The New York Trilogy

Finally, I am writing the long-promised words on The New York Trilogy.

First a bit of background to how I came across this book in particular. Quite simply, Paul Auster was next on the list. I keep a list in my pocketbook of the authors whose work I need to read. Incidentally, before him came Dambudzo Marachera ("House of Hunger" is superb), and after him comes Willa Cather. Of Auster's work, I chose this novel because of the title - I'm a sucker for anything to do with New York - city
of possibilities, in my (limited) experience rival only to Rome and London (my home) as big cities go.

So, having read the book, how did I feel about it? In review, I found it variously intriguing, challenging, compelling, frustrating, bleak, but infuriatingly engaging. I think what I like the most about The New York Trilogy is its sense of difficulty. Even now, having read the book, I am still left in doubt as to whether I have indeed, actually read it. That is not a paradox - it is a reflection of how unsettling I found it, and how the writing sustains its erosion of certainty.

When I say it's a difficult piece of work, I don't mean the same kind of impenetrable difficulty one gets from reading Heidegger's "sein und zeit", Derrida's "De la grammatologie" or Hegel's "Rechtsphilosophie". I cite those volumes as examples not only because of my less-than-simple experiences with them, but also because they
were the ones that I immediately associated with Auster's trilogy. In those formidable volumes, it was hard enough to grasp the terminology claimed by the authors, terms and ideas that appropriate a very particular language. You
could cleave open the pages only to find a wall of concrete holding meaning at bay, forcing you to wind up your mental muscles and set in for the long midnight haul. In stark contrast, Auster's text is thin, transparent, generally devoid of lyrical flourish - it seems to present no especial challenge for understanding. Yet this seeming transparency creates in the unsuspecting reader a sense of unfounded security - the perfect envrionment for a plenitude of feints, blind-side jabs, and sucker-punches (of the literary variety, naturally). Meanings gush forward, then drain, a momentary flood, conjuring up something then creating a famine of thought. This is done with meticulous engineering, a hunger baited, swiftly abated then baited further: Does Stillman exist? Is Auster actually Fanshawe?

Intertextuality is prevalent throughout the book. My academic background being heavily literary and literary-theoretical, I found this one of most intriguing elements. The novel arcs its parabola, inviting familiar tangents - resonances of names (Quinn, Stillman, Daniel, even Paul Auster himself), women as objects of desire and affection (think Virgina Stillman, Mrs. Fanshawe, Sophie), literary echoes...

In terms of pure literary intertextuality, Auster explicitly cites Cervantes and Milton but beyond the confines of the novel, I found further textual analogues. My mind fused literary experiences with Auster's textual fabric: When reading about the author's beating and expectation of death in The Locked Room, I think of Blanchot's "Folie du Jour" and "L'instant de ma mort"; when thinking on the trilogic structure, I remember going to the Edinburgh Festival in 1994, and seeing a pair of plays by Arthur Miller: "Elegy for a Lady" and "Some kind of love story", paired under the umbrella title of "Two Way Mirror". The two plays were separate, had no immediate linkage in terms of character, intrigue or context. Yet they were paired, perhaps as a challenge to the committed audience to grasp

At times, I have to admit Auster's smartness pissed me off. Particularly in the way he would forge coincidence: the emergence of a name (e.g. Henry Dark) forces a mental rewind and a temptation to flick back to earlier pages. Having focused on the Stillman conundrum in the City of Glass, his cursory appearance in the last third of the trilogy sparks a desire to break backwards and re-examine the question of who he was - Auster baits us, and we jump on it like rats on rotten meat. After, frustrated and ashamed, I found myself having to resist further temptation - "You pulling my chain, Auster, you motherfucker? Not going to flick back..."

Of the three, it is undoubtedly The Locked Room that I found the most engaging and certainly the most developed. This is logical - it was written last, it builds on its predecessors, and of course, it being the last, one would presume it promises a satisfactory resolution to the trilogy - closure, in short, an ending. Upon completion, the reader recognises that it promises no such thing. Auster doesn't allow for a simple ending; he sets the scope of his novel beyond even the paper dust jacket. It is important to note that the novel is not circular - to suggest such a thing would propose closure, a repetitive loop that nonetheless traps infinity. The novel is expansive, sets in motion a replication of thoughts, a horizon in itself - something that proposes an end in the distance but is destined to remain forever beyond accomplishment. It's as though Auster suggests - "yeah there's an ending, shithead, but it's an ending that occurs in some other sucker's nightmare". Auster's stratagem is to "fray" the ends of the stories. The reader is drawn to the brink of a vertiginous "mise-en-abime", where the undefined endings scream out like sirens to the hapless reader.

At times this book was frightening - a book can generally be controllable, closed flat, stowed in a shelf amongst other books. This was one that could not be controlled. Its lack of finality reached out beyond glass panes, beyond the tain of mirror, across the room. Possibilities seeped through my fingers, dribbled onto the floor as my mind tried to throw arms around. The fascination that The New York Trilogy arouses is tempered by doubt, always doubt, about the veracity of language certainly, but also the fact of being - it is phenomenological, with all the associated trapdoors and humiliations.

The threads have lured me to further inquiry into Auster. I am now reading "Hand to Mouth" and "The Invention of Solitude" - and expectations are high.