Paul Auster: Bringing Theory to Life

Critical theory in fiction

Photo by Kier... in Sight on Unsplash

Today, I’m picking up with our Tuesday Topic of the month: Paul Auster, introduced here last week.

For those of you not into Paul Auster or who want a few extra interesting reads, check these out:

• Patagonia, whose gear I swear by for skiing (sponsorship?!), has made a lot of cool ethical moves in the past year. The latest is a protected national park in Albania with the last fully ‘natural’ flowing river in Europe. My summer is pretty booked, but I know where I’m going in 2024.

• This book review of Matthew Desmond’s Poverty, by America in The New Yorker is enlightening and terrifying: How America Manufactures Poverty.

• Brett Goldstein has so much to offer us! I’m enjoying the new season of Ted Lasso (which he often writes and also stars in) as well as his film podcast and recent Sesame Street cameo. Here’s an interview with the man on his future.

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Paul Auster: Bringing Theory to Life

I am convinced that fiction will remain alive since it meets a crucial human necessity. I even believe that films might become extinct before the novel, since it is one of the only spaces where two strangers can have a very personal relationship.

When reading a book, the reader is able to access the mind of someone else, and in doing so, may learn something about themselves, contributing to their sense of aliveness.

-Paul Auster in an interview with Jonathan Lethem

Some think critical theory merely forms literature into cultural capital. Others think it deadens the beauty of a story. Instead, I would posit that theory can make a book both more accessible and more alive. It makes the invisible visible. And it throws the text into conversation with the world around it and other forms of art.

Literature (and films we will look at next week) that seems to have theory at its nascence brings a different level of engagement from its readers. This “access” and “aliveness” that Auster discusses above feel all that more sharp in the way he seamlessly infuses, maps, and plays with theoretical writings by artistic and cultural scholars.

In his interviews, Paul Auster often considers the impact of books, and specifically fiction, on society as well as the different impact of writers in different cultures. Aspects of critical theory that address such — the power of art in the world — are often dismissed by him as having any sway over the way he writes. However, he is an author highly discussed in academic circles and one that, at least implicitly and sometimes explicitly, contains discussions of poststructuralism, postmodernism, existentialism, and other lenses of understanding texts within his writing.

I ended up talking about Auster quite a bit during my lecture at Pratt: From Theory to Fiction. Even more so than in this recording; in the actual lecture, I had several questions that brought me back to Auster and theory.

As I mentioned last week, the inception of my relationship with both Auster’s work and critical theory came during my first year as a student at Bowdoin College. This tying, on a personal level, could not be undone. As I learned about French poststructuralists, I learned about Auster. I saw so much of them in his work. Conversely, his fiction seemed to add to this theoretical discourse.

But, I would also posit, that theory — and perhaps especially of this poststructural nature — is at its best when it is completely in harmony with the world. It should not, in other words, be something that is put upon a text or a reader. It should illuminate a message and place the work within a larger intertextual discourse.

Today, I explore Auster’s relationship with theory and the way he has been placed within discourses as well as his completely free approach to writing. I would argue that this, however, is not a tension at all.

Working in the in-between

As I mentioned last week, Auster’s early published work was nearly all translated poetry and critical essays. Living in France, he was constantly navigating the in-between of culture and language.

In that liminal space, the constant crossing of thresholds, one can find deeper discoveries. I like this succinct explanation of the concept by Arup Ratan Chakraborty in Anudhyan: An International Journal of Social Sciences:

The word ‘liminality’ or ‘liminal’ is derived from the Latin limen meaning ‘threshold’. Liminal space is the ‘in-between’ location of cultural action, in which according to various cultural theorists, anthropologists and psychologists meaning is produced.

Homi K. Bhabha and Edward Said are good starting places to investigate this concept further. Their work in cultural studies largely falls into postcolonial discourse but is in no way limited by that designation. Culture is everywhere and their work is relatable to everyday experiences. Below is an interesting lecture and discussion of this concept via Bath Royal Literary and Scientific Institution.

Jennifer Howard-Grenville et al further discusses the concept in a way that can be applicable to our realities in “Liminality as Cultural Process for Cultural Change” (p. 525):

Turner (1977, 1982, 1987) suggests that liminal occasions are characterized by heightened reflexivity. They are "privileged spaces where people are allowed to think about how they think, about the terms in which they con duct their thinking, or to feel about how they feel in daily life. Here the code rules are themselves the reference of the knowing; the knowledge propositions themselves are the object of knowledge" (Turner 1987, p. 102). That is, individuals use their human capacity to step back and think about their situation, considering consciously what regulates their behavior. It is here that people can "talk about how they normally talk."

In this way, the many in-betweens of Auster’s writing helps us to think about our own worlds, to learn something about ourselves.

Auster creates many layers in his texts also by utilizing metafiction and working between genres. He writes literary fiction, detective stories (as The New York Trilogy is widely considered), non-fiction, and screenplays. Sometimes there are artists working also within the texts, writers or photographers for example, that seem to add another layer of awareness within the text. He clearly does this in the collaborations with filmmaker Wayne Wang, which I’ll talk about in two weeks. But he also does it in City of Glass with a character of his same name (Paul Auster) and in Man in the Dark through an aging book critic.

These many layers create an effect you can visualize as mise-en-abyme, or placed into infinity, as Jacques Rancière especially theorizes. I’ll talk about this idea more in a couple of weeks with the focus on film since it is related to some academic research I’ve published. In the meantime, we can think about the concept as creating reflections both within the stories and externally for the reader. These elements create a more versatile understanding and allows us to go deeper with ideas, but giving power to the reader to navigate and make our own sense of these Borges-like labyrinths.

Despite these navigations and frequent use of imaginary elements in his work, Auster claims he is “a realist.” What does this mean? I guess he is concerned with truth and with people. Neither of those elements are in contrast with writing fiction. As Virginia Woolf tells us famously in “A Room of One’s Own”:

Fiction here is likely to contain more truth than fact.

A postmodern author?

Can one be postmodern if one rejects the notion? I’ve read interviews where Auster denies any use of postmodernism or poststructuralism in his work, yet so many scholars seem to find it there. As a recent article about Auster describes:

His early books, including 1987's "The New York Trilogy," were existential, postmodern detective stories of outsiders with conflicting identities that found a receptive audience, especially in Europe. Auster, who barely read French postmodern theorists such as Jacques Derrida, rejects the characterization, however.

Yet, I’m sure, just like many others, that it is there. Could it be instead that Derrida and Auster have arrived at similar conclusions and questions about the world through their lines of thought about the world?

Sure, it’s possible.

Postmodernism is hard to define and is - by definition - in flux, so we may be coming to this reading with different understandings of it. For a thorough yet succinct tracing of the history of the term and general forms of use, the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy has a good overview. A much shorter overview from The Conversation is also a good read as well as this one from the Tate.

One way of understanding postmodernism is not only as a reaction against modernism or as something coming after it, but as an exploration of relative truths: “reality only comes into being through our interpretations of what the world means to us individually.” Auster’s 4 3 2 1, then, in addition to his works of metafiction and plays with language(s), gives us this possibility through a world of parallel universes where the protagonist’s identity and fate are changed by different factors. Although the story is filled with many relatable human experiences, we are able to consider the play of many factors in the world that might impact our own outcomes.

David L. Ulin from The Washington Post observes:

“4321” is a long book, and it can meander through the details and detritus of a life — or quartet of lives. Still, what’s compelling always is its sense that the most important time exists within us, the time of memory and imagination, out of which identity is forged. Like everyone, Archie and his family must live in time, and die. But like everyone also, the measure of their existence is not necessarily what they leave behind but who they thought they were. “The word psyche means two things in Greek,” Archie’s aunt, a literature professor, tells him in one of the novel’s most trenchant passages. “Butterfly and soul. But when you stop and think about it carefully, butterfly and soul aren’t so different, after all.”

In this way, I would argue, Auster’s books as postmodern art both attempt not to find universal truths, like the modernists, and find common elements of humanity, perhaps without specific language to give them. The paradox of this multiplicity and universality is a constant illumination through his oeuvre.

In an interview with the Paris Review, Auster tells us: “The greatest influences on my work have been fairy tales, oral traditions of storytelling.” He discusses his use of metafiction and similarities with (postmodern Argentinian writer) Borges, for example, in the contexts of playing with secret tensions and ideas deep inside him rather than engaging in any theoretical discourse.

Auster talks with Granta about ‘existential doubt’ and 4 3 2 1:

A natural writer

In the video below, Auster explains how he doesn’t have a choice but to write. It is a part of him. Not some lofty idea as a youth, but something to spend his whole life on. It brings him a lot of joy despite the marginalization by American society and the constant solitude.

My curse is that I am a writer.

Nobody cares what a writer has to say. We are marginalized. Other countries, they’re putting writers on television!

Perhaps because it is such a natural part of who Auster is, he rejects the idea that theory could influence his writing. It doesn’t mean he is not a careful writer however. He often writes first by hand then typewriter, at a slow pace to avoid laziness, in his words, and to carefully find the correct words for his ideas.

I can’t help but think that so many great literary figures and theorists are entrenched deep in Auster’s brain. He mentions writers like Borges and Dickens and Tolstoy easily and frequently in interviews. He worked as a critic and lecturer; is highly aware of the discourse that’s out there.

So what if he simply uses what suits him without putting a label on it? That’s exactly the direction that many have taken theory in the twenty-first century, as Post-Theory (which I again discuss in that lecture; see also for example this source) or into the realm of Cultural Studies, which is interdisciplinary. Although perhaps continuing to label where the theories come from in connection rather than an absence of labels altogether is what is really being done in the academic world. In this way, we can trace knowledge as well as give knowledge from the arts power in the articulation of its relevancy. Isn’t this why some people are afraid of Critical Race Theory?

Here, Auster says to avoid being ‘too clever’ as a writer unless there’s a real need for it. This resonates with his work, where we see echoes of theory and philosophy, but always in a natural and meaningful way.

I think Auster is doing this kind of improvisation I discussed in regards to jazz last month. He knows and understands so much of the literary discourses out there — in addition to the English and French languages — that they simply come out as improvisation, free expression of identity and ideas.

What’s your view on and experience with critical theory? Does it help you to understand Auster’s work in any way?

What do you think about Auster’s view that writers are marginalized in America? That nobody really listens to them?

In the spirit of Derrida, I’ll leave you with the questions.