New York Trilogy: Author and Authorship

The legacy of the author in the postmodern fiction has always been a controversial issue. Having subscribed to the genre of postmodern detective fiction, Paul Auster’s New York Trilogy, likewise, appears to have destabilized, among other things, the ontological role of author through an endorsement of the anti-essentialist approach, formation of numerous doubles in the novel, and a cryptic act of breaking the frame of narrative by introducing the author as a fictional character.

Essentialism, in the first place, is defined upon a rigid pace of consistency of the essence, subsequently implying an origin out of which an essence emerges. The notion of essence that appears in the novel, however, hardly implies any origin, but rather betrays that there is no real out there. Authorial function, bearing on the same anti-essentialist paradigm, comes only to flicker an “illusion of presence” time and again in the novel, destabilizing the ontology of the Author in the text. The novel deconstructs the authorial function through oscillating it “between presence and absence”, so much so that “the author”, as it appears in case of Auster the author and Auster the character “is ‘dead, but still with us, still with us, but dead’” (PF 202).

Despite the reluctance to assume an ontologically stable essence for the author, the novel also destabilizes the role of author through displacing and distributing the “authorial role” among other figures in the novel, forming doubles that lead to confused identities in the novel, the most important of which is that of author. Paul Auster as the author of the work has many doubles within the novel. In City of Glass, for example, Auster’s authorial role is dispersed among different figures, from Daniel Quinn, taking up the role of the fictional detective, to Auster the character, who in turn plays the real detective, Auster the novelist, in solving the mystery around Peter Stillman. Inasmuch as the detective genre is concerned, the characters’ pursuit of criminals, in a larger scale, is the search for authority and establishing authorship which is constantly thwarted in the novel by doubling the identities and dismantling the power relation, hence destabilizing the role of author (Pace 8).

Following the formation of doubles in the novel, introducing “author into fiction” as a conspicuous presence seemingly breaks the frame of narrative – insofar as the fictional author retains a biographical quality in the novel – destabilizing the ontological structure of the authorship as merely fictional. Likewise, the “Paul Auster” to whom Quinn goes in City of Glass when discussing authorship in Don Quixote, is (to use Roland Barthes’ terminology) “the paper-author” who lives “as a guest in his own text”. His life, Barthes maintains, “is no longer the origin of his fictions but a fiction contributing to his work” Getting stripped of all his authorial, paternal legacy, Auster the novelist is inscribed in the novel “like one of his characters, figured in the carpet” that undermines and destabilizes the ontology further (qtd. In PF 205).

On the whole, the frame-breaking almost enacted as a result of anti-essentialism and formation of ‘doubles’ in the novel might have wider application regarding the notion of authorship, all rejecting the idea of authorial power and destabilizing its ontological structure. This achieves a personal touch in City of Glass where Paul Auster himself shows up with his son, asserting the legacy of the author in disguise.


Sources:

Auster, Paul. The New York Trilogy. New York: Penguin Classics, 1985.
McHale, Brian. Post modernist Fiction. London: Routledge, 1987.
Pace, Chris. “Escaping from the Locked Room: Overthrowing the Tyranny of Artifice in Paul Auster’s New York Trilogy” April 2nd, 2010.

The Mark (of Narrative Digression) on the Wall

Temporal succession in itself is a loose link. Defining time as the relations of chronology between story and text, Gerard Genette considers the experience of time represented in narrative text as constitutive both of the means of representation and of the object being represented, which might be viewed in three respects: order, duration, and frequency. Correspondingly, Virginia Woolf's The Mark on the Wall represents, among other things, a disturbing discrepancy between the story-time and the text-time through the tedium of several digressions that seemingly subscribe to a snap-shot description of the narrator's experience, a snail-like deceleration of narrative action, and above all a meta-narrative self-reflection within the story.

The narrator's detailed discovery of the mark is incessantly punctuated by a series of digressions on history, art, society and reality; giving rise to some snap-shot descriptions where the minimum speed of narration is manifested as a descriptive pause. The flux of images, ideas, and reminiscences between which the narrator is constantly shifting back and forth provide fairly a large quantity of narrative information that relatively effaces the narrator from the scenes being described, marking a multilinearity of the story-time and distorting the temporal succession of events.

Regarding the discrepancy further in terms of duration, there seems an infinity of possible paces on the theoretical level as the story, already fraught with a descriptive pause, produces multiple degrees of deceleration within the text. Similar to what Genette argues, the segment of the text in The Mark almost corresponds to the zero story duration building upon introspective monologues rather than articulating actions. The snail-like deceleration of narrative drive that is correspondingly connected with the unchanged, fixed mark on the wall gives way for a series of multi-linear digression to be prescribed on the possible linear figuration of events in the story. Nonetheless, the inherent paradox is hardly resolved in the story as the level of narrative digressions, brought forth by the degrees of deceleration; further substantiate the mark as a point of departure than as indication of centrality and importance in the story.

Apart from the noted discrepancies, The Mark aptly relates the narrative digression, on a meta-narrative level, with the self-reflexive subjectivism practiced in the story. The pause and deceleration of narrative information, whether descriptive or not, allows for a subjective reflection on how the narrator can pursue and connect the pattern of introspective train of thoughts with the observation of the mark on the wall. The method pursued in the story is almost similar to what the narrator states: "To steady myself, let me catch hold of the first idea that passes…" It seems the narrator is dissatisfied with the impediment of that "train of thoughts" and "shower of ideas", and their tyranny of demands that upon several points of digression prescribe a multi-directional figuration on the mode of narration.

On the whole, the abiding narrative digression seems to bound up the story in several respects, whereby the narrator's attempts to liberate the narrative from this constraint appear to destroy the subjectivism and intelligibility of the narrative. The digression seems to stop, however, as the identification of the snail closes the narrative, yet paradoxically leaving the end of the story open for another digression.

Sources:

McQuillan, Martin. Ed. The Narrative Reader. London: Routledge, 2000.

Rebeca, Matei. "Virginia Woolf's The Mark on the Wall." Nov. 14th 2009. http://www.scribd.com/doc/22146701/Virginia-Wolf-The-Mark-on-the-Wall

Rimmon-Kenan, Shlomith. Narrative Fiction: Contemporary Poetics, 2nd Ed. London: Routledge, 2002.

Gender Ideology; Construction of Male Reading in Pope's Rape of the Lock

Language, as a medium of semiotic representation, is informed with ideology and power. Experimentation on the language of Pope's Rape might betray an intricate gender ideology latent in the patriarchal reflection of eighteenth century society in that construction or assumption of the reader as male configures a patriarchal agenda that seems to reflect critically on the gender and gender-stereotype, reinforcing the phallogocentric view of female as preoccupied with the trivial, wanton in violation, and most importantly inferior to male imperatives within the representational categories defined by men.

Formation of a male reading in Rape is perhaps anticipated as early as Pope’s letter to Arabella Fermor sets out a gendered attitude towards the “nature” of “modern ladies” who are preoccupied with trivial things and equally with making trivia appear as of having “utmost importance.” Through the political semiotics of representation, Pope aptly seems to have defined the “otherness” early in the epigraph, consolidating the sexual difference(s) by naturalizing or mystifying the male reading of the poem. As Cassandra argues, Pope in his letter addresses Ms. Fermor that the poem was published at her request, although in actuality the writing of this poem was suggested by one of Pope’s male friends. As thus, Pope is making it seem “as though Ms. Fermor enjoyed and even asked to be mocked.”

Apart from the mythical preoccupation of women with trivia as represented in character of Blinda, Pope’s gendered language pictures femininity and womanhood as reductively wanton in character – the madwoman in the attic – that scarcely subscribes to the male dictated norms. As noted by Pollak, in describing Belinda’s anger, for example, “the author goes to great lengths to paint her as a witch with almost supernatural characteristics.” In the similar vein, representation of Thaletris as an Amazonian type of woman who is most feared and scorned by men since rejecting male imperatives also contributes to the construction of a male reading of the poem. Conversely, though, the male in the story is portrayed as being victim to the seductive spell of female characters (27).

Construction of male reading of the Rape seems also to build, most importantly, on the view of female as generally inferior and subordinate to male imperatives. As Ellen Pollack argues, in the poem “woman is made to function as the sign not of her own subjectivity but of a male desire of which she is the object” (23). Affirming the sexual myth of woman as inferior, Pope’s Rape uses woman to serve a function and to act out a particular part in the poem in which the male is excused for his violation and female is repudiated for her sly seductiveness and beauty.

On the whole, Pope’s Rape is mediated in the language inundated with gender ideologies that critically gives rise to assuming of the reader as male and thus forming a male reading of the poem in that a phallogocentric representation of female as obsessed with trivia, wanton in action, and inferior to male dominance is underscored.

Sources:

Sowerby, Robin. Alexander Pope: Selected Poetry and Prose. London: Routledge, 1998.

Pollak, Ellen. The Poetics of Sexual Myth: Gender and Ideology in the Verse of Swift and Pope. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985.

Westfall, Cassandra. “The Negative Images of Women in Pope's The Rape of the Lock”. Knox College Common Room: Volume 2. Dec. 19^th, 2009.

Consciousness

College is out again, and I lie crippled with a sense of guilt over the lack of drive to pen anything. Life goes on, yet mind lives back in the memories once gone away. I have started hating consciousness these days: that I think, feel, suffer, speak, and reason bother me and the entire universe. Wish I could fly the wings I have been denied and wag the tail I cannot see though learn that which makes me the subject of mockery.