(Post)Modern “I” and Other in Auster, Nijhoff & Stein

Although Paul Auster’s three part novel The New York Trilogy (1987), consisting of three separate novels; City of Glass, Ghosts and The Locked Room, was written more than forty years after the events that in most critics view ended the modernist era and pushed us into the Postmodern this article will argue that the text deals with many of the same ideas, concepts and criticisms that concerned some of the most important Modernist writers. And even though The New York Trilogy is labeled as a typical Postmodernist text, when comparing it to typical modernist texts in the form of Gertrude Stein’s Everybody’s Autobiography (1937) and Martinus Nijhoff’s Awater (1934) it becomes rather ambiguous to speak of a Post. This argument will further be supported by showing that Postmodern understanding of these concepts were already being explored in the two Modernist texts. Through this reading this article will argue that it is more accurate to speak of a expansion or radicalization of modernist thought that builds on what came before rather then moves away from them. The article will show that many of the themes explored in two typical Modernist texts are mirrored and in a typical “Post” modern novel, in the shape of Auster’s New York Trilogy and vice versa. For as Linda Hutcheon states; the terms ‘postmodernism’ and ‘postmodernity’ actively ‘incorporate that which they aim to contest by including and modifying the word ‘modern’ within themselves’ (1988:3)

Throughout modernity and through the influence of such prominent figures as Sigmund Freud, as well as Other psychologists and philosophers, perspectives and ideas on identity and individuality changed and became fragmented. No longer did people see themselves as a stable or a knowable being but rather as a fragmented and (at least partly) unstable being that could not be known completely (Malpas 2005). In Postmodernism this fragmentation and instability is often viewed as pushed further off balance into a completely fractured identity of wholly unstable and Self-referential fragments. A consequence of this fragmenting of identity is a crisis in our ability to fully understand the Self and Other and a breakdown of the concepts of “I” and “Other”. This in turn had far reaching consequences in art, culture and, not least of all, in literature. Paul Auster’s (1987) New York trilogy , Martinus Nijhof’s (1934) Awater and Gertrude Stein’s (1937) Everybody’s Autobiography are all, in their own ways, an exploration into these new concepts of identity and individuality, subjectivity and knowing.

At the base of the oldest text of the three, Nijhoff’s Awater is an exploration into our ability and desire to know an Other. The unknown and unidentified speaker in the poem has spent several days observing anOther person walking by his window and has, on this day, decided to follow this man, a man he makes clear he does not know; ‘I’ve seen a man. A man who has no name.’(35) To see if this man, that he decides to call Awater, could make a good traveling companion. Or, in Other words, a desire to know an Other. Throughout the poem we are only hinted at the identity of the speaker and catch only glimpses of his past, the reason why he needs a new traveling companion. Why he is currently following this Other man that he called Awater remains a mystery to the reader. In the text we are confronted with the speaker’s desire to relate to anOther human being, to feel a form of kinship with him, a shared understanding of the world. The “I” in the poem suffers from loneliness caused by, as the reader learns later in the text, by the death of his brOther and possibly his mOther. This desire for an Other is an important factor of postmodern Lacanian psychology and postmodern concepts of identity and the shaping of identity which states that the driving force in shaping our identity is a desire and ‘desire is the desire of the Other’ (Lacan 1997: 264)

Throughout the text we expect to come to some understanding of Awater as he fulfills the role of a central character in the poem. Yet as the poem progresses we become more and more aware of the speaker’s role in our understanding of Awater. Throughout the text Awater is portrayed in constantly shifting, contradicting, juxtaposing personality traits and a changing identity. This lack of identity can be explained by the fact that the only information we attain about him is filtered through an unknown speaker, and these are the speaker’s interpretations, needs and desires projected on the perceived actions of this Other being, Awater. This idea of projection of the “I” on the Other is an important theme in this text and highlights the changing perspectives on identity. The speaking “I” is indeed confronted with this breach between the perspective of “I” from the past and the way “I” is perceived in modernism when he follows Awater into a café and the waiter remarks: ‘The times , he says, ‘aren’t what they used to be.’’ (40) Or in Other words; the times have changed, a comment that the “I” misinterprets and projects his own desires onto, believing the waiter to be talking about the death of the speaker’s brOther. The source for his loneliness, his desire for an Other as a reaffirmation of his identity.

As the poem continues we come to realize that our understanding of Awater is a fogged up or smeared image and wholly incomplete. All we might truly know of him are the dry and descriptive elements in the text. We become aware of the speaker’s projection of his own wishes and desires on the action of Awater. The text appears to argue against the possibility for the speaker, and through him the reader, to understand the Other and that, in his attempts to do so, will only project his own desires onto the Other’s actions.

Throughout the main part of the poem the speaker continuously projects his own needs upon Awater. This projection of the Self onto the Other continues only for as far as Awater is unknown to both the speaker and the reader. For as long as the man remains a blank slate, a tabula rasa, and as long as the speaker’s knowledge is limited ‘the possibilities of projections are unlimited’ (Van Den Akker 90) Because of this the reader is confronted with the unnamed speaker’s interpretation of the events and the reader becomes aware that all received information is first filtered through the interpreting perspective of the speaker and that in fact very little actually happens; Awater goes to a barber, visits a café where he plays a game of chess and finally visits a restaurant. The moment the speaking “I” and Awater finaly connect at some level beyond that of follower and followed the illusion of projection fails and the speaker appears to become aware of the futility of finding and understanding an Other. The speaker becomes disillusioned with Awater the moment he realizes the futility of his desire to understand the Other and becomes aware of the projection he has pushed onto this man he did not know. In Other words, the “I” fails to connect with the “Other”. At its core Awater deals with the ‘fundamental alienation in the modern world’(Van Den Akker, 95) and the irreparable gap that has emerged between individuals.

The difficulties and desire to know anOther human being is one of the many typical modernist elements that are mirrored and expanded upon in Paul Auster’s novel The New York Trilogy. Auster’s text consists of three seperate stories, City of Glass, Ghosts and The Locked Room, which all revolve around the same theme; a desire or need to understand and relate to an Other. The first two of these texts read as a postmodern take on the detective novel, a genre that typically revolves around one human being following anOther and interpreting the movements and actions of this person in an attempt to understand the followed Other. An element that is highly reminiscent of the speaker’s actions in the above discussed Awater. Auster, however, expands on the modernist claim in Nijhoff’s text of projection of the perceiver’s desires onto the perceived and followed by tapping into further understanding of the fragmentation of the “I” in Postmodern thought. In Ghosts, the second text of the novel, the protagonist, a private eye by the name of Blue, is hired by a rather mysterious man called White to shadow an Other, a man called Black. Blue accepts the job and moves into an austere apartment looking out at Black’s equally austere apartment. It is here that the novel’s true story unfolds. Yet, as is the case with Awater, the action and movement of the followed Black is minimal.

Unlike the unnamed speaker in Awater the protagonist in Ghosts is fully aware of what he is doing at the start of the novel, and is cautious about minimizing the amount of projection and interpretation he pushes onto the actions of Black;

“his method is to stick to outward facts, describing events as though each word tallied exactly with the thing described, and to question the matter no further. Words are transparent for him, great windows that stand between him and the world, and until now they have never impeded his view, have never seemed to be there. […]he tries to fashion a coherent whole, discarding the slack and embellishing the gist. In every report he has written so far, action holds forth interpretation. […], no stab at trying to guess what the subject might be thinking. The report confines itSelf to known and verifiable facts”(148)

The protagonists believe in the objectivity of words to describe actions and his desire to stay on the surface of things is a trait he highly values in himself. A statement mirrored in the first text of the novel City of Glass; “We will set down things seen as seen, things heard as heard, so that our book may be an accurate record, free from any sort of fabrication. And all who read this book or hear it may do so with full confidence, because it contains nothing but the truth.’” (6)

As the novel continues, a lack of action on behalf of Black unconsciously changes the protagonist’s observations. The lack of stimuli and a sense of isolation and loneliness cause the protagonist’s mind to wander, to speculate and to imagine or interpret the actions of Black; “there is the notebook, ofcourse, but when he looks through it to see what he has written, he is disappointed to find such paucity of detail. It’s as though his words, instead of drawing out the facts and making them sit palpably in the world, have induced them to disappear” (149)

Like the “I” in Nijhoff’s Awater, Blue starts to project his own desires and thoughts onto the Other he is following. An action the protagonist in Ghosts is only vaguely aware of at first. But, as was the case with the “I” in Awater, Blue becomes aware of what he has been doing; ‘to enter Black, then, was to enter himSelf, he can no longer conceive of being anywhere else. But this is precisely where Black is’. (192)

Unlike with Awater, however, The New York Trilogy takes the idea of projection further then just to the futility of it. The text suggests that those who aim to understand an Other will not only fail to do so completely, a goal that from the modernist age onward was labeled as impossible, but will, in the process, also lose their own sense of Self. They are forced to live in the paradoxical world of solitude through the desired company of a single person and the lines between the identity of Self and Other becomes vague, the fragmented identities of both become mixed until identity is not only Self-referential, impossible to know in concepts of Self and Other but has completely disappeared. Identity and a search for meaning, in Auster’s text has been expanded to include a post-colonial understanding of identity in which; ‘The will for meaning [and identity] that drives Enlightenment thought is rejected […] and replaced by a continual rebuilding of the Self.’(Malpas,2005:70) According to Malpas this happens when ‘the narrator moves from person to person, text to text, misidentification to misidentification in the search for identity’(70) This them of misidentification or projection of the Self’s needs on the Other is highly reminiscent again of both Nijhoff as well as Auster.

In Awater we come to the speaker in the middle of his misidentification of the Self on the Other and the quick and sudden break from this misidentification within the same day.In Auster’s text this is expanded to include the beginning and forming of this misidentification and the results of a prolonged misidentification over long periods of time. According to this reading of Auster’s text if misidentification is prolonged for an extended period of time, either through obsession (City of Glass) or through will or lack of choice (Ghosts, The Locked Room) there will not just be a form of misidentification but also a sense of lost identity which will either result in the complete loss of Self and thought if no interaction with the Other can be had, as is the case with the protagonist Quinn in City of Glass, or a violent confrontation between the two (miss)identities, Blue in Ghosts. This idea of the unknown Other is also explored in Gertrude Stein’s Everybody’s Autobiography. Like Auster’s New York Trilogy, Everybody’s Autobiography is also a critical take on an already established genre in literature; the (auto-) biography. In many ways the biographer performs a similar role as that of the detective. Like a detective the biographer tries to understand an Other, tries to interpret the actions of this Other, attempts to speculate on the motivations behind these actions and the thoughts that drive the person to them. It could then be reasoned that the autobiographer “has it easier” as they are only their own thoughts, motivations and actions that they are required to put into words.

However, in the modernist period the “I” has become fragmented and unknowable or in Other words; the “I” has become an “Other”. This would then entail that even the autobiographer is also writing about, and trying to understand an Other. Because of this increasingly accepted idea of the unknowable Self, Everybody’s Autobiography remains of the surface of actions, like Blue in Auster’s Ghosts, Stein does not pay attention to detail or on speculations on the thoughts of Other, nor does she give much away of the thoughts of the “I”. In the Autobiography the Self has not only fragmented, but, as in Auster’s text, has become an Other. An idea heavily influenced by Freud who claimed that our conscious has ‘characteristics and peculiarities that seem alien to us’(1984:172) In this sense the Other, from modernism onwards, has become unknowable and thus the Self has become unknowable; ‘identity is funny being yourself is funny as you are never yourself to yourself except as you remember yourself and then of course you do not believe yourself. That is really the trouble with an autobiography you do not […] really believe yourself […] you know so well so very well that it is not yourself, it could not be yourself […] You are of course not yourself’(Stein 70)

The idea of the unknowable Other has, in the Autobiography, become an accepted perspective on identity. Furthermore, the idea that one person can know an Other has become a frightening concept. A thought that becomes apparent in a remark by Pablo Picasso during one of the many dinner parties; ‘Picasso got scared, it is a funny thing to know so much about what people are going to do on the part of anybody always scares people who are occupied in creating […] they never like that anybody can know what anybody will do […] and act successfully act upon what people are going to do […] It was not because he was afraid of the man who would get in except insofar as the man who would get in knew too much about how to bring it about.’ (21)

The main difference in their exploration of the “Other” between Stein and Auster/Nijhoff is the presence of interaction with Others in the Autobiography. Stein’s argument appears to be that even if we do not know who the “I” is or who the “Other” is through the interaction with the Other we are at least able to come to an understanding of what we are; ‘Slowely and in a way it was not astonishing but slowly I was knowing that I was a genius and it was happening and I did not say anything but I was almost ready to begin to say something. My brOther began saying something and this is what he said. […] He said it was not it it was I.’ (Stein 79) And it is this idea of what we are through our interaction with the Other that carries through to Auster’s Ghosts. The protagonist Blue at the start of the text is confident in who and especially what he is. He is a detective.

As the text progresses and he becomes more and more isolated and starts lacking interaction with an “Other” he starts to lose his sense of Self, not only who he is but also what he is; “then suddenly aware of what his mind is doing, he wonders why he has turned so sentimental, why all these thoughts keep coming to him. It’s all part of it, he thinks, embarrassed at himself for being like this. That’s what happens when you have no one to talk to.” (153) All three texts would in this reading then seem to argue a very Postmodern psychological construct of identity; that of Lacan’s Other.

According to Lacan, our sense of identity is ‘shaped by the recognition we receive from Others’ and that because of this ‘the possibility of ever fully knowing ourselves is forever denied’ (Malpas 69) a Postmodern viewpoint that is agreeable to the above reading of Gertrude Stein’s typical modernist text.

Auster and Nijhoff, however, seem to take this argument even further or at the very least expand upon it. Arguing that the mere presence or visual interaction with an Other is not enough for a identity to be formed. The texts discussed above have a high focus on the interaction between different individuals and different Others. The texts show us that the “Self” is not created through a visible Other or through an interacting Other. The solitude of Nijhoff’s speaker and Auster’s protagonists in Ghosts and City of Glass has indeed caused them to lose their idea of Self, of both who and what they are. Or, in a more Lacanian sense, they no longer have an Other to desire or to desire to be desired by. Yet the texts also seem to argue that in the metaphysical interaction of the projecting mind we push our own desired identity upon the Other, never truly seeing or becoming aware of the actual Self of the Other. We only see what we desire to see in the desired Other. Furthermore, the texts would also suggest that after the loss of identity through isolation, solitude and the projection of the Self onto a single individual we we attain nothing but an illusioned and fragile Other, which will result in a new, highly unstable Self which will then, as Auster’s protagonists in Ghosts puts it; ‘feel as though [it] is falling into some dark, cave-like place’(147) A complete loss of Self, Other and Environment.

In conclusion I would then refer back onto this article in my statement that in Auster we do not find a postmodern author, a term that seems to suggest a mode of thought opposed to modernism, but rather and expansion, elaboration, continuation and radicalization of ideas, thoughts and concepts that were already being explored in modernist literature. New concepts of identity, Self and Other were dominant features in both Gertrude Stein’s Everybody’s Autobiography and Martinus Nijhoff Awater and are only expanded, radicalized or made more explicit in Postmodernism and through (Post)Modernist artists and authors.

• Bibliography:
  Auster, Paul (1987) The New York Trilogy, Faber and Faber: London
  Freud, Sigmund (1984) On Metapsychology: The Theory of Psychoanalysis, ed. Angela Richards, Harmondsworth: Penguin
  Hutcheon, Linda (1988) The poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction, Routledge: London
  Lacan, Jacques (1977) Écrits: A Selection, trans. Alan Sheridan, Routledge: London
  Malpas, Simon (2005) The Postmodern, Routledge: London
  Nijhoff, Martinus (2010) Awater, ed. Thomas Möhlmann, Anvil: London
  Stein, Gertrude (1937) Everybody’s Biography, Exact Change: London
  Van Den Akker, Wiljan in Nijhoff, Martinus (2010) Awater, ed. Thomas Möhlmann, Anvil: London