Book Of Illusions Research Articles

Artists in Isolation: The Paradox of Recognition in Paul Auster’s the Book of Illusions

ABSTRACT Paul Auster’s novel The Book of Illusions presents a series of isolated, decentered artists whose identities, not merely their stories, are nested inside one another. Through a handful of textual clues, the narrator Zimmer assembles, within himself, the identity of the silent movie actor Hector Mann, and that construction, in turn, reflects back on Zimmer and secures his identity. The creative act can become a debilitating retreat or a productive form of intersubjectivity. In his quest for a stable identity, Zimmer explores what it means to be either an artist like Mann who shuts out the audience, depriving himself of the other’s gaze, or one who narrates himself into existence through a communion with absent and imaginary people. Auster complicates a simple notion of recognition and the possibility of intersubjectivity, by rejecting humanist presuppositions about the subject and by qualifying – through his depiction of desire and the quest narrative – a postmodern view of the decentered, intertextual subject. A postmodern dialectics of recognition appear not only in Zimmer’s textual relation to Mann and his flesh-and-blood relation to Alma, but also in Mann’s secret film The Inner Life of Martin Frost.

Three Ways of Understanding the Word-world Relation in the Book of Illusions and the Cure of Trauma

ABSTRACT In The Book of Illusions, Auster juxtaposes three ways of understandings the word-world relation. The postmodernist belief in the self-sufficiency of language finds its spokesperson in the narrator-protagonist David Zimmer. Alma Grund, by contrast, is a stanch realist. She strives after a strict correspondence between words and their referents in the physical world. Different from both Zimmer and Grund, Hector Mann is a “middleman” that straddles two realms – art and life. He shuttles between art and reality at ease and is able to transform either one into the other. In this essay, I first demonstrate how the three main characters of the novel represent the three understandings. Based on the analysis, I proceed to examine David Zimmer’s (failed) attempt to get over the trauma caused by the death of his family in light of the Lacanian trinity of imaginary-symbolic-real. Mann’s late film The Inner Life of Martin Frost and its thematic relation to the novel will also be discussed to further shed light on Auster’s view on the word-world, or art-reality relation.

The Incredible Shrinking Man in Paul Auster’s Report from the Interior: The Film and the Myths

The Incredible Shrinking Man, one of the two “written films” (quoted in Gonzales 18) that Auster narrates in Report from the Interior, turns the book, as in The Book of Illusions, into a virtual screen, showing how influential the 1957 Universal Pictures production was to fabricate both Auster’s auctorial identity and his various characters’ identities. The Incredible Shrinking Man exclusively focuses on the physical metamorphosis of the protagonist who is submitted to a sudden, corporeal diminishment, and then on his rebirth at a higher state of consciousness: after dying to his old self, he struggles to survive, overcoming obstacles and trials as he is confined in the cellar of his own house. The plot undeniably recalls the process of regression, the so-called “art of hunger” that most Austerian protagonists experience. It also casts a light on the theme of the depletion of material resources which pervades Auster’s fictions and conveys, in multiple ways, the idea of “a return to origins” as Mircea Eliade, for instance, analyzed it. Carey’s initiatory and transformative adventure, which resembles a fairy tale, explains, at least partly, Auster’s fascination for this genre which has always inspired him, and Auster’s analysis of the film in Report from the Interior unveils his vision on initiation, on life and fiction, along with his obsession with enclosed spaces.

“A World Complete Without Me”: Writing Cinema in Paul Auster’s The Book of Illusions

ABSTRACTPaul Auster’s creative practice involves a tendency to transcend the boundaries between different mediums, as exemplified by his cinematographic fiction. Although relevant research has started to gain traction in recent years, there are still few in-depth analyses of the medium of film, its implication in the verbal medium, and its connection with the themes explored in an individual novel of Auster’s. Drawing on Stanley Cavell’s film philosophy, the present essay attempts to explicate the meaning and function of writing cinema in The Book of Illusions. Starting with several fundamental issues concerning viewing and writing—including the philosophical basis on which cinematic experience and its expression can possibly be construed—this essay delves further into their connections with one of the ethical questions presented in the novel: how can and should one relate to another’s life and work? From the viewpoint of Cavellian film philosophy, the question may be phrased this way: how can and should I, a viewer, respond to “a world complete without me”?

Skepticism and Responsibility: Paul Auster’s The Book of Illusions

ABSTRACTPaul Auster’s novels evoke with staunch sincerity what the American philosopher Stanley Cavell calls “the responsibility you bear” for your words and actions alike. I argue that Cavell’s ongoing inquiry into topics such as community and skepticism, informed by nineteenth-century Transcendentalist philosophy, can be extended to Auster’s fiction to help illuminate the ethical underpinnings of his metaphysical work. In my analysis of the author’s 2002 novel, The Book of Illusions, I show how Auster subverts the postmodern paradigm of deconstructing the humanist subject as a locus of ethical conflicts and choices. A meditation on assuming responsibility for one’s own actions and their sometimes tragic consequences, the novel rejects any claim to an unsatisfying relativism of “anything goes.” In a story obsessively occupied with guilt and penance, characters are held accountable for their mistakes and neglects. Shaped by chance events, unanticipated encounters, and deadly accidents, The Book of Illusions confirms Auster’s view of the random workings of the universe. At the same time, the novel negotiates Cavellian skepticism by advocating an ethics of love, companionship, and responsibility for the other.

Archival Futurism in Paul Auster’s The Book of Illusions

Through a reading of Paul Auster’s 2002 novel The Book of Illusions, this article explores the archival impulse in the context of queer theorist Lee Edelman’s schematization of “reproductive futurism.” I argue that The Book of Illusions positions the archive, rather than the child, as the object of futurity and suggest that Auster explores what I term “archival futurism” through two competing visions of the archive: David Zimmer, the protagonist of The Book of Illusions, seeks to extend human life through the archive, exhibiting a pathological archive mania following the death of his family; Hector Mann, in contrast, exemplifies a queered vision of the traditional archive, rejecting futurity by destroying the archive of films he has been making for sixty-odd years. Mann ultimately overcomes the archive while Zimmer remains feverishly devoted to it.

Narrative Care: Biopolitics and the Novel by Arne De Boever (review)

DE BOEVER, ARNE. Narrative Care: Biopolitics and the Novel. New York: Bloomsbury, 2013.181 pp. $29.95. It is clear that we cannot go on as before (142), Arne De Boever states in his paradigm-shifting volume, Narrative Care: Biopolitics and the Novel. The twenty-first century must come into an awareness of how its modern predecessors were crafted as models of perfection and discover ways to resist the increasingly clear levels of complicity between biopolitics and life-writing (142). Referencing Ian Watt's classic treatise on the development of the as a genre dedicated to everyday life, De Boever argues that the rise of the modern coincided with developments in governmentality and social control explained in the political philosophies of Michel Foucault and Giorgio Agamben. De Boever's study carries on a tradition of Foucauldian literary criticism earlier exemplified by D. A. Miller's The Novel and the Police, but it achieves a significant shift in analytical focus: from surveillance to control, from the individual body to the body politic, and from narrative discipline to narrative care. De Boever explains the necessity of such a shift in chapter one, which considers Foucault's unfinished work on biopolitics (1977-1979) alongside Agamben's return to questions of political sovereignty after 9/11. After an accessible discussion of these theories, the following chapters yield several intriguing claims and new theories of the novel, including an Agambenian theory of the novel (72), a pharmacological theory of the novel (141), and a biopolitical theory of the as a (151). The narrator of J. M. Coetzee's Slow Man initially furnishes De Boever with the term biologico-literary experiment, which he then uses to characterize all four of the novels under discussion. From relations between the narrator and his caregiver in Slow Man, De Boever turns to the invocation of the concentration camp in Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go and to embedded Flolocaust references in Paul Auster's Book of Illusions. He then considers the ethical implications of simulating life and death in Tom McCarthy's Remainder and in Charlie Kaufman's film Synecdoche, New York. In addition to situating each work in its novelist's larger oeuvre, De Boever explores a broad selection of contexts and intertexts, including forerunners such as Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe and Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, as well as Catherine Malabou's current research on neuroplasticity in What Should We Do With Our Brain? …

Narrative Care: Biopolitics and the Novel by Arne De Boever (review)

De Boever, Arne. 2013. Narrative Care: Biopolitics and the Novel. New York: Bloomsbury. $100.00 hc. $25.99 eBook. 192 pp.Arne De Boever's new work falls within what he terms an interdisciplinary vitalist in the humanities (2; emphasis in original). Narrative Care: Biopolitics and the Novel addresses the definability and livability of life in the grip of biopolitics and thus intersects with the political project and theory of such thinkers as Judith Butler, Eric Santner, Melinda Cooper, and Giorgio Agamben. The twist, however, is that Narrative Care hinges this trend to literary theory and analyzes the lives of literary characters. Through close reading of four contemporary Anglophone novels-J. M. Coetzee's Slow Man (2005), Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go (2010), Paul Auster's The Book of Illusions (2002), and Tom McCarthy's Remainder (2005)-Narrative Care proposes theory of the novel that closely relates it to biopolitical regime. Tailoring Michel Foucault's notions of biopolitics and care, De Boever evaluates the lives of the characters caught up in this regime as well as the style and effect of the authors who resist it.De Boever argues that the novel is deeply complicit with what Foucault terms biopolitics, politics that operates through norms rather than laws and that controls, regulates, and transforms life. As De Boever clearly articulates, the notion of biopower has disquieting implications: It is within the realms where we think we are free-that is, where power refrains from positively implementing itself-that we turn out to be most controlled (37). The novel not only arises at the same point in history as this new of power but also attends to and governs individual lives; both the novel and biopolitics foster life until the point of death (45). This theory takes seriously the lives of characters: fictional characters not only allegorize our own biopolitical subjectivity but also have lives of their own that matter analytically, politically, and ethically. The novel is thus simultaneously form of life-writing and biopolitical regime, both a practice of and a dark apparatus of capture (8, 21; emphasis in original). In spite of the severity of his critique-De Boever will, somewhat problematically, compare the novel to concentration camp-the novel as genre survives due to the pharmacological nature of narrative care. As Jacques Derrida elaborates in Plato's Pharmacy (1972), pharmakon means both poison and cure: thus pharmacological narrative care has the potential not only to control but also to liberate. Authorial self-reflexivity, for example, can call attention to and so resist the novel's biopolitical regime.Although De Boever acknowledges that he adapts the meaning and applicability of biopolitics (by relating it to care and applying it to postmodernism and trauma studies), his argument is most cogent when he keeps close to Foucault's usage. His chapter on Coetzee's Slow Man is therefore his strongest, showcasing the cooperation of philosophy and literary theory that enables his argument. Slow Man ties together many of the elements of De Boever's theory: it deals with care thematically and formally, drawing attention to the practice of writing by interrupting the narrative to introduce its author, Elizabeth Costello, character in another of Coetzee's novels. …

In the Country of Missing Persons: Paul Auster's Narratives of Trauma

Auster's recent novel, The Brooklyn Follies (2006), opens with a stunning line--I was looking for a quiet place to die--and closes with a faintly foreshadowed but still shocking reference to the brilliant blue sky under which the protagonist walks in New York City on the morning of September 11,2001 (1,306). Auster's framing of the novel's action between moments of personal and national trauma points to one of the abiding preoccupations of his career. Best known for his narrative puzzles constructed around a postmodern metaphysics of identity, as in his early New York Trilogy (1985-86), also takes his stories of ontological and epistemological uncertainty outside the purely metaphysical realm within which the subject intuits his own fundamental lack of presence. Often in such instances, dramatizes lack by way of narratives of missing persons, especially as seen from the point of view of those left behind. At times, these narratives recount a personal loss--of a family member or lover--and at others, they move within a national landscape, providing in their missing figures metaphoric surrogates for an impersonal or cultural lack. In both cases, however, explores the possibility that loss is a historical, and hence potentially narratable, condition. Such a premise leaves open the potential for moving beyond loss, a potential that each novel questions in its own way and that ultimately structures each narrative trajectory according to the psychoanalytic pattern of acting-out and working-through associated with the process of mourning. Since a central absence shadows and directs Auster's novels, they tend to follow a narrative pattern of quest or detection in which the questing figure-generally the narrator or his surrogate--seeks the missing person, either literally or in the figurative terrain of knowledge and understanding. Consider, for example, from early in his career, Auster's search for the story of his father in the memoir The Invention of Solitude (1982); the diegetic Paul Auster attempting to comprehend Quinn's obsessive pursuit of Peter Stillman, Sr., in City of Glass (1985; rpt. in The New York Trilogy); and Anna Blume's quest for her brother in In the Country of Last Things (1987). In subsequent novels, the pattern is visible in Peter Aaron's goal to reconstruct the story of his enigmatic friend Benjamin Sachs in Leviathan (1992), David Zimmer's scholarly pursuit of the vanished silent film star Hector Mann in The Book of Illusions (2002), and even Sidney Orr's desperate attempt to seek out and heal his fractured subjectivity in Oracle Night (2003). In each case, the narrator's desire to erase an absence aims toward uncovering secrets--and the fact of narration both testifies to and enables the quest. Each quest stands for the narrator's confrontation with trauma. The inconclusiveness of each suggests that loss is largely irremediable, the primary object of desire not just inaccessible, but at times unrepresentable. Nevertheless, despite the intuition of existential absence evident in The New York Trilogy, demonstrates a surprising, if modest, optimism. The narrators pursuing their objects engage in a therapeutic process that brings them toward accepting loss, contingency, and thwarted desire. Their narratives complete histories that record and embrace loss by recovering the very possibility of the historical from the timeless stasis of the traumatic condition. The histories they construct provisionally release them, if not their objects of contemplation, from the past so as to live in an ongoing present. Auster's work, and especially the relationship between his narrators and the objects of their quests, is illuminated by central distinctions that Dominick LaCapra has drawn from Freud's work. In Reflections on Trauma, Absence, and Loss, LaCapra differentiates absence from loss, acting-out from working-through, mourning from melancholy. The distinction between the latter two terms derives from Freud's account in Mourning and Melancholia (1917), with the emphasis on the active work of mourning that allows one who has lost an object to move beyond grief, as opposed to melancholia, which is characteristic of an arrested process in which the depressed, self-berating, and traumatized self, locked in compulsive repetition, is possessed by the past . …

The Poetics and Politics of Metafiction: Reading Paul Auster's Travels in the Scriptorium

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. This is strange enough—to be only half alive at best, seeing the world only through words, living only through the lives of others. But if the book were an interesting one, perhaps it wouldn't be so bad. … But this book offers him nothing. 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?1 1Auster, New York Trilogy: Ghosts, 201. References to Auster's fiction will be abbreviated as follows: New York Trilogy: NYT; In the Country of Last Things: CLT; Moon Palace: MP; Music of Chance: MC; Leviathan: L; Mr. Vertigo: MV; Timbuktu: T; The Book of Illusions: BI; Oracle Night: ON; Travels in the Scriptorium: TS.

Carrying the Burden of Representation: Paul Auster's The Book of Illusions

The most important thing in art is The Frame. For painting: literally; for other arts: figuratively – because, without this humble appliance, you can't know where The Art stops and The Real World begins. You have to put a “box” around it because otherwise, what is that shit on the wall?If John Cage, for instance, says, “I'm putting a contact microphone on my throat, and I'm going to drink carrot juice, and that's my composition,” then his gurgling qualifies as his composition because he put a frame around it and said so. “Take it or leave it, I nowwillthis to bemusic.” After that it's a matter of taste. Without the frame-as-announced, it's a guy swallowing carrot juice.

Hector Mann and Henry Roth: Portraits of Invisible Men in Paul Auster's <i>The Book of Illusions

Hector Mann and Henry Roth: Portraits of Invisible Men in Paul Auster's <i>The Book of Illusions

Post-Traumatic People in Paul Auster's The Book of Illusions from Cathy Caruth's and Michelle Balaev's Perspectives

Post-Traumatic People in Paul Auster's The Book of Illusions from Cathy Caruth's and Michelle Balaev's Perspectives