According to Hutcheon, postmodernism can be read as an ‘ahistorical’ movement.102 Sean Homer has described what he terms postmodernism’s ‘pervasive flattening of space and displacement of diachronic time with synchronic immanence’.103 For Marxist theorists such as Fredric Jameson, this ‘displacement of diachronic time’ is the ‘major theme’ of postmodernism:
The disappearance of a sense of history, the way in which our entire contemporary social system has little by little begun to lose its capacity to retain its own past, has begun to live in a perpetual present and in a perpetual change that obliterates traditions.104
Hutcheon counters Jameson’s anti-postmodernist position with the observation that postmodernism – and poststructuralism – teaches us that ‘history and fiction are discourses, that both constitute systems of signification by which we make sense of the past’; the meaning and shape of events and facts are structurally determined, ‘an acknowledgement of the meaning-making function of human constructs’.105 Hutcheon describes how postmodernism ‘reinstalls historical contexts as significant and even determining, but in so doing, it problematizes the entire notion of historical knowledge’.106 In this sense, postmodern literature acknowledges the Foucaultian paradigm that ‘writing has freed itself from the theme of expression, but without being restricted to the confines of its interiority,
102 Hutcheon, A Poetics of Postmodernism, p. 87.
103 Sean Homer, ‘Fredric Jameson’ in Postmodernism: The Key Figures, ed. by Bertens and Natoli, p. 183. 104 F. Jameson, p. 20.
105 Hutcheon, p. 89. 106 Hutcheon, p. 89.
writing is identified with its own unfolded exteriority’.107 Postmodern narratives often appear to plunge into a vortex of atemporality, where the linear storytelling of realism combines with the fragmentary liminality of modernism to create an anti-teleological mise en abyme.108 By contrast, Barthes construes the ‘Author’ as being ‘always conceived of as the past of his book: book and author stand
automatically on a single line divided into a before and after’.109 Rather than embarking on a linear journey through a text, we instead descend into a cascade of images, surfaces, labyrinths and dead ends: progress is impeded by a paradoxical paradigm, but the narrative is propelled by a hermeneutic compulsion to unpick and resolve the paradox.
This structured play between language and temporality are intrinsic to the shape and form of Hustvedt and Auster’s debut novels, whose temporal and spatial linearity is conspicuously disrupted.110 Auster’s treatment of time in his debut novel inspired Russell to insist upon its denial of ‘linear movement, realistic
107 Foucault, p. 206.
108 The liminal structures of postmodern literature are equally reflective of the Barthesian concept of ‘the
modern scriptor’ who, shorn of all defining characteristics, is ‘born simultaneously with the text, is in no way equipped with a being preceding or exceeding the writing’, and that there is ‘no other time than that of the enunciation and every text is externally written here and now’ (Barthes, ‘The Death of the Author’ in Image –
Music – Text, p. 145).
109 Barthes, ‘The Death of the Author’ in Image – Music – Text, p. 145.
110 This disruption constitutes an exploration of the disjunct between the Foucault’s apprehension of
representation and closure’,111 depicting it instead as a Derridean deconstruction of logocentrism: a principal concern of Derrida's, for whom spoken
‘deconstructive discourses’ are ‘trapped in a kind of circle’,112 and from which writing seems to offer a semblance of escape: ‘language bears within itself the necessity of its own critique’.113 Referencing Beckettian negation, Little records that ‘nothing happens again and again’, and that the novel ‘subverts the
teleological notion of progress’.114 Lavender similarly suggests City of Glass ‘deconstructs the form of the novel, the canons of criticism, theory and tradition, and it deconstructs itself, as it literally falls apart in its progression’ before going on to observe ‘it clears a space where representation can once again close with politics and society’.115
This postmodern instability is exemplified in Auster’s existential opening to City of Glass, a narrativised descent into a decentred, decontextualized and destabilised world:
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 had
111 Alison Russell, ‘Deconstructing The New York Trilogy: Paul Auster's Anti-Detective Fiction’, Critique
(31: 2, 1990), 71-83 (p. 72).
112 Derrida, ‘Structure, Sign and Play’ in Writing and Difference, p. 280. 113 Derrida, ‘Structure, Sign and Play’ in Writing and Difference, p. 284. 114 Little, p. 133.
115 William Lavender, ‘The Novel of Critical Engagement: Paul Auster’s City of Glass’, Contemporary
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. (Trilogy 3)
The texture of the paragraph elicits negation and negotiation, delimited possibilities and lost causes, and negligible cause and effect. The telephone’s noise piercing ‘the dead of night’ perhaps exempifying the crisis of representation which predicates Lyotard’s postmodernity,116 and Derrida’s ‘rupture and
redoubling’ which predicates deconstructive discourse.117 A vestige of atemporal location remains: ‘dead of night’, ‘in the beginning’ and ‘much later’ imply that time exists and will pass in this narrative, but nothing further is offered in the way of temporal specifity. Auster’s protagonist, Quinn, is a man without a past whose scant existence is barely inscribed within the frame of the novel: ‘As for Quinn, there is little that need detain us. Who he was, where he came from, and what he did are of no great importance’. (Trilogy 3) ‘Nothing was real except chance’, records the narrator, positioning contingency, happenstance and the randomness of existence as empirical and ontological obstacles to teleological epistemology,
116 ‘Capitalism inherently possesses the power to derealize familiar objects, social roles, and institutions to
such a degree that the so-called realistic representations can no longer evoke reality except as nostalgia or mockery’ (Jean-François Lyotard ‘Answering the Question: What is Postmodernism?’, trans. by Regis Durand, in The Postmodern Condition, pp71-82 [p. 74]).
by impeding linear thought, self-determination and movement through the temporal-spatial landscape.
Nevertheless, as the narrator observes, ‘the question was the story itself’: the story being the individual’s quest for authentic selfhood in the wake of personal tragedy. Auster’s Trilogy thus proceeds inexorably from one section to the next, with prescient and retrospective intertextual tensions. The plot of each part concludes in the loosest possible sense, with a final, enfolding closure of sorts offered in the destruction (or deconstruction) of Fanshawe’s red notebook at the climax of The Locked Room, the final part of the Trilogy. The narrative therefore deploys a degree of foreshadowing and backshadowing, while at its centre rests a continual deferral of progress. Yet the anti-teleological ‘close’ to City of Glass leaves the frame of that particular narrative open, with the enduring mystery of what happened to the protagonist left agonisingly unresolved: ‘it is impossible for me to say where he is now’. (Trilogy 133) The location of the subsequent parts to the Trilogy within different temporal zones serves to deepen the structural and thematic mise en abyme constructed by Auster.118
Hustvedt deploys a similarly disordered textual strategy for The Blindfold: four temporally reconstituted sections which act as episodic narratives-in-
miniature, but within which are embedded references to the others. According to Knirsch, ‘The Blindfold’s narrative structure is comprised of four loosely
118 Quinn and Iris emerge from and disappear into the textual fabric of these apparently deconstructive novels,
yet both ‘reappear’ in later fictions: Quinn in Auster’s In the Country of Last Things and 4321; Iris in Hustvedt’s The Blazing World (as I.V Hess) and Auster’s Leviathan.
connected episodes which are ordered anachronically, almost as in a time warp’, while the time structure of the novel ‘remains open’, without two clearly
identifiable moments of inception or closure.119 Upon first reading, the first episode performs as a prologue for the remainder, with Iris’ linguistic power play with Mr. Morning casting a narrative shadow over everything that follows. Consequently, according to Alise Jameson, Iris experiences ‘nothing less than a self-shattering, a dangerous destabilization of any sense of personal identity’;120 this destabilisation is signalled by the air of ambivalence towards her earlier descriptive difficulties under the control of patriarchal linguistics, and the
submissive hope of encountering her tormentor once more: ‘Mr. Morning had my telephone number, after all, and there was nothing to prevent him from finding me. I waited for months, but I never heard from him. When the telephone rang, it was always someone else’. (Blindfold 38) The ‘Stephen’ fleetingly referred to in Iris’ opening narration reappears as a major character in a later section, a
reflection of Hustvedt’s exploration of the preoccupation of postmodern fiction with its own unfolded exteriority. Antje Dalmann attempts to restore linear time to the novel’s ‘unchronological representation’,121 concluding:
119 Christian Knirsch, ‘In a Time-Warp: The Issue of Chronology in Siri Hustvedt’s The Blindfold’. 120 A. Jameson, p. 422.
The narrative time (thought scrambled) is neatly restorable. The narrated time is exactly three academic years, while the time of narration is eight years after Iris’s second summer at Columbia.122
Knirsch links the ‘migrane-induced scotomas’ Iris undergoes throughout the course of the narrative to Derridean poststructuralism, with ‘form and content becoming one’: each section refers to the other, without offering causational or correlative points of origin or closure.123
Hustvedt and Auster’s narratives acknowledge McHale’s ontological dominant and Hutcheon’s ‘historiographic metafiction’ – writing which signals a break with the epistemologically-grounded, humanistic ‘truths’ of realism and modernism by ‘rethinking and reworking the forms of the past...in order to subvert them’ – 124 but Hustvedt and Auster’s engagement with canonical literature, and social and cultural history, proliferates through the prism of temporal disordering and immanence within their narratives. This idea of the present state of language in relation to its development over time is critical to Auster’s narrative, and his depiction of Stillman Snr’s linguistic crusade. Smith perceptively argues that Stillman Snr’s restorative quest overlooks the ‘slippages and ambiguities of language that give it life’; that language is ‘conventional, arbitrary and culturally entrained’.125 In City of Glass, following his encounter
122 Dallman, p. 104.
123 Knirsch, ‘In a Time-Warp: The Issue of Chronology in Siri Hustvedt’s The Blindfold’. 124 Hutcheon, A Poetics of Postmodernism, p. 5.
125 Hazel Smith, ‘A Labyrinth of Endless Steps: Fiction Making, Interactive Narrativity and the Poetics of
with the disintegrated Stillman Jnr, Quinn is tasked by Virginia Stillman with tracking down Stillman Snr. This quest is framed and mediated by his reading and interpretation of the historian Stillman Snr’s academic tract, The Garden and The
Tower: Early Visions of the New World, a distillation and condensation of the
history of Western thought ‘in two parts of approximately equal length, ‘The Myth of Paradise’ and ‘The Myth of Babel’’. (Trilogy 41) Stillman’s historical- theocratic investigation into the mythology of language – linguistic collapse (Eden/Tower of Babel) presaging prelapsarian restoration (the New World/The New Babel) – refers obliquely to Foucault’s identification of the structured nature of language, knowledge and history:
Later in the Book of Genesis there is another story about language. According to Stillman, the Tower of Babel episode was an exact recapitulation of what happened in the Garden, only expanded, made general in its significance for all mankind…This is the very last incident of prehistory in the Bible…The Tower of Babel stands as the last image before the true beginning of the world. (Trilogy 43)
Stillman Snr’s divided text – as with Auster’s Trilogy – is ironically unified under the rubric of its materiality (as a written critique of structuralism, and a published object), recontextualised by deconstruction’s fragmentary pluralism and
postmodernism’s provisionality:
After the fall, this was no longer true. Names became detached from things; words devolved into a collection of arbitrary signs; language had
been severed from God. The story of the Garden, therefore, not only records the fall of man, but the fall of language. (Trilogy 43)
Stillman Snr has been driven ‘crazy, absolutely insane’ by his ambition to restore the referential binary connections which determine linguistic meaning. Hazel Smith depicts Stillman Snr’s book as ‘a parody of the structuralist idea that language makes the world’,126 and his historical-theological preoccupation with Edenic-linguistic essentialism – when ‘a thing and its name were interchangeable’ – is mirrored in the mythology of the Tower of Babel: ‘And the whole earth was of one language, and of one speech’. Stillman Snr seeks to ressurect the utopian quest for a prelapsarian language from the ruins of the deconstructed present:
You see the world is in fragments, sir. Not only have we lost our sense of purpose, we have lost the language whereby we can speak of it. These are no doubt spiritual matters, but they have their analogue in the material world. My brilliant stroke has been to confine myself to physical things, to the immediate and tangible. My motives are lofty, but my work now takes place in the realm of the everyday. (Trilogy 76)
Stillman Snr’s theological dissection of the problematized nature of epistemological and ontological existence mirror’s Auster’s own examination of co-dependence and conflict between arbitrary systems of signification: the
diachronic (the evolution of language over time) and synchronic (the condition of language in the present); langue (the language system) and parole (the speaking of that system); the syntagmatic and paradigmatic axes; the spatio-temporal and
the socio-historical; the epistemological and ontological. Auster’s fiction
investigates how these systems evolve and what happens when they disintegrate, as evidenced by the extreme destabilisation of Stillman Jnr as a consequence of his father’s abusive treatment:
The body acted almost exactly as the voice had: machine-like, fitful, alternating between slow and rapid gestures, rigid and yet expressive, as if the operation were out of control, not quite corresponding to the will that lay behind it. (Trilogy 15)
When Quinn finally catches up with Stillman at New York’s Riverside Park, Auster uses their meeting to further dissect the way in which formalist, structural and poststructural theoretical positions encircle each other within the postmodern problematic. Deploying labyrinthine language and a sequence of paradoxical paradigms, Auster invites a hermeneutic response to these dialogic negations (‘I’m sorry, but it won’t be possible for me to talk to you’) and negotiations (‘I could tell you were a man of sense right away, Mr. Quinn. If you only knew how many people have misunderstood me’), (Trilogy 73; 75) before revisiting and reconfiguring Stillman’s theocratic search for linguistic truth:
A new language that will at last say what we have to say. For our words no longer correspond to the world. When things were whole, we felt
confident that our words could express them. But little by little these things have broken apart, shattered, collapsed into chaos. And yet our words have remained the same. They have not adapted themselves to the
new reality. Hence, every time we try to speak of what we see, we speak falsely, distorting the very thing we are trying to represent. (Trilogy 77)
Stillman Snr’s linguistic quest doubles as a geo-spatial traversal: physically transporting him across the city ‘the most forlorn of places, the most abject’, while he painstakingly shuffles over the surface of the streets in search of ‘broken objects…the chipped to the smashed, from the dented to the squashed, from the pulverised to the putrid’, (Trilogy 78) objects severed from their meaningful place within history and through which he will erect his postlapsarian utopia.
Versluys’ reading of Hustvedt’s depiction of New York City as a maze in
The Blindfold is equally true for Auster’s novel. The experiences of Quinn and Iris
take place in a landscape which verges on the dystopian: their identities are subjected to the postmodern contingencies of surviving within vertiginous, dehumanizing cities of glass, while their responses to this predicament are primarily ambivalent. Smith believes that Quinn’s trailing of Stillman Snr on his unconscious urban perambulations and conscious re-naming of things enacts the performative process of writing, whereby:
Body and city continuously transform each other, because neither body nor city is a unified, autonomous object. The hyperscape [a site characterised by multiple oppositions] is activated by the process of walking, and the dynamic relationship it creates between body and city.127
The maps of Stillman Snr’s peripatetic wanderings which Quinn cribs in his red notebook flatten the perplexity of these hyperscapes, revealing shapes which seem to spell ‘OWER OF BAB’, hieroglyphs that prophesise the arrival of Stillman Snr’s postlapsarian utopia. Much like the seemingly random markings Mr. Morning makes in his notepad in The Blindfold, their actual meaning is inscrutable and unattributable to the symbols Quinn has scribed:
The letters continued to horrify Quinn. The whole thing was so oblique, so fiendish in its circumlocutions, that he did not want to accept it. Then doubts came, as if on command…he had imagined the whole thing. The letters were not letters at all. He had seen them only because he had wanted to see them. And even if the diagrams did form letters, it was only a fluke. Stillman had nothing to do with it. It was all an accident, a hoax he had perpetrated on himself. (Trilogy 71)
Motifs of perception, and representations of seeing and assimilating visual objects, frequently slow the narratives of Hustvedt and Auster’s fiction. Much like Auster’s narrative, The Blindfold contains instances of time being manipulated, sped up or slowed down, or compressed, so that events which should endure happen in the space of a sentence (‘I waited for months’), while events which occur instantaneously move at a crawl. Here Hustvedt compares Iris’
apprehension of the exterior urban landscape with the stultifying, antiquated interior world of Mr. Morning’s apartment:
I ran into the street and began to walk toward Broadway. When I reached the corner, I paused. It had stopped raining and the sky was breaking into
vast, blank holes of blue. I watched the clouds move and then looked into the street. The sidewalk, buildings, and people had been given a fierce clarity in the new light; each thing was radically distinct, as though my eyesight had suddenly been sharpened. (Blindfold 38)
Elsewhere Iris recalls her first visit to Mr. Morning’s den of antiquity: ‘The walls were lined with stuffed bookshelves, and more books were piled in leaning towers all over the room’. (Blindfold 10) The ‘leaning towers of books’ in Mr. Morning’s apartment proliferate with hermeneutic connotations, suggesting the patriarchal formalism of literary tradition, Foucault’s hierarchies of structured knowledge, Stillman’s Tower of Babel – the fall of Adamic language detailed in
City of Glass – and the spatial structure of the city of New York, the skyscrapers