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.