Postmodern characteristics in Paul Auster’s fiction

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Azerbaijan University of Languages, Baku

Postmodern characteristics in Paul Auster's fiction

Huseynli Gila Mehdi

Paul Benjamin Auster is an author having a unique voice in modern American Literature. In many ways, he is one of the artisans determining the major development direction of modern literary and artistic process in public literary speculation. The most important feature of the author's oeuvre is connected with his skillfulness in many different types of art, as well as his attempt to combine all of them synthetically: he was a poet and writer, playwright and screenwriter and acted as an interpreter - tried his pen in all the areas mentioned above and gained some relevant achievement. Owing to his versatility, different artistic styles and techniques are observed in the works of Paul Auster and moreover, the universality of the author's individual style consequently led to the formation of a postmodernist writer. Due to this universality, the literary heritage of Paul Auster draws attention with his being able to portray the most urgent, the most radical and painful problems of American reality, as well as with the diversity and variability of his ways of expression.

P. Auster's attitude to the modernist tradition differs sharply from the perspective of the other postmodernist writers towards their predecessors. As a matter of fact, “everything in everything” that seeks to embody the whole world, forms the basis of relationship of the art towards the reality. Modernists had repudiated from this principle - defining the context of the art since Aristotle's period and had divided them into the components to emphasize “everything”; as it is well known, the aesthetics of the classical art requires not only the unity of the literary work but also, its component parts and only in cases of following this principle, the assumption of providing unity was made: all the elements of the artistic work with obeying inevitably to the centrifugal forces are able to provide the unification of the structures [4, p. 1]. Modernist artists do not deviate from presenting “the intact” in an odd mode and in this way they were trying to prove “the intact” being away from the maturity or organic unity. This feature demonstrates itself distinctly in the art exhibits that generated on the basis of Cubist, Dadaist or Surrealist concepts. Characters in a literary text exist through narration, but in postmodern literature, mimesis is toned down, and their narratives are often fragmented, contradictory and challenge the readers' ability to perceive the characters as personae. Having faced the necessity of analyzing the principles critically - as catching up with the modernist predecessors' heritage and with their embodiment of the principles of reality, P. Auster strives to gather the pieces of the literary “intact” in his creativity and uniting them under the laws of the post-modernist poetics. To carry out this difficult mission P. Auster considers “intertextuality” the most effective and efficient means in postmodern criticism, that is to say, for restoring the lost integrity the writer attempts to bring together the notions, which were created by the art throughout the history. However, it is also true that the author essentially does not use all the available resources at the same level; American writer treats warmly to the modernist sources, takes advantage of them directly and uses all relevant details. However, his appeal to the classical resources is alike in somehow in the mode of filtered through the modernist machine and presented in the edited version. Therefore, P. Auster's postmodernism in American literature is the modernism having been “modernized again” according to the postmodern principles; the modernism adapted to the requirements of the late 20th and early 21st century literary styles.

Obviously, the theorists of postmodernism justify all of them - literary and artistic concepts established in previous periods (such as romanticism, realism, modernism, popular literature and so on) and even various fields of human thought (as philosophy, sociology, political science, aesthetics, psychology or psychoanalysis, etc.) colorful, in terms of style of expression, but also semantically incompatible with each other, besides without changing the texts of the different facets (this is basically due to the refusal of any editing work of postmodernist poetics), speculating from the provisions of this theory the artists, in the process of consolidating their resources taken from various sources, do not seek their organic unity, refuse to misappropriate “the centrifugal” texts and express their opinions by means of post-modern irony. The researchers of postmodernism ascribe such an eclectic approach starting from the post-modernist text or the style of embodiment to the content of the literary work and explain this with the clarification of all the creative methods of postmodernism towards their means of expressions. Starting out from such colorful, different oriented principles of poetics P. Auster elucidates it with a lack of any hierarchical order within literary and artistic samples which are the manifestation of human life: the elements making up the reality of his thought are equally possible and have the same value. Auster experiments with form and narration of the novel, creating compound, multi-layered or polyphonic narrative structures with complex characters. Such novels reflect his special relation to reality - either by fictionizing it in an alternative way or by criticizing it and making it cruel or shocking. In terms of hybridity, the mixture of different narrative approaches, techniques and voices, and also of different genres can often be found in Auster`s novels [8, p. 3]. P. Auster, performing from the nonhierarchical assumption of Holland scientist named D. Fokkema repudiates from the purposeful choice of the linguistic and other narrative elements in his literary work. Therefore, it leads to the refusal of readers having interpretted the text according to any objective laws suggested by P. Auster. The principles of narrative fiction which P. Auster displays in his works, in most ways reflect fundamental provisions of postmodernism, in some cases are distinguished by their originality. P. Auster's novel “The New York Trilogy” with its being leading work of postmodernist aesthetics is more typical for the analysis of post-modernist poetics.

According to some experts American post-modernist writer P. Auster has written this novel on the basis of the motives and effect of Samuel Beckett's trilogy of the novels “Molloy”, “Malone Dies” and “The Unnamable”. Therefore, P. Auster's novel is not more than the reference to the trilogy of the Irish artist written in the first half of the last century, as well as the most influential postmodernist citation. P. Auster tries to misappropriate postmodernism both in shape and context of S. Beckett, who in his turn strives for taking possession of modernism.

P. Auster does not deviate from portraying the existing details of the different types of art in the novel of S. Beckett directly, he inflicts no formal or semantic changes, almost restating them at the level of plagiarism. Additionally, in the introduction of the modernist writer's novel, a nude man is depicted who is isolated from the entire world, sitting in an empty room and busy with constant writing. He was born to carry out one mission only: he has to write in a continuous manner. As with other types of art, in the art of fiction as well the author's essential duty is to embody human being as a physical and spiritual creature; just in this case, it is possible to portray him/her in all his/her complexity and contradictions as well as to reveal colorful manifestations of his/her nature. However, proceeding from the principles of modernist poetics, S. Beckett's “hero” is reduced to merely one feature - writing. That is to say, here the writing process is represented not as a symbol of contacting to the world or communicating but as a symbol of severing all ties and relations. Just like the protagonist of S. Beckett, the hero of P. Auster Daniel Quinn (from “The New York Trilogy”) also writes day and night. He is also busy with writing, but with literary writing. As the protagonist in Beckett's Molloy Quinn has lost his man image, all his fortune and was deprived of his apartment. Yet, both Beckett and Auster's speech or writing, words and letters are needed as a sign of the boundary (including social), as well as the opportunity to go over the border [1, para. 8]. The comparison of Irish and American artists' works discloses two poetic systems, including the difference between two narrative methods; in modernist writer's novel the hero is awarded according to the absurd nature of dreaming, though P. Auster's hero does not get any prize for his writings.

Since, the narration in the trilogy of S. Beckett awakes owing to the delusions or constant pronounced voices and words of the deprived of all human qualities, moribund character, and the hero of P. Auster complies with the principles of narrative - the concept of written speech that is adequate to the artistic expression of the postmodern way of thinking.

In this respect, when it is compared, the modernism of S. Beckett, the post-modernism of P. Auster take the same stance on the interpretation of human existence, i.e., in terms of the main ideas - both novels are quite close to each other. However, in terms of the embodiment of this idea, the writers utilized different artistic methods, which are quite opposite to each other. These peculiarities result in referring the modernist and postmodernist artists to two distinct narrative principles. In the art of literary and artistic expression the narration of Beckett on the one hand expresses the peak of the artistic expression style, on the other hand denotes the end, in future implies no point in having a perspective on development; actually, his “anti-narrative” literary style is characterized with the fragmentation and disintegration of the syntactic relationships as well as with the disappearance or the violation of cause-and-effect relationships.

Obviously, P. Auster repudiates from the extreme points of modernist style based on “the delirium” poetics by S. Beckett, transforms it into the comprehensible postmodernist narrative language and the reader is actively involved in the communication process, besides the writer widely uses traditional methods of the classical realism. Moreover, having mastered the poetics of modernism, but being post-modernist P. Auster principally rejects the adherence to truth and using all the poetical opportunities of post-modernist narration emphasizes this artificiality and tries to draw our attention. For instance, in this novel the writer utilizes one of the key elements of the postmodernist work and very skillfully practices basic designs implying that it is fake metafiction: the author of the novel is presented as a hero of the novel; to enter into dialogue with the author of the hero, hinting to him; to write another novel inside the novel or turning this reading to an event and so on [5, p. 268].

P. Auster expresses his artistic philosophy, principles and ideology just with the preliminary sentences of “New York Trilogy”: “It was a wrong number that started it, the telephone ringing three times in the dead of night, and the voice on the other end asking for someone he was not. Much later when he was able to think about the things that happened to him he would conclude that nothing was real except chance. But that was much later. In the beginning there was simply the event and its consequences. Whether it might have turned out differently, or whether it was all predetermined with the first word that came from the stranger's mouth, is not the question. The question is the story itself, and whether or not it means something is not for the story to tell” [3, p. 3].

Now in this introduction of “New York Trilogy” from the angle of vision set, a number of rooted problems of P. Auster's literary heritage find their incarnation. It is likely to cause the creation of chaos in the thinking style of narrator, the sayings of a man who got wrong with the address; thresholds are breached among the past, present, and future, the cause transmits into the result, and the result turns into the cause as well, on the one hand they are introduced as absolutely tiny items with having not of great importance, on the other hand, it is presented as the context of the events demolishing all thinking modes of the narrator.

The author depicts a method already used in modernist narration - a variety of events, and emphasizes the possibility of development in the opposite direction. Additionally, P. Auster states that the author has no responsibility for the flow of happenings in accordance with the principles of postmodernist poetics: unlike the divine status reflected in the classic realist fiction, the author in the post-modernist work is one of the ordinary players on the background of the story: this author does not have accurate information about the causes of the events and does not bear any responsibility in relation with the way in which the events will take place.

P. Auster in his story for understanding the reality especially the truth about human nature has practiced successfully the iceberg technic of one of the towering figures of the 20th century literature, Ernest Miller Hemingway. However, P. Auster has not utilized the iceberg technic of his great predecessor directly; the writer used the mechanism according to his post-modern philosophy just practiced it as the metacitation. Yet, it should be noted that, whether E. Hemingway's “iceberg” - the metaphorical expression reflecting the poetics of “implication”, including the top layer of the text is several times smaller than the inner part of the text, if between these layers there is an extremely intensive relations system and the layers are guided to clarify each other, in the narration of P. Auster, the relations between the two layers are extremely vulnerable, each layer actually exits on its own, semantically they are diffused and their artistic and aesthetic parameters, the events and objects of the reality are difficult to determine.

As can be seen, in his early career Paul Auster attempted to replicate the traditions of modernism; however, later formed a creative attitude to the artistic heritage of the world literature and was able to personalize it. Supposedly, having applied modern literary technics extensively, American artist was not entirely `enslaved' by those technics, moreover, endeavored to defeat the limitedness and indifference specific to modernism. Therefore, the author succeeded in embedding the postmodern fiction with the painful existential problems of the last two centuries and introduced a new fiction mode to literary theory. The author in his later works continued to rely on the postmodernist narrative principle and attempted to distinguish its major regulations.

References

postmodern novel literary

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