York Trilogy Research Articles

Paul Auster’s New York Trilogy as “Historiographic Metafiction”

Seeking to free us from the clutches of our self-made rigid conventions, postmodernism criticizes the metanarratives of modern times, while metafiction seems a better spokesman of it. New York Trilogy , Paul Auster’s debut composition and a meta-detective novel, has secured its fame in the postmodern fiction. It uses and abuses the conventions of detective novel, and lays bare the conventions of objective historiography. In doing this, Auster has given a self-reflective and equally historical dimension to his oeuvre through the technique of “historiographic metafiction”. Linda Hutcheon sees “historiographic metafiction” as a way to rewrite history in postmodern fiction. Postmodernism seeks to embrace a plurality of truths, and history is no longer monolithic and objective. Hutcheon contends that the postmodernist fiction is characterized by intense self-reflexivity and overtly parodic intertextuality. Utilizing historical accounts as intertextual effects, the writers of postmodernist fiction distrust in history. The present article will attempt to analyze New York Trilogy as a “historiographic metafiction”. Firstly, and insofar as it is within the scope of the article, it will attempt to offer a critical analysis of “postmodernism”, “metafiction”, and “metaphysical detective fiction”. Then, it will examine Auster’s novel as a “historiographic metafiction” in the light of Hutcheon’s theories.

Paul Auster's The New York Trilogy: Revisiting Self in the Merging Boundaries of Gothic and the Postmodern

Inevitably wrought by the socio-historical context in which they occur, literary genres transform in the course of history, and gothic is not an exception. Since its rise in the late eighteenth century, the gothic genre has significantly evolved: from ruins, graveyards, and vampires to echoes of romantic imagination and towards gothic science-fiction. This study argues that gothic has renewed itself in the postmodern context, in the sense that the characteristic features of the genre as materialized in the supernatural are replaced with mysteries, terrors, and ghosts that haunt the contemporary self's inner mind. Thus a proliferation of vampires, doubles and ghosts has given way to the haunted vaults and obscure shadows within the characters' inner worlds. In particular, this paper addresses the concept of self and the postmodern gothic as reincarnated in Paul Austers' The New York Trilogy by relating the notion of 'self' to space, self-reflexivity, the uncanny, and doubles.

TÁC QUYỀN TRUYỆN KỂ TRẦN TRỤI VỚI VĂN CHƯƠNG: MÊ CUNG TRÒ CHƠI TRÍ TUỆ TRONG TIỂU THUYẾT PAUL AUSTER

TÁC QUYỀN TRUYỆN KỂ TRẦN TRỤI VỚI VĂN CHƯƠNG: MÊ CUNG TRÒ CHƠI TRÍ TUỆ TRONG TIỂU THUYẾT PAUL AUSTER

Globalization and Its Effect on the Novels Translated into Persian: A Postcolonial Approach

Translation can be considered as one of the ways which make different cultures closer to each other. Sometimes this affinity can make cultures to adopt some cultural elements. Cronin (2003) named this phenomenon “globalization”. This becomes an important issue when it comes to dominant and dominated cultures. This study was intended (1) to show how globalization can affect translations of Persian novels and (2) to show what strategies the translators use, in order to see if translation and globalization serve English language and impose Western culture into dominated culture, or help dominated cultures to become globally known. “Domestication” and “foreignization” strategies introduced by Venuti (1995) have been considered as main framework of this study. In order to analyze the effects of globalization, culture-specific items have been chosen as the unit of the study. The corpus of the study was an American novel entitled, The New York Trilogy, written by Paul Auster and its Persian translation by Khojaste Keyhan and Shahrzad Lolachi. The analysis revealed that although foreignization strategy is more common; whenever an element is against Iran’s religious or traditional rules, domestication strategy was preferred.

Coping with the Postmodern: Paul Auster's New York Trilogy

Throughout this essay, I will show the characters of Paul Auster's New York Trilogy moving between modernism and postmodernism, and discuss the way some of them epitomize either largely modernist or postmodernist epistemologies. My purpose is to offer a reconstruction of Auster's dialogue across both, and I will resist situating the novelist in either the modern or the postmodern camp. I see him as rather watching from a distance, while his characters scour the terrain (both terrains, as a matter of fact) for him. My conclusion is that Auster seems to acknowledge the inevitability of inhabiting the cultural space of the postmodern, while staking out a claim to question, or even to challenge, some of its presumptions. While modernism still holds a powerful spell for the protagonists of City of Glass and Ghosts (less so for the latter), the narrator of The Locked Room posits the inextricability of embracing our contemporary sensibility, the postmodern, without necessarily rejecting altogether what went before. Auster associates modernism largely with the secluded, invisible, despicable Fanshawe, whose spell and influence over him the narrator of the third novel of the trilogy manages to break.

Finding Ghosts in a “No Man’s Land”: Žižekian Subjects in Paul Auster’s The New York Trilogy

The present article is an attempt to investigate Paul Auster’s The New York Trilogy in the light of Žižek’s Hegel-inspired theorization about subjectivity. It studies Hegelian themes of “absolute negativity” and the “night of the world” that figure prominently in theorization of the Žižekian subject. In so doing, it argues how the characters of The New York Trilogy experience their immediate surroundings as “absolute negativity,” as a “no man’s land” that is eclipsed by the “night of the world,” and how as empty points of negativity they see the need for the transition from a state of nature to that of culture, so that giving birth to their subjectivity. By dividing the procedure between two groups of characters, it tries to show how desperately both try but fail in their attempts to become a subject, that is why ghosts frequent New York’s streets, and not the real subjects.

The ghost in the mirror: Notes on Paul Auster’s Ghosts

Here I present a reading of Paul Auster’s Ghosts, part of The New York Trilogy, attentive to theories of subjectivity (especially those informed by psychoanalysis). I also try to go beyond the notion of theory as a supplier of ‘critical tools’; in fact, my reading suggests that Ghosts is in harmony with and complementary to certain theoretical discourses; it belongs, then, to a category we can loosely call ‘theoretical fiction’. Central to my argument is the dialectics of ‘I’ and ‘other’ that determines subjective constitution.

International Don Quixote

International Don Quixote

A EXPERIÊNCIA DE VIDA DO SUJEITO COMUM E O <i>ETHOS</i> DO ESCRITOR NA ESPACIALIDADE TEXTUAL: narrativa autobiográfica na literatura de Paul Auster

Este trabalho detém-se no exame dos engendramentos enunciativos utilizados pelo escritor estadunidense Paul Auster em A Trilogia de Nova York (1987) e Desvarios no Brooklyn (2005). Nas narrativas em foco, observa-se que as relações são complexas, vez que o próprio autor empírico figura como personagem de modo explícito e implícito, aspergindo pelos textos relatos da própria vida, em movimento autobiográfico. Auster expõe também acontecimentos vividos por outros escritores como “pessoas físicas”. Desse modo, para além da autoridade do nome o qual figura nas capas dos livros e dos fatos que pululam nas biografias autorizadas, Auster procura fatos “verdadeiramente” vividos, que ilustrem, ao máximo, a humanidade dos artistas que admira e com cuja experiência julga ter constituído a própria subjetividade e a identidade artística.

Paul Auster and the French Connection: City of Glass and French Philosophy

Paul Auster likes the sound that his typewriter makes. He likes to use it to write about solitude and chance, about survival and dying, about self-consciousness and self-writing texts, about upside...

Reflexões sobre a condição do artista contemporâneo na luta contra os discursos oficiais: Paul Auster, a literatura e a história

We present a reading of The New York Trilogy (1987), Leviathan (1992) and The Brooklyn Follies (2005), by Paul Auster, through the articulation between subjectivities and discourses, notably literature and history. The effort was guided by the observation of the criticism constructed by the writer in relation to the United States' national myth, in the perspective of a movement that resounds other writers' criticism, overall the north-American ones, among which Auster presents himself as a genealogical heir. In digging the discursive and historical viscera on the "origin" of the American nation, the writer presents some reflections on the national identity issue, mainly in relation to the symbols and to the way the characters deal with the official representations.

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.

New York dans le polar métaphysique : la ville totale

Thousands of writers have set their novels in New York City and several anthologies of New York writings have been published recently, establishing the city as a central element in American literature. Considering the particular genre of detective fiction, this is also the case, so to speak. Our contemporary world, mostly urban, has led to a major shift in the genre towards increasing uncertainty and doubt about the traditional detective hero’s ability to cope with such a harsh environment. He used to stand as a reassuring heroic figure against the historic background inherited after WWII and then the Cold War and the Vietnam War. Then followed an era of increasing terrorism, globalization and generalized scare; September 11 came as the ultimate manifestation of this threat. In this context, detective fiction mostly evolved towards a much darker path - thriller or noir – whereas other authors created a new branch of the genre by mixing detective fiction patterns with a metaphysical questioning of our contemporary existence - metaphysical detective fiction - which can be illustrated by writers from very different horizons, such as Paul Auster in his New York Trilogy, Jerome Charyn and his Isaac Sidel series or Jonathan Lethem’s Motherless Brooklyn. All three have in common their renewal of the detective genre and their deep attachment to New York. The city is the main protagonist of their detective fiction: omnipresent and omnipotent, New York plays a capital role in the narration and stands as a genuine participant in the plot.

A Vision of Complex Symmetry

A Vision of Complex Symmetry

Public Personae and the Private I: De-Compositional Ontology in Paul Auster's The New York Trilogy

Public Personae and the Private I: De-Compositional Ontology in Paul Auster's The New York Trilogy

Corporeality and the Metropolis: Dissolving the Body in Paul Auster's The New York Trilogy

This article deals with the theme of the shattering of the body in the contemporary urban environment as it appears in Paul Auster’s The New York Trilogy. In the three novels of The Trilogy, the writer deals with the complex interaction between the metropolitan cityscape and the human body: moving through a labyrinthine New York whose dimensions exceed by far the human scale, Auster’s heroes experience conditions of depersonalization and assumed absorption by space, which finally lead them to the extreme state of the dissolution of their bodies. This transgression of the physical body, that “melting into the walls of the city” (139), is however celebrated by Auster as a form of transgression of logical boundaries, which permits thought to reveal its poetic nature: the heroes may disappear in the end, however they leave behind them a written story – product and witness of their existence of their existence in the postmodern city that escapes all anthropomorphic qualities in order to reveal a more archaic and inspiring imagery.

Wrong Numbers: The Endless Fiction of Auster and Deleuze and Guattari and …

It was a wrong number that started it. —Paul Auster, The New York Trilogy One ought, probably, to make a start for oneself, but I think that on this point Jeffrey T. Nealon says it best The detective novel is often analyzed in terms of its metafictional and metaphysical appeal. Whether consciously or unconsciously, the genre comments upon the process of sifting through signs, and ultimately upon the possibility of deriving order from the seeming chaos of conflicting clues and motives. The unravelling work of the detective within the story mirrors and assists the work of the reader, as both try to piece together the disparate signs that might eventually solve the mystery. The reader of the detective novel comes metafictionally to identify with the detective, as both reader and detective are bound up in the metaphysical or epistemological work of interpretation, the work of reading clues and writing a solution or end. (91-92)

Problems in the Translation of Paul Austers The New York Trilogy

In this paper I examine an original text, The New York Trilogy by Paul Auster, and its translation into Spanish. The source text chosen displays a wealth of instances of symbolic names, rhymes, wordplay, idioms, cultural references, colloquialisms and other stylistic features which are hard to transfer to Spanish without a significant loss of information. I attempt to identify those phenomena and discuss how the translator confronted them. I am particularly concerned with the lexical level. The conclusion of my paper is that the assessment of the translation problems posed by this literary work reveals the possibility of achieving an acceptable version at the readership’s level. This kind of studies are useful for the subsequent systematisation of strategies for the translational problems found in any literary text.

Inventions of Solitude: Thoreau and Auster

In Ghosts, the second part of Paul Auster's The New York Trilogy, a private eye called Blue is hired by a certain White to shadow a man called Black. Black lives in a small apartment in Brooklyn; Blue moves into an equally small apartment just across the street from Black. He is alarmed to discover that Black spends most of his time at his desk by the window, writing in a notebook with a red fountain-pen. In the evenings Black reads, and through his binoculars Blue can just make out the title of Black's book: Walden, by Henry David Thoreau.Accordingly Blue obtains his own copy of Walden – a 1942 edition published, by coincidence, by one Walter J. Black – thinking it might help him solve the mystery of his assignment. But, like almost every reader of Walden, from Emerson to Stanley Cavell to Auster himself, Blue finds reading this book is “not a simple business”:Whole chapters go by, and when he comes to the end of them he realizes that he has not retained a thing. Why would anyone want to go off and live alone in the woods? What's all this about planting beans and not drinking coffee or eating meat? Why all these interminable descriptions of birds? Blue thought that he was going to get a story, or at least something like a story, but this is no more than blather, an endless harangue about nothing at all.The next day Blue tries the book again, and finally comes across a sentence he can understand: “Books must be read as deliberately and reservedly as they were written.” Blue realizes that “the trick is to go slowly, more slowly than he has ever gone with the words before.” Nevertheless, he still finds the whole business excruciatingly painful, and curses Black for torturing him in this way. “What he does not know,” the anonymous narrator remarks, “is that were he to find the patience to read the book in the spirit in which it asks to be read, his entire life would begin to change, and little by little he would come to a full understanding of his situation – that is to say, of Black, of White, of the case, of everything that concerns him.” Instead, Blue throws the book aside in disgust and goes out for a walk, not realizing “that this is the beginning of the end.”