[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
.This suggests thepossibility that Auster2 might need to be located anterior to the narrator,which would give:Auster0 ’! Auster1 ’! Quinn ’! Wilson ’! Work ’! Auster2 ’! IBut then it is the narrator who tells the story of Quinn and the others.It iseven, in this strange case, the narrator who, apparently, embeds the signs of 81Paul Auster s City of Glassthe implied author.Thus it appears that we might need to position I between Auster0 and Auster1.The situation is further complicated by thefact that the novel itself seems to have an opinion on the matter, renderedallegorically in the scene where Quinn meets the Auster character (Auster2).Their conversation turns to Don Quixote, about whom Auster is writing anessay.In his essay, he tells Quinn (and the reader), he is presenting a theorythat the real author of the book is Sancho Panza, with the stenographic aidof the barber and the priest:It seems perfectly possible to me that [Sancho Panza] dictated thestory to someone else namely, to the barber and the priest, DonQuixote s good friends.They put the story into proper literaryform in Spanish and then turned the manuscript over toSamson Carrasco, the bachelor from Salamanca, who proceededto translate it into Arabic.Cervantes found the translation, had itrendered back into Spanish, and then published the book TheAdventures of Don Quixote.(118)It is, then, possible in this strange world for a character in a novel to be itsauthor.Thus we can give our final diagram of the author side of Chatman sconstruction as:Auster0 ’! Auster1 ’! Quinn ’! Wilson ’! Work ’! Auster2 ’!I‘! |The construction is circular and seamless.It is final, however, only byour own critical whim, since, as will be seen below, Quinn adopts still morepseudonyms, one of which, while he is posing as Detective Auster, is DanielQuinn (Quinn2).We have not even attempted to diagram the reader side ofthe Chatman model, but the mention of Quinn s notebook, which thenarrator professes to be the source of the text, which is written, technically,by Detective Auster and then labored over, read, first by Quinn, then byAuster2 and I, gives us a hint that simplicity is not what such a diagramwould reveal.We wonder, even, if discreteness between the two sides of thetransaction could be maintained, if the layers of readers would not simplydistribute themselves among the strata of authors.The illusion, then, is oneof infinity.The point is that City of Glass suggests, allegorically, a hopelesslycomplex, paradoxical, self-referential system of geneses that parodies not 82William Lavenderonly Chatman s model but the very idea of models of narrative structure bymaking itself into a model of itself.We could say that it naively takes thecritics at their word, writes itself according to the plan, the critical blueprint,even takes it a step further (if three layers are good, shouldn t six, or ten, bebetter?), and erects the lopsided monument of its structure as the mosteloquent comment on the theory.The extent to which this engagement is conscious or intentional is endlessly arguable and finally moot; whetheror not Auster had Seymour Chatman specifically in mind when heconstructed his point of view is irrelevant.What matters is that the discursivemilieu in which the novel (and the trilogy) positions itself is critical as well asnovelistic.The characterization of the author s namesake as an essayist makesthis conclusion unavoidable.1Alison Russell, in Deconstructing The New York Trilogy: Paul Auster sAnti-Detective Fiction, has noted that the three works employ anddeconstruct the conventional elements of the detective story,.theRomance, realistic fiction, and autobiography (71), but this approachleaves several of the most prominent devices in City of Glass unexplained,including the indeterminate reflexivity of point of view described above.Aswill be seen below, the parodic forms employed in character and plot alsorefuse definitive positioning in relation to popular genres, but refer in everyinstance to critical models.We turn now to a consideration of character.In the first half of thetwentieth century, character was considered by many novelists and critics tobe the very fundament of the novel.Virginia Woolf, in Mr.Bennett andMrs.Brown, gives the most explicit formulation of this trend, saying, Ibelieve that all novels.deal with character, and that it is to express character.that the form of the novel.has been evolved (31).E.M.Forster, in Flatand Round Characters, also espouses the primacy of character
[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
