had never appeared before. For them, it becomes a matter of stopping and trying to grasp the real or the true, only to discover they had never been there, or at least that they are not there anymore. Keith, Guy, and Samson in London Fields, and Quinn, Blue and the unnamed narrator of The Locked Room (the Trilogy) are all on a quest to find their selves. Moreover, Nicola Six (LF) and Stillman, Black and Fanshawe (NYT), their anti-selves, are most likely on the same journey. The readers will not be surprised that their shared destiny is deletion, dissolution and disappearance albeit in several distinct ways. But how did they get to that point? To answer this question we will first rephrase it: how did we get here? Because it doesn't feel like home2; as Amis’s narrator reflects about one of the 2 In his article "How did I Get Here? This is not my Home..." (my translation, "¿Cómo he llegado hasta aquí?: Esta no Rueda 7/209 Identity as Alterity characters: “perhaps he was wondering why, in the fantasy, you felt at home in places like these, whereas of course you never did, and never would” (LF: 421). In order to engage with the texts and contextualize these apparent nihilist and apocalyptic representations of what we call the real world now we will have to turn to “parasitic citation” in search of authority (Docherty: 78), because that is how serious research is done. And, although we do not trust in language either anymore because it turns out to be a totalizing element and a creator of its own meanings3, we will try to put into words how the humanities and sciences are worried about identity and subjectivity. In Stuart Hall's words, and he had a life-long career in criticism on identities and alterities, “This so-called ‘crisis of identity’ is seen as part of a wider process of change which [is] dislocating the central structures and processes of modern societies and undermining the frameworks which gave individuals stable anchorage in the social world” (Hall MI: 596). We will discuss how the influence of this predicament is palpable in the fiction of Paul Auster and Martin Amis, both nearly obsessed with the issue at every stage of their work.
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