Norman Mailer once wrote of Samuel Beckett that, as “he never enters a
situation where any of his people might try to break out of whatever trap
they are in”, his work is “obsessive rather than haunting”. The same might
be said of Paul Auster, whose fiction has seemed resolutely to obsess about
recurrent problems with little hope of resolving them: coincidence;
indigence; and – most commonly – the troublesome act of writing itself.
It is an irony that this latter obsession has probably led to the diminution
of his status in the American canon. Auster has too regularly succumbed to
postmodern posturing in his novels, a manufacturer of merely “an art that is
the direct expression of the effort to express itself”. This was most
tellingly demonstrated by Travels in the Scriptorium (2007), in which an
author (“Mr Blank”, but let’s call him Auster) is confronted by “the
bodiless souls” (the non-haunting “phantom beings”) of his own characters,
who hold him hostage in a bare chamber. It was the literal realization of
Auster’s claim that, for a writer, “the world has shrunk to the size of a
room” or “padded cell”. It was also a novel in which any pleasure was
securely locked out of reach from the reader.
Of course (as is ever the case with this metafictional approach), there was an
element of honesty as well: a novelist should bear witness to the human
condition of self-awareness, a process in which – as Emerson put it – “man
is as it were clapped into jail by his consciousness”. When Auster struggles
with his own authorial status in his writing, he is enacting the sort of
everyday struggle for identity that is the lot of everyone. The problem is
when the process neglects to be relevant to those outside existences, when –
as with Daniel Quinn in City of Glass (1985) – all that “interested him
about the stories he wrote was not their relation to the world but their
relation to other stories”.
If postmodernism is a jail freely entered, the writer must ensure that he
always looks out as well as in. When Auster writes only about writing, he
removes his relation to the outside world, relying on “the sovereignty of
inwardness” (1985) and “the severity of his inwardness” (1987), finding “a
refuge of inwardness” (1989), and experiencing “a long moment of inwardness”
(1982) that has lasted sporadically over twenty years.
Thankfully, and joyously, Man in the Dark manages – despite initial
appearances – to dispel this interior gloom. It tells the story of August
Brill (whose prospects, at first glance, appear to be neither): “a retired
book critic, seventy-two years old, living outside Brattleboro, Vermont,
with his forty-seven-year-old daughter and twenty-three-year-old
granddaughter. His wife died last year. The daughter’s husband left her five
years ago. The granddaughter’s boyfriend was killed”. Brill sits late at
night, the typical Auster hero (“alone in the dark”, bereft, philosophical)
and tells himself a series of stories.
The central story concerns Owen Brick, who wakes up one morning and discovers
that he is in a parallel America, in which the 2000 election has led to
secession and the creation of the Independent States of America, now at war
with the remaining United States. He is told that his task is to end the
war, by assassinating the man who has caused it. Perhaps unsurprisingly,
that man happens to be a writer called August Brill, who lives in the
“other” America: “everything that happens or is about to happen is in his
head. Eliminate that head, and the war stops. It’s that simple”.
The great virtue of Man in the Dark, and of Auster as a writer, is revealed in
that final phrase. The central premiss may be tricksy, even tiresome (“there
are many worlds and they all run parallel to one another, worlds and
anti-worlds, worlds and shadow-worlds, and each world is dreamed or imagined
or written by someone in another world”), but Auster is able to rely on what
is called here the “nuts and bolts” method of telling a tale simply and
well. He gives us white-collar philosophy, but blue-collar prose.
Indeed, the experiences of Owen Brick are described in the urgent tones of a
thriller, or even an action film. Brill notes that movies provide a
“flattened-out existence”, in which a story is told with the linear clarity
of two dimensions. The writing echoes this approach in its swift set-ups,
clearly presented backgrounds, and flat-out hurry to convey what is
happening: “signs of former life: burned-out houses, collapsed food markets,
a dead dog, several exploded cars”; “sounds of copulation: a grunting Duke,
a yelping Molly, squeaking mattress and springs”. Duke, by the way, is
straight from the casting of a B-movie: “one of those body-builder types . .
. Duke the boyfriend, the guy with the bad temper, dressed in a
tight-fitting black T-Shirt and blue boxer shorts”. He works for Lou Frisk,
who says things like: “if Brill isn’t taken care of by midnight on the
twenty-eighth, Duke and I will be back, and next time our guns will be
loaded”. We soon learn that being two-dimensional can be a quality not a
curse; it enables Auster to “get things going” in the most efficient way.
Man in the Dark is not just the account of August Brill and his attempt to
come to terms with his family’s grief, or of Owen Brick and his attempt to
murder “August Brill”, but is full of “every kind of story you can imagine”.
So, the text brims with plot summaries from films (“the opening scenes of
The Bicycle Thief”), “war stories”, the tale of “an adored Beatrice by some
unknown Dante from the SS”, and so on. Indeed, amid such a flurry of
narrative, the darkness in which much of the novel is set (“the black of
night”; “the black center of the dead of night”) is revealed not as evidence
of oblivion but of creation: the lowering of light in an auditorium to
enable the “flattened-out” picture to be better seen; August Brill with what
The Book of Illusions (2002) termed “the projection room of my skull”. But
what Auster also wishes to demonstrate is, as he has said elsewhere, that
“words go deeper than pictures do”. The triumph of his new novel is that,
despite all of its artifice, it seeks to reveals something about the
three-dimensional reality (what John Updike calls the “blood and human
juice”) of the life outside it. As Auster noted in The Locked Room (1987),
“only darkness has the power to make a man open his heart to the world”.
Most tellingly, this means that for the first time, perhaps, in an Auster
novel the heart is more important than the head. There is a pleasingly
sentimental strain to the writing, which bears unsubtle witness to the
primacy of love and lust when it is experienced (“the knockout beauty who
will suck the breath out of you and make your heart stop beating”) and the
devastation when it departs: “people die of broken hearts. It happens every
day, and it will go on happening until the end of time”.
Auster is more ambitious than that, however: the heartbeats of August Brill
are revealed to be intimately connected to his capacity for storytelling
(“how many beats of the heart, how many breaths, how many words spoken and
heard”). Between stories we hear his coughs and splutters (“the faint rattle
of phlegm buried deep in my bronchia”; a death-rattle in miniature), which
are soothed by the rhythm of his words. And the prose only expands into
pulses of life when it seeks to address the threat of death:
"I think about Titus’s death often, the horrifying story of that death,
the images of that death, the pulverising consequences of that death on my
grieving granddaughter, but I don’t want to go there now, I can’t go there
now, I have to push it far away."
This recalls Emerson in his essay “Experience”, which seeks to respond to the
death of his son in deliberately pulsing prose (“so is it with this
calamity; it does not touch me; something which I fancied was part of me,
which could not be torn away without tearing me nor enlarged without
enriching me, falls off from me”). Auster is showing how Brill has to strive
to represent, and so come to terms with, the loss of his granddaughter’s
partner. It is only by the end of the novel that Brill can tell of Titus’s
brutal murder (in Iraq, in a filmed beheading, a travesty of a silent
movie): “Titus is no longer quite human. He becomes the idea of a person, a
person and not a person, a dead bleeding thing: une nature morte”. We note
that, in order to describe this brutality, Brill has to resort to
artificiality (the “inanimate object” that he associates with “the language
of film”; “une nature morte”). This is the great truth behind all
metafiction, which reveals the human need for imposed narrative to give
structure to messy experience: we may need a still life to still make sense
of life. Man in the Dark is not, then, just a collection of stories, but a
justification for Auster’s storytelling method over the years. It argues, as
the author once said, that there need be “no division between life and
writing . . . life as it is lived in the intimacy of the body, of the blood
that flows through one’s veins”. It is a piece of work that is artistically
life-affirming; it is postmodernism, for once, with a pulse.
Paul Auster
MAN IN THE DARK
160pp. Faber. £14.99.
978 0 571 24976 0
Stephen Abell is a freelance writer living in London.
