auster y la filoofia
TRANSCRIPT
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PAUL AUS TER S CINEMATOGRAPHIC FICT ION S:
AGAINST
THE
ONTOLOGY
OE THE
PRESENT
Timothy Bewes
In the c i nema ... man has lost his soul ; in re turn, however, he
gains his body.
Georg von Ltikacs, Th ou gh ts Towardan Aesthetic of the Ginema
If we agree - with Fredric Jam eso n - that historicising works of literature
is always necessary, recent fiction poses a part icular chal lenge to t ha t
a p p r o a c h ;
not,
primari ly, because
of the
difficulty
of
ga in ing cri tical
distance on the contemporaiy period, but more importantly, because the
ideaof contempo ranei ty , of the present , hasrecently becom e implicated
as never before in the way weread literature. The first task in historicising
contemporaiy fiction,
will suggest, sh ould be to historicise the very concept
of contemporaneity. This, paradoxically, means beginning to dissolve the
ideological
and
historical congelation that
is
implied
in a
phrase such
as
the cultural logic of late cap italism .My a rgument in this essay will be that
po stm ode rnity , the most influential recen t theorisation of the pres ent , has for
the m ost part constitutedan obstacle to this historicisation of co ntem por aneity ;
that it
has,
moreover, privileged the pres ent
as
a principle that, ineffect, stan ds
outside itsown historicity. Jam eso n s powerful diagnosis of a certain spatial
turn
in the
pos tmodern
has,
unde r
the
sign
of
historicisation , functioned
to ciystallise a sense of the contem poraiy assuch - something that may be
subjected to scrutiny and ana lysis . Jam eson s diagnosis , furthermore, is l. Ki-edricJameson.
. 1 II 1 I r tr 1 Postmodertii. im, or Th e
Itself premised
on an
already spatialised concept
of
t ime:
If
experience
and
culturalu cofijite
expression still seem largelyapt in the cultural sph ere of the m ode rn , writes Cnpitalism Dmliani,
( , , , f. . . . . . . , N C , Oiike Universi ty
Jameson, they are altogether o?/ac and anachron istic in a post m oder n p|.gj.j |yg| u,,
age, where , if tem por ality stillhas itsplace it would seem better to speak of th e
writing of it than of any lived experience. ^ The synonymy ofd isplacement 2.
ibid.,
emphasis
and anachronism
in
this sentence
is
em blematic
of
a spatio-temporal logic
at work, in wbich histoiy is conceived as a succession of discrete p resents,
separated by rup ture s , crises and epistemic breaks . Jam eso n s spatial
turn , in other words, is here presupposed rather than derived; or, to put it
ano ther way,the argtmient that temporal experience has been replacedby the
spatial is a self-fulfilling on e, a tautology.
The claim that postmodernity
has
ended,
and the
question
of
what will
follow it, are similarly dependent upon this spatialised understanding of
t ime and temporality; indeed, Jameson himself has recently begtin to talk Modernity: ssay o
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4.
Geoi-g von Liikacs,
'Thoughts Tovvai'd
an Aesthetic of the
Cinema', Janelle
Blankenship (trans).
Polygraph
13(2001):
p l 5 .
spatialised n otionofthe postm odern as an e poch that maybesucceededby
anythingatall.Tothisend, Iwill consid er thepostm odern ontologyof the
present (as Icallit)alongside earlier attem pts totheorisethecon tempora iy
- mo st notably, Ge org L ukacs s The heory of the Novel which puts foi-ward
an epochal notion of absolute sinfulness as the defining principle of tbe
novel form - tbe intention being todecant whatisessentialto and credible
inthe postmo dern hypothesis from tbe propensity todelimitit historically.
Interestingly, several years before h e wroteThe heoryo ftheNovel Ltikacsput
forwardaless ontologically gloom y theo ry of aesthetic form ,in ashort article
on theaestheticsofcinema, in which cinema isdifferentiated from thea tre
onthebasisof its presentation of m ove m ent in itself, an eternal variability,
the never-resting changeof things . Cinem a, claims Lukacs, introduc es an
entirely different metaphysics - differentnotonly from the atre ,butfrom the
ontologyofinteriorand exterior, subjectand object, implied in l i terature s
dependence
on the
word.
Inthe lightof this contiguityofcinemaand thenovel inLukacs s early
work,I propose herea readingof two recent fictional works byPaul A uster,
in which the tension between a spatialontology of temporality and a more
sensuous tem porality, liberated from space, is staged asanencounter between
novelisticandcinematic form. Auster,Iargue,is astransfixed by thespatio-
historical na rrative as Lukacs and Jam eso n;
and yet the
captivation by cinema
apparent
in
his recent work
-
albeit ultimately disavowed
in the
texts discussed
here
-
illustrates
the
extent
to
which so-called po stm od ern fiction
is
drawn
towards that which would liberate
it
from that veiy categoiy, conceived
of
asa historical, periodising one.If postmodern narrative strategies are to be
succeeded byanytbing,itwillbe by an entirely different metap hysics ,one
which, however,is imaginatively configured within postmodern theoiy itself,
as wellas inLukacs s theory of the novel,and in theyearning of Paul A uster s
rece nt fictionsfor the immediacy ofcinema.
THE IDEOLOGYOE GONTEMPORANEITY
5.Chai'les
Jencks, Phe
Emei gent Rules',
Postmoderttmn:
A
Reader T h o m a s
Docherty (ed). New
York, Columbia
University Press,
1993,
pp288-9.
The central assertions
of
postmodern theoiy,
in the US at
least, have been
formulatedon thebasisand in theaftermath of Jam eson s spatial turn,and
tbey have tende d similarlytointroducea set of spatially conceived tropes to
the interpre tation of culture. Intertextuality , irony , doub le-cod ing (aterm
coinedbyGharles Jenc ks, referring to tbe peaceful co-existence of different
architectural styles in a single work, and to the ir sim ulta neo us validity ),
self-referentiality , metafiction , have been impos ed upo n literaiy texts
in
particular, with tbe result that postmodern fiction, and postmodernity in
general, have been understoo dinterm s of banality, depth lessne ss, cynicism,
alienation, sterility, political defeat,
the
totality
of
commodification
- in
short,as a set ofcultural practicesinwhich in here thefailureof art and the
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delimitation, to be ranged alongside other such ontologising moments as
Charles Newman's statement that contemporary American literature presents
'the flattest possible charac ters in the flattest possible landsca pe re nd ered in
the flattest possible diction'; David Hai-vey's use of terms such as 'plunder',
'amnesia' and 'spectacle' to describe the relation of postmodern aesthetics to
histoiy; even Ihab H assan's earlier, mo re nuanced diagnosis of po stmo dernism
as a literature of'exh aus tion ' an d 'silence'. Th ese statem ents, at least in their
crudest form, rep resent variations on the claim that the contem poraiy period
is one in whichevents are
no
longerpossible; that history has - in a sense not
nearly so removed from Francis Fukuyama's 'controversial' thesis as these
thinkers imagine - ended.
A m ore recen t version ofthishistorio grap hy of critical decline is found in
the work of Walter B enn M ichaels, who, in
The Shapeofthe
Signifier identifies
a broad shift, across a range of recent works of fiction, literai-y theory and
political philosophy, from talking about class and ideology to talking about
'culture' and 'identity'. The characters in novels such as Bret Easton Ellis's
Glamoravia and Don DeLillo'sMaoII - and by extension their authors - says
Michaels, are not animated by 'deep disagreements at tbe level of ideas'; in
fact they don't have any ideas. ' The interest these texts have in terrorists,
for example, is not ideological, but 'ontological' - their concern is not with
'doing the right thing' but with 'the question of whether we are living our
lives to th e fullest'
SS
p i76).For Michaels, indeed, politics itself
h s
become
'ontologised'. This shift has been paralleled by a new commitment to the
'materiality' of the sign in literaiy studies, which Michaels presents as a
movement away from interpretation and authorial intention, and towards
a conception of plural meanings, yoked to the plurality of subject positions
encountering the text; this reorientation amounts in effect to the abolition of
meaning and its replacement
by
a concept of experience. His thesis, developed
largely in reaction to the set of 'postmodernist' critical practices described
above (although in fact sha ring th eir basic assum ptions ), is tha t tbe 'm aterial
turn' and tbe rejection of intentionality form an alliance that is essentially
contradictoiy; for to emphasise 'experience' is, for Michaels, ultimately to
negate the 'materiality' of the text for the primacy of the subject.
Micbaels here opposes the particularity of individual 'needs and desires'
- a phrase he lifts from Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri's mpire - to the
suppo sed universality and transce ndentality of'beliefs'. Th e most provocative
formulation of bis argument is the following, characteristically invasive
challenge to his reader: 'If you think that difTerences in belief cannot be
described as dilTerences in identity, you m ust also think that texts mean what
their authors intend' {S SpplO-11). Yet, like his und ersta nd ing of exp erience
and materiality, the distinction between beliefs and desires is an ontological
one in Micbaels
{SS
p 178) - wbich is to say that it is ahisto rical, r oo ted in th e
present as a unitaiy categoiy, fenced in on either side by the past and the
future, and in the separa tion of subject (experience) an d object (m ateriality).
6. Cliai ' les Newman,
'Wlial's Left Oiil of
Lileiatui 'e ' , NeuiYork
Times,
12/07/1987,
late edilioii, sec. 7,
p i ; David1-laiTey
The Coudition of
Postmoiteniily: A )i
Enquiry into Ihe
Origins of Cultural
Clmnge, Oxford .
Basil Blackwell,
1989,
p.^4; Ihab
I-Iassaii, Th e
t)ismemheniieiit of
Orpheus:ToTuardn
l-\>slniodeni Literature
(Second lidilion),
Madison, Wisconsin,
University of
Wisconsin Pi ess,
1982,
p2fi8.
7.
Vfellei- Benn
Michaels, 77S/inyM
of the Siguifter:
1967to the Knd of
History (henceforth
SS), Princeton and
Oxford, Princeton
Utiiversity Press,
2 0 0 4 ,
p i 7 3 .
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8.
Georg
LiikAcs, Th e
Theory ofthe Novel:A
Historico-Philosophical
Essayon the forms of
Great Epic Literature
(henceforthTofN),
Anna Bostock
(trans), Cambridge,
MA, MIT Press,
1971,
plO3.
9. Jean-Francois
Lyotard, 'Answering
the Question: What
Is Postniodernism?',
R^gis Dm'and
(trans),
Ttie
Postmodern
Condition: A Report
on
Knowledge,
Manchester,
Manchester
fact the opposite is true: beliefs are material entities; they do not involve
transcendental claims until they are themselves on the verge of obsolescence
- until, as Georg Lukacs says, the world is 'released from its paradoxical
anchorage in a
beyond
that is truly present .^ When they are constitutive of a
society, beliefs are
materially present
to consciousness. Th us , even th e so-called
'decline' of belief or ideology, their 'replacement' by 'culture' or 'identity'
- what Michaels calls elsewhere the transformation from the pohtical to the
biopolitical(SS pi74) - this too, insofar as it exists at all in the generalised,
historical sense that Michaels thinks it does, is a set of beliefs as materially,
sensuously
present to consciousness as the 'religious' faith tbat animated
societies in earlier periods.
' In ideological s t ruggles ' , wri tes Michaels ( indicat ing the cold war
period), 'victory is imagined as tbe triumph of one political and economic
system over another; no new bodies are required. In ontological struggles,
victory is the defeat of one body by another; in the ontological struggle
not against some other body but against what is (hence against even one's
own body), victory will be 'change' , the destruction of what is and its
replacem ent by som etbing new ' (S S pi73). Yet Michaels 's perception of
this 'ontologisation' of ideology - the most ' ingenious' version of which,
according to Michaels, is the recent transformation of poverty from a
class into a 'way of being' in Hardt and Negri's
mpire
{ SS pl81) - is only
possible on the basis of Michaels 's own ontologisation of the present. In
his analysis a catego rical - tha t is to say, ep och al - difference sep ara tes, say,
the (contemporary) concept of religion 'as a kind of identity' from tbat of
religious belief'as
belief
(SS p l7 0 ). M ateriality, ideology an d
belief
however,
are impoverished terms in Michaels 's analysis, delimited conceptually and
historically from consciousness, desire, and identity.
In contrast to all these thinkers, and following the work of Jean-Francois
Lyotard, I will approach the postmodern not as signalling the end of the
possibility of the event, but as the occasion of the event. This perspective
requires a suspension of the spatialised relation to time as broken up into
unitary epochs and transitions; an interrup tion of tbe idea ofthe pos tmo dern
as a generic or typological category that is applicable to particular texts and
authors; a rejection of the diagnostic and interpretive critical model for a
kind of reading that is bound tightly to its ownhistorical m om ent; an d a
resumption of attention to the ways in which the work is engaged with the
question of its possibility.
According to Lyotard, the defining quality of the postmodern work is
that it is un de rtak en in tbe absence of rules, and 'in ord er to formu late the
rules of whatwill have
beendone.
He nce th e fact that work and text bave the
characters of an event ... . Lyotard is concerned less witb anatomising the
features of a particular artistic form or period than with the idea ofthe work
as forged o n the div ide between possibility an d actuality - or, as he form ulates
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the modern. Read alongside Jameson, Harvey, Michaels, et al, the most
striking characteristic of Lyotard's formulation, and of the essay as a wbole,
is the absence of any constative statements that relate to the 'present'. For
Lyotard, there is no 'state of the world' as such: the p rese nt is not an ope rative
categoiy in bis work, andThe Postmodern Conditionis not a theorisation of the
contemporaiy Indeed, the 'slackening' reldchement)that Lyotard observes to
be part of the 'color of the tim es'' is not a quality of the po stm od ern , but what
detracts from it - a reified and period ising thin king tha t diagnoses a prese nt
constituted by crisis, impossibility, and a general sense of the un prec ede nted .
Tbe implication of Lyotard's phrase 'the loiles oiwhatwill have beendone ,and
of his conception of the postmodern work as an 'event' irreducible to any
moment in time - irreducible, that is to say, to any single historicisation - is
that tbe 'prese nt' do es not have any substantial actuality except in retrospect;
except, that is to say, in imagination.
In this essay, then, the work of Paul Auster, whom Peter Biooker has
described as 'pure p os tm od ern ist ' , will be read not as a mo re or less
adequa te treatment of 'pos tm ode rn' themes and techniques; nor as evidence
of a decline, in works of literature, from realist representation into
self-
conscious awareness of its impossibility; nor,pace Walter Benn Michaels, as
a lapse from a world organised ideologically to one organised ontologically;
but rather, in terms ofitspositive, material qualities: as a body of work tbat,
precisely in its most cerebral and reflective a spects, is far more than a som bre
meditation upon a world from which it is constitutively removed. Auster's
work is engaged, rather, witb its own possibility. His fictional works appear
to stage tbe impossibility of tbe novel, and tbe failure of the literary as sucb
- and yet, I shall argue , it is the idee fixe of postmodernity tbat has taught us
to limit bis texts in tbis way. Auster materialises a struggle witb possibility
itself:
the strugg le to produ ce, in a situation in wbich tbe rules of pro duction
are not given. Tb e 'm ateriality' of iswork, tben, has n othin g to do with what
Michaels dismissively refers to as 'the space between the words and letters, th e
quality of tbe p aper, an d so forth' {SSp5), and eve iytbing to do with tbe event
of tbe work's production and reception : the sensuous dynam ic of possibility,
impossibility and actuality that is inseparable from tbe consciousness of tbe
work as sucb. Furtbermore, this dynamic is manifest, sensuously present in
Auster's work, as a ti utb worthy
of belief
in all its immediacy.
LUKACS, TH EO RIST O F TH E POSTMODERN
For Lyotard, the question 'and what now?' is not one that succeeds the
postmodern, but is precisely tbe question
of
it: 'Tbis is tbe miseiy [of] the
painter [faced] witb a plastic surface, of the musician with the acoustic
surface, tbe miseiy tbe thinker faces witb a desert of tbougbt, and so on'. '
Tbe postmodern is for Lyotard apreconditionof the m odern , not a symptom
of its exhaustion. Tbe postmodern, he says, [is what] takes place not only in
10. Ibid.,
11 . Itier Bi-ooker.
Nfny York
Fictiotis:
Modernity,
I bstmodenii im, The
New Modem, L ondon
and New York,
Longni.in, 1996.
pl48.
12. Jcan-Fran(;is
Lyotaixl,
'The
Sublimeand the
Avanl-Garde .
The Continental
Aesthetics Header,
Clive Cn/eanx (ed).
London and New
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13.
Lyotard, in the m od e r n , pu t s f o r wa r d th e un p r e s e n ta b le in p r e s e n ta t io n
i tsel f .
iiswenng,op. ci.,
j
s i tua t ion i s on e o f a c o m ple te d i s junc t ion be tw e e n wha t we a r e a b le to
c o n c ei v e a n d o u r m e a n s o f p r e s e n t a t i o n :
We have tb e Ide a of tb e w or ld ( the to ta l i ty of w hat is ), bu t we do n ot bav e
the c a pa c i ty to s how a n e x a m ple o f it. W e ha ve the ide a o f the s im p le ( tha t
w b i c h c a n n o t b e b r o k e n d o w n , d e c o m p o s e d ) , b u t w e c a n n o t i l l u s t r a t e i t
wi th a sens ib le ob jec t wh ich woul d be a case of i t . We can con ce iv e t be
inf in ite ly grea t , the inf in i te ly powe r fu l , bu t every pre sen ta t ion of an objec t
de s t ine d to m a ke v i s ib le th i s a bs o lu te g r e a t ne s s o r pow e r a p pe a r s to u s
14.Ibid., p78. p a in fu l ly ina d e qu a te .
W ha t Lyo ta r d de s c r ibe s a s the s i tua t ion o f the pos tm od e r n a r t i s t a n d wr i t e r
is r e m a r ka b ly s imi la r to the h i s to r i c o - pb i lo s oph ic a l r e a l i ty o f the nove l , as
de s c r ibe d by Luka c s in The Theory of the Novel. Fo r Luka c s , the nove l a pp e a r s
a t a po in t whe n f o r m a n d c on te n t - Lyo ta r d s fa c u l ti e s o f p r e s e n t in g a n d
c onc e iv ing - a r e s p li t a p a r t , a c on d i t io n he c ha r a c te r i s e s wi th the ph r a s e the
e poc h o f a bs o lu te s in f u lne s s {TofN pl52). T b e nove l , he says , i s th e ep i c of
an age in whicb tbe ex tens ive to ta l i ty of l i f e is no longer d i rec t ly g iven , in
wh ic h the im m a n e n c e o f m e a n in g in l if e ba s be c om e a p r o b le m , ye t wh ic h s t il l
th inks in t e r ms o f to ta l i ty TofN p 5 6 ) . The Theory of the Novel, w r i t t e n in the
ye a r s p r i o r to the ou t b r e a k o f tbe F i r st W o r ld W a r, ha s tbe r e pu ta t ion o f a t e x t
ove r wh e lm e d by the s e ns e o f c on te m po r a ne i ty . H owe ve r , th i s is l a r gely d ue
to Luka c s s own a fte r wor d on tbe book , wr i t t e n m uc h l a ter , in 196 2 , in wb ic h
h e c o n d e m n e d t h e b o o k - a n d t h e p h r a s e a b s o l u t e s i n fu l n e ss i n p a r t i c u l a r
- for wbat he ca l led i ts e th ica l ly- t inged pess imism vis -a -v is tbe present
{TofN
p i 8 ) .
Tb e a f t e r wor d wa s pub l i s he d a s a p r e f a c e to the 1 968 G e r m a n e d i t ion ,
a n d to tbe s ub s e q ue n t Eng l i s b t r a ns la t ion in 1 97 1 , a n d i t is the on ly p la c e in
th e book wb ere tb ere is any b is tor ica l spec ific i ty a t a l l .
T b e b o o k w a s w r i t t e n , s ay s L u k a c s i n 1 9 6 2 , i n a m o o d o f p e r m a n e n t
d e s p a i r o v e r t h e s t a t e o f t h e w o r l d {TofN p i 2 ) . T b e F i rs t W o r l d W a r b a d
ju s t b r oke n ou t - the f i r s t wa r invo lv ing e ve r y ma jo r wor ld powe r - a nd wa s
a c c o m p a n i e d b y a s u d d e n e s c a l a t i o n in p o p u l a r n a t i o n a l i s t s e n t i m e n t w h i c h
c a s t the Eu r ope a n l e f t in to a s t a te o f c r i s i s . I n te l l e c tua l s , s a ys Luka c s , we r e
c a u g h t b e t w e e n h o r r o r a t t h e w a r it s el f a n d h o r r o r a t t b e o n l y a v a i l a b l e
s o l u t i o n t o t h e w a r : W e s t e r n i n t e r v e n t i o n . T h i s i s t b e s i t u a t i o n w h i c h
- d i s ta n c i n g h ims e l f f r om tb e pb r a s e - he c a l l e d in 1915 a bs o lu te s in f u lne s s :
a b s o l u t e , s i n c e t h e r e i s n o a c c e p t a b l e s o l u t i o n t h a t m i g h t b e a r t i c u l a t e d
in pos i t ive t e r m s ; s in f u lne s s , be c a us e al l t a lk o f inn oc e n c e , o r bone s ty ,
o r r e d e m p t i o n , is r e n d e r e d o b j e c ti v e ly fu t il e a n d d e l u d e d . T b e w o r l d b a d
p r o ve n to be s o c om ple t e ly a n d u t t e r ly fa l se , a c c o r d i ng to Luk a c s , tb a t a ny
a va i l a b le s o lu t io n wa s d i s c r e d i t e d s imp ly by tbe f a ct tba t i t wa s s p e a k a b le
wi tb in i t . I n s o f a r a s a s o lu t io n m ig h t e x i s t , i t m a y on ly be a r t i c u l a te d by
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In the main text, by contrast, there are almost no historical references at
all,
and certainly no referential specificity to the phra se 'th e epoc h of ahsoltite
sinfulness'. What the later Lukacs casts as the real historical impasse behind
his own early work is presented in the work itself as an aporia at the heart
ofthe novel form as such. In the novel, he says in TheTheory ofthe Novel
aesthetics is permanently separated from ethics - which is not to say that
ethics is absent from the novel, but that the novel's ethical substance is tied
inseparably to conte nt. Ethical comm unication is limited to the pontification
of its characters, or the commentaiy of its narrators. The novel gives form
to the ethical dimension, but only by separating itself from what Lukacs calls
'the immanent meaning ofthe objective world'{TofNp84). Form and content,
then, become severed from each other in the novel: it is this condition of
separation, rather than any particular moral deficit, or sudden historical
break, that in 1915 Lukacs signifies with the term 'absolute sintlilness'.
'Absolute sinfulness' {vollendeten Silndhaftigkeit is a quotatio n from Fichte,
from a series of lectures entitled
Die Gmndzuge
Des Gegenwdrtigen Zeitalters
delivered in Berlin over a hundred years belore Lukacs was writing, in 1804-
05,
and translated into English with the title 'The Characteristics of the
Present Age'.' ' From the perspective of his own 1962 preface, then, Lukacs,
in 1915,
is
wrenc hing out ofcontex t a phras e originally used to designa te th e
post-Enlightenment period, and reapplying it to 'his own' traumatic present.
What the later Lukacs is criticising in his younger self in other words, is a
tendency to ontologise and transcenden talise the pre sent - as in the assertion
underpinning the work, that 'there is no longer any spontaneous totality
of being'
{TofN
pp l7 -1 8) . Yet Lukjics's retrospec tive self-critique arguably
participa tes in that 'ontolo gisation ' even as it deplo res it. His altei^word inserts
the text into a traumatic 'present' caught between nostalgia and utopianism,
and offloads a 'naivety' and an 'abstractionism' upon it that, he says, 'we
have every right to smile at'
{TofN
p20). How ever, it is far from clear t hat the
paralysing historical sense that the older Lukacs attributes to the youn ger is
essential to the overall schema put fonvard in
The
Theory
ofthe
Novel or even
that it is substantially present in the thesis at all,
I will atte m pt a media tion of the tem por al framework of
The Theory
ofthe Novel
in order to reorient the text away from its spatio-temporal
nostalgia for premodern literary forms - remnants of a time when (in
the famous opening paragraphs of Lukacs's work) 'everything . , , is new
and yet familiar ' ; when 'each action of the soul becomes meaningful
and rou nd ed in [the] duality [of world and
self]:
complete in meaning
- in
sense
- and co m ple te For the sen ses ,,, '
{TofN
p29) . The 'nostalgic '
ele m en t in Lukacs's text, I shall argue , is a purely speculative categ ory
organising the 'h istor ico-philosophical ' d imension of his argument. By
suspending its periodising aspects, it may yet be harnessed in the service
of
a
potential unity of material and spiritual, residing not in any lost past
1.5,
See
Joiiann
Co ltlieb I'lclite, Hie
Cliaracteristics of the
Present. Age', IVoni
The Popular
Works
ofjohann Gottlieb
Fichte.
William
Smith (trans, '1th
lulitioii), London:
Ttiibnei-, 1889,1)17:
'The Present Age
,,, stajids iti that
Kpoch ,,, which
chanicteiised
as the lipoch of
Liberation - directly
fn^m the external
riding Attthoi ity,
- indirectly IVom
the power of Reasoti
as Institict, and
general ly IVom
iieasott in any
fortn; the Age of
absoktte indilTerence
towards all trtith,
atid ol etitire
atid um'estrained
licentionsness: - the
State of completed
Sitifttlness,' Kot'
Fichte, significantly,
this is tiot an
etidpoint, bnt
merely the tliitxl of
five stages on the
foad from instinct
to reason; and he
goes on to qualify
the 'ontological'
itnplications of the
diagnosis: 'I do not
here include all
men now living in
our time, but only
those who at'e trnly
products of the Age,
and in whom it most
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ABSOLUTE SINFULNESS INPAUL AU STER
16 . Paul Auster,Mr
Vertigo {henceforth
MrV ,
New York,
Viking Penguin,
1994, p3.
17 . Paul Auster,
The Book of Illusions
(henceforthBofl),
New
York,
Heniy
Holt, 2002, pi84.
To read Paul Auster
sa
'pos tm od ern ' writer in Lyotard's sense, then , is to read
him
as an
author condemned
to the
historical
and
metaphysical cond ition
that,
for
Lukacs, defines the novel as such. T he image of
world of 'absolute
sinfulness' recurs throughout his writing
-
the moment when night hegins
'to fallonthe world forever', as
M rVertigo
(1994) has it; when imm ane nce ,
the epic unityofsensoiy a nd intellectual e xp erie nce , gives waytothe world
of the novel; when his writer-protagon ists be com e reconciled orresignedto
the novel form - and thecalamity isfrequently da tedto theyear 1927,the
strange consistency serving,
it
seems, to und erm ine any suggestion
ofa
real,
epistemic (temporal-spatial) rupture. Auster's protagonists are always blocked
or aspiring a utho rs, and the novel form is almost always
an
absent presence
- an entity prese nt only as an absence -wi thi n the text.
Mr. Vertigo,
for exam ple
opens
in
1927, the year
in
which
the
protagonist,
a
levitating perform ance
artist, witnesses the horrific m ur de r of two of his friends by the Ku Klux Klan,
the sham e of which signals the end of his performan ces, and precipitates the
events tha t will culm inate inthe w ritingof the book we are reading.
The Boo k of Illusions
(2002)
is,
am ong o ther things,
the
story
ofa
silent
movie actor, Hecto r Ma nn, who disap pea rs in 1929 soon after dispo sing of the
body
of
his pregnant lover, who has been killed by his fiancee. As
a
fugitive.
Hector initially makesaliving asasex p erformer,adevelopment that marks
the m om ent when 'his world [splits]in two', after which point 'his mind and
body were
no
longer talking
to
each ot he r ' . This contrasts with
his
silent
film work, which thenarratorofthe book,arecently-bereaved andblocked
writer nam ed David Zimmer, describes as 'at once eng age d inthe world a nd
observing
it
from
a
great distance'
{Bofl
p35).
David
is
undertaking
a
translation
of
C hateaubriand 's
emoiresd outre-
tombe
durin g the period n arrated by the book, and
- it
turns out
-
is himself
writing a memoir that will only become available after hisdeath : this,of
course, is the bo okweare reading. The narrative concerns David's encou nter
with Hector Mann, andwith thefilmshe hascontinued tomake in secret
on
a
ranch
in
New Mexico
-
films that turn
out to be
muc h mo re like novels
than films, since they rely heavily on voice-over narration, and arecaught
up,for
Hector,
in an
ethical econom y
of
personal expiation and aton em ent.
For Hector, however, absolution will never
be
possible
{Bofl
p278); cinema,
far from lifting
him out of
'absolute sinfulness',
is
rather
the
context
in
which that novelistic condition isexperienced . A uster's conception of the
transition from silenttosound cinema- ashift tha t is usually d ate d to 1927
with thereleaseof
The Jazz Singer
- thus repeats Lukacs's conception ofthe
transition from the world ofthe e pictothat of the novel. Silent cinema, says
David Zimmer, is a dead art, awholly defunct genre that would n everbe
practiced aga in. And ye t. .. non e ofit could possibly grow old. It
w s
thought
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without any thought of a living audience is presented in the book as a way
of paying due penance - for Chateaubriand, who imagines his narrative
posthumously 'accompanied by those voices which have something sacred
about them because they come from the sepulchre' (Bo/7 p67); for Hector,
who makes films only on the condition that they will be destroyed after his
death Bo/7pp207 -8); and for D avidhimself for whose narrative about Hector
Ma nn a nd his films there is so little sui'viving evidenc e, and w hich c onclu des
in thoughts of such corrup ting 'power and ugliness', that he too resolves not
to publish it until after his own death (Bq/7 pp316, 318),
Oracle Night
(2003) is narrated by Sidney Orr, another blocked writer.
On purc has ing a blue noteb ook at a stationeiy store, Sidney is finally able to
begin a new work of fiction, a story about a disenchanted publisher named
Nick Bowen, who one day receives the manuscript of an unpublished novel
entitled 'Oracle Night', written - in 1927 - by a woman long dead, by the
name of Sylvia Maxwell, The manuscript - a novel within a novel (within
a novel) - impresses Nick by its demands for 'total surrender in order to
be read, an unremitting attentiveness of both body and mind'. * Its central
character is a First World War veteran named Lemuel Flagg who suffers
seizures during which be is able to see the future, the terrible knowledge
of which causes him to com mit suicide. An other surrogate author-figure
in Sidney's novel is a former taxi-driver named Ed Victory, whom Nick
encounters when, inspired by a parable related in Dashiell Hammett 's
The alteseFalcon,
he abandons his life in New York and, on a whim, flies
to Kansas, Ed was a member of the allied liberating forces in Europe at
the end of the Second World War, and he characterises his experience on
entering Dachau in April 1945 to Nick Bowen as follows: 'That was the
end of mankind ,,, God turned his eyes away from us and left the world
forever'
{O N
p92). After the war, Ed began a project which he calls 'The
Historical Presei vation B ureau' - a collection of tele ph on e directorie s from
around the world, kept in an underground lock-up in Kansas City - as a
way of dealing with the enormity of the horror at Dachau, In
Oracle Night
too, then, the events take place in a world of'absolute sinfulness', with the
unb earab le know ledge of what man is capable of, and an awareness of th e
impossibility of rendering that horror in literature. Soon after we hear the
fictional Ed's story - a day after Sidney
writes
the story
Sidney himself
comes across a newspaper stoiy about a prostitute giving birth over a toilet,
discarding the baby and then returning to her client, which causes him to
experience the same extreme sensations:
This is theworst story I have ever
read
. . . I und ersto od that I was readin g a story about the end of m ankin d,
that that room in the Bronx was the precise spot on earth where human life
had lost its meaning'
{O N
pi 15), The episode is an objective correlative,
perhaps, of Sidney's own difficulties in finishing his novel; after reading
the Bronx stoiy, he is unable to make any more progress, and the stoiy is
abandoned, with his character Nick trapped in the underground Bureau
18,
ftuil Ausler,
Oracle ight
(heiicefoitli ON),
New York, H eiiiy
Holt,
2003,
p66.
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ORACLE
NIGHT
I have written elsewhere of the envy that Auster s novels enterta in for m ore
sensuous and immediate forms of aesthetic experience: music, painting,
levitation, even (inTimbuktu canine sen se-perception ( Novel as an Ahsence ).
In
The
Book
of Illusions
an d Oracle
Night
the most consistent counterpart to
the novel is cinem a, altho ugh the attitu de towards it of both books is deeply
ambivalent. In Oracle Night for example, Sidney is invited to submit a
treatm ent for a film ada ptatio n of H.G. Wells s
The
Time Machine
-
a purely
comm ercial ente rpris e, it is mad e clear. Wells s idea of t im e travel , as Sidney
is aware, is predicated on a spatialised conception of time, and as such is
incohe rent: for once peo ple from the future began to influence events in the
past and people from the past began to influence events in the future, the
nature of time would change. Instead of being a continuous progression of
discrete mom ents inc hing forward in on e direction only,
it
would crumb le into
a vast, synchronistic blur {O N p i2 2 ). Yet, for th e sake of the fifty tho us an d
dollars on offer, Sidney outlines a scenario in which the inventor of the time
ma chine , in the year 1895, travels forward in time to 1963, and me ets a girl
from the twenty-second century who, thank s to the further technological
development of his invention, has been able to travel back in time. The two
fall in love and decide to stay together, beginning from the year 1963; they
bury their time m achines in a meadow, thereby precludin gthe very technologica
development that made theirm eeting possible.Auste r s conc eit is a ges ture, at lea
towards a non-spatial temporality; however, the proposal is rejected by the
Hollywood production com pany as too cerebral (07V pi 87 ), a ju dg m en t
that is apparently consistent with the novel s final affirmation of literature
over cinema. At the end of the book, Sidney s friend and fellow au tho r Jo hn
Trause tells him in a posth um ous letter - a voice from the sepulch re - I do n t
want you to have to waste your time fretting about movies. Stick with books.
Th at s where your future i s . . . {ON
p229).
On read ing the note, Sidney hears
Jo hn s living voice talking from the othe r side of dea th, from the oth er side
of nowhere ... Is wJoh n s ashes streaming o ut of the urn in the park that
morning ... I had my face in my hands and was sobbing my guts out... Even
as the tears po ured out of me I was happy, ha pp ier to be alive than I had ever
been before. It was a bappiness beyond consolation, beyond miseiy, beyond
all the ugliness and beauty of the world
{O N
p242-3).
Writing is here imagined as attaining everything that Auster longs for:
presenc e, immediacy, sensation, the simultaneity of past, presen t and future.
However, behind that aspiration on behalf of writing stands cinema - in
particular, that idea of cinema as human will expressing itself through the
human body put forward in The Book of Illusions: a form constructed from
a syntax of the eye, a gra m m ar of pu re kinesis {Boflpi5 ). A uster s works,
it seems, are defined by a wish that the novel might achieve the imm ediacy
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follows: Ev eiyo ne in them looked alive, bri m m ing with energy, pre sen t in
the moment, a part of some eternal now that had gone on perpetuating
itself for close to thirty years
{O N
pp37-8). Yet what becomes clear in that
final paragraph ofOracleNight is that Auster does not believe in the case he
is tiying to m ake. In its amb ivalent relation to cinema, Auster s work shows
itself to be driven by the lure of sensuous immediacy, and yet, in that veiy
fixation, finds itselfrearticulating the spatio-temporal nostalgia ofthe novel
form as such - con de m nin g itself to what is, accordin g to Lukacs, the ethical
division between form and content in the novel. After all,
OracleNight
is itself
a piece of writing; if the level of immediacy that Auster yearns for in writing
were possible, why argue the case for it?
A more convincing statement of bel ief in Oracle Night is found a few
pages earlier, when Sidney refiects on the recent travails that have beset him
- a catalogue of the events we have been reading about, foremost among
which is the failure of his Nick Bowen n ovel. H ere , arguably, Au ster s work
looks directly and less anxiously at the historico-philoso phical conditions of
literaiy production e mblem atised by the novel form, and produces som ething
closer to a materialisation o fthe consciousness ofthe work, organised aroun d
the struggle with possibility:
I tried to write a stoiy and came to an impasse, I tried to sell an idea for a
film and was rejected ,,, I was a lost man, an ill man, a man struggling to
regain his footing, but un der nea th all the missteps and follies I com mitted
that week,
knew somethingIwasn t awareofknoiuing.At certain mo men ts
during those days, I felt as if
my
body had become transparent, a porous
membrane through which all the invisible forces ofthe world could pass
- a nexus of airborne electrical charges transmitted by the thoughts and
feelings of others, I suspect that condition was what led to the birth of
Lemuel Flagg, the blind hero of Oracle Night a man so sensitive to the
vibrations around him that he knew what was going to happen before
the events themselves took place, I did n t know, but eveiy thou ght tha t
entered my head was pointing me in that direction. Stillborn babies,
concentration camp atrocities, presidential assassinations, disappearing
spouses, impossible journ eys back and forth throu gh time. The future was
already inside m e, and I was pre pa ring myself for the disasters th at were
about to come,
{O N
pp222-3, emphasis ad ded)
Know ing things withoutknoTving that we know them:
this is the co ndition that
Lukdcs characterises as that of the epic, and it denotes a world in which
bein g an d destiny [that is to say, actuality and possibility], ad ven ture and
accomplishment, life and essence are ,,, identical concepts
{TofN
p30) . Th e
greatest historical exam ple, acco rding to Lukacs, is the works of Hom er, who
found the answer to the questio n of how life can beco m e essence before the
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if enigmatic ones) but no riddles, only forms but no chaos {TofNp31) .
The obvious thing to say about the long passage from Auster is that by
writing it he confirms its untru th. Toknowthat one knows som ething that one
is not aware of knowing - to
long
to know without bein g aware of knowing -
defeats the aspiration towards imm anen ce, lifting the en tire structure into the
ethical dom ain of th e should be - in whose des per ate intensity the essence
seeks refuge , says Lukacs, because it has become an outlaw on e art h {TofN
p48).
And yet - as Lukacs says of th e nostalgic relation to the world o fth e epic
- what we]seek to escape from w hen [we] turn to the Greeks cons titutes [our]
own depth an d greatness {TofNpZl . Rea ding Auster with Lukacs enables us
to affirm even that which prohibits its affirmation, and to deny even th at which
forces us to make the denial: the permanent estrangement ofthe world and
the essence . T he final catastroph e of Nick Bowen, trap pe d irrevocably in
an underground lock-up, with his creator unable to devise a credible means
of escape - this com plete failure of form is, perh aps , the m om en t of Auster s
greatest success; or rather, the m eans
by
which the dua lity of aes thetic success
and failure is displaced by a commitment, in principle,to the reconciliation
of form and conte nt, sensation and intellection, mind and body. With Nick s
indefinite incarceration underground, the trajectory on which he has been
embarked since the beginning - the abandonment of a life of convention
and predictability in New York in orde r to learn to accept what s h ap pe nin g,
accept it and actively embrace it {O N p95) - is bro ugh t to a logical ex trem e.
T he trajectory is tha t of Auster himself:away from the ethos oft he novel and
towards what Lukacs calls the im m ane nt me anin g of the objective world .
Impasse is transformed from a (spatio-temporal) historical condition into a
condition of possibility itself
LUKACS S AESTHE TICS OF CINEMA
For Lukacs, the novel by def ini t ion stands outside i ts own ethical
pronouncements; in the novel we know things, and we know that we know
them. Knowledge and experience are commensurable, but only at the cost of
the sensuous intimacy of that know ledge. In the world of the novel, belief has
becom e (to use Walter Ben n Michaels s word) trans cen den tal . Its norm ative
me ntality is irony because th e novel is ethically reflective; ethicscan onlytake
the form of an oug ht , a should b e which is always profoundly inartistic
{TofN
p85 . Such ethical pontification, organised aro und th e interioiity oft he
individual, and th e expression of his or her trans cen den tal hom elessnes s ,
is harne ssed to the word, and is differentiated from art , which, wheth er
literary or visual, has a sensuous actuality. Thus Dostoevsky - whose works
depict the world in an imm ediate form rem ote from any struggle against
what actually exists - did not, according to Lukacs, write novels - unlike,
say, Tolstoy, whose pol em ical and nos talgic works exemplify th e forma l
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an answer to the 'problems' that had seemed to him,when he waswriting
TheTheory oftheNovel, 'insoluble' (To/N pi 2) ;he is referring, ofcourse, to
his 'conversion' toBolshevism, Yet, eventolookfor asolution, toconceiveof
the situation
of the
novel
in
terms
of
'problems' requiring
a
'solution',
is an
approach that emergesout ofa 'novelistic' ethic,and - ithardly needs saying
- aspatialised temporality, 'An epic hero c onstructedoutof what should be' ,
writes LukScs in1915, 'will alwaysbe but ashadowof theliving epicman of
historical reality,his shadow but never his original
image,
and hisgiven worldof
experience andadventurecanonlybea watered down copy of reality, neve rits
coreandessence' TofNp48).It is difficult, reading this sentence,not tothink
of cinem aasits contrap osition, particularlyin itstheorisation by An dre Bazin,
who,in The
Ontology of the Ph otographic Imag e',
writes: The
photographic
i m a g e is theobjec t itself, theoh^ecx.reed
rom the conditions of time
andspace
that
govern
it.
Bazin continues: Nomatterhowfuzzy, distorted,ordiscolored,no
m atter how lacking
in
documentai-y value
the
image may be,
it
shares, by virtue
of the veiy process ofits becoming, thebeingof the modelofwhich it is the
reproduction; it themodel'. *
Lukics himself remained faithful to the historical-revolutionary solution
he discovered in 1917 for therestof his life. However, several years before
he wrote
The
Theory
of
the
Novel,
heenter tained a quite different, 'aesthetic'
solution, onethat predatesthedawning 'historical' consciousness app aren tin
that work,and that, furthermore, impliesaconception ofcinematic time that
is quiteatodd s withthe'spatio -tem poral' ethos of the novel.In alittle know n
essay entitled 'Thoughts Toward
an
Aesthetic
of the
Cinema', published
in
1913,
Lukacs outlines
a
precocious philosophy of cinematic form
as a
vehicle
of thekindofunbroken, sensuous intimacy between soulandworld that,in
The
Theoryofthe
Novel,
he would later ascribe to the epic.^ In this earlier
essay,hebegins by comparing cinematotheatreinterms of the veiy different
inflections which each givesto thenotion ofpresence,and thepresent.He
writes that thelack of [a] pre sen t istheprim aiy characteristic of the cinema',
as oppose d to thetheatre, inwhich thestageis an 'absolute present'.^' This
lack ofapresent is nodefect of the cine ma ', writes Lukacs. 'Th isis itslimit,
itsprincipium
stilisationis\
And he
goes
on to
outline something like
an
idea
of the immanence ofcinema:
Not only in their technique,butalso in their effect, cinematic images,
equal in their essence tonature,are noless orga nicandalive than [,.,]
imagesof the stage. Only they maintain alifeofa completely different
kind. In aword, they beco me fantastic. This fantastical ele m ent is not
a contrast to living life, however, it isonly a newaspect of the same:
a life without thepresent , a life without fate, without reasons, without
motives,
a
life without measure
or
order, without essence
or
value,
a
life without soul, of pure surface, a life with which the innermost of
19,Andr^ Bazin,
riie Ontologyof
the Photographic
Image',
Wliat
K Cinema?
vol,
i. Hugh Gray
(trans),
Berkeley,
CA, University
of
Calilornia I'less,
1967,pl4.
20 ,Formore details
on thec ireujiistances
of the essay's
publication,
see
Janelle Blankenship,
'Futurist Fantasies:
Liik^cs's Karly Essay
Tho nghts 'Iowaixl
an Aesthelic ofthe
Cinema ',
hAygraph
13 (2001): pp 21-36.
21 .
Uik.'ics,
'Thoughts', op.
cit.,
ppl3-14.
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22 .
Ibid., pl4.
23 .
Ibid., p
5
{emphasis added).
24,
Andre Barin,
Th e Ontology of
the Photographic
Image ,
What
Is
Cinevui ?
Vol.
1
Hugh Gray
(trans), Berkeley,
CA, U niversity
of California
Press,
1967,
p p 9 - 1 6 ; Leclisse
Michelangelo
Antonioni (dir),
Italy, 1962; Gilles
Deleuze,Cinema 1:
Th e
Movement-Image,
Hugh Tomlinson
and Barbara
Habbeijam (trans),
London, Athlone,
1986.
som ethi ng far off an d internally distant. T he world of the cin em a is
thus a world without background or perspective, without any difference
in weight or quaiity, as oniy the present gives things fate and weight,
iight and lightness,^^
For Luiiacs, he re, cinem a has non e of the deathiy irony of tiie novei; the
ethical quality of cinema is precisely the absence of ethics assuch; or rather,
the inseparability ofthe ethicai from the real, the inseparabiiity of possibility
from actuality, (The sam e idea is expre ssed in Je an Luc Go da rd s famous line
abo ut the cine ma , an inte rtitie in his fiimLe Ventd est: Ce n est pas une image
juste,
c est jus te u ne image, ) Everything is possible , says Lukacs further:
this is the worldview ofth e cinem a , and because it technically expressed
absolute reality [,,,] in every individual moment, the validity of possibility
is cancelled o ut as a category opposed to reality. T h e tw o c a t e g o r i e s b e c o m e
equal. They assum e one identity, Everything is true an d real, is equally
true and equally real, T his is the teaching ofth e shot seque ncing of th e
cinema .^
Writing, then , over thirty years before A ndre Bazin wrote Th e On toiogy of
the Photographic Image (1945), fifty years before Michelangelo Antonioni
made
Leclisse
(1962), and seventy years before Gilles Deleuze published
The
Movement-Image
(1983),^ Lukacs puts forward a theo iy of the cine m a as
having a sensuous, immediate relation to temporality
itself
The cinema, for
Lukacs in 1913, is eveiything that the novel is not. In fact, cinema is closer
to how Lukacs came to see the epic: as having none oft he formal, historical
and ethical melancholy associated, for Lukacs, with the novel.
Yet the significance of Lukacs s essay on cinem a is less to tbe c inem a as
such, perhaps, than to the mentality of the novel. After all, the essay itself
is
adistinctly ethical -
that is to say, novelistic - reflection; according to its
own prescriptions, the cinema could not help but regard its earnest avowals
ironically, Lukacs s essay shou ld be read, th en , as an ind ex o ft h e me ntality
that \s preoccupied with tbe novel - the anxiety that forms
and isfonned
byth e
novel, the me ntality of the writer a nd theo rist of fiction, Lukacs s essay is
especially relevant in the contemporaiy context, where the cinema so often
app ears as a solution to the dilem ma s an d problem atics of fiction
itself:
besides
the recent works by Paul Auster I have been discussing, we might think of
texts such as Salman R ushdie sThe Satanic Verses E,L, D octorow sCityof God
Dennis Coo per s Period, or W,G, Seb ald s Austerlitz,each of which betrays
an attraction to cinema as the model for a fictional practice that works to
introduce som ething like Lukacs s imag ined renewed epic - a form bou nd
to the historical m om en t in such a way tha t the world is drawn ,,, simply as
a seen reality {TofN p i5 2) , Th e term seen {geschaute is here a distraction
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and, particularly, time, are
viateriallypresent
In cinema, time, for Lukacs as
for Deleuze an d Bazin, is exp erien ced outsid e the linear, spatialised and
imperialist conception of it - the conception reprod uced in all pe riodising
accounts of the postmodern.
Certainly, Auster's
The Book of
Illusions, at least at the beginning, looks
longingly towards cinema as a symbol of eveiything that writing is unable
to achieve. Cinema, in other words, is inserted into
The Book ofIllusions
as
a potential
solutio i
to the ethical-aesthetic incommensurability that defines
the novel as such. However, this conception of cinematic possibility is so
'novelistic', so deeply implicated in an economy - b otb ethical and tem pora l
- of expiation and rede m ptio n, th at it is unab le to release Auster's work from
the structural 'irony' to which Lukacs condemns the novel as such; in fact,
cinema in Auster functions to bind his work even more firmly to the novel.
Nevertheless, the encounter staged between cinema and the novel in Lukacs's
early writings, as well as in Auster's most recent fiction, enables us to read
even that failure 'cinematically', following a logic ofthe postmodern 'event',
in Lyotard's sense , in which the qu estion of success or failure is displace d by
that of possibility itself
THE BOOKOFILLUSIONS
As has a lr eady be en n o t ed , au thor - f i gures p ro l i f e r a t e i n Aus t e r ' s works , an d
in The Book of Illusions as much a s any . Bes ides Dav id Z immer and Hec to r
M ann , whose p ro j ec t o f c i nem at i c a t on em en t beg ins i n 1939 (' ju s t a f t er t he
G e r m a n s i n v a d e d P o l a n d ' ) (B o/7 p 2 1 2 ) , a n o t h e r a u t h o r - s u r r o g a t e a p p e a r s a s
the cent ra l charac ter of one of Hector ' s f i lms . The Inner Life of Martin Frost,
made i n 1946 ,
The Inner Life of Martin Frostis the on ly f ilm th at Da vid ha s t im e to watch
a f t e r be ing summoned t o t he r anch - be fo re Hec to r d i e s and t he f i lms a r e
des t roy ed - an d the only on e , therefore , tha t he desc r ibes in de ta i l . T h e f i lm
was shot a t the ranch, and as David begins to watch, he f inds i t imposs ible
to separa te the ' f i c t ional ' images f rom the ' rea l i ty ' of the i r fami l iar se t t ing,
' I was supposed to read them as shadows, but my mind was s low to make the
ad jus tm en t . Aga in an d ag a in , I s aw them as t hey were , no t a s t hey were m ea n t
t o be '
{BofI
p24 3) . Mar t in Fros t, the pro tag on is t of th e f ilm, is a novel i s t , w ho
arr ives to s tay a t 'Hector and Er ieda 's ranch ' whi le they are on vacat ion; thus ,
t he i dea , wh ich Baz in and L ukacs sha re , o f c i nema ' s d i s i n t eg ra t i on o f t he
d i s t i nc t i on be tween o r ig ina l and r ep roduc t i on , pos s ib i l i t y and ac tua l i t y , a r t
an d l ife - tha t i s to say, c in em a 's ch al le ng e to ontolog y itself- i s p layed wi th
expl ic i t ly in Hector ' s f i lm, and yet , perhaps , only played wi th , Eor Deleuze ,
the sam e qual i ty is wh at enable s c in em a to ma ter ia l i se t im e in a 'c iys ta l l ine '
f o rm, me an ing t ha t t he ' i nd iv is i b l e un i t y o f an ac tua l ima ge an d i t s v i r t ua l
image' - the vir tual i ty of the actual - becomes manifest as such, '* ' ' In such j ^^ op cit p78
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27 .Ibid., p26 4; see
Immanuel Kant,
Critiqueof Pure
Reason
F. Max
MuUer (trans, 2nd
revised edn). New
York, Macmillan,
1915, p34.
28 .
Auster's
pseudonymous
detective novel,
entided
Squeeze
Play is included as
an appendix in his
otherwise non -
fiction collection
Hand to Mouth: A
Chronicle of Early
Failure. N ewYork
Henry Holt 1997.
29.Deleuze, nne-
hnage.op. cit., p69.
Almost immediately on arriving, despite his intention to 'do no thin g, to live
the life of a sto ne '{BofIp24 5), M artin Frost hegins work on a new story, inspired
hy the desert landscape arou nd him. O n awakening, his first m ornin g, he finds
the mysterious C laire,abeautifial philo soph y stu den t, asleep in his bed ; after the
initial shock they quickly fall in love. Passages from Claire's r eading of Berkeley
and Kant, on sense percep tion a nd the impossibility of objective know ledge, are
worked into the narrative in Claire's delivery (for example, from Kant: 'if we
dro p ou r subject or the subjective form of our senses, all qualities, all relation s
of objects in space and time, nay space and time themselves, would vanish').^'
The scenario is not dissimilar to a subplot of a film Auster himself scripted,
entitledSmoke(1995), in which a writer nam ed Paul Benjamin (a na m e Auster
once took asa
nom deplume
to publish a detective novel) * accepts an app aren tly
hom eless boy as a guest in his Brooklyn apa rtm en t after the boy saves his life.
Both films - the real and the fictional - include relatively conventional uses
of mo ntage , in which cinema tographic shots of the writer ban ging away on a
typewriter (Martin Frost an d Paul Benjamin respectively) are jux tap os ed with
actions which may or may not be anything more than a scenario bein g played
out in the writer's head and on his page.
As in Smoke the un certainty is quickly settled by theMartinFrostnarrative
although in the opposite direction to Smoke whe re the resolution is on th e side
of the 'actual'. By confirming the
mise en scene
of
The
Inner
Life
of Ma rtin
Fro
as 'the inside of a man's h ead '{BofIp24 3), Auster dissolves the indiscernibility
of actual and virtual in cinema into a merely subjective ambiguity. In such a
case, writes Deleuze, 'the confusion of the real and the imaginary is a simple
erro r of fact, an d d oes no t affect th eir discernibility: the confusion is pro duc ed
solely in som eon e's head' .^'' It is ju st this kind of'psycholog ical' reso lution th at
Lukacs regards as typically novelistic: 'The autonomous life of interiority' he
writes, 'is possible and necessary only when the distinctions between me n have
ma de an un bridgeab le chasm; when the gods are silent and n either sacrifices
nor the ecstatic gift of tongues can solve their riddle ...'
{TofN
p66).
These conceptual relations of the novel arestaged by Auster, of course,
rather than simply reproduced - and the staging is most overt with the
conclusion of The Inner Life of Martin
Frost.
By the tim e Ma rtin finishes
writing his story, Claire is dead, having succumbed to a fever that has been
wors ening correlatively with the progress M artin has been m akin g on his work.
Fu rth erm ore , M artin discovers th at h e is able to revive her, as if miraculously,
by burn ing the pages ofhisstory. Th is circumstance alludes to H ector's plan
to destroy his own films after his death, and is referred explicitly both to a
passage in Luis Bunuel's autobiog raphy yLastSigh where Bufiuel considers
burning the negative of his film UnChienandalou on the place du Tertre in
Montmartre
{BofI
p28 4), and to Ch ateaub riand's ideal of withholding his
Memoiresfrom publication (Hector owns copies of both works) (Bo/7 p2 37-8 ).
It also recalls a story rec oun ted inSmokeby Paul Benjamin, of Mikhail Bakh tin
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scholar M ichael Holquist as an inde x of th e insignificance to Bakhtin of his
own thoug hts 'once they had already been tho ugh t thro ugh '' - that is to say,
of Bak htin's unintere sted nes s in exploiting his thou ghts , once they had sei-ved
their pur pos e. In all of these cases - M artin, Hector, Bun uel, C hate aub riand ,
Bakhtin - the valency ofthe posthumous gesture consists in an indifference
to posterity, and a com mitm ent to the event, life - the intimacy between a rt
and life - rather than to thedocumentation of the event, or artassuch.
In cinema, however, the destruction of the work is unnecessary for the
affirmation of life, for the sim ple reaso n th at - as Lukacs in 1913 was aware
- cinema is not predicated on the notion of presence, of ontology, at all:
'T he essence of the cinema is mo vem ent in itself, an eternal variability,
the never-resting change of things'.'^' The reality of cinema, writes Bazin
in a similar vein, is that of 'the world of which we are a part, the sensoiy
contin uum of which the film takes a spatial as well as tem pora l mold'. '^ T he
state of'indifferen ce' that Auster's characters are in pursuit
of ON
p60 and
ofJp24 5) is achieved by cinemaassuch; there is no need for heroic, egoistic
gestu res. 'T he w orld was full of
holes, '
observes David early on inThe ook
of
Illusions(after he has narrowly escaped shoo ting himself with a loaded gun),
'tiny apertures of meaninglessness, microscopic rifts that the mind could
walk thro ugh , an d on ce you were on the o ther side of one of those holes, you
were free of yourself, free of your life, free of your death, free of everything
that belonged to you'
Bofl
p i
09).
Yet this is a lesson of cinema (or indeed,
the epic) - not of the novel, where, for Lukacs at least, immanence is always
attenu ated by the p rinciple of individuality. 'An emp ty im ma nenc e', he writes,
'which is anch ored only in the writer's experien ce a nd no t, at the same time,
in his return to the home of
ll
things, is merely the immanence of
surface
that covers up the cracks but is incapable of retaining this immanence and
must become a surface riddled with holes'{TofNp92).
InOracleNight, Sidney reflects on the preparation of his Hollywood film
script: 'I didn't want there to be any holes in the story'
ON
pi36). But for
Deleuz e, the power of cinem a is precisely tha t of 'a dissociative force which
would introduce a figure of nothin gnes s , a hole in appearances' .' ' ' Lukacs's
use of the same image to denote the contrary - the betrayal of immanence
- exposes and corrects the 'novelistic' ethos at work in his own passage, as
quoted above. Imm anen ce, after
all,
can be neither 'betrayed' nor 'attenuate d'.
As Lukacs says a paragraph later, the 'intuitive double vision' of the novel
makes it 'the representative art-form of our age', the structural qualities
of which 'constitutively coincide with the world as it is today'
TofN
p93) .
Im m ane nce is not a lost innocence, but awaits us as a category
ofpossibility
to
be wrought out ofthe simultaneity of past, present and future.
END AND CO NTINUITY
30 .
Michael
Holquist,
Introcluclioii ,
M.
M. Bakluiii, Th e
Dialogic Itnagination:
Four Es.say. i,C a i y l
Emei son an d
Michael Holqiiisl
(trans), Austin,
University
of
Texas
Press,
1981,pxxv.
31.Uik,1cs,
riioughts', op. cit.,
p l 5 .
32 .
Anclr(5 Bazin,
Death Every
Afternoon ,
Lilenny
Debate: Texk and
Contexts,
Denis
Hollier
and
JefTrey
Mehlman
(eds).
New
York,
The New
Press,
1999, pi44.
33 .Deleuze,
Time-
Image,op. cit. , pi 67 .
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The preoccupations that drive his fiction are those ofthe novel as such; and
yet those preoccupations are themselves formed, in part, by the app eara nce
of cinem a - as sugg ested by the fact tha t Lukacs s essay on the aesthe tics of
cinema precedes his great work on the novel by two or three years. Even
when dealin g directly with cinema, as in TheBook of
Illusions
Auster does so
as a novelist, looking to cinema w ith envy, as to a prom ise of rede m ptio n that
will achieve the immanence of the epic - the category of possibility that his
metaphysically, historically and ethically-traumatised writer-protagonists have
been consumed by ever sinceCity
of
Glass.Read in the light of Lukacs s early
writing, Auster s fiction seems determ ine d u po n playing out the dem ise of
fiction itself; yet this determination has its contrary structurally embedded
within it.
Th e conjunction of two apparently incomp atible diagnoses, Lyotard s
mode of the postmodern as futur anterior and Lukacs s concep t of absolute
sinfulness , requ ires us to dispens e with th ehistorical thesis of
The
Theory
o
the
Novel -
the link between absolute sinfulness and a particu lar historico-
philosophical mom ent - s well sthe spatio-historical thesis ofth e pos tm od ern
that we fmd in, for exam ple, Jam eso n, H arvey and Michaels: not only the idea
of its contemp orane ity, but also the idea of its recen t obsolescence. B oth theses
reiterate an ontology of the present, emerging from an intense awareness
of the present as such. As long as the novel situates itself in a derivative or
imitative relation to cinema, looking enviously to cinema as a solution to its
own formal disunity, it seems destined to rep eat th e traum atic and impossible
ethical relation to the p rese nt that is consistently staged in Paul Auster s
work. If the re is a lesson in cine ma for fiction, it is, in Deleu ze s wo rds, to
34.Deleuze,
Time-
free [itself] from the mo del of truth which pen etra tes it . Only when the
Image
op.
cit. pi50.
literary text construes such a cinem atic or e pic relation to time in
the b
ofthe writing
itself
as it does , I would argue , in writers such as W.C. Sebald
and Dennis Cooper - only then will it overcome that ontological relation to
the pres ent th at Lukacs calls absolute sinfulness .
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