FICTION
The same book, again and again
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`Here, in essence, lies the philosophical richness of Auster's work, his refusal to fall into the post-modern trap of denying meaning.'
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MOST writers grapple with lingering themes, but Auster is among the few who replicate characters, plot twists and motifs. The Locked Room (1987), The Music of Chance (1990) and his latest, Oracle Night (2004), all feature men who abandon their lives and take to the road.
Resonances across books
These broad similarities are accompanied by specific symbolic resonances: locked rooms, strange notebooks, and serpentine libraries proliferate. Furthermore, the titles themselves suggest the common ground on which his stories are based — he examines the pleasures and pains of solitude, and the mysterious interplay between chance and destiny.
Oracle Night is no different in its attention to these concerns — in the opening paragraph, the novelist-narrator, Sidney Orr informs us that:
When the day came for me to leave the hospital, I barely knew how to walk anymore, could barely remember who I was supposed to be. ... They had given me up for dead, and now that I had confounded their predictions and mysteriously failed to die, what choice did I have but to live as though a future life were waiting for me?
So, Orr buys a new notebook and starts working. But the promise of a possible future is turned inside-out when, instead of writing a novel, he begins writing dangerously oracular fantasies about himself.
The structure of Oracle Night resembles a set of concentric circles: the main narrative encloses another fiction, which in turn contains a different novel (also titled "Oracle Night"). Life imitates art repeatedly — Orr's film adaptation, Tabula Rasa, turns out to be prophetic, as do his speculative scribblings about his wife's past. Art and reality continually reflect each other — this point is driven home when Orr visits his friend, John, and muses on the fact that his novel is set in this very apartment:
I was there, fully engaged in what was happening, and at the same time, I wasn't there — for there wasn't an authentic there anymore. It was an illusory place that existed in my head, and that's where I was as well. In both places at the same time.
Orr is of course, talking about writing, but his author is cutting through to the fundamental mystery of consciousness — the ability to experience reality on many levels, often simultaneously. Writing fascinates Auster as well: he intended to epigraph his first novel, City of Glass, with the words: "And it also means something to speak of `living in the pages of a book'" (the phrase is from Wittgenstein's Zettel). Although City of Glass was published sans epigraph, the same phrase could have furnished the opening page of Oracle Night, for its characters too inhabit imagined and real worlds with equal intensity.
Narrative and life
Indeed, false starts and incomplete fictions proliferate, until the "real" story comes to the surface, barely 30 pages before the novel's conclusion. It takes a considerable degree of chutzpah to structure a novel along these lines: the narrative mirrors the weave of life, suggesting that life does not simply follow art, but that art too reflects the haphazard structure of life, or at least, art in the Auster mould, that is, writing which takes imaginative failure as its premise.
In an interview conducted in 2002, the author confided that "every time I set out to write a novel, I make a conscious effort to reinvent myself, to work against the books I've written before. No matter how far I think I'm getting away from myself and my past, however, I can never really escape."
And so, he writes the same book over and over. Nonetheless, his writing continues to challenge — not despite his inclination to traverse familiar territory, not even because he flatters his readers into spotting similarities and engage in a mind-game with him.
The role of coincidence
Rather, his method is grounded in a much more old-fashioned view of humanity: that we have yet to unravel the mysteries of the self or understand the dance of destiny, will, and chance. The overlapping parallels in Oracle Night challenge the notion of life as a chaotic accumulation of details by showing the ways in which coincidence forms a vital part of our experience.
Here, in essence, lies the philosophical richness of Auster's work, his refusal to fall into the post-modern trap of denying meaning. Like the many aborted fictions in Oracle Night, life is complex, difficult, unfulfilling even, but in the eyes of this writer, it remains an object of curiosity and never degenerates into a sideshow of meaningless tragedy.
The absence of closure in the many stories in Oracle Night suggests that although we never really turn the page on the past, the force of the present pushes us on, moving us to erase and inscribe the text of personality on the same page. With each moment, we become another version of who we are. As Auster has said about his own creative process: "And in the end, all you really discover is yourself. Again and again."
Oracle Night, Paul Auster, Faber and Faber, 2005, paperback, p.304, £7.99.
AMMU KANNAMPILLY
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