Re: View - Paul Auster's 'The New York Trilogy' (1987)

Auster's pen renders New York at once a discrete organism, the contradictory entanglement of lives within it, a reflection of us as individual people.

Postmodernism, much like its predecessor, is often characterised as little more than wilfully difficult obscurantism, its aims to communicate the inherent subjectivity of the world no more than a mask for totally vacuous nihilism. To aestheticians like Harold Bloom, Postmodernism represents a ghastly literary self-deception; that the ‘value’ of literature rests merely in the eye of the beholder, whether this beholder be a denizen of society, or society itself; that all fiction is merely a social and political reflection of its times, and not self-contained artistic expression. And to the average reader, myself included, one imagines that it has the self-satisfied air of most academic traditions: that of intellectualising something which does not need to be intellectualised.

These critiques have merit, yet Postmodernism continues to hold immense sway in the critical community. At the eve of many a topical issue today (generally some hackneyed trite about the culture war), a professor interviewed on the news isn’t unlikely to invoke Foucault, Postcolnialism, or queer theory, to give some examples. Why might this be? Novels like the New York Trilogy help to answer that question.

Belgian Painter René Magritte's 1929 painting, 'The Treachery of Images'. Although not strictly Postmodern, it lays the groundwork for ideas that would later become its calling cards - the subterfuge of representation, the reality of the virtual, and the malleability of our perspective. We cannot divorce the world from our view of it.

Paul Auster has in my view synthesised the most universal aspects of the Postmodern mood to forge a work of masterful power. When the author’s focus is on the vital, shattered-mirror web of the human mind, I have read little prose which contemplates so profoundly and delicately on the experience of modern man. This is certainly not to throw shade on other literary schools, yet works like Auster’s New York Trilogy illuminate the prismatic and fragmented nature of the way we live now more effectively than, say, a Romantic Poem. The poetry of John Ashbery is arguably far more attuned to the peculiar architecture of contemporary thought than that of Shakespeare, for example (pitchforks away, please). Both writers attempt to describe the human condition, yet each take a different route thereto; one through the head, and the other through the heart.

Sue me for sounding like a parrot, but we live in a media saturated age, our minds besieged by advertisers, corporations and hucksters alike (is there even a difference?) who want nothing more than the eyeballs of the entire globe to linger on whatever carrot they dangle on a stick for just long enough so that we won’t notice their fingers slithering into our pockets. The worlds of fact (alternative ones included) and fiction are beginning to enmesh, truth now trailing like sand through our fingers, and it seems kids are heeding the silent call to grow up faster, unconsciously reacting to this need to discriminate between the two. A new set of social mores is emerging with rise of technological connectivity; the virtual economy of symbols and signifiers is king. If you want to survive, you’ll need to get an early start.

Financial insecurity becomes simply part of the furniture as more and more citizens of the West wheeze with exhaustion trying to grasp a sense of economic stability in their lives. We are forced to numb ourselves to the cultural blitzkrieg that slaps us in the face every time we open our phones, walk down the high street, scroll through Netflix, or peruse the magazine aisle. Text and image grow less reliable with each passing minute. As Indiana Jones in the finale of the Last Crusade had to traverse a path of deceptive alphabet tiles, we must judiciously decide whether our next steps will provide solid support, or whether we will plummet into the abyss. Moreover, given that mental health and the decline of religious faith are bigger talking points than ever, I’d wager that we have never been as ‘in our heads’ as a species than right now. Auster’s quasi-mystically detached yet occasionally playful style fits today’s climate (pun intended) like a glove, a symphony in prose, a glass negative illuminating the cerebral profile of individuals at the very edges of being and civilisation, where so many of us live.

Heavily inspired by Film Noir, the story loafes through dangerous alleys and plush uptown apartments, populated by enigmatic femme fatales and hard-nosed Bogart types, a world where every conundrum can be solved with good stiff drink. As the reader descends deeper into this seedy, cryptic landscape, the characters themselves begin to embody more and more of these traits. Is art life, or is life art?

As far as the plot of the New York Trilogy goes, it’s practically ineffable, for the novel is, as one might presume, comprised of three separate tales, only loosely connected. It is with great trepidation that I try and squash these together into an easily digestible synopsis. As to not disrupt the delightful ways in which these stories interlink and bolster the emotional weight of each other, I shall exercise a bit of Churchillian philosophy in my revelation of the premise, and, like so many of his speeches, attempt to replicate the perfect skirt: “long enough to the cover the subject, short enough to maintain interest.”

Daniel Quinn is a writer living in New York City (unsurprisingly). He is a man who views himself through the glass panes and steel girders of its skyscrapers, someone who wantonly slips into invisibility and solitude. Struggling to cope with the loss of his wife and child, the mystery stories he crafts are a labyrinthine comfort to his ever-tender psychological wounds. He lives the quietest life as can be expected from any man, until he receives a call in the middle of the night asking for a detective agency. He initially shrugs off the cold caller, assuming that they had the wrong number. What very quickly becomes apparent is that this call is much more than a quotidian oddity, as the same request is made night after night. Quinn, his curiosity now aroused by the frequency of these calls, accepts the investigative job, totally unaware that it will soon consume him, forcing him to interrogate all that he once held as true.

Auster takes the abstract idea of “the mystery”, and overlays it onto the writing process as a whole. Literature is the investigation into both the incomprehensible world around us, and the darkness that eternally engulfs each of our souls. It is this investigation which is almost untransferable to any other artistic medium. Much of the plot could be told visually, yes, but not without gutting the real meat of the story. Fret not, I’ll discuss my personal delineation between plot and story in a hot minute. The real heart of the novel lies in the ambient moments of quietude ensconced between the thoughtfully observed rhetorical pugilism of the characters who often casually drop world-class erudition without even breaking a sweat. Between the moments of palpable, and describable physical action. Moments wherein Auster achieves a transcendental quality in his writing, embodying the tone of a late afternoon sky, the multi-layered significance of a single thought or the completion of self by another person in mutual love.

At times, reading Auster's work is akin to viewing an MC Escher engraving for a prolonged period; the more you look, the less anchored you feel.

The New York Trilogy is a hallowed myth of asceticism, passion and obsession, a story which attempts, and succeeds in part, to untangle identity’s knot, and cleanly lay it out for the reader. However, much as rope is simply comprised of smaller rope wound together, Auster does justice the impressionistic, cyclical, and somewhat inscrutable nature of life and history through well-placed parallels between the different tales which rewards the observant reader.

This is not a novel to breeze through on a Sunday afternoon in Copacabana whilst sipping a cool mimosa. It’s a novel to annotate feverishly in the obsessive spirit of its curious characters, noticing connections, parallels, allusions, and appreciating the painterly composition of Auster’s prose. As the writer becomes the detective in this novel, language itself goes through a transition which Auster follows with a keen ear; from adequacy to inadequacy. The syntax, grammar and vocabulary of English itself becomes Auster’s interlocutor throughout the novel, critiqued with thrilling academic dexterity by the characters. The book charts the chasm separating literature, language and writers, which, a search that is (thank Christ) carried out to some kind of conclusion, rather than insouciantly thrown in to add a half-baked intellectual flex.

The Author, Auster (Pictured left), originally wanted to be a filmmaker, and his writing certainly has a whiff of the cinematic about it. I guess he felt that his name allowed for only one career choice.

In my eyes, a novel is comprised of five overlapping elements: Plot, character, dialogue, theme and prose. The unified Venn diagram in this case is story. Story dictates how much plot, or dialogue should be present in the work. It dictates how the characters behave, and what they say. It dictates what ideas are discussed and in what voice. When all of these stars align, when a writer has cracked story and when they know it, the world is graced with a creative gem. The New York Trilogy is one such rarity. How could any angsty, ungainly, naîve youth like myself resist such a hearty existential pie?