Between 1982 and 1984 Paul Auster sent his manuscript for City of Glass to seventeen publishers; they all turned it down. Twelve years later, he sold his manuscripts to the Berg Collection in the New York Public Library, where they now lie in the company of those of Charles Dickens, Mark Twain and Vladimir Nabokov. Since 1984, Auster has published nine novels as well as books of non-fiction, while some of his early plays, along with a pseudonymous detective novel originally published in 1982, have been published in the form of appendices to new work. Meanwhile, his career in film has progressed from a cameo appearance in Philip Haas's adaptation of The Music of Chance to writing and co-directing Smoke and Blue in the Face with Wayne Wang, to a film written and directed by himself, Lulu on the Bridge. In the 1970s, Auster felt that everything he touched ‘turned to failure’ (HM 3); by the early 1990s, he could support himself through writing, and now the story has it that his books are kept behind the counter in many bookshops because he is a favourite among shoplifters. The critical attention he has received is no less impressive than his reversal of fortune; in a book published in 1995 Dennis Barone predicted an ‘exponential growth’ in Auster criticism in the late 1990s, and in 1996 alone four books on Moon Palace appeared in France.

Despite this success, Sven Birkerts has a point when he describes Auster as ‘the ghost at the banquet of contemporary American letters’, while Auster himself feels that what he is doing is ‘so contrary to what most novelists are trying to accomplish that I often have trouble thinking of myself as a novelist at all’ (AH 305). There are, as we shall see, various factors that may help to explain the peculiar position that Auster occupies in American letters. His fiction is hard to classify, as it borrows from different traditions and participates in, without belonging to, various ‘schools’ of writing. His work combines metafictive elements with a clearly articulated interest in, and engagement with, the contemporary world. Overt references to the act and the nature of writing and self-conscious subversions of traditional notions of story-telling are never divorced from questions pertaining to urban living, Western history, capitalism, the tyranny of money, and the role of the author in society.

‘Mr Vertigo is different from my other books,’ says Paul Auster. Asked how it fits into the cycle of complex novels followed by simpler ones, he says that that circle has closed: ‘Mr Vertigo constitutes a leap towards another place. After Leviathan, which was a very difficult book to write, very tough, an altogether strenuous effort, I wanted to engage in a much lighter project. Deep down, this desire to talk of levitation seems to me like a resistance to heaviness, to a certain weightiness of the previous novel.’ This desire to escape the ‘weightiness’ of previous novels may one day be read as the beginning of a second phase in Auster's novelistic career, a suggestion which his latest novel, Timbuktu, seems to confirm. Although both books contain certain motifs that can be traced back to Auster's earlier work, they are more notable for their difference from their predecessors. They therefore fall outside the scope of this book, since a detailed study of them would necessitate an entirely different set of theoretical parameters and critical perspectives.

Narrated in the first person, Mr Vertigo tells the story of Walter Claire-borne Rawley, a nine-year-old orphaned urchin who is picked up by the mysterious Master Yehudi in the streets of St Louis in 1924. Master Yehudi promises to teach Walt to fly, and, after a gruelling three-year apprenticeship, Walt lifts himself off the ground. Reinvented as Walt the Wonder Boy, he tours the country with his master and becomes famous but, as puberty sets in, he loses the ability to levitate. Having lost his mentor, he drifts aimlessly through life until, at the age of seventy-seven, he begins to write his memoirs, which he instructs his nephew to publish after his death. Although the novel is written in such a way that the opportunity arises, Auster deliberately avoids the questions he had asked in all his previous novels.

Paul Auster has observed that his novels follow a pendular rhythm in which a complex, labyrinthine book is followed by one that is simple in its construction.The New York Trilogy, Moon Palace and Leviathan are all narrated in a complex manner and contain numerous stories within their intricate plots, whereas In The Country of Last Things and The Music of Chance are characterised by a movement towards lessness. They are what Auster would call ‘bare bone narratives’, simple stories told in a straightforward manner. This chapter, ‘Austerities’, as the title suggests, considers the place of these ascetic narratives in Auster's œuvre. The most pronounced intertextual presences here are the writings of Beckett, Kafka and Knut Hamsun, while the fairy-tale and the parable are the genres that provide a starting point for Auster's fiction. However, the pendular rhythm that the author identifies can also be detected within The New York Trilogy itself, not only in the second story, Ghosts, but also in the stripping down of traditional narrative forms (especially the detective novel) which takes place throughout the book. As I argued in the previous chapter, Auster negotiates his own position in relation to nineteenth-century American writing by causing the text to become a field of confrontation for the two opposing trends in the writings of that period. At the same time, though, his own position is also regulated by his reading of modernist literature, and the way it challenged Romantic assumptions as well as realist writing. Therefore, before I examine In the Country of Last Things and The Music of Chance, I remain with The New York Trilogy, this time reading it in relation to Samuel Beckett's Trilogy.

If Auster ever came close to experiencing the anxiety of influence, he must have felt it in relation to Beckett. In his own critical work he praises Beckett who, ‘Even at his not quite best… remains Beckett, and reading him is like reading no one else… Beckett is not like other writers… beyond Dickens and Joyce, there is perhaps no English writer of the past hundred years who has equalled Beckett's early prose for vigor and intelligence’ (AH 83–87).

‘Legacies’ offers an analysis which takes the form of a juxtaposition between Auster's New York Trilogy and texts by his American forefathers. As I have already stated, my aim is not to trace influences or chase allusions, if only because Auster makes such a task superfluous by drawing attention to them in a very explicit manner. Nor does my method involve a study of the historical progression of American literature from the nineteenth century to the present, and this is not only due to the fact that any such history may be ideologically suspect, and often necessarily simplistic, but also because it has for a long time been recognised that literature is also read backwards from the present. In ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’ (1917), T.S. Eliot called attention to this effect when he wrote: ‘What happens when a new work of art is created is something that happens simultaneously to all works of art which preceded it... The past [is] altered by the present as much as the present is directed by the past.’ Borges gave a more specific example, emphasising the contribution of individual authors to the way we read earlier texts. In his essay on Nathaniel Hawthorne, he drew parallels between ‘Wakefield’ and Kafka's stories, and he concluded:

In his book Reverse Tradition: Postmodern Fictions and the Nineteenth Century Novel, Robert Kiely expands on this proposition, and offers readings of nineteenth-century texts through contemporary ones.

The fall of the Berlin Wall may have given The Music of Chance a resonance that the author himself could not have anticipated, but in much of his fiction Auster deliberately explores the boundaries between the ‘real’ and the ‘fictive’. As I have discussed in previous chapters, The New York Trilogy is as much about the literary ghosts that haunt the modern city as it is about the experience of living in it, while In the Country of Last Things presents a collage of cities which have witnessed the progress and the horrors of the twentieth century. These novels may have revealed a bias, on my part as well as Auster's, towards the ‘literary’ rather than the ‘factual’, but they have never been totally detached from the real world. After all, as I have argued, the notion of the intertext is not limited to literary works but embraces processes of fiction-making which have not always been recognised as such. The interaction between the ‘real’ world of history and politics and the world of fiction is given a more prominent position in Moon Palace and Leviathan and, in a different way, also in Mr Vertigo. Although all three are complex narratives encompassing stories within stories, and covering a large time-span that is signposted through references to historical events, the effect is not one of all-inclusiveness. Paradoxically, this panorama of historical and political events is not meant to represent an attempt at mimesis, but serves rather to emphasise subjectivity. In other words, these are narratives that may appear to be ‘grand’ in scale but which seek not to assert their authority, but rather constantly to put it in question. As Chantal Coulomb-Buffa states in relation to Moon Palace, Auster's writing ‘keeps questioning the infinite power of text to generate itself and the impossibility to [sic] reach any original truth’.