The New York Trilogy

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The New York trilogy gave the American writer Paul Auster (* 1947 ) an international breakthrough. It consists of the novels Stadt aus Glas (City of Glass , 1985), Schlagschatten (Ghosts , 1986) and Behind Closed Doors (The Locked Room , 1987).

The plot of these novels takes place in New York and shows protagonists who are hired or obsessed with finding or observing someone. In their search, however, they constantly encounter new ambiguities and finally lose themselves. As in other postmodern novels, the metafictional character of Auster's trilogy is shown by the fact that the author himself is included in the fictional events.

City made of glass

→ Main article: City of glass

In the novel City of Glass , the main character, a writer named Daniel Quinn, is mistaken for a private investigator named Paul Auster (this corresponds to the name of the author of the book). Quinn - who takes on the role - is tasked with finding the apparently mentally confused religious researcher Peter Stillmann sr. to be observed, because his son Peter Stillman jr. fears his father is trying to kill him. The father served a prison sentence until recently - he kept his son locked in a dark room for years to find out whether he would learn the language of God without any contact with other people.

Quinn follows Stillman Sr.'s heels until he finally loses him - he seems to have been swallowed by the earth. To Stillman Jr. To protect himself, Quinn positions himself near his house, always keeping the front door in his eyes. Months go by without anything happening.

Finally, Quinn leaves his post. Not only is it found that his apartment has been vacated and re-let in his absence, but he learns that Stillman sr. killed on the day of his disappearance. Penniless Quinn returns to Stillman Jr.'s apartment. back, but he and his wife haven't lived there for a long time. Quinn realizes that he has nothing left but his red notebook in which he documented the Stillman case.

Drop shadow

→ Main article: Drop shadow (novel)

The private detective Blue is assigned by White to shadow Black without knowing why. He settles in a one-room apartment, from where he can see directly into Black's apartment, who does nothing but write, read and occasionally shop for groceries. The case is a mystery to Blue. His suspicion that Black is himself his client is slowly growing. After about 16 months he wants to act to find out Black's secret. He succeeds, partly in disguise, to start conversations with Black. When Black leaves his apartment, Blue breaks in and steals sheets of a manuscript. They are Blues' own weekly reports. Blue looks for Black in his apartment, Black threatens him, Blue knocks him down and steals the correct manuscript. The progress remains open.

Schlagschatten is the reworking of Auster's one-act play Blackouts from 1976.

Behind closed doors

The writer Fanshawe, who has never published anything, disappears without a trace and leaves behind his wife Sophie and a son. After unsuccessful investigations by a private detective, Sophie thinks he is dead and - as her husband wished - hires the nameless first-person narrator, a critic, to sift through the estate. The narrator is a childhood friend of Fanshawe, but has not had contact with him for a long time. He manages to find a publisher and the author's name Fanshawe becomes famous, but as a person he has disappeared. Then the narrator receives a letter from Fanshawe, who still wants to be held for dead and warns the narrator. He, Fanshawe, will kill him if he tracks him down. He asks the narrator to marry Sophie and to represent him as the father of his son Ben.

The narrator gets into a crisis because he realizes that he mustn't tell Sophie about this letter if he doesn't want to lose her. The crisis intensifies when he promises the publisher to write a biography of the allegedly dead fanshawe. He is now searching for facts and yet has the feeling that he can never and may never penetrate the truth. As a result, he moves further and further away from Sophie. Although he soon gives up the biography project, he visits Fanshawe's mother, reads Fanshawe's letters, flies to Paris, where Fanshawe lived, and lives in the country house in which he has temporarily stayed, but finds no trace of his childhood friend to follow. Once he mistook a stranger for fanshawe and defiantly insists on his misjudgment until the stranger gets angry and knocks him out. He returns to New York, makes up with Sophie - and receives another letter from Fanshawe. Fanshawe gives him an address in Boston where he wants the first-person narrator to visit him. The house has fallen into disrepair. Only separated by a door, Fanshawe explains to the narrator that he has already taken poison and will die. When the narrator tries to open the door, Fanshawe demonstrates by firing a shot that he has a revolver that he will use to shoot him if he tries to get to him. He has left a red notebook in a cupboard behind the narrator, which is supposed to explain everything, but only contains things that are incomprehensible.

In the end, the narrator writes that City of Glass, Drop Shadows and Behind Closed Doors are ultimately the same story, only in a different stage. That is the name of the detective Sophie hired after Fanshawe's disappearance, Quinn. A stranger whom the narrator in France thinks is fanshawe and is persecuting himself is called Peter Stillman.

Interpretative approach

Influenced by modern French literature, Auster tries to create a text in his New York trilogy that does justice to the changing cityscape of the present by innovatively developing postmodern spellings into a neorealist style. In contrast to previous versions of the American urban novel, for example in the case of John Dos Passos , the techniques of modern architecture, which previously provided stability in the novel, are in Auster's work in a resolution that, as a general phenomenon of decay, also affects the constituent elements of the novel affects.

The only formative element of the genre of the novel lies in the narrative structure of the detective novel on which the entire New York trilogy is based, albeit with a clearly anti-detective orientation, as in Thomas Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49 (1966). The confusion prevailing on all levels, which ultimately results from an apocalyptic confusion of language, means from the outset the failure or impossibility of any detective venture.

Quinn, the author of detective stories, is taken for an alleged detective himself and is entrusted by Peter with the observation of his mentally ill father. For his part, as a theology professor, he had isolated his son from the outside world during his childhood in order to regain that unity of language through the unspoiled children's language, which had been lost through the confusion of languages ​​during the building of the Tower of Babel .

With the recovery of such a clear linguistic reference system it would then be possible to transform the horror phenomenon of the modern New York metropolis, which is comparable to the Tower of Babel, into a paradisiacal original state. However, the search of the fanatical religious scholar for the time before the linguistic fall of man comes to nothing, as does the search of the ambitious detective writer for the professor's motives.

The bewildering variety of tracks ultimately makes Quinn his own object of search. After losing track of the professor, he is no longer able to break away from this case. He becomes the personification of his own fictions , since he is no longer able to differentiate between the invented and the real occurrence. In the end he takes on the role of the tramp, which he initially only chose as a disguise.

The threats and dangers to the city result from this confusion of language and perception: the objects of the city appear as mere linguistic ciphers which, like all linguistic expressions, have long lost their real background and are only fictional. For this reason, the characters and their actions are also fictional and affected by the universal decay and loss of identity resulting from the confusion.

The fear of the collapse of identity finds its apparent parallel in the falling apart of the urban landscape. As in his other novels, Auster expresses his criticism of the dehumanizing moments of post-industrial society and post-modern reality with the depicted loss of any stability or security .

The observations in the city, which are highlighted with neo-realistic techniques, as well as the description of the psychological suffering can be understood as a realistic portrayal of a bizarre postmodern city life in Auster's dystopia In the Country of Last Things (1987) and his next novel Moon Palace (1989) to be expanded to the apocalyptic end-time vision of a dying city.

Factory history background

After the modest success of his prose debut The Invention of Loneliness , which is an attempt to get closer to his late father, Stadt aus Glas is initially rejected by 17 publishers, but is then placed on the list of nominations for the Edgar Allan Poe Award . With the release of the trilogy, Auster finally became world famous. As a young man he read Chandler and Hammett . Here he uses set pieces from crime fiction and each of the three novels looks more like a classic detective story at the beginning . The detective novel Squeeze Play , published in a larger edition only in 1998 in the appendix to the Auster portrait volume From hand to mouth: A chronicle of early failures , which he tried to publish in 1978 under the pseudonym Paul Benjamin for purely commercial reasons and which was first printed in 1982 , was kind of a forerunner.

“Ideally, the detective novel is one of the purest and most fascinating forms of storytelling par excellence. The idea that every sentence is important, that every word can be important, drives the author to peak performance. And that's the only reason I was so interested in the genre. "

The protagonists' observations and research do not lead to the investigation of a criminal case or the completion of an order. Rather, they reflect and illustrate their personal fate and lead to self-knowledge in the further course of the action. Auster's detective stories go beyond the usual framework of this genre. The form is used to represent and analyze existential problems and questions about human identity. The trilogy bears attributes of the postmodern novel.

Quote

“Every novel in the trilogy is about an excessive passion. City made of glass alludes to Don Quixote (…): Where is the line between madness and creativity? Where is the line between reality and fantasy? In cast shadows , the spirit of Thoreau (...) dominates the idea of ​​living a life of solitude, of withdrawing to oneself like a monk - including the dangers that this entails. (…) In Behind Closed Doors , the name Fanshawe is a direct reference to Hawthorne's (…) first novel. He wrote it at a very young age, and no sooner had the book appeared than he distanced himself from it inwardly ... ”- Paul Auster

expenditure

  • The New York Trilogy. Faber & Faber, London 1987. ISBN 0-571-16864-7
    • Translation: The New York Trilogy. German by Joachim A. Frank. Rowohlt, Reinbek 1989. ISBN 3-499-12548-X
  • City of Glass , 1994. GraphicNovel by David Mazzucchelli and Paul Karasik. Published by Art Spiegelman

literature

  • Anne M. Holzapfel: The New York trilogy. Whodunit? Tracking the structure of Paul Auster's anti-detective novels. Lang, Frankfurt am Main 1996 (= studies in German and English; 11), ISBN 3-631-49798-9
  • Matthias Kugler: Paul Auster's “The New York Trilogy” as Postmodern Detective Fiction (diploma thesis). Diplomica Publishing, Hamburg 1999, ISBN 978-3838618524
  • Roberta Rubenstein: “Doubling, Intertextuality, and the Postmodern Uncanny: Paul Auster's New York Trilogy ”, in: LIT 9, 1998, pp. 245-262

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ On the book itself the title is written like this: "The New York Trilogy".
  2. ↑ See Franz Link: American storytellers since 1950 - Topics - Contents - Forms . Schöningh Verlag, Paderborn u. a. 1993, ISBN 3-506-70822-8 , p. 503.
  3. ^ Blackouts in: From hand to mouth , Rowohlt, Reinbek 1998, pp. 199ff.
  4. ↑ On this approach to an analysis, see Hubert Zapf : American Literature History. Metzler Verlag, 2nd, updated edition, Stuttgart / Weimar 2004, ISBN 3-476-02036-3 , p. 364f.
  5. ↑ Interview with Larry McCaffery and Sinda Gregory, 1990, in: Die Kunst des Hungers , Rowohlt, Reinbek 2000, p. 227
  6. ↑ Interview with Joseph Mallia 1987, in: Die Kunst des Hungers , Rowohlt, Reinbek 2000, p. 198