The Danger of Rereading: Disastrous Endings in Paul Auster’s The Brooklyn Follies and Jhumpa Lahiri’s Unaccustomed Earth

Abstract

The ethical and aesthetic challenges of narrating recent, real world catastrophes have been taken up by a number of major literary figures today, including Don DeLillo, Haruki Murakami, Jonathan Safran Foer, Art Spiegelman, and Dave Eggers. Disaster fascinates and confounds imagination, and thus contemporary fiction grapples with overwhelming sense of unreality experienced by witnesses to catastrophe. Literature seems to offer chance to return to moments before a natural or man-made disaster and, with retrospective understanding, re-experience an event that spectators witnessed uncomprehendingly when it occurred. In other words, literature gives us chance to reread historical disaster in light of its outcome. But what can we make of fiction such as Paul Auster's novel The Brooklyn Follies (2006) or Jhumpa Lahiri's short story collection Unaccustomed Earth (2008), which are not about a disaster, but which use a disaster as an instrumental narrative device? Unlike authors mentioned above, neither Auster nor Lahiri offers a sustained literary treatment of a catastrophic event, its aftermath, or representational challenges it poses for fiction writer. Rather, they each employ a catastrophe to terminate their plots. Auster's novel, picaresque tale of Nathan Glass, a retired man re-embracing life cancer, ends abruptly on morning of September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks. In concluding story of Lahiri's collection, potential marriage plot of characters Kaushik and Hema is aborted when Kaushik drowns in 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami during his seaside vacation in Thailand. As their plots wind down, logic of Auster's and Lahiri's fictional worlds self-destructs, seemingly without reason. In a sense, Auster and Lahiri employ disasters as deus ex to abruptly conclude, but not resolve, their plots. The deus ex machina, or from machine, a device originally employed in Greek drama, resolves a seemingly inextricable narrative bind through a miraculous intervention: lowering a god onto stage by machine. Auster's and Lahiri's catastrophes arrive like gods descending out of clear blue sky. The concluding lines of The Brooklyn Follies, referencing bright blue morning sky on September 11, 2001, invite readers to imagine veering plane, whose hijackers conceived of themselves as instruments of god piloting machine. Unaccustomed Earth is brought to a close by a stupendous tsunami wave, a natural disaster that some might call an act of god. As in Greek tragedy, spectacular disaster as deus ex in contemporary fiction abruptly punctures logic of plot, and invites disbelief. Aristotle's Poetics critiques contrived, irrational (29) nature of deus ex machina, and argues that narrative resolutions should develop organically from previous events: the unravelling of plot ... must arise out of plot itself, it must not be brought about by deus ex machina (28). The author's recourse to deus ex reveals his or her failure to achieve a logical and harmonious conclusion. Admittedly, Auster's and Lahiri's deployment of disaster do not constitute deus ex in strictest sense because rather than solve a narrative problem, each disaster precipitates a total traumatic rupture. The uncanny invocation of veering plane or looming wave splits narrative, situating everything preceding it as definitively before. In Auster's and Lahiri's narratives, we do not know what comes after disaster for characters, and therefore narrative closure eludes us. What after-effects do such disastrous endings create? How does surprising invocation of catastrophe in concluding pages of a narrative impact our interpretation of text as a whole? The unsettling and even frustrating conclusions of Auster's and Lahiri's fiction evoke confusion and sense of unreality generated by mass disasters. …