Sophisticated Surfaces and Subliminal Mythologies in the Linguistic De/Construction of Paul Auster’s "The New York Trilogy"

Abstract

This article studies the imagery of writing in the work of Paul Auster, as an actual building craft that uses words as its raw-material. Though paying special attention to The New York Trilogy, the article uses several intertextual references, not only from other works by Paul Auster but also from Kafka, Beckett, Melville and Hawthorne. There is freedom inside the closed space of the writing-scene, which is a refuge of endless possibilities, where an alternative universe is created with a perfect order set by imagination. The writer-character builds pages that become the walls of the room that surrounds him, so that the written genesis may grow and expand. The room is like a womb that conceives and gives birth to the written work, after a gestation in solitary confinement. The writer is the creator of a cosmogony, using the power of genesis revealed in the solitude of the room. In Auster’s work, the building of the written work is similar to the ordered building of an imaginary universe. Nevertheless, the writer can also be, in another context, a creator of lethal vacuum, describing a caogony, throwing the universe he has conceived into disorder, conjuring the wall of death around him and his characters. The writer-character in constant self-reflection is like an inexperienced God, whose hands may originate either cosmos or chaos, life or death, hence Auster’s recurring meditation on the work and the power of writing, at the same time an autobiography and a self-criticism.