Zugl.: Mainz, Univ., Magisterarbeit, 2005

Thesis (M.A.)--University of North Carolina Wilmington, 2008. / Title from PDF title page (viewed September 24, 2008) Includes bibliographical references (p. [63]-[65])

Mémoire (M.E.L.)--Université du Québec à Chicoutimi, 2000. / Document électronique également accessible en format PDF. CaQCU

Paul Auster, um escritor norte-americano nascido em 1945, já publicou inúmeros romances, poemas e diversos textos críticos. É também tradutor, roteirista e já dirigiu filmes, como Sem Fôlego (1995). Seu trabalho integra as mais diferentes artes, como literatura, fotografia e cinema, aproximando-as dentro da própria narrativa literária. É ainda neste espaço que a figura do autor se problematiza, a partir dos nomes atribuídos a narrador e personagens, por exemplo. Um desses nomes pode ser ―Paul Auster-, mas, ao invés dele pode-se procurar deixar um espaço em branco, ou então negá-lo. Da mesma forma, quando fala de espaços, como aquele onde o escritor reside, o Brooklin, é sempre a partir de uma multiplicidade e de uma diferença cultural que não consegue fixar um único sentido ou origem. Seja, então, na autobiografia ou biografia, no diário, no retrato ou utilizando-se de elementos do documentário, sua obra aproxima a ficção de suas próprias ―verdades‖, deixando de lado o ―real preexistente‖ como ponto de partida, e baseando-se também na narração a partir da memória. Neste trabalho, esboçam-se aproximações entre sua obra e as de outros artistas, como Diego Velázquez, René Magritte e Orson Welles, para então repensar o que se entende pelo conceito de ―representação‖ nas artes, quais são seus limites, e como o próprio pensar artístico reflete (sobre) esse problema. / Paul Auster, a North-American writer born in 1945, has already published many novels, poems, and texts on art criticism. He is also a translator, scriptwriter and has directed films, such as Blue in the Face (1995). His work involves different arts, like literature, photography and cinema, approximating them inside the literary narrative. It is also in this space that the notion of ―author‖ is discussed, considering the names attributed to the narrator and the characters, for example. One of these names might be ―Paul Auster‖, but, instead of accepting this option, a blank space may be left, or the name could be denied. This way, when Auster mentions spaces, such as the one where the writer resides, that is, Brooklyn, it is always from a perspective of multiplicity and cultural difference which can‘t settle on one meaning or origin. May it be, then, in the autobiography or the biography, in the diary, the portrait or making use of elements from the documentary as a genre, his work makes fiction closer to its own ―truths‖, leaving aside the ―real‖ as a notion of something preexistent, and also taking the narration from the perspective of memory. This thesis establishes relations between Auster‘s works and the works of other artists, such as Diego Velázquez, René Magritte and Orson Welles, seeking to rethink what is understood by the concept of ―representation‖ in the arts, which are its limits, and how art can poetically reflect (on) this problem.

Paul Auster, um escritor norte-americano nascido em 1945, já publicou inúmeros romances, poemas e diversos textos críticos. É também tradutor, roteirista e já dirigiu filmes, como Sem Fôlego (1995). Seu trabalho integra as mais diferentes artes, como literatura, fotografia e cinema, aproximando-as dentro da própria narrativa literária. É ainda neste espaço que a figura do autor se problematiza, a partir dos nomes atribuídos a narrador e personagens, por exemplo. Um desses nomes pode ser ―Paul Auster-, mas, ao invés dele pode-se procurar deixar um espaço em branco, ou então negá-lo. Da mesma forma, quando fala de espaços, como aquele onde o escritor reside, o Brooklin, é sempre a partir de uma multiplicidade e de uma diferença cultural que não consegue fixar um único sentido ou origem. Seja, então, na autobiografia ou biografia, no diário, no retrato ou utilizando-se de elementos do documentário, sua obra aproxima a ficção de suas próprias ―verdades‖, deixando de lado o ―real preexistente‖ como ponto de partida, e baseando-se também na narração a partir da memória. Neste trabalho, esboçam-se aproximações entre sua obra e as de outros artistas, como Diego Velázquez, René Magritte e Orson Welles, para então repensar o que se entende pelo conceito de ―representação‖ nas artes, quais são seus limites, e como o próprio pensar artístico reflete (sobre) esse problema. / Paul Auster, a North-American writer born in 1945, has already published many novels, poems, and texts on art criticism. He is also a translator, scriptwriter and has directed films, such as Blue in the Face (1995). His work involves different arts, like literature, photography and cinema, approximating them inside the literary narrative. It is also in this space that the notion of ―author‖ is discussed, considering the names attributed to the narrator and the characters, for example. One of these names might be ―Paul Auster‖, but, instead of accepting this option, a blank space may be left, or the name could be denied. This way, when Auster mentions spaces, such as the one where the writer resides, that is, Brooklyn, it is always from a perspective of multiplicity and cultural difference which can‘t settle on one meaning or origin. May it be, then, in the autobiography or the biography, in the diary, the portrait or making use of elements from the documentary as a genre, his work makes fiction closer to its own ―truths‖, leaving aside the ―real‖ as a notion of something preexistent, and also taking the narration from the perspective of memory. This thesis establishes relations between Auster‘s works and the works of other artists, such as Diego Velázquez, René Magritte and Orson Welles, seeking to rethink what is understood by the concept of ―representation‖ in the arts, which are its limits, and how art can poetically reflect (on) this problem.

Paul Auster, um escritor norte-americano nascido em 1945, já publicou inúmeros romances, poemas e diversos textos críticos. É também tradutor, roteirista e já dirigiu filmes, como Sem Fôlego (1995). Seu trabalho integra as mais diferentes artes, como literatura, fotografia e cinema, aproximando-as dentro da própria narrativa literária. É ainda neste espaço que a figura do autor se problematiza, a partir dos nomes atribuídos a narrador e personagens, por exemplo. Um desses nomes pode ser ―Paul Auster-, mas, ao invés dele pode-se procurar deixar um espaço em branco, ou então negá-lo. Da mesma forma, quando fala de espaços, como aquele onde o escritor reside, o Brooklin, é sempre a partir de uma multiplicidade e de uma diferença cultural que não consegue fixar um único sentido ou origem. Seja, então, na autobiografia ou biografia, no diário, no retrato ou utilizando-se de elementos do documentário, sua obra aproxima a ficção de suas próprias ―verdades‖, deixando de lado o ―real preexistente‖ como ponto de partida, e baseando-se também na narração a partir da memória. Neste trabalho, esboçam-se aproximações entre sua obra e as de outros artistas, como Diego Velázquez, René Magritte e Orson Welles, para então repensar o que se entende pelo conceito de ―representação‖ nas artes, quais são seus limites, e como o próprio pensar artístico reflete (sobre) esse problema. / Paul Auster, a North-American writer born in 1945, has already published many novels, poems, and texts on art criticism. He is also a translator, scriptwriter and has directed films, such as Blue in the Face (1995). His work involves different arts, like literature, photography and cinema, approximating them inside the literary narrative. It is also in this space that the notion of ―author‖ is discussed, considering the names attributed to the narrator and the characters, for example. One of these names might be ―Paul Auster‖, but, instead of accepting this option, a blank space may be left, or the name could be denied. This way, when Auster mentions spaces, such as the one where the writer resides, that is, Brooklyn, it is always from a perspective of multiplicity and cultural difference which can‘t settle on one meaning or origin. May it be, then, in the autobiography or the biography, in the diary, the portrait or making use of elements from the documentary as a genre, his work makes fiction closer to its own ―truths‖, leaving aside the ―real‖ as a notion of something preexistent, and also taking the narration from the perspective of memory. This thesis establishes relations between Auster‘s works and the works of other artists, such as Diego Velázquez, René Magritte and Orson Welles, seeking to rethink what is understood by the concept of ―representation‖ in the arts, which are its limits, and how art can poetically reflect (on) this problem.

Paul Auster is regarded by some as an important novelist. He has, in a relatively short space of time, produced an intriguing body of work, which has attracted comparatively little critical attention. This study is based on the premise that Auster's art is the record of an entertaining, intelligent and utterly serious engagement with the possibilities of conceiving of the identity of an individual subject in the contemporary, late-twentieth century moment. This study, focussing on Auster's novels, but also considering selected poetry and critical prose, explores the representation of identity in his work. The short Foreword introduces Paul Auster and sketches in outline the concerns of the study. Chapter One explores the manner in which Auster's early (anti-),detective' fiction develops a concern with identity. It is suggested that Squeeze Play, Auster's pseudonymous 'hard-boiled' detective thriller, provided the author with a testing ground for his subsequent appropriation and subversion of the detective genre in The New York Trilogy. Through a close consideration of City of Glass, and an examination of elements in Ghosts, it is shown how the loss of the traditional detective's immunity, and the problematising of strategies which had previously guaranteed him access to interpretive and narrative closure, precipitates a collapse which initiates an interrogation of the nature and construction of ideas about individual identity. Chapter Two develops a suggestion that City of Glass was written in response to particular emotional concerns of the author by turning to an examination of the memoir-novel, The Invention of Solitude. This chapter examines the extent to which Auster's Jewishness is implicated in his understanding of identity, and in the techniques with which he expresses his concerns. It is argued that Auster's engagement with texts and memories important to him in order to find a voice adequate to the task which he assumes in The Invention of Solitude, reveals the ethical imperative of recognizing and accepting a relationship to alterity. The influence on Auster of certain Jewish writers, like Edmond Jabes, is considered in the course of the chapter. The third chapter addresses the issue of the description of Auster's work as postmodernist, in the light of what the study has presented as Auster's ethical engagement with alterity. Critical responses to Auster's texts are canvassed, before it is suggested that aspects of the ethical phenomenology of Emmanuel Levinas may be useful in considering these important issues in Auster's oeuvre. Chapter Four returns to a consideration of The New York Trilogy, examining its final part, The Locked Room, before discussing In the Country of Last Things and Moon Palace. All three novels are narrated by first-person narrators who, in very different situations, come (consciously and unconsciously) to negotiate their own identities in relation either to other people or to adverse circumstances. The chapter thus considers the manner in which these texts figure Auster's concern with relationships between individuals and otherness. Chapter Five seeks, as a means of concluding the study, to consider aspects of Auster's presentation of the manner in which identity is connected to perception, and to an engagement with that which is other than the self This chapter focuses on Auster's figuration of necessary responses to the otherness of the objective world and to chance as a radical alterity. Beginning with a consideration of an early essay, the chapter explores relevant aspects of Moon Palace, The Music of Chance, Leviathan and Mr Vertigo, considers elements in Auster's poetry, and demonstrates the usefulness of exploring the influence on his work of the 'objectivist' poets and aspects of Dada and Surrealist poetics. The seemingly punitive severity of the fates of some of Auster's protagonists is shown ultimately to be positive, and (potentially) redemptive, reflecting Auster's profoundly ethical conception of the responsibilities and possibilities of selfhood.

Cette thèse explore la genèse de l’écriture mémorielle dans l’œuvre de Paul Auster à travers un mouvement de reconstruction de la mémoire collective et personnelle. Partant de l’hypothèse que le mécanisme de la reconstruction de la mémoire collective et de la mémoire individuelle est le résultat de l’expansion et de la réduction de l’espace mémoriel, nous analysons dans une démarche croisée entre un premier mouvement dirigé vers l’extérieur et regroupant le collectif et un deuxième vers l’intérieur et regroupant le personnel. En se référant à la dialectique mémorielle paradoxale personnel/collectif, intérieur/extérieur, ouvert/enfermé, nous avons tenté de définir comment le discours mémoriel, transcendant la simple notion de l’individualité unique, s’associe à un espace collectif par une interaction sans cesse établie entre le « moi » et l’« autre ». Notre recherche invite à vérifier si l’expansion de l’espace mémoriel, par le texte parallèle, l’intertextualité et les multiples renvois métatextuels à une tradition littéraire antérieure américaine et européenne, à un vaste registre de genres (journal intime, littérature de voyage et tradition littéraire judaïque) permet de construire une mémoire collective. Le passage du collectif à l’individuel et la reconstruction de la mémoire personnelle s’apparente à l’exploration de l’espace intérieur du sujet favorisé par la réminiscence des souvenirs d’enfance et la quête filiale, des origines, de l’engendrement, de la transmission générationnelle et des substituts paternels. / This thesis questions the genesis of memory writing in the work of Paul Auster following a movement of reconstruction of collective and personal memory. On the basis of the assumption that the mechanism of the reconstruction of collective memory and individual memory is the result of the expansion and the reduction of memory space, we examine the crossing between a first movement directed towards the outside and gathering together the collective and a second one directed towards the interior and gathering together the personal. While referring to the paradoxical memory dialectics of personal/collective, interior/external, opening/seclusion, we tried to define how the memory speech, transcending the simple notion of isolated individuality, joins a collective space through a constant interaction established between the “self” and the “other”. Our research prompts us to check if the expansion of memory space, through the parallel text, intertextuality and the multiple metatextual references to the American and European former literary tradition, and to a vast register of literary genre (diary, travel literature and Judaic literary tradition) makes it possible to reconstruct a collective memory. The movement from the collective to the individual and the reconstruction of personal memory are connected with the exploration of the individual’s interior space supported by the reminiscence of childhood memories and filiation, the search for origins, fathering, generational transmission and surrogate fathers.

Les romans de Powers, Auster et Wideman sont travaillés par l’image et hantés par l’histoire. Au fil des pages, photographes, peintres, spectateurs visionnaires ou témoins aveugles signifient la toute-puissance d’une image qui, bien souvent, scelle la rencontre du regard et du passé. L’entrée dans l’image est aussi entrée dans l’histoire événementielle, et l’histoire quant à elle ne se donne à voir que sous forme d’image, photographique, picturale ou langagière. Cependant, l’image, qu’elle soit littérale ou littéraire, oppose une temporalité propre au temps de l’histoire : conjonction précaire du passé et du présent, simultanéité de temporalités disjointes, l’image, par son hétérogénéité même, disloque le cours de l’histoire. Dans les six romans de Powers, Auster et Wideman qui constituent le corpus de cette thèse, l’image apparaît alors comme le lieu de la conversion du temps chronologique en temps imaginaire ; par le truchement de l’image, le temps des horloges est suspendu tandis qu’afflue celui de la fiction. En reconfigurant le temps, l’image politise l’écriture des trois écrivains : parce qu’elle est en excès de tout discours historiciste, elle fait exploser les mythes fondateurs de l’Amérique et les postulats d’une histoire orientée. Elle démonte le discours du progrès chez Powers, brouille le code des couleurs chez Wideman, et vide le symbole de sa force consensuelle chez Auster. Elle ouvre un temps convulsif à l’intérieur du temps chronologique, et engage, par sa forme même, le regard qui se pose sur elle. Parce qu’elle est force explosive et fictionnante, l’image engendre alors une communauté qui ne communie plus autour de mythes et de symboles, mais s’éprouve en tant que fiction ; l’image apparaît ainsi comme une image « en reste », un résidu et une réserve qui désœuvre la communauté, défait toute clôture narrative et totalité organique, et réinvente les imaginaires du commun. / Auster’s, Power’s and Wideman’s novels are wrought by images and haunted by history. Page after page, photographers, painters, visionary onlookers, or blind witnesses testify to the might of images that force the gaze to confront the past. Entering an image also means entering history and history, in its turn, reveals itself under the form of photographic, pictorial, or verbal images. However, the image, whether literal or literary, pits its own temporality against the time of history : a tenuous conjunction of past and present, a simultaneous combination of disconnected temporalities, the image, by its very heterogeneity, disrupts the flow of history. In the six novels by Paul Auster, Richard Powers, and John Edgar Wideman that make up the corpus of this dissertation, the image then is the crux where chronological time is converted into imaginary time; through the image, clockset time is suspended while the time of fiction flows in. By rearranging time, the image politicizes the writings of these three authors: because it exceeds historicist and positivist discourses, the image blows apart the founding myths of America and the premises of a biased history. In Powers’s novels, it debunks the discourse of progress, in Wideman’s it blurs the code of colours , and drains the symbol of its consensual strength in Auster’s. The image opens up a convulsive time within chronological time and by its sheer form, commits the gaze that rests on it. Because of its explosive and fictional strength, the image begets a community that no longer communes around myths and symbols but experiences itself as fictional ; a lingering image, a remnant and a supply of meaning, it makes the community inoperative, as it undermines narrative closure and ruins any notion of an organic whole, thus crafting new forms of poetic commonality.

Les trois oeuvres de notre corpus déclinent les données d'un vivre-ensemble tissé de solitude, d’une existence qui est coexistence. La solitude affecte des personnages qui constituent les témoins de l'humaine condition. L’oubli qui les hante est également solitude. Dès lors, la mémoire constitue l’antidote communautaire à une amnésie menaçante, et l’intertexte permet d’unir les solitudes par la matérialisation d'une communauté humaine aux prises avec l’altérité du réel. Cette communauté s'exprime de manière privilégiée dans ces trois récits qui donnent libre cours aux tensions et contradictions d'un réel toujours étranger à l'homme. Murakami, Auster et Quignard reflètent cette solitude communautaire dans des récits ouverts au dèmos qui accueillent cette altérité à laquelle le sacré et les mythes donnent voix. Chez les trois auteurs, c’est le problème de l'absolument autre et de sa traduction mythique qui permet de comprendre ce qui unit les hommes, mais aussi ce qui en eux – et dans le réel –, résiste à la socialité. Ce problème est donc éminemment communautaire. Présente dans les trois ouvrages, la musique, expression du génie humain, est également solitude. Elle traduit dans les oeuvres une présence/absence du souvenir, donne voix à l’indicible, renvoie à une moralité infinie, ou reste liée à l’animalité. Quant à la présence de l’auteur ou du narrateur dans les textes, le lecteur est confronté à trois manières différentes de donner voix à la communauté humaine, que ce soit par le deuil du lyrisme auctorial, en dotant au contraire sa voix d'une forte expressivité, ou à travers une voix narrative qui gagne en puissance au fil de l'ouvrage, illustrant ainsi l'engagement graduel du personnage dans le texte. La dimension historique, mémorielle et politique des communautés représentées, l’effort vers l’être-pour, qui constitue à la fois une théorisation du partage du sensible et une forme non militante de l’engagement personnel et collectif, sont également analysés dans ces trois oeuvres, qui mettent en évidence l’impossibilité d’une solitude non peuplée. / The three novels under scrutiny confront the very fact of existence as coexistence; they express solitude, considered as an unquestionable fact of life. Solitude affects characters who represent all mankind. The oblivion which haunts the protagonists is also an expression of solitude. Memory then becomes the common antidote to an impending amnesia, and intertextuality provides a way to bring solitudes together in a human community confronted to the strangeness of reality. Giving a voice to human community is the aim of these three contemporary novels, which express the tensions and contradictions of a reality filled with an undeniable otherness. Murakami, Auster and Quignard reflect on this common solitude in narratives that are open to that very strangeness, which is conveyed by mythology and the presence of sacred people or objects in the novels. For the three writers, it is the question of otherness and its mythical transcription that allows to understand what brings men together, and the things which, within people and reality, resist to socializing. Therefore, otherness must be considered as an eminently communal element in the novels. Music, an expression of human genius, is also a product of solitude. It expresses the presence/absence of things past, the unspeakable, refers to the infinity of morality, or else remains linked with animality. The reader is confronted to three different ways of expressing human community in the narratives, whether by accepting to give up one's lyricism, or on the contrary by using a very expressive style, or else by allowing the narrative voice to gather momentum throughout the text, to match the gradual social commitment of the protagonist. Therefore music, memory, the historical and political dimension of the depicted communities, the efforts of the characters towards involvement, a non-militant form of commitment, emphasize the fact that solitude, in these novels, is essentially communal.