Following his acclaimed debut work, a memoir entitled
The Invention of Solitude, Auster gained renown for a series of three loosely-connected detective stories published collectively as
The New York Trilogy. These books are not conventional detective stories organized around a mystery and a series of clues. Rather, he uses the detective form to address existential issues and questions of identity, space, language and literature, creating his own distinctively postmodern (and critique of postmodernist) form in the process.
The search for identity and personal meaning has permeated Auster's later publications, many of which concentrate heavily on the role of coincidence and random events (
The Music of Chance) or increasingly, the relationships between men and their peers and environment (
The Book of Illusions,
Moon Palace). Auster's heroes often find themselves obliged to work as part of someone else's inscrutable and larger-than-life schemes. In 1995, Auster wrote and co-directed the films
Smoke (which won him the Independent Spirit Award for Best First Screenplay) and
Blue in the Face. Auster's more recent works,
Oracle Night (2004),
The Brooklyn Follies (2005) and the novella
Travels in the Scriptorium have also met critical acclaim.
Themes
According to a dissertation by Heiko Jakubzik at the University of Heidelberg, two central influences in Paul Auster's writing are Jacques Lacan's psychoanalysis and the American transcendentalism of the early to middle 19th century, namely amongst others Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson.
In short Lacan's theory declares that we enter the world through words. We observe the world through our senses but the world we sense is structured (mediated) in our mind through language. Thus our subconscious is also structured as a language. This leaves us with a sense of anomaly. We can only perceive the world through language, but we have the feeling of a lack. The lack is the sense of a being outside of language. The world can only be constructed through language but it always leaves something uncovered, something that can not be told and be thought of, it can only be sensed. This can be seen as one of the central themes of Paul Auster's writing.
Lacan is considered to be one of the key figures of French poststructuralism. Some academics are keen to discern traces of other poststructuralist philosophers throughout Auster's oeuvre - mainly Jacques Derrida, Jean Baudrillard and Michel de Certeau - although Auster himself has claimed to find such philosophies 'unreadable' [1]
The transcendentalists believe in the fact that the symbolic order of civilization separated us from the natural order of the world. By moving into nature - like Thoreau in
Walden - it would be possible to return to this natural order.
The common factor of both ideas is the question of the meaning of symbols for human beings. Auster's protagonists are often writers who establish meaning in their lives through writing, and they try to find their place within the natural order to be able to live again in civilization.
Edgar Allan Poe, Samuel Beckett, and Herman Melville have also had a strong influence on Auster's writing. Not only do their characters reappear in Austers work (like William Wilson in
City of Glass or Hawthorne's Fanshawe in
The Locked Room, both from
The New York Trilogy). Auster also uses variations on the themes of these writers.
Paul Auster's reappearing subjects are:
- coincidence
- frequent portrayal of an ascetic life
- a sense of imminent disaster
- obsessive writer as central character/narrator
- loss of the ability to understand
- loss of language
- depiction of daily and ordinary life
- failure
- absence of a father
- writing/story telling, metafiction
- intertextuality
- American History
- American Space
Coincidence
Instances of coincidence can be found all over Auster's work. Auster himself claims that people are so influenced by all the consistent stories that surround them, that they do not see the elements of coincidence, inconsistency and contradiction in their own lives:
Failure
Failure in Paul Auster's works is not just the opposite of the happy ending. In
Moon Palace and
The Book of Illusions it results from the individual's uncertainty about the status of his own identity. The protagonists start a search for their own identity and reduce their life to the absolute minimum. From this zero point they gain new strength and start their new life and they are also able to get into contact with their environment again. A similar development can also be seen in
City of Glass and
The Music of Chance.
Failure in this context is not the "nothing" - it is the beginning of something all new.
Identity/Subjectivity
Auster's protagonists often go through a process that reduces their support structure to an absolute minimum: They sever all contact with family and friends, go hungry and lose or give away all their belongings. Out of this approximation of their nil they either acquire new strength to reconnect with the world or they fail and disappear for good.