Auster vs. Eggers: What is Postmodernism?

This is the final I wrote for "Modern Literary Criticism and Theory" this past Spring. Though I loathed most of the subject material for the class, the professor was amazing and allowed me to write my final on basically whatever I wanted. You may notice some structural flaws and unfinished thoughts, but I've chosen not to edit them out because this is how I turned in this paper, and I still got an A. That's postmodern, you know.

[Primary texts: "The Locked Room", the New York Trilogy, Paul Auster & A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, Dave Eggers; Secondary text: The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism]

Self-Reflexive Fiction as a Symptom of Postmodernism

"No one wants to be part of a fiction, and even less so if that fiction is real.”

Paul Auster, “the Locked Room,” the New York Trilogy

The question "Is this a postmodern text?" cannot be answered until one has answered the question, "What is a postmodern text?" Postmodernism is a problematic category because it defies categorization. It is more than just what came after modernism, but it is still a response to modernism. In the head notes to Lyotard's essay "Defining Postmodernism" the editor addresses what Lyotard saw as some of the characteristics of postmodern art:

Complexity, he insists, cannot be sidestepped by simple visions of right and wrong or simple models of all-encompassing systems. And he wants an art that is attentive to complexity, that grapples with the multiple meanings of our past and the plural realities of our present (1611).

It would seem that in this interpretation of Lyotard, he believes art in general, and postmodern art in particular, should attempt to portray the complexities of reality, including the role of the past in creating present realities. To complicate the question, we can further ask, how does self-referential fiction, by blurring the line between fiction and reality, distort the very relationship between the past and the present that Lyotard was concerned with? Likewise, how does it change the relationship between the author and this work, and the author and his reader? These are questions drawn from Foucault’s concerns in “What is an Author?” In both Paul Auster's "The Locked Room" and Dave Egger’s A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius (AHWOSG) there is a striking recurrence of self-referentiality, which creates another dimension to the question that must be addressed. To begin to formulate an answer, one must first locate specific instances in the texts in which all these relationships are displayed, and how they illustrate what Foucault called the “author-function”. One example from “the Locked Room” is the story the narrator tells of working as a census taker in Harlem. Another is the epiphany the narrator has in the cottage in Southern France as well as his encounter with the young Peter Stillman in Paris. All of these moments serve to illustrate Auster's fascination with blurring the lines between truth and fiction, interior and exterior realities, and the past and the present. As for Eggers, he employs a self-reflexive dialogic device that allows for him to subtly yet noticeably break character in order to have a conversation with himself, to the effect of foregrounding his self-consciousness as a writer recreating his own past.

Auster’s narrator has a history of making people up, so should we believe him when he says Fanshawe, the object of his obsession is a real person? The answer is neither yes nor no. The point is that it doesn't matter. All that matters is what the narrator needs him to be. He admits this on page 346: "

The entire story comes down to what happened in the end, and without that end inside me now, I could not have started this book. The same holds for the two books that come before it, City of Glass and Ghosts. These three stories are finally the same story, but each one represent a different stage in my awareness of what it is about. I don't claim to have solved any problems. I am merely suggesting that a moment came when it no longer frightened me to look at what had happened. If words followed, it was only because I had no choice but to accept them, to take them upon myself and go where they wanted me to go. But that does not necessarily make the words important. I have bene struggling to say goodbye to something for a long time now, and this struggle is all that really matters. The story is not in the words; it's in the struggle."

This passage is no longer the narrator speaking as a fictional character in a made up story about a sensational writer and his childhood friend. This passage is Paul Auster speaking directly to the reader, confessing his ultimate reason for writing the Trilogy. This is surprisingly similar to various moments in AHWOSG in which Eggers, employing an interview dialogue as a device to converse with his self, reveals his intentions in writing the novel and portraying himself and others as he does. Auster's story is indeed fiction, but it is a lie that conceals a deep truth. Alternately, AHWOSG is presented as fictionalized truth rather than truthful fiction, so the lies are harder to discern though they are no less important than in “the Locked Room”. The bottom line for both is that it doesn't matter what truth is, and as a result the reader comes to recognize her own inner struggle with truth. By defying the boundary between reality and fiction, Auster creates a mystery that takes the reader into the darkest hidden places of her own secret past, bridging the gap between the confessor and the confidant. The narrator’s story becomes a metaphor for anyone who has struggled with the line between fantasy and fact, memory and identity, self and other.

[Relationship of fiction to reality:

“As opposed to the story writer, I was offering my creations directly to the real world, and therefore it seemed possible to me that they could affect this real world in a real way, that they could eventually become a part of the real itself. No writer could ask for more than that" (295). Though this is written by Auster, it very well could have been written by Eggers.

Relationship of author to his work, blurring of line between author and narrator:

“Fanshawe's power had to be broken, not submitted to. The point was to prove to him that I no longer cared--that was the crux of it: to treat him as a dead man, even though he was alive. But before I proved this to Fanshawe, I had to prove it to myself..." (317). It is difficult to draw the line between the narrator and Fanshawe.]

The epiphany in the cottage is the most pivotal scene in Auster's entire novel. The process of self-realization is akin to the writing process. The epiphany is that Fanshawe is merely a figment of the writer’s imagination. The novel operates both on the level of realistic fiction and fictional reality. The story is true, but the events are not.

Fanshawe was there, and no matter how hard I tried not to think about him, I couldn't escape. This was unexpected, galling. Now that I had stopped looking for him, he was more present than ever. The whole process had been reversed. After all these months of trying to find him, I felt as though I was the one who had been found. Instead of looking for Fanshawe, I had actually been running away from him (344).

The novel is thick with double-meaning. Reading it, one feels she is reading the story of her life. The same can be said of Eggers. However, Eggers, instead of creating an entirely fictional persona, uses himself as a trope. Fanshawe is the fear of success that can keep the writer from achieving his full creative potential. He is a myth, a tragic muse that exists only within the blankness of the imagination. Finally, the narrator’s submission to the inevitability of Fanshawe is a moment of empowerment that gives him the power to use language to manipulate reality. That is part of the significance of his encounter with the young Peter Stillman in Paris. By embracing that Fanshawe’s identity is a lie the narrator/Auster/the reader is finally taking asserting the power of his own imagination. The man who was Fanshawe relinquished his identity. He is no one. Because of that he is anyone the narrator chooses.

My happiness was immeasurable. I exulted in the sheer falsity of my assertion, celebrating the new power I had jsut bestowed upon myself. I was the sublime alchemist whou could change the world at will. This man was Fanshawe because I said he was Fanshawe, and that was all there was to it (348).

Likewise, Eggers, as author, has sole control over who his characters become; ex: 272-3.

“[R]ather than delude myself with the thought that I could ever get rid of Fanshawe, I tried to prepare myself for it, tried to make myself ready for anything. It is the power of this anything, I believe, that has made the story so difficult to tell. For when anything can happened—that is the precise moment when words begin to fail. To the degree that Fanshawe became inevitable, that was the degree to which he was no longer there. I learned to accept this. I learned to live with him in the same way I lived with the thought of my own death. Fanshawe himself was not death—but he was like death, and he functioned as a trope for the death inside me” (356).

Auster hides behind Fanshawe while Eggers hides behind an ambiguous claim to pseudo-truth. Eggers, in fact, employs a dialogue with various characters to illustrate the inner conflict one faces when attempting to describe real events, while embracing his creative freedom to manipulate the reality of the text. In the end, the dreamlike world of memory wins out and he embraces the subjectivity of his personal experience. This is a spectacular manifestation of Lyotard’s concept of the goal of postmodern art. Eggers appropriates scenes from his own past in order to make a statement about writing to remember. This changes his relationship as an author both to his reader and his subjects. Whereas Eggers creates fictional versions of real individuals, Auster creates real entities from a false one because Fanshawe and the narrator are, in fact, real elements of Auster’s authorial identity. Arguably, Eggers and Auster are just two sides of the same authorial coin.

The trouble with writing about real people is that once you restrict a personality to the two-dimensional limits of the text it ceases to be a real person. Rather it is an imitation of certain qualities demonstrated by a real person and interpreted by the author, which is inevitably a fiction. In conversation with his friend John, Eggers acknowledges the resentment felt by real people when they find their personalities reduced to literary devices, as well as Eggers own challenge in deciding to what ends he should employ such devices. However, because he acknowledges the problematic nature of reconciling this conflict, he is in a way inviting the reader to make of it what she will, to recognize the questionable accuracy of memory and the validity of the individual’s subjective experience. Likewise, Eggers does not fail to acknowledge his own status within the text as an imitation of his real self. His literary persona is a paranoid, hyper self-conscious idealization. Yet the irony is that the two Eggers, the one of the past remembered and the one of the present authorial act, exist simultaneously in the narrow perspective of the past and the broader perspective of the present Eggers is reflecting on the self he once understood himself to be. He is no less and no more a fictional character than anyone else he portrays. His paranoid self-congratulations are a direct symptom of the painful resentment he harbors as a result of his parents' death and his consequent obligations to his brother.

“… This is such fucking garbage. I’m just supposed to lie there with my bruised shins and everything, while you get to play the dutiful friend, always there for me ooh, ooh, all responsible, while I’m lost and worthless. . . Listen, fuck it. I want no part of that. Find someone else to be symbolic of, you know, youth wasted or whatever.”

“Listen, John—”

“Who’s John?”

“You’re John.”

“I’m John?”

“Yeah. I changed your name.”

“Oh. Right. Now, why John again?”

“That’s my dad’s name.”

“Jesus! So I’m your dad, too. Fuck man, this is just too much. . .” (273).

Eggers is clearly struggling with his own egotism for wanting to tell what he considers to be a remarkable story while simultaneously feeling it to be a necessary part of the process of grief and healing. He longs for approval and recognition yet is wracked with paranoid fantasies and shame for the way he is living and raising his brother. He is drowning in a whirlpool fed by resentment towards obligation. Auster’s narrator feels similarly trapped by the inevitability of his past and the obligations which restrict his self-realization in the present. For both the writing process is a way to ultimately forgive themselves their flawed humanity. By the end of both stories, neither is asking for anything any longer from the reader or himself, but rather they are merely making their offerings to the past and moving onward with the present. For both, it is a matter of learning to recognize that you cannot live in the present until you have accepted the fixed nature of the past. This process is beautifully illustrated by Eggers introduction of the metaphor of the snake. By employing the structure of the interview, he allows himself the opportunity to slip out of character and directly address the reader, offering up a rationalization of why he is writing. Though there are many instances of this trope throughout the course of the novel, the metaphor of the snake seems among the most candid and straightforward of the bunch.

We feel that to reveal embarrassing or private things. . . we have given someone something, that, like a primitive person fearing that a photographer will steal his soul, we identify our secrets, our pasts and their blotches, with our identity, that revealing our habits or losses or deeds somehow makes one less oneself. But it’s just the opposite, more is more is more—more bleeding, more giving. These things, details, stories, whatever, are like the skin shed by snakes, who leave theirs for anyone to see. What does he care where it is, who sees it, this snake and his skin? He leaves it where he molts. Hours, days or months later, we come across a snake’s long-shed skin and we know something of the snake, we know that it’s of this approximate girth and that approximate length, but we know very little else. Do we know where the snake is now? What the snake is thinking now? No. By now the snake could be wearing fur; the snake could be selling pencils in Hanoi. The skin is no longer his, he wore it because it grew from him, but then it dried and slipped off and he and everyone could look at it (215-6).

Of course, Eggers is the snake and the skin he sheds is the novel. One cannot carry the past with him and remain in the present. That is the irony of his attempt to fully immerse himself in the moment with his brother, various women, and his absurd paranoid daydreams. However, he has displaced his grief and resentment and anger about the condition of his life with his grandiose plans of riding Might magazine to the top, by manipulating and mocking those people he claims to want to help. He cannot even see that he is a vindictive, self-loathing excuse for a person who cannot even see how he is failing himself, his friends, and his family. He is trapped raising his brother, who is the living image of all his inescapable failure. That is why again, employing dialogue as his trope, Eggers uses his brother as the displaced voice of his conscience with respect to his staging the death of a washed up child star.

“I mean, can it be any more gruesome and transparently symbolic, you people killing this contemporary of yours, a kid on TV when you were kids watching TV, this victim of your predatory mentality, who you claim is in on it all but who really has no idea of the scale of, the potential consequences of this thing—and certainly not your motivations, the bitterness simmering just below the surface, the desire to dirty him, humiliate him, reduce him to you, to below you—I mean, does he have any idea about the jokes made at his expense at the office? Could he ever imagine the malice involved? It’s disgusting. I mean, what is this? What does this mean? Where does anger like that come from?”

“It’s not anger.”

“Of course it is. . .” (316-7).

Again this is the ambiguous blurring together of Eggers two selves, similar to the merging together of Auster’s narrator with Fanshawe. Like Auster, Eggers is lost to himself and so searches for some fragment of self-realization in the people he knows.

In this way Auster’s image of the locked room, a metaphor for the mind, is relevant to both fictions. It is the hidden refuge of dark memories which elude us, but the voice of which still seeps through a keyhole into our consciousness. We might be frightened of them at first, but their threat of death provokes us to seek them out, to overcome that fear of death, to live with the possibility of it, to live acknowledging the past but not in it. This theme emerges again and again throughout AHWOSG. As hard as Eggers tries to blot out his past by living fully in the moment (both of reality and fantasy) with Toph, he must learn to live with its inevitability. It is perhaps ironic that the double of the meaning of the novel is his dealing with his not dealing with his past during the course of events which the novel spans. Like “the Locked Room” the events of the narrative are about the experiences building up to the creative act, not quite the process of the creative act itself. Both authors ask, what drives one to write, what kind of inevitable pain, first denied but then embraced makes the creative confession possible? It all seems quite repressed, but it is the reality of non-reality, that secret place beyond but within oneself where anything can happen precisely because we do not know what is in there. It is the fear of the hidden potential within all of us. We cannot see into the locked room and consequently we cannot describe it. It is an enigma. We are ultimately mysteries unto ourselves, and that is the point Auster relates. Even once we turn our gaze to the past, the person we were but have ceased to be, the memory becomes a fiction, a reconstruction of one’s identity that cannot be proven true or false, but serves to create the semblance of a coherent narrative of the past without which the present would not be possible, a useable past constructed to suit one’s present needs. But this fiction is insufficient, and that is why Eggers takes the liberties he does with the past. Whatever he wants to be true will be true because they are his experiences and he is the author, and thus the authority. Likewise, Auster turns the reader into the detective who is searching inside herself for what is true and what is false. She eventually realizes, guided as she is by the narrator, that truth is a subjective reality—the truth is whatever she decides to make of it. She takes from the story what is true for her, and leaves the rest. And that is ultimately what any author does. “We all want to be told stories, and we listen to them in the same way we did when we were young. We imagine the real story inside the words and to do this we substitute ourselves for the person in the story, pretending that we can understand him because we understand ourselves. This is a deception. We exist for ourselves, perhaps, and at times we even have a glimmer of who we are, but in the end we can never be sure, and as our lives go on, we become more and more opaque to ourselves, more and more aware of our own incoherence. No one can cross the boundary into another--for the simple reason that no one can gain access to himself" (292). That was the narrator’s ultimate goal, to get inside Fanshawe, to become him, to understand him and his motivations, but it was an impossible task. Finally in his struggle to understand the motivations of another, he came to recognize his own motives for trying to find Fanshawe, he found himself. He realized he could never find the man who was Fanshawe because that man no longer existed except as a memory. The only mind he could ever gain access to was his own. Two simple words of dialogue in the final chapter illustrate this metaphor.

‘Let me in,’ I said. ‘Open the door and let me in.’

‘I can’t do that,’ the voice answered. ‘We’ll have to talk like this’ (360).

Ultimately, the only reality we know is what we create for ourselves. We cannot know another's thoughts, only what they tell us of them, and vice versa. Each person’s mind is a locked room, and some of them have keys and some of them do not. Fanshawe always knew this, but the narrator had to struggle to realize this about himself, and that was the struggle to find Fanshawe. This is likewise Egger’s struggle, to wrestle himself free of his obligations to the past. It is the struggle to distill for oneself some idea of an essential self from the constantly evolving text of one’s experience.

This self-reflexive form relates to Foucault’s concept of the author-function with respect to initiating literary discourse. It is hardly possible to attribute to any one writer the introduction of self-reflexive fiction. However, if we consider postmodernism an evolving discursive tradition, it must then follow that self-reflexivity in fiction is at least an effective device in allowing for the incorporation new forms of narrative into the postmodern tradition. Likewise, self-reflexivity in the artistic process, according the Lyotard, is essentially postmodern because it embodies the way in which art should to some degree address the difficult relationship of each person to the inevitability of her past successes and failures.