Friday, 31 December 2010
Sunday, 5 December 2010
Paul Auster's New York Maze.
Below I publish once written paper on Auster's novel The New York Trilogy. This is one of my favorites novels that's why I decided to deliver a lecture on it back in 2004. I strongly recommend this novel to anyone who likes detective stories. But be aware - this one is definitely not "a classical" detective story.
PAUL AUSTER’S NEW YORK MAZE
The subject of this paper concerns the creation of the novel by the author and reader in Paul Auster’s The New York Trilogy. This paper focuses on the development of characters as well as on the importance of the reader. While working on this project I predominantly consulted Chris Pace’s thesis that describes the concepts of Auster’s books.
The New York Trilogy is comprised of three short novels (City of Glass Glass
What can we expect from a classical novel? Peter Huhn in his article “The Detective as Reader: Narrativity and Reading Concepts in Detective Fiction” distinguishes in the plot of the classical detective novel “two basically separate stories – the story of the crime (which consists of action) and the story of the investigation (which is concerned with knowledge).”[1] Detective novels have rigid conventions of how the plot must develop, what the role of character is and also how the roles of the reader and author function. “The readers in addition to characters are fated to follow the dictates of the author because it is the author who chooses the setting, the action, and the plot (...) he or she [the readers] must rely on the God-like near-omnipotence of the detective for a proper reading of reality’s text. This powerlessness on the reader‘s part is indicative of the general relationship between all readers and all authors. Seen in this light, texts become locked rooms to which only the author has the keys.”[2]
In The New York Trilogy, Auster destroys the conventions of a detective novel. He also abandons the stereotype of reading the detective novel. He accomplishes it by making his characters aware of their existences as characters. But before that they must realize that they had fallen into a trap set by the author; that they are the characters placed in a novel written by someone who can control them; someone who controls their actions, words they speak – an omnipotent creator. Chris Pace comments: “they [the characters] have been placed in a labyrinth by the author, a maze which often gives them the illusion of control, but which in truth is designed especially for them (or are they designed especially for it?), so that what appear to be choices on their parts are actually predestined actions determined for them by the invisible author.”[3]
An example may come from City of Glass
To facilitate the problem and not to reveal too much of the Quinn’s perplexing story let me recall a similar case that happened to a famous cartoon character – Johnny Bravo. In one of Bravo’s cartoons, Johnny goes in panic because his mom does not appear on time at home. He is terrified because of a thought that something could have happened to her. He decides to call for help the detective who advertises his services on TV. The man together with Johnny roams the streets in search for the missing mom. The cartoon detective seeks every possible thing that in his opinion is the clue to reveal the mystery of the missing mother. For example, Johnny and the detective enter a restaurant in which they are served fortune cookies. The detective treats the message that he found inside the cookie as a credible premise and strong evidence that leads to the kidnapped mom. He goes after each sign that instead of revealing the truth makes the situation more complicated. The cartoon detective behaves in similar way like Daniel Quinn from City of Glass
Finally, all major characters (Quinn, Blue, Fanshawe’s best friend) manage to escape from the confines of the book. Starting from that point they are no longer the protagonists in one of the books written by some invisible author. They become authors of their own life, acting according to their wish, choosing on their own:
Where he goes after that is not important. (…) I myself prefer to think that he went far away, boarding a train that morning and going out West to start a new life. It is even possible that America China China
Blue, the spying detective from Ghosts, is also locked in a room of the novel. He has to break free and escape from the compulsory way of being that was imposed on him by the invisible author. Blue is confined to his room from where he looks through the window and spies on Black. The windows of the room are directly opposite the room which Black inhabits. White who hired Blue pays for the rent; he previously equipped the apartment with clothes, food and other supplies. Blue has perfect conditions for sitting in the room and watching Black. What also keeps Blue in this room is that his subject of observation does not go out often. Blue is trapped in his room. There is nothing he can do but sit at the desk and watch Black, writing down everything he sees. What Black does is also sitting at the desk and writing or reading. It is after some time that Blue realizes he is trapped. His sole action enslaves him, makes him feel ensnared. He realizes his own isolation: “They have trapped Blue into doing nothing, into being so inactive as to reduce his life to almost no life at all. He feels like a man who has been condemned to sit in a room and go on reading a book for the rest of his life.”[8] Blue has been placed in a locked room and like other characters in the novel he experiences constant surveillance. Pace shrewdly comments:
Despite the fact that Blue is supposedly the one writing about Black, it is actually Black who is the author, the controller of the situation, because it is his actions that dictate what Blue will write. Even when Blue leaves the locked room which White has rented for him, it is only to follow Black. His actions are no longer his own, but rather fated for him depending on Black’s actions. This situation becomes even more mysterious and raises even more questions about authors and characters when we learn that Black, posing as White, was probably the man who hired him in the first place.[9]
In Locked Room, the unnamed narrator realizes that he has become a character in a work of fiction written by his boyhood friend Fanshawe. After the mysterious disappearance, the narrator publishes Fanshawe’s works, marries his forlorn wife and takes care of the child. Firstly, it sounds like an odd series of coincidences. But then the narrator receives a letter from Fanshawe who thanks him for helping his family but on the other hand wants to be treated as a dead man. This raises suspicions about the recent events that had happened to the narrator. It seems that Fanshawe pulls the strings and that he had arranged the narrator’s past few months of life. The narrator literally takes Fanshawe’s place while Fanshawe hides himself from the outside world. “The narrator is trapped in a locked room that appears to be as large as the world and to include all possibilities within it, but which in reality is so tiny that he is constrained no matter what he does. He has almost no chance to escape, because he cannot even define the boundaries that make up his prison.”[10] The narrator finally reclaims his identity by reclaiming his creative power. He discovers his potential as an author, creator of the world and master of words. He realizes his potential as an artist while sitting in a bar. He calls newly met girl Fayaway after the character from Melville’s novel Typee. Then he discerns an American walking in and also tries to match a name for him:
I had never seen this man before, and yet there was something familiar about him, something that stopped me from turning away: a brief scald, a weird synapse of recognition. I tried out various names on him, shunted him through the past, unraveled the spool of associations – but nothing happened. He’s no one, I said to myself, finally giving up. And then, out of the blue, by some muddled chain of reasoning, I finished the thought by adding: and if he’s no one, then he must be Fanshawe (…) I exulted in the sheer falsity of my assertion, celebrating the new power I has just bestowed upon myself. I was the sublime alchemist who could change the world at will. This man was Fanshawe because I said he was Fanshawe, and that was all there was to it.[11]
The narrator has escaped from the locked room by naming people according to his will. Therefore, he creates his individual world that is subdued to his control. He escaped from Fanshawe’s universe and is now able to create a world of his own. Auster makes his characters become aware of their own existence and their potential to act like an author of the novel.
Apart from characters the readers also have their role in creating the novel. Chris Pace explains:
Auster, through the process of making his characters self-aware, encourages the readers to realize their own potential as creators in the telling of the story, to become conscious of the ways in which they shape the book. Rather than confining us to the role of unconsciously filling in the blanks, Auster instead forces us to recognize the power of our imagination in constructing the text.[12]
Later the author of “Escaping from the Locked Room” clarifies and says that “Auster makes his characters aware that like some readers, they are trapped in the locked room of a conventionally structured novel whose structures lead only back to the text itself, and not to the world that exists outside of the novel.”[13]
Daniel Quinn realizes that the reader plays very important role in constructing the novel. While waiting in the railway station, he observes a girl reading one of his books. Instead of feeling content, he is quite disappointed and angry. He feels offended because she skims the pages that had cost him so much effort. Though he is offended he is still interested in the girl’s opinion of the book:
(…) ‘I was just wondering if you liked the book.’
The girl shrugged. ‘I’ve read better and I’ve read worse.’
Quinn wanted to drop the conversation right there, but something in him persisted. Before he could get up and leave, the words were already out of his mouth. ‘Do you find it interesting?’
The girl shrugged again and cracked her gum loudly. ‘Sort of. There’s a part where the detective gets lost. That’s kind of scary.’
‘Is he a smart detective?’
‘Yeah, he’s smart. But he talks too much.’
‘You’d like more action?’
‘I guess so.’
‘If you don’t like it, why do you go on reading?’
‘I don’t know.’ The girl shrugged once again. ‘It passes the time, I guess. Anyway, it’s no big deal. It’s just a book.’[14]
Quinn understands that the people who read his words are as important to the story as the author is; the interpreters are as important as the speakers. He realizes that no matter how simply and clearly he writes something it will still be open to as many different interpretations as there are readers. The power of the story will not necessarily derive from the power of the author, but rather from the power of the imagination of the reader and willingness to use that power.
In The New York Trilogy characters are presented as trapped people in some kind of a locked room – either mental or physical – from which they must escape. In City of Glass
Auster himself elaborates on the importance of the reader in the interview. He explains his view on the example of a fairy tale:
[Fairy tales] are bare-boned narratives, narratives largely devoid of details, yet enormous amounts of information are communicated in a very short space, with very few words. What fairy tales prove, I think, is that it's the reader—or the listener—who actually tells the story to himself. The text is no more than a springboard for the imagination. 'Once upon a time there was a girl who lived with her mother in a house at the edge of a large wood.' You don't know what the girl looks like, you don't know what color the house is, you don't know if the mother is tall or short, fat or thin, you know next to nothing. But the mind won't allow these things to remain blank; it fills in the details itself, it creates images based on its own memories and experiences—which is why these stories resonate so deeply inside us. The listener becomes an active participant in the story.[16]
Auster points here on the reader as the one who ought to recognize the power of imagination in constructing the text. Chris Pace draws conclusions from the interview conducted with Paul Auster who says that we should not approach texts as riddles to be solved, but rather as “springboards for imagination:”
Books should make one think, and lead one to self-consciously reorder the world as an act of creation, just as the writer has consciously ordered some sort of reality in the book (…) through art and artistic creation. This is why it is so important for the reader to realize his or her creative role in the text, and write the story for him- or herself so that it provides a new way of seeing the world and understanding one's place in it. If one simply read and believed in whatever the writer said, then the conventions of the novel would take over real life, since, as Auster says, “reality is something we invent.”[17]
In Ghosts, Blue feels like a reader who reads a conventionally structured novel. It is also because Blue and the reader are “only half-alive at best, seeing the world only through words, living only through the lives of others.”[18]
Like the inactive reader of a conventionally structured novel, Blue no longer has any experiences that are truly his own; all that happens to him is a secondary reflection of Black’s actions. Black has put him into a box, whose role here as a manipulator of people in an artificial environment of his making is closely akin to that of an author.[19]
Blue is locked by the overwhelming power of the author. What distinguishes Blue from conventional characters is that he becomes conscious that he is kept locked. He recognizes the danger and states: “There is no story, no plot, no action – nothing but a man sitting alone in a room and writing a book. That’s all there is, Blue realizes, and he no longer wants any part of it. But how to get out? How to get out of the room that is the book that will go on being written for as long as he stays in the room?”[20]
‘Reality is something we invent’ – says Paul Auster and by saying that he points to the one who reads the book (not necessarily Auster’s). Readers may naturally fall in the same trap like the characters from The New York Trilogy. The conventional detective novel keeps the reader within its strict conventions. While reading such book the booklover follows the established rules of a detective novel and the ending is barely a surprise. On the other hand, Auster’s novel leaves many clues and not used alternatives that can puzzle the reader and make him aware of the arbitrariness of the characters’ choices.
[1] Pace, Chris. „Escaping from the Locked Room: Overthrowing the Tyranny of Artifice in Paul Auster’s New York Trilogy.”
[2] Pace, Chris. „Escaping from the Locked Room: Overthrowing the Tyranny of Artifice in Paul Auster’s New York Trilogy.”
[3] Pace, Chris. „Escaping from the Locked Room: Overthrowing the Tyranny of Artifice in Paul Auster’s New York Trilogy.”
[5] Pace, Chris. „Escaping from the Locked Room: Overthrowing the Tyranny of Artifice in Paul Auster’s New York Trilogy.”
[6] Pace, Chris. „Escaping from the Locked Room: Overthrowing the Tyranny of Artifice in Paul Auster’s New York Trilogy.”
[9] Pace, Chris. „Escaping from the Locked Room: Overthrowing the Tyranny of Artifice in Paul Auster’s New York Trilogy.”
[10] Pace, Chris. „Escaping from the Locked Room: Overthrowing the Tyranny of Artifice in Paul Auster’s New York Trilogy.”
[12] Pace, Chris. „Escaping from the Locked Room: Overthrowing the Tyranny of Artifice in Paul Auster’s New York Trilogy.”
[13] Pace, Chris. „Escaping from the Locked Room: Overthrowing the Tyranny of Artifice in Paul Auster’s New York Trilogy.”
[15] Pace, Chris. „Escaping from the Locked Room: Overthrowing the Tyranny of Artifice in Paul Auster’s New York Trilogy.”
[16] Pace, Chris. „Escaping from the Locked Room: Overthrowing the Tyranny of Artifice in Paul Auster’s New York Trilogy.”
[17] Pace, Chris. „Escaping from the Locked Room: Overthrowing the Tyranny of Artifice in Paul Auster’s New York Trilogy.”
[19] Pace, Chris. „Escaping from the Locked Room: Overthrowing the Tyranny of Artifice in Paul Auster’s New York Trilogy.”
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