Paul Auster

Paul Auster

Paul Auster, September 2008
Born Paul Benjamin Auster
February 3, 1947 (1947-02-03) (age 64)
Newark, NJ, United States
Pen name

Paul Queen[1]

Paul Benjamin
Occupation Novelist and poet
Nationality American
Period 1974 – present
Genres Absurdist fiction, crime fiction, mystery fiction
Literary movement Postmodernism

Paul Benjamin Auster (born February 3, 1947) is an American author known for works blending absurdism, existentialism, crime fiction and the search for identity and personal meaning in works such as The New York Trilogy (1987), Moon Palace (1989), The Music of Chance (1990), The Book of Illusions (2002) and The Brooklyn Follies (2005).

Contents

Biography

Auster was born in Newark, New Jersey[4], to Jewish middle class parents of Polish descent Samuel and Queenie Auster. He grew up in South Orange, New Jersey[5] and graduated from Columbia High School in adjoining Maplewood.[6] After graduating from Columbia University in 1970, he moved to Paris, France where he earned a living translating French literature. Since returning to the U.S. in 1974, he has published poems, essays, novels of his own as well as translations of French writers such as Stéphane Mallarmé and Joseph Joubert.

He married his second wife, writer Siri Hustvedt, in 1981, and they live in Brooklyn.[4] Together they have one daughter, Sophie Auster. Previously, Auster was married to the acclaimed writer Lydia Davis. They had one son together, Daniel Auster.

He is also the Vice-President of PEN American Center.

Writing

Following his acclaimed debut work, a memoir entitled The Invention of Solitude, Auster gained renown for a series of three loosely-connected detective stories published collectively as The New York Trilogy. These books are not conventional detective stories organized around a mystery and a series of clues. Rather, he uses the detective form to address existential issues and questions of identity, space, language and literature, creating his own distinctively postmodern (and critique of postmodernist) form in the process.

The search for identity and personal meaning has permeated Auster's later publications, many of which concentrate heavily on the role of coincidence and random events (The Music of Chance) or increasingly, the relationships between men and their peers and environment (The Book of Illusions, Moon Palace). Auster's heroes often find themselves obliged to work as part of someone else's inscrutable and larger-than-life schemes. In 1995, Auster wrote and co-directed the films Smoke (which won him the Independent Spirit Award for Best First Screenplay) and Blue in the Face. Auster's more recent works, Oracle Night (2004), The Brooklyn Follies (2005) and the novella Travels in the Scriptorium have also met critical acclaim.

Themes

According to a dissertation by Heiko Jakubzik at the University of Heidelberg, two central influences in Paul Auster's writing are Jacques Lacan's psychoanalysis and the American transcendentalism of the early to middle 19th century, namely amongst others Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson.

In short Lacan's theory declares that we enter the world through words. We observe the world through our senses but the world we sense is structured (mediated) in our mind through language. Thus our subconscious is also structured as a language. This leaves us with a sense of anomaly. We can only perceive the world through language, but we have the feeling of a lack. The lack is the sense of a being outside of language. The world can only be constructed through language but it always leaves something uncovered, something that can not be told and be thought of, it can only be sensed. This can be seen as one of the central themes of Paul Auster's writing.

Lacan is considered to be one of the key figures of French poststructuralism. Some academics are keen to discern traces of other poststructuralist philosophers throughout Auster's oeuvre - mainly Jacques Derrida, Jean Baudrillard and Michel de Certeau - although Auster himself has claimed to find such philosophies 'unreadable' [3]

The transcendentalists believe in the fact that the symbolic order of civilization separated us from the natural order of the world. By moving into nature - like Thoreau in Walden - it would be possible to return to this natural order.

The common factor of both ideas is the question of the meaning of symbols for human beings.[7] Auster's protagonists are often writers who establish meaning in their lives through writing, and they try to find their place within the natural order to be able to live again in civilization.

Edgar Allan Poe, Samuel Beckett, and Herman Melville have also had a strong influence on Auster's writing. Not only do their characters reappear in Austers work (like William Wilson in City of Glass or Hawthorne's Fanshawe in The Locked Room, both from The New York Trilogy). Auster also uses variations on the themes of these writers.

Paul Auster's reappearing subjects are:[8]

Coincidence

Instances of coincidence can be found all over Auster's work. Auster himself claims that people are so influenced by all the consistent stories that surround them, that they do not see the elements of coincidence, inconsistency and contradiction in their own lives:

“ This idea of contrasts, contradictions, paradox, I think, gets very much to the heart of what novel writing is for me. It's a way for me to express my own contradictions.[10] ”

Failure

Failure in Paul Auster's works is not just the opposite of the happy ending. In Moon Palace and The Book of Illusions it results from the individual's uncertainty about the status of his own identity. The protagonists start a search for their own identity and reduce their life to the absolute minimum. From this zero point they gain new strength and start their new life and they are also able to get into contact with their environment again. A similar development can also be seen in City of Glass and The Music of Chance.

Failure in this context is not the "nothing" - it is the beginning of something all new.

Identity/Subjectivity

Auster's protagonists often go through a process that reduces their support structure to an absolute minimum: They sever all contact with family and friends, go hungry and lose or give away all their belongings. Out of this approximation of their nil they either acquire new strength to reconnect with the world or they fail and disappear for good.

“ But in the end, he manages to resolve the question for himself - more or less. He finally comes to accept his own life, to understand that no matter how bewitched and haunted he is, he has to accept reality as it is, to tolerate the presence of ambiguity within himself. ”

—Paul Auster about the protagonist of The Locked Room, quoted in Martin Klepper, Pynchon, Auster, DeLillo.[11]

Reception

"Over the past twenty-five years," opined Michael Dirda in The New York Review of Books in 2008, "Paul Auster has established one of the most distinctive niches in contemporary literature."[12] Dirda has also extolled his loaded virtues in The Washington Post:

Ever since City of Glass, the first volume of his New York Trilogy, Auster has perfected a limpid, confessional style, then used it to set disoriented heroes in a seemingly familiar world gradually suffused with mounting uneasiness, vague menace and possible hallucination. His plots — drawing on elements from suspense stories, existential récit and autobiography — keep readers turning the pages, but sometimes end by leaving them uncertain about what they've just been through.[13]

Respected book critic James Wood, however, offers Auster little praise in his piece "Shallow Graves" in the November 30, 2009 issue of The New Yorker:

What Auster often gets instead is the worst of both worlds: fake realism and shallow skepticism. The two weaknesses are related. Auster is a compelling storyteller, but his stories are assertions rather than persuasions. They declare themselves; they hound the next revelation. Because nothing is persuasively assembled, the inevitable postmodern disassembly leaves one largely untouched. (The disassembly is also grindingly explicit, spelled out in billboard-size type.) Presence fails to turn into significant absence, because presence was not present enough.[14]

Public Appearances

On March 12, 2009, Paul Auster gave the sixth annual Lewis Mumford Lecture on Urbanism at the City College of New York (CCNY), with the title "City of Words."

Awards

Published works

Fiction

Poetry

Screenplays

The Inner Life of Martin Frost is a screenplay that is mentioned in Auster's novel `The Book of Illusions.' It's the only film that the protagonist watches of Hector Mann's later, hidden films. It's a simple story of a man meeting a girl, and an intense relationship, and her vanishing.

Essays, memoirs, and autobiographies

Edited collections

Translations

Miscellaneous

Other media

See also

References

Notes

  1. ↑ Hand to Mouth
  2. ↑ Off the Page: Paul Auster Auster lists most of these writers as major influences on his fiction, during an on-line chat December 16, 2003. Link here for transcript which appeared in the Washington Post.
  3. ↑ The Art of Hunger
  4. ↑ 4.0 4.1 Freeman, John. "At home with Siri and Paul", The Jerusalem Post, April 3, 2008. Accessed September 19, 2008. "Like so many people in New York, both of them are spiritual refugees of a sort. Auster hails from Newark, New Jersey, and Hustvedt from Minnesota, where she was raised the daughter of a professor, among a clan of very tall siblings."
  5. ↑ Begley, Adam. "Case of the Brooklyn Symbolist", The New York Times, August 30, 1992. Accessed September 19, 2008. "The grandson of first-generation Jewish immigrants, he was born in Newark in 1947, grew up in South Orange and attended high school in Maplewood, 20 miles southwest of New York."
  6. ↑ Freeman, Hadley. "American dreams: He may be known as one of New York's coolest chroniclers, but Paul Auster grew up in suburban New Jersey and worked on an oil tanker before achieving literary success. Hadley Freeman meets a modernist with some very traditional views", The Guardian, October 26, 2002. Accessed September 19, 2008. "Education: Columbia High School, New Jersey; 1965-69 Columbia College, New York; '69-70 Columbia University, New York (quit after one year)"
  7. ↑ Heiko Jakubzik: Paul Auster und die Klassiker der American Renaissance. Dissertation, Universität Heidelberg 1999 (online text)
  8. ↑ Dennis Barone (ed.): Beyond the Red Notebook. Essays on Paul Auster. Penn Studies in Contemporary American Fiction. University of Pennsylvania Press, Philadelphia (2. ed. 1996)
  9. ↑ Dirk Peters: Das Motiv des Scheiterns in Paul Austers "City of Glass" und "Music of Chance". unpublished MA dissertation, Christian-Albrechts Universität Kiel, 1998
  10. ↑ Paul Auster from Mark Irwin, "Inventing the Music of Chance" In: The Review of Contemporary Fiction Vol. XIV, no. 1
  11. ↑ Martin Klepper, Pynchon, Auster, DeLillo. Die amerikanische Postmoderne zwischen Spiel und Rekonstruktion. Campus, Frankfurt am Main u.a. 1996. (= Nordamerikastudien; 3) ISBN 3-593-35618-X
  12. ↑ Dirda 2008.
  13. ↑ Dirda 2003.
  14. ↑ Wood 2009, http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/books/2009/11/30/091130crbo_books_wood?currentPage=1.
  15. ↑ Paul Auster's next novel, 'Man in the Dark', is due to be published by Henry Holt in the US on Monday 1st September 2008.[1]
  16. ↑ [2]
  17. ↑ http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/features/innocence-of-youth-how-paul-auster-excavated-his-own-past-for-his-latest-novel-1811322.html
  18. ↑ for more information about some of the poets included in this volume see:French Poetry since 1950: Tendencies III by Jean-Michel Maulpoix
  19. ↑ Boxer, Sarah. "Sounds of a Silent Place" The New York Times. Sept. 11, 2004. Accessed Sept. 12, 2009.
  20. ↑ Soundwalk Accessed Sept. 12, 2009.
  21. ↑ Dalton Pen Communications Awards. Accessed Sept. 17, 2009.
  22. ↑ Audio Publishers Association. Accessed Sept. 17, 2009.

Further reading

External links