Writing into Oblivion
In the night, no refuge is to be found in sleep.
— Maurice Blanchot
A new novel by Paul Auster is something of a literary event. Now in his mid-fifties,
Auster still retains the aura of a younger, daringly experimental writer, consummately
surfing the tidal wave of postmodernism and producing fiction that remains cerebral but
readable, even strangely gripping, staying lucid rather than ludicrous. His touchstone
themes of language, meaning, chance, writing, walking, fathers, sons, and overarching
negation have gone through the permutations required for eleven novels since the mid-
eighties, and countless critics and novelists have followed him into his idiosyncratic
versions of Manhattan, Brooklyn, New York, and America itself.
For all his European connections (he remains more widely read in Europe; he has a
formidable CV as a translator of French avant-gardeliterature and theory, and as
an academic essayist) Auster still signifies the "contemporary American novel," self-
consciously dependent upon its own past, mapping the alleyways and side-streets
tributary to the mainstream of American literary history. His novels, consequently,
always carry a curiously detached air that is partly a result of style (of which more
below), partly an effect of their conspicuous consumption of other writings, as if, within
the fiction, we stand forever on the verge of a critical discussion.
Auster's characters, usually male, often roughly corresponding to their author (like
Stephen King, he finds being a writer a springboard for so many narratives), always go
about their business with an air of detachment that sustains the reader in a condition of
alienation that seduces, of complicity that excludes. The tale, in all its specific
complexities (Auster retains his ability to weave a dark and intricate yarn), is told with an
efficiency verging on the disparaging, as if the tale itself were not the point, as if it were
merely the pretext for something bigger and altogether more intangible than the clumsy
materiality of words.
Oracle Night continues his exploration of writing as a task both onerous and
liberating, initiated by the purchase of a notebook (blue, in this case), leading the writer
into worlds utterly different from and yet approximating this one, where "fiction" and
"reality" blur together in a confusing and exhilarating tour-de-force of narration.
One is left, at the end, wondering whether this book was really a collection of short
stories welded together so the seams are still visible (I count at least eight separate but
embedded narratives, all interlinked and interdependent).
The trademark literary games are here, as is the closed, blank style. The novel contains its
fair share of suspicion and suspense, violence and violation, writing and walking (ending,
as it begins, with the narrator on the streets of Brooklyn), qualifying it for the Auster
canon. The narrator is Sidney Orr, a recuperating writer. His name recalls Orr the plane-
crashing escapologist in Joseph Heller's Catch 22, suggesting that Sidney offers
some kind of alternative. To what, we may ask. He buys a blue notebook from M. R.
Chang ("Mental Resources. Multiple Readings. Mysterious Revelations," ponders
Sidney, strewing red herrings before us like a deranged fisher-detective. How about
"Montague Rhodes," as in James? This novel, after all, "reads like an old-fashioned ghost
story," according to the blurb. It doesn't. It reads like an old-fashioned Paul Auster novel,
in spite of its narrator's occasional references to "my book of ghosts.")
The notebook, and Sidney's writing into it, generates the plots of numerous tales, leading
us into a world of occasional bizarre coincidence, a Kafkaesque unreality (Auster has
always seemed to me more akin to Kafka than to Beckett) where Sidney seems to be
implicitly yet indirectly responsible for the book's events, and suffers them even more
stoically than Josef K. Auster's style throughout resides in a prickly territory somewhere
between cliché and mere convention. "He was hip, he lived on the edge, and he didn't
take crap from anyone," we're told of one rather one-dimensional character; right on. It's
difficult at such moments to untangle the implications –- the narrator's chronic uncool?
Narrator's/author's irony? A satire on the character? Lazy writing? Auster, as he so often
does, leaves us guessing.
Elsewhere we're offered more meditations on language linked to the deeper theme of the
novel, which is to do with how words, photographs and other forms of representation
allow "the dead to keep their hold on us." One narrative involves a three-dimensional
slide viewer and some photos of the narrators' adolescence. The embedded narrative of
Oracle Night (itself a novel within a novel) leads its reader to a copy of the
Warsaw telephone directory for 1937-38, and the realisation that "nearly every Jewish
person listed in that book is long dead." Auster is traversing territory recently explored by
W. G. Sebald here, and even takes a leaf out of Sebald's book, reproducing an image of
the telephone directory as "proof."
And yet, while Sebald evokes an immense 20th century history of suffering and
estrangement from the micro-narratives of individual lives, similar material in Auster's
hands ends up being somehow unsatisfactory, merely an adjunct to what the book implies
are its deeper themes. But can there be a more urgent and pressing concern for a writer
like Auster? How can the horror of Dachau, momentarily related here, be left so
incomplete, so tangential to the writer's life in 1980s New York? And, while we're at it,
is the insistent date of "September 1982" meant to resonate with 9/11? Where are
contemporary American concerns here, aside from being burgled by stereotype drug
addicts in Brooklyn?
Oracle Night, to its author's credit, provokes such interrogation in a way that
other novels don't, as if we can legitimately expect so much more from a writer who
consistently delivers less, and who has made the theme of "lessness" his own defining
quality. One dead-end narrative here involves a screenplay (dismally Americanised) for
H. G. Wells's The Time Machine (again -- prescience, or opportunism?). Fiction
is its own time machine, Auster implies -- like the 3D viewer, it is "a magic lantern that
allowed him to travel through time and visit the dead." On what we should do on such
visits, Oracle Night retains a classically oracular ambiguity.
— 24 February 2004
