Literary Austerity In Paul Austers Ghosts - Essay Example

 Literary Austerity In Paul Auster’s Ghosts Paul Auster is not the usual American storyteller. He has consciously eschewed the trappings of realism and conventional plot for more complex stylistic methods. Yet it is difficult to find a novelist who is more profoundly American in his understanding of the enormity of the American experience. As Garan Holcombe says, “Paul Auster is a writer, who, like Beckett, is obsessed with identity and the way it is constructed out of and through the medium of stories, words, or even the thinnest of airs. He places great emphasis on the need for storytelling. His characters are restless inquisitors, asking endless questions of life, undertaking journeys across the vastness of America, often in solitude, in pursuit of ends which even they themselves are unaware; and if these characters are not travelling outwards, then there is always the journey within.” 1 Auster’s narratives are elliptical, abstract and metaphysical. The comparison with Beckett is not extraneous because like Beckett, who in the least words and even lesser actions created an overwhelmingly powerful literary impression of post-war Europe, Auster has done it for America, except that unlike Beckett, Auster does not always refer to defining political moments but literary ones. For example, he has turned the detective story on its head in his path breaking New York Trilogy, of which Ghosts is the middle one. Similarly his search for that elusive American experience has found fruition in the True Tales of American Life, a broadcast project that sought to present real life stories from all over the States. While reading Auster, one is increasingly aware of the slippery, elusive nature of reality and identity. One can even say that identity is a shifting reality in Auster. And Auster’s oeuvre, in Ghosts as much as in any other specimen of his body of work, has been to relentlessly problematise the identity of reality and the reality of any identity. In his discussion of The Locked Room¸ the third and by consensus the most powerful part of the New York Trilogy, Stephen Bernstein says “In The Locked Room, as in the other novels of Paul Auster's New York Trilogy, the path the reader follows diverges considerably from what might be expected in conventional detective fiction. This is due to what are, by this stage in the trilogy, predictable recourses to narratorial unreliability, epis­temological uncertainty, and existential contingency.”2 The same can be inferred for Ghosts, where a private detective called Blue is investigating a man named Black for a client named White. Auster is of course playing on our apriori notions of the three colours. The client being White the fugitive being Black is obviously a satire on the exiting framework of references that a detective novel throws up. Almost as an apriori knowledge we seem to let ourselves be carried away by the innocence of the man who has approached the detective and the criminal intent of the man being chased. In that sense white and black is what we have already assigned to the characters without Auster have to name them for us. But Auster, being what he is, starts from there and tries to dismember our notions that we have deeply held close from Poe, to Chandler via Conan Doyle. Like its compatriots in the Trilogy, City of Glass and The Locked Room, Ghosts is a play on identities and self fashioning and to what extent we can refigure and reconstitute ourselves and our ability to do so. In Ghosts, Black and White turns out to be the same person. And that too a writer. In fact all three protagonists in all three novels of the Trilogy is a writer and ostensibly all of them are Auster or part of Auster. But we neither know clearly the other Auster, or the other half of the character who is partly like Auster. While in this confusion the reader find out that in Ghosts Black/White, the man who is both the client and the fugitive criminal and who has assigned Blue with an investigation is watching Blue watching himself. And he is writing a story on Blue watching White/Black. If this is not a brilliant caricature of everything that detective fiction has stood for and what Hitchcock and Hollywood has for ages so effectively sold to an wide audience, what is? The most important literary trope of conventional detective fiction is that the writer is not the all-knowing omnipresent narrator but is a co-walker, a fellow traveler with the reader who is watching along with him, how a mystery unfolds. Here, the detective is the man with a better vantage point than either the writer, the reader and of course the man on the run. The writer of course knows the course of events when he sits to write a novel but must pretend innocence to the reader and must take part in his/her discoveries throughout the span of the narrative. In Ghosts two things happen simultaneously which usurp the conventional framework of the detective fiction. And by doing so, Auster has most skillfully deconstructed the identity of each one of them. I have already explained the identification with the colors given as names to characters. But even while we are engrossed in the narrative , we come to realized that the client and criminal is the same. He has assigned Blue with a job and watches Blue following him. And while doing so, records the events. Here the man who is both Black and White has the usual vantage point than the detective has in a conventional story. Here the detective is merely an undiscerning character in the larger theatrics of hide and seek, illumination and gloom, a puppet in the elaborate mood play that the writer has created. Here, the writer who has set the man into his mission and at the same time makes a mockery of that same mission is the real character, the god, the vantaged narrator and the vantaged creator of that narration. And interestingly it’s the detective who is at the other side of the mirror and not the criminal and not even the reader. He reader finds out that along with the writer he/she is also vantaged to watch the detective from a distance rather than following the eyes of the detective while he investigates -- as is usual in conventional fiction. Auster turns literary conventions and tropes of received identity mechanism on their head. Look at this text closely. … should he stick with Black or divert his attention to the woman? This could possibly accelerate matters a bit but at the same time it could mean that Black would be given a chance to escape away from him, perhaps for good. In other words, is the meeting with the women a smoke screen or the real thing? Is it s a part of the case or not, is it an essential or contingent fact? Blue ponder this questions for a while and concludes that it’s too early to tell. Yes, it could be one thing, he tells himself. But it could also be another. (p 183) Auster clearly is not interested in putting the reader is a state of sublime suspense; he would rather play with the reader, tease him and invite them to read his mind. Suspense in Auster is not about what will happen next, but to see how the expected will never happen. He transfers the questions of the readers to that of the detective and allows him to have doubts, reading his mind in public, so to say. Here Blue is not sure and is in fact increasingly uncertain if he should consider this apparently insignificant even as critical or should overlook the matter entirely. This is just one textual example of Blue’s utter confused state, a state that Black relishes no end, till of course the inevitable happens in the end. 3 By killing Black, Blue is able to bring closure; is able to do away with the ‘criminal’. But by killing White, who is also Black, Blue signs a permanent breach. He is now the new murderer, the new criminal. Ghosts, in that sense, is a masterly evocation of the meta-detective novel. And a ghostly interpretation of our long held certainties. Matthias Kugler has noted4 “Paul Auster seems to be an the right way of leaving the stony ground of ‘The Literature of Exhaustion’, which according to John Barth only leads to ‘replenishment’ if we creatively make use of 'what has been there before'. There is hardly anybody is America to do it better than him. Read More