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Posts tagged “Paul Auster”

Authorship & Theory in Paul Auster

In a previous article I argued that Paul Auster’s The New York Trilogy is an exploration into The difficulties and desire to know another and that 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. In this article I will argue for a completely different reading of the text. Instead of focusing on the consequences of a prolonged absence of the Other I will instead argue that Auster’s The New York Trilogy is in fact an exploration into modern concepts of authorship and approaches to literary theory.

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August 5, 2014 | Categories: Criticism | Tags: , , , , , | Leave a comment

Paul Auster’s – Winter Journal

Published thirty years after the publication of his debut novel The Invention of Solitude Paul Auster’s latest novel Winter Journal can (and has been) read as a continuation or rather a sequel of this first book. There are however striking differences between the two novel, something to be expected with a thirty year gap in between. More about this in a later post. For now I will first however address this novel on its own (and plentiful) merits.

Auster’s Winter Journal is, in its essence, a highly personal working through of questions that arise from getting older, of discovering that life’s good, the bad, and the traumatic experiences are ultimately finite and death comes for all at one point or another.

This reworking of the biographical novel opens several days before Auster’s 64th birthday as he sits himself in front of his desk and begins the mull over his life and the text itself is a detailed account of it. This in itself is very nicely done and is certainly interesting for anyone trying to discover some of the secrets of this grandmaster of the postmodern novel. Indeed I suspect many prospective writers and students of literature will find this novel quite alluring as it gives a first-person account of the life of a writer. Yet any trying to attain an insight into Auster’s means of writing, of discovering how he writes what he writes will sadly be left disappointed.

Winter Journal, however, does something far more interesting than giving a peak into the inner workings of a literary mind. With this novel Auster is trying to over come that which many of his protagonists of his novels (The New York Trilogy, Oracle Night, The Country of Last Things etc etc) experience or suffer through, a loss of self and identity and to me Auster is attempting to cope with or even overcome this loss in much the same way that his protagonists do. By writing.  In some way this reading is highly reminiscent of Auster’s novel Man in Dark in which fiction and reality are intertwined (as with most Auster novels) and in which the “real” protagonist, a storyteller meets his fictional creation. In a sense this is similar to what happens in Winter Journal, Auster’s fiction has become real. Auster himself, in this autobiography is experiencing that which he has written about on so many occasions and is working through it in the same way his fictional characters have, by writing.

By the act of writing Winter Journal Auster has turned the page and ink receiving his thoughts into a symbolic other (in a Lacan and Butler sense) upon which to construct and reconstruct his own identity, something to reassess his sense of self upon. Winter Journal should thus be read as a diary of a man, late in life, trying to figure out who he was and who he is. Through this text Auster is taking stock of his own life, trying to find himself, or at the very least trying to make sense of who he is now that old age is distancing himself from his body, a body that is failing him more often, a body which through all its scars and marks should tell him who he is.

In conclusion then, this new novel by Paul Auster is something completely different from what one would expect to read in an autobiography. It is not a tale of a man relating his life story, it is the wanderings of a mind trying to come to terms with himself. In this it is a powerful and unique read. It is the search for the self that comes with old age, a search for understanding, and in doing this it is a novel which does what many texts try to do yet only the good ones achieve, one of the main purposes of good literary work; it teaches how to live, how to experience and how to cope with growing older, when our bodies can no longer do all the things we once could.

August 23, 2012 | Categories: review | Tags: , , , , | Leave a comment

(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.

August 23, 2012 | Categories: Criticism | Tags: , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment