Alternative Americas Paul Auster

comparative american studies, Vol. 9 No. 1, March, 2011, 21–34

‘Another History’: Alternative Americas in Paul Auster’s Fiction Jesús Ángel González University of Cantabria, Spain

Even though Paul Auster’s work has been influenced by European writers, he is also a fundamentally American writer. His settings, many of his literary references, his characters and most of his themes are certainly American.

And so is his interest in American history and reality. Moon Palace (1989), for example, deals with the creation of the myth of the American Dream as the country extended its frontier westward. One of the ways for Auster to express his concerns is the creation of parallel fictions like ‘Kepler’s Blood’, a story-within-the-story which fictionally rewrites the origins of the US. Almost two decades later, Travels in the Scriptorium (2006) creates another Western American fiction by moving forward and describing a parallel nineteenth-century North America and a country called ‘the Confederation’.

Finally, in Man in the Dark (2008), Auster’s effort at the creation of alternative Americas reaches the twenty-first century by showing a country where the 2000 election has led to secession and war. This essay analyses the parallel worlds created by Auster to question American myths and archetypes, particularly as they relate to the origins of the myths behind the creation of the United States of America. keywords Auster, fiction, alternative history, American Dream, melting, myth, moon, film

In The Art of Hunger (1992) Paul Auster wrote: ‘in the strictest sense of the word, I consider myself a realist’ (Auster 1992: 269), a statement qualified later by Dennis Barone when, in his introduction to Beyond the Red Notebook, he said that Auster’s writing ‘is a unique and important synthesis of postmodern concerns, premodern questions, and a sufficient realism’ (Barone, 1995: 22, my emphasis). However, this realism comes into question when in Man in the Dark (2008) a character called Owen Brick wakes up one morning and discovers that he is in a parallel America, in which the 2000 election has led to secession and to the creation of the Independent States of America, now at war with the remaining United States. © W. S. Maney & Son Ltd 2011

DOI 10.1179/147757011X12983070064836

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And yet, as surprising as this may seem, this, as we will see, is not the first instance of Auster’s creation of alternative or parallel Americas. One could argue that every fiction — and particularly Auster’s fiction — is an alternative reality created by the author as a contrast to the actual world, but in this novel (as in previous works, like Moon Palace [1989] or Travels in the Scriptorium [2006]) Auster goes one step further to combine historical facts with historical fiction (like the outcome of the 2000 election) to create a fictional world presented as a parallel America. The terms alternative or alternate history, also known as allohistory, uchronia or counterfactual history, have been used by historians and critics (like Steven H. Silver, Gavriel D. Rosenfeld or Evelyn C. Leeper) to describe this type of novel where the consequences of real events and the underlying historical facts are shown by hypothesizing alternative worlds. A well-known example may be Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America (2004), where the author presents an alternative America in which Charles A. Lindbergh defeated Franklin Roosevelt in the 1940 presidential election. This counterfactual twist allows Roth to explore, among other things, the underlying anti-Semitism of American society in the ’30s and ’40s. Vladimir Nabokov’s Ada or Ardor or Michael Chabon’s The Yiddish Policemen’s Union are similar examples.

It is my contention that in these three novels Auster creates alternative Americas to question well-known American myths and archetypes, in particular as they relate to the origins of the myths in the creation of the country. As one character says: ‘there are many worlds, and they all run parallel to one another . . . Each world is the creation of a mind’ (Auster, 2008: 69). The purpose of this essay is to analyze the parallel worlds created by Auster’s mind in these novels in an attempt to show the ideological implications of these worlds and the novels where they appear.

Alternative origins: Kepler’s Blood We can find Auster’s first attempt at creating alternative Americas in Moon Palace, where one of the characters, Solomon Barber, writes a novel called Kepler’s Blood, ‘written in the sensational style of thirties pulp novels’ (Auster, 1989: 253), in an attempt to come to terms with his father’s disappearance before he was born.

In this pulp novel, an artist named John Kepler travels to the West in the 1870s and finds a group of Indians who call themselves ‘the Humans, the Folk’ or ‘The Ones Who Came from Far Away’. According to the legend, after a great drought on the moon, two survivors travelled to the earth on a cloud and settled in a forest (‘The Forest of First Things’) where they were helped by an Indian tribe (‘the Others’). They lived there peacefully until they were forced to move west by the arrival of the ‘Wild Men’, and this is where the story resembles more closely the actual history of America: But then the Wild Men came from the other side of the world, sailing onto the land one morning in their huge wooden boats. For a time the Bearded Ones seemed friendly, but then they marched into the Forest of First Things and cut down many trees. When the Humans and the Others asked them to stop, the Wild Men took out their thunderand-lightning sticks and killed them . . . The Bearded Men always professed friendliness at first, but inevitably they would start cutting down trees and killing the Humans, shouting about their god and their book and their indomitable strength. (Auster, 1989: 255–6)

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By paying attention to the Humans’ language, which sounds like an evolved variety of English, Kepler is able to advance an alternative theory about the real origin of the tribe: ‘perhaps faced with the threat of extinction, a band of early colonists might well have asked admittance into an Indian tribe to ensure their survival against the hostile forces of nature’ (Auster, 1989: 258).

While other critics have seen Moon Palace as a postmodern picaresque (Bernd Herzogenrath), a frontier novel (James Peacock) or ‘the cornerstone of a fictional enterprise which constantly echoes the concerns of the poet’ (Marc Chenétier), the role of Kepler’s Blood inside the novel as an alternative America has probably not been sufficiently stressed before. But in order to understand the significance of Kepler’s Blood in Moon Palace, first of all we have to remember that this narrative is part of a web of stories weaved by Auster in the novel. By interacting with the other fictional and non-fictional narratives in the book, it highlights similarities and differences and adds and receives meanings from them. The story that is re-written is obviously the story of the origin of America, but this takes place in a book which deals precisely with genealogy: on the one hand, the origins of characters who try to find their lost fathers (Marco, Solomon), and on the other the origins of America as created by myths like the American Dream or the American West.

The first interpretation of Kepler’s Blood comes from Solomon Barber’s son, Marco Stanley Fogg. He reads it from a psychological point of view, as a clue into Solomon Barber’s personality (‘the book is valuable to me as a psychological document’, says Marco [Auster, 1989: 262]). Solomon’s father (Effing) had disappeared from his life when he was a boy, and Marco reads the story as a way to get ‘an idea of the extent to which his father’s absence had affected his imagination’ (Auster, 1989: 253). But we shouldn’t forget that Marco is an orphan himself and that he is repeating this imaginative process when reading and interpreting his own lost father’s novel. In another example of the Chinese boxes games Auster is so fond of, Marco finds out about his father (Solomon) by reading this story about Solomon finding out about his father (Effing). This psychological interpretation is particularly obvious if we look at the rest of the story: after ‘turning native’, Kepler becomes the father of a new generation of ‘Humans’. His son (Kepler Jr) searches for and kills his father when he finds him. From here on, the novel starts a chain of revenges between the Indian and white sides of Kepler’s offspring which ends with fantastic transformations and a tale of regeneration. Solomon’s oedipal attempt to both find and kill the father (not so different from Marco’s when he accidentally pushes Solomon into his grave) is reinforced by the title itself, which relates the search for paternity to its physical origins. The book is then ‘a complex dance of guilt and desire’ (Auster, 1989: 263), an attempt by Solomon to come to terms with the disappearance of his own father.1 Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan uses Mieke Bal’s term ‘hypodiegetic stories’ for this type of narrative inside another story and considers that they may have three main functions: actional (to maintain or advance the action of the first narrative), explicative (to offer an explanation of the diegetic level) and thematic (to establish relations of analogy, similarity and contrast) (Rimmon-Kenan, 1993: 92). In the case of Kepler’s Blood, the psychological interpretation we have just described could have an explicative function: the story helps one of the characters (Marco) to understand his dead

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father better. However, the main function of the narrative is probably thematic: Auster uses Kepler’s Blood to underline the similarities between the different stories in the book and stress their common themes. The narrative is another story of selfdiscovery, resurrection and salvation — like Marco’s, Effing’s and Solomon’s — which takes place, like the other stories, in a mythical place: the West of the USA. Moon Palace creates a web of references to, or actual examples of, historical accounts, pictorial representations and fictional stories, all of which seem to be just well-meaning attempts to represent the West and its role in American history. Auster traces the historical origin of this myth by having Marco read to Effing the travel books which first helped to create it (from Raleigh to Cabeza de Vaca). However, Auster is not only dealing with the linguistic representation of the West in history, but also with its iconographic version and, accordingly, Effing tells Marco about the pictorial origin of the image of the West: painters like Thomas Cole, Thomas Moran or Ralph Albert Blakelock.

All these historical, factual representations are presented in the book side by side with fictional representations whose truth is frequently questioned, thereby extending a shadow of doubt about the validity of all these attempts to represent the reality of the West. First of all, the real paintings are accompanied by ‘fictional’ works painted

by Effing himself, of which there is no trace. And secondly, even the real paintings or photographs are just ill-fated attempts at portraying reality: ‘Pictures don’t tell you anything about it, Fogg. It’s all too massive to be painted or drawn . . . To see it is to make it vanish’ (Auster, 1989: 157).

If iconic representation, whether real or imaginary, seems to be impossible to attain, the same could be said about the linguistic representations of the West, whether in the form of factual ‘histories’ or fictional ‘stories’. The value of historical representations is undercut by the presence of several fictional narratives with which they are equated. First, we find history books written by Solomon Barber about the West, and then we follow the supposedly truthful narratives of other fictional characters travelling there, like Uncle Victor, Marco and Effing, whose story is so full of coincidences that it becomes suspect from beginning to end. Not only does Marco himself have serious doubts about its truthfulness, but the editor of a magazine to which he sends it after Effing’s death suggests that it should be submitted somewhere else ‘as a work of fiction’ (Auster, 1989: 231). If ‘real’ stories (in the diegetic world of the novel) are dismissed as fiction, the suggestion could be that ‘real’ history can probably not be trusted either.

Similarly, Kepler’s Blood is dismissed by Marco because ‘the story lurched from one improbability to the next, churning forward with the implacable momentum of a dream’ (Auster, 1989: 253), but in fact the story is not so different from Effing’s supposedly truthful account, a fact which therefore adds to the implausibility of all the stories in the book. In the end, what Auster accomplishes through this amalgam of fictional or non-fictional, but equally doubtful, stories about the West is to deconstruct the image of that space which is commonly assumed by readers, to show that it is just a myth, an artistic creation. After all, the American West, whether in popular westerns or in canonical literature, has always been a symbolic rather than physical place: the frontier, the place where civilization and wilderness meet, the place whose ‘physical aspects . . . and its social aspects [were conceived] as expressive

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emblems for the invention and development of a new national civilization’ (Fussell, 1965: 13). And Auster manages to convey these ideas through literary means, bringing into question epistemological certainties through a combination of doubtful fictional and non-fictional stories and representations.

Moon Palace is not the first novel to show Auster’s preoccupation with space as a literary category, but in Moon Palace Auster also manages to connect space with time, the American West with the American Dream, topos with history. The story narrated is as firmly rooted in space as it is in time: ‘It was the summer that men first walked on the moon’ (Auster, 1989: 1) begins the novel, connecting the writer’s experiences with those of his country, and establishing a historical subtext which permeates the entire novel. From then on the reader is allowed to establish parallels between the historical sources of the idea of the frontier and the more contemporary events: the conquest of the moon, the war in Vietnam, the student riots at Columbia, the atomic bomb trials in no other place than Utah . . . Thus, the juxtaposition of the myth of the old frontier together with contemporary events brings about an obvious critique of the concept itself. Auster is not only deconstructing the image of the West, but also showing another picture: that of the American Dream gone wrong, the contemporary American nightmare. Or, as Effing says, ‘Manifest Destiny! They mapped it out, they made pictures of it, they digested it into the great American profit machine’ (Auster, 1989: 149).

Tim Woods had related Moon Palace to The Music of Chance and Ghosts to stress their ‘meditation on the American ideology of progress and expansion, especially as it was figured and represented in the settlement of the American wilderness’ (Woods, 1995: 145). In this process of deconstruction of the myths attached to the ideology of progress, Kepler’s Blood occupies a central role, since it rewrites America’s history from the perspective of the defeated: the geographical spaces are slightly disguised by poetic names (‘The Forest of First Things’, ‘The Land in the Sky’, ‘The Land of Little Water’), whereas the constant flight of the tribe reminds the reader of the ‘Trail of Tears’ and other similar deportations; but it is the use of ‘Wild Men’ for white men as opposed to the ‘Humans’ for natives that most clearly rewrites history to focus the tale on the tragedy of the defeated.

Another crucial aspect of the narrative is that it highlights the importance of mixture in the origin of nations. We have seen how Kepler realizes that the Humans are the product of the mixture of Native Americans and Europeans and everything in Barber’s novel stresses the importance of melting and regeneration through new blood, an alternative to the traditional regeneration through violence typically associated with the West, as emphasized by Richard Slotkin. The Humans mix again with the Others in the Forest of New Things and, when they see themselves threatened by extinction, they decide to mingle again, this time with one of their enemies, John Kepler. By stressing the importance of mixture and melting in Kepler’s Blood,2 Auster is questioning the very concept of origins, which may very well be on the moon, as in the Humans’ legend. After so many instances of mixture, origins become blurred, lose importance and become a myth, which might be Auster’s way of rewriting another all-American myth attached to the American Dream: American Exceptionalism.

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The West also has a more symbolic role both in Kepler’s Blood and Moon Palace as a place of danger and resurrection for the main characters. We see men in crisis who descend into the abyss and almost perish, but the West leads them, on the one hand, to isolation and self-evaluation, and, on the other, to artistic and literary creation.3 The West is also associated, even identified, with the moon both in Kepler’s Blood and Moon Palace: not only are their landscapes surprisingly similar, they are also frontiers, symbolic spaces for the American conquest. Moreover, the moon is, in Auster’s words, ‘repetition, the cyclical nature of human experience. There are three stories in the book, and each one is finally the same. Each generation repeats the mistakes of the previous generation. So it’s also a critique of the notion of progress’ (Auster, 1995: 151). This critique of the notion of progress appears not only in these three stories, but also in a fourth narrative (Kepler’s Blood) and could also be extended to the West as the frontier and the role it has played in American history.

Aliki Varvogli remarks that ‘Fogg’s story does, indeed, record a journey of discovery; the young protagonist embarks on a quest for his own identity, as well as for that of his country, and the two quests are often hard to tell apart’ (Varvogli, 2001: 125); and Christian Seidl has stressed that both Marco’s story and Kepler’s Blood itself are ‘quests for identity’, which turn out to be ‘an exploration of genealogy’ (Seidl, 2005: 60). If American Exceptionalism is related to America’s origins in the frontier experience and the Puritan ideology of progress and expansion, Auster is reminding the reader that these origins are based on a fundamental injustice: the destruction of the world inhabited by American Indians, and that if we do not deconstruct the myths of the country’s origins to try to understand them better, the same kind of mistakes could be made in times of cold war in places like Vietnam.

The identification between the moon and the West can also be seen in the description of Moonlight, a painting by Blakelock which is at the centre of the novel and which links powerfully both topoi. Effing instructs Marco to look at this painting carefully, and the painting turns out to be fundamental for Marco’s initiation and transformation: he is able to see not only the moon and the landscape, but also its connection with American history and the West. Marco first notices that the sky and the earth have been painted in the same color when in the real world they are always somewhat different, and that fact leads him to think that this was the way for the artist to emphasize the harmony in which Native Americans were living until the white civilization with its violent ideas of progress and the misconception of the American Dream destroyed that primitive land: It struck me that Blakelock was painting an American idyll, the world the Indians had inhabited before the white men came to destroy it . . . this picture was meant to stand for everything we had lost. It was not a landscape, it was a memorial, a death song for a vanished world. (Auster, 1989: 139)

This ‘American idyll’ is actually very similar to the one depicted in Kepler’s Blood.

If Moonlight is, in Steven Weisenburger’s words, ‘an antirepresentational text’ (Weisenburger, 1995: 138), a text whose mimetic details are undone by the painter’s ‘lunatic disregard’ for realism, so is in many ways Solomon Barber’s science-fiction novel. Weisenburger’s sentences about Moonlight could also very well be applied to Kepler’s Blood: they both are

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a ‘memorial’ for a ‘vanished world’ of cross-cultural contacts between Native American and Eurocentric culture. What most troubles Marco (and, apparently, Auster) is the loss of a unique chance to claim a contingent but symbolically rich ground for innovative cultural contact, a chance seen as having been destroyed under the wheels of an obsessively lineal narrative of progress and destiny. (Weisenburger, 1995: 138)

If Moonlight’s role as key to understanding Moon Palace has already been stressed, it is probably time to highlight Kepler’s Blood’s similar function. By telling an alternative story of America’s origins from the perspective of the defeated, emphasizing the importance of mixture as regeneration, and by acting as mise-en-abyme of the diegetic story, it helps to present an alternative reading of myths like the American West, the American Dream or American Exceptionalism.

Alternative past: Travels in the Scriptorium Almost two decades after Moon Palace, Auster uses again an alternative version of American history in Travels in the Scriptorium (2006), a short novel where the protagonist (Mr Blank) reads a manuscript involving a parallel history of the country.

The origins are summarized in a paragraph that does little more than change the names of the European settlers (Iberia, Gaul, Albion . . .). The new country is called the Confederation, later explained by Mr Blank as ‘just another name for America.

Not the United States as we know it, but a country that has evolved in another way, that has another history’ (Auster, 2006: 81). Mr Blank identifies the times as the 1830s. ‘Much like America, but not identical. No black slaves . . . but more ethnic variety than here for that moment in history’ (Auster, 2006: 108). This ethnic and linguistic variety is shown in the names of the ‘provinces’ that have become part of the Confederation (Tierra Vieja, Tierra Blanca, Faux Lieu, Neue Welt) as well as in the unnamed capital.

These names clearly evoke narratives and myths of exploration and conquest in different languages, as well as ‘foundational’ myths for ‘discovered’ countries.

However, whereas Kepler’s Blood emphasizes the advantages to be found in mixture and blending, the scenario described in Travels in the Scriptorium is certainly darker.

Native Americans (now called ‘the Primitives’ or ‘the Djinns’, rather than ‘the Humans’) have been ‘slaughtered . . . enslaved . . . and herded together in the parched and barren territories beyond the western provinces’ (p. 67). Besides, the variety of origins and languages has not led to a more civilized country: there have been constant ethnic wars, like the ‘Faux Lieu Language Wars’ that led to massacre and exile.

The reader may gather that it was a war against the German-speaking minority in the French-speaking province of Faux Lieu (the narrator, Sigmund Graf, has a German name and he was forced to leave Faux Lieu in order to travel to Nachburg, in Neue Welt). We also learn that there was a movement against political fragmentation that led to the unification of the country. Even though the report’s writer is a Confederation fighter who presents political division as something negative, the reader receives enough clues to understand that the unification has been a bloody process which has left too many victims.

Another important aspect of this narrative is that it is presented as a ‘report’ written by a not completely reliable narrator: Graf is a spy, an agent of the Bureau

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of Internal Affairs, and he writes it at the request of Colonel De Vega as a way to exonerate himself of treason charges. He suspects that he has been betrayed both on a personal and political level by his friend and colleague Ernesto Land, and he lets the reader know that ‘these are treacherous times’ (Auster, 2006: 44). In fact, as we find out in the end, Graf and Land have been used by their superiors: Land’s real mission was to unleash a war that would help the consolidation of the new country: ‘what better way to unite the people than to invent a common enemy and start a war? . . . not so different from what we did to the Indians after the Civil War. Get the natives riled up and then slaughter them’ (Auster, 2006: 82). Graf’s real mission is to write the report that we have been reading: When confined in a prison and offered the chance to write, ‘he’s the person who’s going to get the war started’ (Auster, 2006: 114).

In order to understand the significance of this hypodiegetic narrative of alternative America we have to remember that it is presented inside a short novella where the protagonist (Mr Blank) is also confined in a room and forced to continue this story by his caretakers. After reading the first part of the story, Mr Blank must complete it as part of his ‘treatment’, an exercise in ‘imaginative reasoning’ that is meant to help him to recover his memory and his ability as a writer. The similarities between the diegetic and hypodiegetic story are unveiled as the story proceeds: Mr Blank has also sent his operatives (characters) into missions and has written reports (books) that he has partially forgotten. He is offered the chance to continue his story as part of the mentioned treatment, but he is also part of a plot and apparently betrayed by his captors (‘the monsters’ [Auster, 2006: 106]): at the beginning of Mr Blank’s story he had found some name labels attached to the objects in his room (in what might be interpreted as an effort to help him remember the names) but these labels are later manipulated in order to increase his linguistic confusion, and at a point in the story he suffers what he interprets as attempted poisoning.

The final ‘betrayal’ suffered by Mr Blank may also be suggested by the hypodiegetic narrative. If Graf becomes a character in the Confederation plot, Mr Blank ends up as a character in a novel apparently created by one of his operativecharacters: Mr Blank is one of us now, and . . . he will always be lost . . . Without him, we are nothing, but the paradox is that we, the figments of another mind, will outlive the mind that made us, for once we are thrown into the world, we continue to exist forever, and our stories go on being told, even after we are dead. (Auster, 2006: 129)

Of course, the real irony is that, like Graf himself (actually a character taking part in an invented story), Mr Blank has become a character and, as such, ‘he can never die, never disappear, never be anything but the words I am writing on his page’ (Auster, 2006: 130).

Apart from this internal function, the hypodiegetic story seems to have obvious external references as well. When Travels in the Scriptorium was published, it was received rather coldly by reviewers, among other reasons because it was considered a self-referential, indulgent, even onanistic book (Hayward, 2007: n.p.). Maybe this was the reason why Auster wanted to remind his readers that the book ‘resonates with what’s happening in America today’ (Lalor, 2006: n.p.). The connection with

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American myths and the critique of American past and present history seems to be quite straightforward: the creation of a common enemy as an excuse for a ‘phony’ war can be related to real nineteenth-century wars with the Native Americans, Mexico or Spain, but also to the contemporary Iraqi or Afghan wars. If Kepler’s Blood acted as a reminder of the relationship between the foundational myths of the country and American foreign policy in the late ’60s, the manuscript found by Mr Blank now connects these foundational myths with the wars against terror in the twenty-first century.

Besides, Mr Blank is told that the first part of the story was written by John Trause, a character from Oracle Night, who in that 2004 novel describes the origins of this intradiegetic story: an early version called ‘The Empire of Bones’, described

by Trause as a ‘political parable’ about the McCarthy period. Apparently, Auster decided to rescue this early version a few years later, although the political references seem to change from the Cold War and communism to the war on terror, Islamism and Homeland Security policies. Butler and Gurr have emphasized the ‘references to cells, detention and abductions by night’ which ‘make it hard not to think of contemporary America, the “war on terror”, and prison camps in Guantanamo, Afghanistan, Iraq and elsewhere’ (Butler & Gurr, 2008: 198). Some of these references appear in Graf’s report (he is imprisoned in a cell with a ‘dirt floor’, not ‘part of the military stockade or the territorial house of detention’, with the ‘desert begin[ning] just outside my window’, where Graf receives ‘numerous beatings’ [Auster, 2006: 8–9]), whereas others appear in Mr Blank’s narrative (‘perhaps he’s no longer in America . . . abducted in the dead of night by secret agents working for a foreign power’ [Auster, 2006: 11]).

Another reference to contemporary America and the war on terror may be found in the presentation of all the stories in the text as ‘reports’ whose truth is at the same time emphasized and questioned. Mr Blank’s diegetic story of confinement is presented as the result of the recording of microphones and a camera, clicking silently ‘once every second’ (Auster, 2006: 1), but at the same time the unnamed narrator is able to present Mr Blank’s thoughts without further explanation, thus bringing into question the alleged objectivity of the report. The reference to other contemporary ‘reports’ that have also been used as an excuse for wars (like the ones proving the existence of weapons of mass destruction) has also been emphasized by Butler and Gurr: ‘In a text riddled, as we have seen, with other allusions to contemporary America and the “war on terror”, telling references to misleading “intelligence reports” are complemented by an obtrusively self-reflexive undermining of the genre of report and its alleged facticity’ (Butler & Gurr, 2008: 199).

Alternative present: Man in the Dark Auster’s revision of American myths and their present consequences continues in Man in the Dark (2008), which is in more than one way a re-writing of Travels in the Scriptorium, to the point that Auster himself has talked about these two novels as a ‘diptych’, two short works that should be read together (Segundo, 2008: n.p.). We can find common themes and structure as well as a similar protagonist: an old man (now called August Brill, although at a point in the story some characters speculate

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that his name could be Blank) creating imaginary worlds to try to find a cure for his physical and psychological decline.

Instead of a protagonist like Sigmund Graf, we meet Owen Brick, a magician who finds himself in a parallel world (in April 2007) where the twin towers still stand, yet which is at war — not with Iraq but with itself. After the contested 2000 election, New York City has seceded from the country, to be followed by 15 other liberal states. Unfortunately, this secession has triggered a civil war against the ‘Federals’ led by George W. Bush. The cruelty of the conflict is shown brutally in a dystopia with reminiscences of In the Country of Last Things: it is ‘an imaginary war on home ground. America cracking apart, the noble experiment finally dead’ (Auster, 2008: 49).

This narrative can first be seen, like Sigmund Graf’s report, as a political parable with an independent, external meaning. First of all, the story of alternate reality criticizes the outcome of the contested 2000 election which, for Auster, was an act of legal robbery that has forced the whole country (and the rest of the world) to live in a parallel reality: ‘it was a travesty of justice . . . a coup by legal and political means.

The reality is that Al Gore was elected. Which means we’re living in an alternate universe, an alternate reality. Like Owen Brick. In the real world, there would be no war in Iraq, no torture at Abu Ghraib, and possibly — just possibly — no 9/11’ (Amidon, 2008: n.p.). The civil war is also an allegory of a deeply divided country, a country where, as Auster has also expressed in different interviews, there is no common language between liberals and religious fanatics. It is also a reminder of the war on terror that the country has been fighting for several years: ‘America’s at war all right, we’re just not fighting it here. Not yet, anyway’ (Auster, 2008: 111). Besides, it is a deep critique of the logic of war and violence, which becomes all the more powerful because it is brought to home ground, like the 1967 Newark race riots that August mentions as ‘his war’ and that Auster also lived through. The parable then becomes a warning: the American people may feel safe because the current war is not fought on home ground, but racial or political division can bring about a civil war as cruel and tragic as all the wars mentioned in the text. As August says: ‘The worst possibilities of the imagination are the country you live in’ (Auster, 2008: 82).

But in order to analyse the full significance of this hypodiegetic story of an alternative America, once again we have to consider it in the context of the main diegesis, which basically deals with the life of August and his family. August is an old man (72), a former book critic who, physically handicapped by a car accident and a recent widower, reviews his life in the company of his daughter and granddaughter, two women who are also trying to recover from their own personal tragedies: ‘It’s a house of grieving, wounded souls’ (Auster, 2008: 71). His daughter Miriam has been abandoned by her husband, and his granddaughter, Katya, had broken up with her boyfriend, Titus, before he went to Iraq only to be cruelly murdered. Now Katya feels guilty for his death: ‘He died because of me’ (Auster, 2008: 164). In the final scenes of the book we learn the two facts the whole story has been building up to. First of all, we learn the truth about August’s relationship with his recently deceased wife Sonia. He had cheated on her and then abandoned Sonia for a younger woman and, although they got back together after nine years, he hasn’t forgiven himself for that betrayal: ‘there’s something wrong with me, a flaw in the mechanism’ (Auster, 2008:

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153). And secondly, we discover the details about Titus’s murder (he was decapitated in front of a camera, after which his eyes were stabbed out, ‘the disaster I’ve been struggling to avoid all night’ [Auster, 2008: 168]) and Titus’s immature reasons for going to Iraq, because he wanted to be a writer and he felt he had had no interesting experiences.

If we compare the way the hypodiegetic narrative interacts with the main story in Travels, we can find a significant difference: the narrative in Man in the Dark does not interact on equal terms with the main diegesis but is a psychological clue into the author’s obsessions. In other words, we can interpret the hypodiegetic story as a result of August’s past and present situation and find out about his emotional state through the story he creates. In Rimmon-Kenan’s terms, the function of the narrative is explicative, rather than thematic, since it offers an explanation of the diegetic level.

Another important difference with Travels is that here the narrative of an alternative America is complemented by four other hypodiegetic narratives. These stories are summaries of scenes from four classical black-and-white films and they interact with Owen Brick’s story to provide the background to understand the final scenes of the book. As a matter of fact, the hypodiegetic narrative of alternative America is presented as a film rather than a written story: ‘I lie in the dark and tell myself stories . . . We could turn them into films . . . Instead of looking at other people’s images, why not make up or own’ (Auster, 2008: 167), a fact which has also been noticed by some reviewers, like Stephen Abell (‘the experiences of Owen Brick are described in the urgent tones of a thriller, or even an action film’ [Abell, 2008: n.p.]).

Indeed, the process of story-telling in the dark is compared explicitly both to the act of dreaming and to film-watching, and these comments act as another link between the films and Owen Brick’s story.

We can see then that Man in the Dark continues Auster’s ongoing concern with the power of images versus words to convey emotions and ideas, a concern that probably started with Moonlight and Moon Palace and continued later with Auster’s films (Smoke, Blue in the Face, Lulu on the Bridge, The Inner Life of Martin Frost) and his novel The Book of Illusions (see González, 2009). August Brill, a book critic who has made a living out of writing words about words, shares Auster’s ideas about film-watching: ‘you can watch a film — and even enjoy it — in a state of mindless passivity’ (Auster, 2008: 15), but we find out that images can be both a terrifying curse and a powerful cure. The black-and-white silent images of Titus’s decapitation have been branded indelibly in Katya’s and August’s minds to such an extent that the only way to erase them is the reception and creation of more images: ‘unless I blot out that video with other images, it’s the only thing I ever see. I can’t get rid of it’ (Auster, 2008: 167).

In order to erase those images of pure evil from their minds, Katya and August start watching other films and it is precisely these films and their interpretations that interact with Owen Brick’s story to lay the ground for the final scenes of the book.

Katya’s theory about film language is that ‘inanimate objects [are] a means of expressing human emotions. That’s the language of film’ (Auster, 2008: 16), and the book provides examples from De Sica’s Bicycle Thief, Jean Renoir’s Grand Illusion, Ray’s The World of Apu, and Ozu’s Tokyo Story. August adds another important

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aspect to the interpretation of these films that does not have to do with semiotics but with human relationships, specifically the relationship between men and women.

‘They’re all about women. How women are the ones who carry the world. They take care of the real business while their hapless men stumble around making a hash of things. Or else just lie around doing nothing’ (Auster, 2008: 22). Besides, although neither Katya nor August mention it, these films also share two more themes: on the one hand, war and violence as a ‘grand illusion’ carried out by men who leave their women alone during military conflicts and in their aftermath. War is the result of men’s actions but it is women who suffer them, as shown in all the movies. On the other, they are all stories of family relationships, of husbands and wives, or parents and children, very similar to the main diegesis of the novel.

If we consider the whole book from the perspective of all these hypodiegetic stories, we can find that the title of the novel is more revealing than it may appear at first: the ‘man in the dark’ is obviously August creating sad stories in the dark of night (‘my mood — which is dark, my little ones, as dark as the obsidian night that surrounds me’ [Auster, 2008: 102]). But a ‘man in the dark’ is also the spectator of a film (‘I am alone in the dark, turning the world around in my head’ [Auster, 2008: 1]), particularly of those films created or described by August whose black-and-white images are intended to erase the images of Titus’s murder. And, finally, all the stories in the book show ‘men in the dark’ about the real world, men who, pursuing crazy fantasies of sex, violence or money, mistreat or leave the women who ‘carry the world’: the German, Italian, Japanese or Indian men of the films abandon their women; Owen leaves Flora in the film created by August; August abandons Sonia; and, finally, Titus leaves Katya to find his death in Iraq, his eyes stabbed out, another man in the dark.

*

*

*

Critics like Aliki Varvogli or Paolo Simonetti have stressed the recent shift in Auster’s writing (particularly after the 9/11 attacks) from a metafictional writer ‘locked in his room’ to a ‘political writer’ more concerned with the world outside his room, from ‘the man who was previously more interested in French poetry and questions of self in language’ (Varvogli, 2011: 41) to ‘an increasing engagement with the world of American politics’ (Varvogli, 2011: 52). However, we have seen how these concerns with American identity and its political consequences can actually be traced back to one of his very first novels.4 The analysis of the hypodiegetic, counterfactual stories of alternative Americas in Moon Palace, Travels in the Scriptorium and Man in the Dark shows that the tension between the locked room and the outer world, or the combination of metafictional strategies with political concerns, is not as recent as it may seem at first glance and is in fact essential for the understanding of Paul Auster’s whole oeuvre.

Notes 1

Not unlike Auster’s own The Invention of Solitude (1982), a search for his father’s real personality after his sudden death. In a similar psychological vein,

Debra Shostak has highlighted the psychoanalytical aspects behind Solomon Barber’s fiction, particularly his treatment of transformations: ‘Barber’s

‘ANOTHER HISTORY’

2

fantasy of bodily transformation bespeaks his desperate desire to escape his own body, to slip out of his self-image’ (Shostak, 2008: 161).

Kepler’s key to recognizing the mixed origin of the Humans is their language, where he can hear ‘traces of English . . . a kind of transmogrified English that has somehow slid into the crevices of this other language’ (Auster, 1989: 257). Languages are not the result of God’s punishment in the Tower of Babel but, as with nations, the result of mixture and regeneration. If the Humans inhabit a kind of Lost Paradise, it is not like the Garden of Eden (with a prelapsarian language, like the one Stillman was looking for in ‘City of Glass’, from The New York

3

4

33

Trilogy), but a place where melting had already taken place.

Mark Brown stresses the role of urban connections and ‘social networks which extend across New York City’ (Brown, 2007: 67) as key to Marco’s recovery, and dismisses the role of the Western setting. One could argue, however, that the recovery provided by Marco’s friends and lover in New York is only temporary, and that Marco’s real salvation only takes place when he finds his true identity as a writer in the West.

Probably the first novel he started writing, as shown

by Marc Chénetier in his analysis of the different manuscripts of Moon Palace.

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Amidon, S. 2008 A dark, adapted eye. The Times. (24 August). Available at: <http://entertainment.timesonline. co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/books/article4574216.ece> [accessed September 2010].

Auster, P. 1987. The New York Trilogy. London: Faber and Faber.

Auster, P. 1988. In the Country of Last Things. London: Faber and Faber.

Auster, P. 1989. Moon Palace. London: Faber and Faber.

Auster, P. 1992. The Art of Hunger. London: Faber and Faber.

Auster, P. 1995. The Red Notebook and Other Writings. London: Faber and Faber.

Auster, P. 2006. Travels in the Scriptorium. London: Faber and Faber.

Auster, P. 2008. Man in the Dark. London: Faber and Faber.

Barone, D. 1995. Introduction: Paul Auster and the Postmodern American Novel. In: D. Barone, ed. Beyond the Red Notebook. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, pp. 1–26.

Brown, M. 2007. Paul Auster. Manchester: Manchester University Press.

Butler, M. & Gurr, J.M. 2008. The Poetics and Politics of Metafiction: Reading Paul Auster’s Travels in the Scriptorium. English Studies, 89(2): 195–209.

Chénetier, M. 1996. Paul Auster as the Wizard of Odds. Paris: Didier.

Fussell, E. 1965. Frontier: American Literature and the American West. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

González, J.A. 2009. Words versus Images: Paul Auster’s Films from Smoke to The Book of Illusions. Literature/ Film Quarterly, 37(1): 28–48.

Hayward, M. 2007. Review, Geist, 64 (Spring). Available at: <http://dev.geist.com/books/travels-scriptorium> [accessed September 2010].

Hutcheon, L. 1988. A Poetics of Postmodernism. London: Routledge.

Lalor, P. 2006. Review of Travels in the Scriptorium. The Australian, 11 November. Available at: <http://www. theaustralian.com.au/news/travels-in-the-scriptorium/story-e6frg8no-1111112484462> [accessed September 2010].

Rimmon-Kenan, S. 1993. Narrative Fiction: Contemporary Poetics. London: Routledge.

Seidl, C. 2005. Regeneration through Creativity: The Frontier in Paul Auster’s Moon Palace. PhiN, 31: 60–78.

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Simonetti, P. 2011. Loss, Ruins, War: Paul Auster’s Response to 9/11 and the ‘War on Terror’. In: S. Ciocia and J.A. González, eds. The Invention of Illusions: International Perspectives on Paul Auster. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars, pp. 13–38.

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Slotkin, R. 1973. Regeneration through Violence. The Mythology of the American Frontier, 1600–1860.

Middletown, CO: Weslyan University Press.

Varvogli, A. 2001. The World that is the Book: Paul Auster’s Fiction. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press.

Varvogli, A. 2011. ‘The Worst Possibilities of the Imagination are the Country You Live in’: Paul Auster in the Twenty-first Century. In: S. Ciocia and J.A. González, eds. The Invention of Illusions: International Perspectives on Paul Auster. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars, pp. 39–54.

Weisenburger, S. 1995. Inside Moon Palace. In: D. Barone, ed. Beyond the Red Notebook. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, pp. 124–142.

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Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, pp. 143–161.

Notes on contributor Jesús Ángel González is a Professor of English at the University of Cantabria, Spain.

He holds an MA in Spanish from Pennsylvania State University and a PhD in English from the University of Salamanca, Spain. He has published La narrativa popular de Dashiell Hammett: Pulps, Cine y Cómics (Valencia University Press, 2002) and An Introduction to North American Culture and Literature (Ediciones TGD, 2006), as well as a number of articles on applied linguistics, the detective novel and American literature. He is also the co-editor of The Invention of Illusions: International Perspectives on Paul Auster (Cambridge Scholars, 2011).

Correspondence to: Jesús Ángel González, Departamento de Filología, Av. Los Castros s/n, 39005, Santander, Cantabria, Spain. Email: gonzalezja@unican.es