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Language, History and Politics
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Paul Auster’s Post-9/11 Writing

L’œuvre post-11 septembre de Paul Auster
François Hugonnier

Résumés

Dans son œuvre, Paul Auster témoigne des événements du 11 septembre 2001 de façon inattendue, par le biais du silence, de la répétition et du détour. Cet essai explore ses réactions variées suite aux attentats terroristes, que l’on peut observer dans ses romans et ses écrits en prose, dévoilant une relation complexe avec l’histoire mondiale et la représentation. Cette discussion inclut les écrits de Paul Auster au 21e siècle, tout en faisant référence à sa poésie et ses essais de jeunesse afin de souligner la persistance du trauma et de l’indicible. Paul Auster continue de dire sans dire, s’approchant de l’ineffable en s’en détournant. Sa stratégie narrative, étudiée ici trace après trace, est unique dans les lettres américaines.

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Entrées d’index

Index de mots-clés :

fiction, prose, témoignage, trauma

Index by keywords:

fiction, prose, testimony, trauma

Index chronologique :

9/11 / 11 septembre 2001
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Texte intégral

  • 1 In the novel The Brooklyn Follies, no mention of 9/11 is made until the very end, when Nathan Glass (...)

1During the conference “Fiction Rescues History” at the Sorbonne in 2016, Don DeLillo claimed that the events of 9/11 were not intended to be an “oblique part” of his novel Falling Man. The use of the adjective “oblique” echoes Paul Auster’s own terminology, although the latter foregrounds a vision apparently opposite to his friend’s. Both New York writers have articulated influential responses in their essays and books of fiction, offering complementary methodologies and common ground for post-9/11 literary expression. Paul Auster may not have written a specific 9/11 book; however, the events keep haunting his writing. Except for Nathan’s final vision in The Brooklyn Follies,1 the chaos caused by the collapsing towers of the World Trade Center is never represented directly in his work of fiction. Through focusing on Auster’s latest output, this essay sets out to explore the evolution of his writing in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks, and especially how his latest novels approach them obliquely.

  • 2 Paul Auster, Winter Journal, New York: Henry Holt, 2012, 11.
  • 3 Paul Auster, White Spaces, Barrytown, NY: Station Hill, 1980. See also Paul Auster, “White Spaces”, (...)

2Whether via fiction or nonfiction, Auster has become a spokesman for a community facing the fall, a “flag-bearer” for the wounded.2 Fiction offers a post-traumatic shelter, housing the art and architecture of absence. After the first major artistic shift enacted in White Spaces in 1979,3 the events of 9/11 constitute another milestone moment in Auster’s œuvre. Returning to his early poetic concerns with the unspeakable, especially derived from his post-1945 Jewish legacy, Paul Auster conversely explores new narrative modes that range from nonfiction and trans-media representations to a thorough rethinking of the novel’s very scope and address. As history is taking more and more room in Auster’s writing in the wake of 9/11, it is crucial to analyze the veiled presence of these events in light of a broader historical context that feeds into fiction in surprising ways.

  • 4 Kristiaan Versluys, Out of the Blue: September 11 and the Novel, New York: Columbia UP, 2009, 2.

3Paul Auster’s work illustrates Kristiaan Versluys’s view of September 11, 2001 as “a semiotic event, involving the total breakdown of all meaning-making systems. […] Yet name it we must”.4 Indeed, Auster’s post-9/11 prose precisely names without naming. It is fraught with displacements, repetitions, oblique references and hybrid tropes that signify his search for new directions and new meanings. It is striking to note that the post-1945 heritage surfaces in his post-9/11 writing, testifying to the enduring hold of trauma. In a variety of nonfiction pieces, he tentatively articulates his personal experience of a collective moment, while some of the dominant aspects of his post-9/11 fiction, namely testimony, haunting, and fragmentation, convey the persistence of the unspeakable.

Deciphering trauma writing: the post-1945 and post-9/11 distortion

  • 5 Paul Auster, 4 3 2 1, New York: Henry Holt, 2017, 250-263.
  • 6 Ibid., 263.

4Archie Ferguson’s grotesque allegorical short story entitled Sole Mates5 and embedded in 4 3 2 1 is obliquely pointing to historical trauma. Even if the narrator explains the cryptic post-WW2 allegory afterward, to my post-9/11 scholar’s biased eyes, the fall of Hank and Frank, this almost identical “rhyming pair” of shoes, down the “incinerator chute”6, might also metaphorically evoke the fall of the Twin Towers and the 9/11 jumpers:

  • 7 Ibid., 263.

and so little Timothy Quine takes hold of Hank, and as he casts him seven floors down into the basement furnace, he says, Good-bye, shoe, and then he takes hold of Frank and repeats the operation, saying Good-bye, shoe, as Frank follows his brother into the fire below, and before another day has dawned over the island of Manhattan, the two sole mates have been transformed into an indistinguishable mass of red, glowing cinders.7

  • 8 Ibid., 263-268.

5The story operates a referential displacement in the fictional context of America in the 1960s. The phrase “before another day has dawned over the island of Manhattan” makes New York City pop up at the decisive moment of the fall, while the doubling pattern (“Hank”/“Frank”; “Good-bye, shoe”/”Good-bye, shoe”) and the “mass of red, glowing cinders” are reminiscent of both the Holocaust and Ground Zero. This post-1945 and post-9/11 distortion epitomizes Auster’s haunted writing since the terrorist attacks. The reference to an “incinerator”, which is part of the Holocaust allegory acknowledged during the multi-voice exegesis of the short story,8 is repeatedly used in Auster’s fiction and nonfiction to describe war disasters and their repetition, delocalization and spectral presence after 9/11.

  • 9 Ibid., 250.
  • 10 Ibid., 263.
  • 11 Ibid., 251.
  • 12 Ibid., 255.
  • 13 Ibid., 251.
  • 14 Ibid., 252, emphasis mine.
  • 15 Claire Maniez, “Suspendu entre passé et avenir : Oracle Night de Paul Auster”, Revue française d’ét (...)

6Once these lexical connections are traced, numerical ones emerge. At the beginning of the shoe story in 4 3 2 1, the date sparks off a 9/11 encoding: “in mid-September Ferguson started writing a short story”.9 At the end of the passage, we are told that Ferguson is “in the ninth grade now”.10 In addition, the pair of shoes is size eleven: “he should think about the number eleven. Size eleven worries him […] [S]ize eleven is one hell of a big shoe”.11 Through this meta-commentary, the reader is indirectly asked to “think about the number eleven” and its “worrying” implications, not to mention those of the word “hell”, repeated in “Hell’s Kitchen”.12 The date of the 9/11 attacks is completed a few words later, when the narrator comments that Frank would be “much happier with an eight or nine”.13 These undecidable numerical intimations are reinforced when Hank and Frank’s box is “pull[ed] out from the tower of boxes they were consigned to”.14 In the same way as the missing towers are proleptically suggested by pencils and rulers briefly mimicking the New York skyline in Oracle Night15, here the shoe boxes make up towers and floors. In both novels, the numbers and the lexicon are enigmatic, left to be read as either mere chance operations or secretive literary design.

  • 16 Paul Auster, 4 3 2 1, op. cit., 250.
  • 17 Art Spiegelman, In the Shadow of No Towers, New York: Pantheon Books, Random House, 2004, 1.

7As it is followed by a series of commentaries, Ferguson’s short story indirectly explains how Auster’s writing process functions. Beneath the polished surface of Auster’s prose, closer scrutiny reveals that the main characters’ names Hank and Frank might refer to Ann Frank’s hiding strategy during WW2. In the main narrative thread of 4 3 2 1, Archie Ferguson and Artie Federman precisely make up “the two A.F.s”,16 whose initials point obliquely to Anne Frank’s name. Ferguson writes this story when he is 14, the same age as Ann Frank when she completed her journal. Yet, to go back to my initial biased response, and additional reading, the cartoonish pair of shoes is not only reminiscent of the concentration camp’s horrors, but also of Art Spiegelman’s phrase “waiting for that other shoe to drop” as a metaphor for the repetition of trauma on and after September 11, 2001 in his cardboard book In the Shadow of No Towers.17 Through a geographical, historical and allegorical shift, with “the two A.F.s” and the two “rhyming” shoes, Paul Auster explores a binary pattern encompassing both the 1945-9/11 references and the Twin Towers’ symmetry. At any rate, in this excerpt from 4 3 2 1, the author is displaying the ropes of fiction writing when the narrator is commenting on the level of nuance that such coded messages should offer.

  • 18 “As he stood in Anne Frank’s room, the room in which the diary was written, […] he suddenly found h (...)
  • 19 Paul Auster, 4 3 2 1, op. cit., 551, 1.

8This mise en abyme of ciphering and deciphering typifies the allegorical nature of most post-9/11 novels by Auster, including Oracle Night, The Brooklyn Follies, Travels in the Scriptorium, Man in the Dark and Sunset Park. When World War II is mentioned in these works, it seems to function as a beforemath speaking for other veiled events, among them 9/11. In the second book of The Invention of Solitude, Auster describes a moment of epiphany that occurred when he visited Ann Frank’s room in Amsterdam,18 suggesting the death of Anne Frank (Book II) triggered his impulse to write. Likewise, the death of his own father Samuel Auster sparked the writing of the first part. In other words, Paul Auster’s earliest work of prose emerged as a response to personal and communal history. While Anne Frank stands as the embodiment of memorial writing in the second section called “The Book of Memory”, “A.F”. stands for Archie Ferguson, derivatives of “archive” and “forgotten” in 4 3 2 1.19 From the outset, Auster’s writing is therefore memorial, and 1945 still holds a central place, along with war narratives that have been revived in his novels since 9/11.

  • 20 Paul Auster, “White”, in Collected Poems, op. cit., 87.
  • 21 Paul Auster, “S. A. 1911-1979”, in Collected Poems, op. cit., 144.
  • 22 Paul Auster, “Fore-Shadows”, in Collected Poems, op. cit., 78.
  • 23 Paul Auster, The Red Notebook (True Stories, Prefaces and Interviews), London: Faber, 1995, 104.

9In Auster’s entire body of work, the impossibility of speech is twofold: the first impossibility is post-lapsarian; the second stems from personal and historical trauma. The obliqueness of Auster’s references and his position on the unspeakable are present since day one, as illustrated by his early use of acrostics in his elegy for Paul Celan (“s-h/n-o-a-h”),20 or when mourning his father’s death (“S-A-M”).21 With his first poems and essays, Auster started out as an “heir” to post-1945 Jewish writers: “I become / your necessary and most violent / heir”.22 These lines from the poem “Fore-Shadows” contain an oral pun translating a post-1945 poetics of interiority, materializing both the air the poet breathes in to survive, and the linguistic struggle of his poetic inheritance. His poems and essays on Paul Celan, Edmond Jabès, Charles Reznikoff and Georges Pérec point to the limitations of language, to the necessary formation of linguistic negativity to cope with the unnamable. Digging in language itself, crushing the fragments from the Tower of Babel behind which the voice suffocates, is what constitutes Auster’s original poetic impulse. It is a poetics that has now been tested in prose. Same impulse and necessity, different form. As Auster told Joseph Mallia: “If it really has to be said, it will create its own form”.23

Auster’s nonfictional responses to 9/11

  • 24 Manhattan, Ground Zero: A Sonic Memorial Sound Walk, New York: Soundwalk, 2005.
  • 25 Paul Auster, “Random Notes — September 11, 2001, 4 PM”, commissioned by Die Zeit, first published S (...)
  • 26 Ibid., 505, 506.

10Paul Auster’s nonfictional responses to 9/11 are diverse in scope and form, ranging from eyewitness accounts, newspaper articles, essays and interviews, to memorial works including the Soundwalk recordings24 and a memoir. The first one is entitled “Random Notes — September 11, 2001, 4 PM”.25 As the title suggests, this testimony comes from a random New Yorker, from his subjective perception and tentative expression of the events. The dash and the time of day also imply that there is no such thing as direct testimony. Facing the need to respond and articulate his eyewitness account, Auster wrote a short set of factual paragraphs describing the smoke and the assault on the senses, tying the un-imaginable (“it’s far worse than anyone ever imagined”) to friendship and family bonds (“Our fourteen-year-old daughter started high school today”), and concluding with a most disturbing historical statement: “And so the twenty-first century finally begins”.26 Both an end and a beginning, the events are instantly mythicized after a few cool-headed political reminders and warnings. In other words, on the very day of the attacks, Auster had already inscribed the events as a universal landmark, a game changer. And change it did, not only politically, but also in terms of literary creation, as illustrated by his next responses.

  • 27 Paul Auster, “Random Notes — September 11, 2001, 4 PM” and “Underground”, in Ulrich Baer (ed.), 101 (...)
  • 28 Paul Auster, Collected Prose, op. cit., 506, 507.

11The second prose text inspired from 9/11 was written a month after the attacks. This time, it is a newspaper notice entitled “Underground” that does not address the events. But both pieces, later published next to each other in Ulrich Baer’s 101 Stories: New York Writes After September 1127 and in Paul Auster’s Collected Prose do feature a fully-formed date: “September 11, 2001” and “October 11, 2001”.28 Here is the full text of “Underground”:

Riding the subway at a busy time of day – morning rush hour, evening rush hour – and having the good luck to find a seat. Counting the number of newspapers not written in English, scanning the titles of books and watching people read (the mystery of it, the impossibility of entering another person’s mind), listening in on conversations, sneaking a look at the baseball scores over someone’s shoulder.
The thin men with their briefcases, the voluminous women with their Bibles and devotional pamphlets, the high school kids with their forty-pound textbooks. Trashy novels, comic books, Melville and Tolstoy, How to Attain Inner Peace.
Looking across the aisle at one’s fellow passengers and studying their faces. Marveling at the variety of skin tones and features, floored by the singularity of each person’s nose, each person’s chin, exulting in the infinite shufflings of the human deck.
The panhandlers with their out-of-tune songs and tales of woe; the fractious harangues of born-again proselytizers; the deaf-mutes politely placing sign-language cards in your lap; the silent men who scuttle through the car selling umbrellas, tablecloths, and cheap wind-up toys.
The noise of the train, the speed of the train. The incomprehensible static that pours through the loudspeaker at each stop. The lurches, the sudden losses of balance, the impact of strangers crashing into one another. The delicate, altogether civilized art of minding one’s own business.
And then, never for any apparent reason, the lights go out, the fans stop whirring, and everyone sits in silence, waiting for the train to start moving again. Never a word from anyone. Rarely even a sigh. My fellow New Yorkers sit in the dark, waiting with the patience of angels.

  • 29 Paul Auster, “Underground”, The New York Times Magazine (October 2001), in Collected Prose, op. cit (...)

October 11, 201129

  • 30 Jacques Derrida, Schibboleth, pour Paul Celan, Paris : Galilée, 1986, 33-36.

12At first sight, the text is simple. A moving, affectionate depiction of New Yorkers in the subway. Without the date and the historical context, we could hardly read it for what it is: a silent, soothing reflection on communal grief after 9/11. The inscription of the date in such short pieces is all the more potent: it exemplifies Jacques Derrida’s concept of the date as an incision in time and memory, a signature.30 On second thoughts, the lexicon reveals intriguing connections. First, the title “Underground”, which is the British word for “subway”, indicates a subtext, a subterranean message. Then, the passengers are systematically portrayed by way of their unknowable interiority: “the mystery of it, the impossibility of entering another person’s mind”, “silence”, “the silent men”, “the deaf-mutes”, “Never a word from anyone”. When language is addressed, it is in light of its unintelligible remoteness or loudness: “sign-language alphabet”, “counting the number of newspapers not written in English”, “The incomprehensible static that pours through the loud speaker at each stop”. While the voice in the loud speaker is deafening, the songs are also distorted (“out-of-tune”). Unable to know people’s “inner” selves, Paul Auster marvels at their surface appearances, their “faces”. Deciphering is so predominant that the reader becomes aware of invisible signs possibly lodged in Auster’s own prose. In the space of a month, Auster’s response has changed radically: the louder the message, the lesser it gets through to the audience.

  • 31 Toni Morrison, “The Dead of September II”, Vanity Fair, September 13, 2001.

13How then, can we read “Underground” as a post-9/11 piece? From a thematic viewpoint, the depiction of multi-ethnic New Yorkers is reminiscent of Toni Morrison’s 9/11 eulogical poem “The Dead of September II”, published on September 13, 2001.31 Auster expresses the same warmth and tenderness mixed with a contrapuntal darkness: “My fellow New Yorkers sit in the dark.” The biblical dichotomy of light and darkness (“the lights go out”) is further deployed through the mention of the “Bibles” and the final vision of the New Yorkers as “angels”. An archetypal descent to the underworld is being described. The undecipherable languages and messages of this eulogy make it indirect, like some secular prayer addressed to the living. In the silence of mourning, the 9/11 events are not mentioned. However, an ambiguous passage seems to repeat the shock of the plane crashes inside the subway wagon: “The lurches, the sudden losses of balance, the impact of strangers crashing into one another.”

  • 32 Paul Auster, “Authors Paul Auster and Salman Rushdie Reflect on September 11”, All Things Considere (...)

14Brevity and allusion suffice in order to convey the crushing presence of trauma. The unspeakable events are not spoken and their lingering presence is veiled, but some traces outline their acceptable, oblique representation. And so, less than a year later, during an interview on the occasion of the first anniversary of the attacks, Paul Auster spoke of the necessity of such oblique responses, as found in Samuel Beckett’s post-1945 work: “Some of the greatest art about a particular time is told obliquely.”32

15Commenting on the works of others allowed Paul Auster to channel his own response. His third significant nonfiction piece about 9/11, a preface to an Art Spiegelman catalogue written in June 2002, entitled “The Art of Worry”, is the locus of his own testimony and theorization. After writing about Spiegelman’s post-1945 and post-9/11 works, he suddenly shifts toward the autobiographical and the universal:

  • 33 Paul Auster, “The Art of Worry” (catalogue preface for Art Spiegelman exhibition, Brescia, Italy: N (...)

Then came September 11, 2001. In the fire and smoke of three thousand incinerated bodies, a holocaust was visited upon us, and nine months later the city is still grieving over its dead. In the immediate aftermath of the attack, in the hours and days that followed that murderous morning, few of us were capable of thinking any coherent thoughts. The shock was too great, and as the smoke continued to hover over the city and we breathed in the vile smells of death and destruction, most of us shuffled around like sleep walkers, numb and dazed, not good for anything. But The New Yorker had an issue to put out […].
That black-on-black issue of September 24 is, in my opinion, Spiegelman’s masterpiece. In the face of absolute horror, one’s inclination is to dispense with images altogether. Words often fail us in moments of extreme duress. The same is true of pictures. […] I believe [Spiegelman] originally resisted that iconoclastic impulse: to hand in a solid black cover to represent mourning, an absent image to stand for the ineffable. Other ideas occurred to him. He tested them out, […] until he arrived at a deep, unmodulated black. But still that wasn’t enough. […] Then […] he began thinking of some of the artists who had come before him, […] in particular Ad Reinhardt and his black-on-black canvases from the sixties, those extremely abstract and minimal anti-images that had taken painting to the farthest edge of possibility. Spiegelman had found his direction. Not in silence–but in the sublime.
You have to look very closely at the picture before you notice the towers. They are there and not there, effaced and yet still present, shadows pulsating in oblivion, in memory, in the ghostly emanation of some tormented after-life. When I saw the picture for the first time, I felt as if Spiegelman had placed a stethoscope on my chest and methodically registered every heartbeat that had shaken my body since September 11.33

  • 34 Paul Auster, The Invention of Solitude, op. cit., 98.
  • 35 Paul Auster, “Book of the Dead (II)”, in Ground Work: Selected Poems and Essays 1970-1979, London: (...)

16Auster expresses a remarkable closeness to Spiegelman’s vision, intimating that when the artist “found his direction”, he actually started to find his own. Resisting the “iconoclastic impulse” is a notion that harks back to Auster’s early poems and essays on both the traumatic and mystical unspeakable, best exemplified by the Holocaust and the unnamable Jewish divinity. Auster was almost reduced to silence when writing about the dead children of the Holocaust in The Invention of Solitude: “these pictures are the unspeakable”.34 Yet utter silence is not acceptable. Like the artists who use “anti-images”, Paul Auster is given a say through unsaying, thanks to unwords that circumvent the unspeakable. In the aftermath of 9/11, Auster writes about the impossibility of thinking “coherent thoughts”. Nonetheless, in the same breath, he gradually pieces them together by way of an ekphrasis. From a clinical viewpoint, the numbing effect of trauma must be fought through narratives, and more conveniently, in Auster’s creative practice, through narratives pointing to “the other side of speech, something almost impossible to express”, as the young writer put it in his conversation with Edmond Jabès in 1978.35 A similar comment is made here on Reinhardt’s “anti-images” experimenting with “the farthest edge of possibility”.

  • 36 Primo Levi, The Drowned and the Saved, New York: Simon & Schuster, 1989. See also Giorgio Agamben, (...)

17Such moments of “extreme duress” as WW2 or 9/11 entail the need to rethink the medium in order to complement the missing narratives of the traumatized survivors and the “integral witnesses”, those who perished without being able to testify, in Primo Levi’s and Giorgio Agamben’s terminology.36 Artists’ and writers’ responses are required in order to drive a whole community back to speech. In Auster’s comparison, Spiegelman is like a doctor using a stethoscope, translating the feelings of the 9/11 victims and witnesses. The pronoun us, used twice in the essay, echoes his “fellow New Yorkers” in “Underground”. From this moment on, Paul Auster himself started to speak for a wounded community.

  • 37 Paul Auster, The Brooklyn Follies, London: Faber, 2005, 304.
  • 38 “That’s what a holocaust is, great flames, burnt whole. So, I think the word was appropriate, not i (...)

18This original mix of personal/communal testimony, literary theory and creative writing reads like a discreet post-9/11 manifesto. Unexpectedly using the personal pronoun you, Paul Auster invites the audience to look at “ghostly” details and apparitions: “you have to look very closely […] before you notice the towers. They are there and not there, effaced and yet still present”. Retrospectively, this comment on the ghost towers applies to Auster’s own post-9/11 works. Indeed, from the first sentence of this long passage on September 11, 2001, Auster’s writing is modeled on Spiegelman’s technique: the words “fire” and “incinerated”, repeated word-for-word in the 2005 novel The Brooklyn Follies (“in the fire and smoke of three thousand incinerated bodies”)37 allude to “a holocaust”, in lower case, as if an indefinite, spectral repetition of the Holocaust had occurred in New York City. However, this displacement is cognitive and linguistic rather than geographical or historical, as Paul Auster told me retrospectively, nuancing the “echo” contained in the word “holocaust”.38 When this key phrase reoccurs in The Brooklyn Follies, the word “holocaust” has disappeared, leaving only the repetition and the oblique allegory. Similarly, a binary pattern, whose symmetry is reminiscent of both the towers and the writer’s heartbeat, is to be noticed in the alliterations “murderous morning”, “death and destruction”, “numb […] not”, as well as in the symmetrical constructions “over […] hover over”, “artists who had […], artists who had” and “black-on-black”.

  • 39 Paul Auster, 4 3 2 1, op. cit., 453.
  • 40 Anne-Laure Fortin-Tournès,  “Le récit intermédial comme dispositif traumatique dans The Rings of Sa (...)
  • 41 See Cathy Caruth, Trauma: Explorations in Memory, Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins UP, 1995, (...)

19More important perhaps is the repetition of the word “still” by an author exceptionally careful with prose polishing and unnecessary, “aggravating repetitions”.39 The collocation “still present” can be read as summing up a quintessential notion of trauma studies: the disruption of chronology which is characterized by what I would like to call a continuous present, haunted by an unmanageable event from the past. The time of the event is generally referred to as kairos, a moment outside of, or parallel to chronological time when the past enlightens the present and the subject experiments the nature of time itself.40 Moreover, trauma theorist Cathy Caruth holds that the re- or de-construction of the narrative enables the victim or the reader to envision the hidden event, that is to say, to finally witness, within a rearranged timeline, the unseeable image trapped in the psyche or in the subtext.41 The expression “still present”, which illustrates the standstill of traumatic time, is actually used again in other texts by Paul Auster, and notably in the concluding moments of Winter Journal, a memoir written in 2011:

  • 42 Paul Auster, Winter Journal, op. cit., 225-226.

[B]ack in the days before the suicidal murderers visited New York, it was always the crossing from Brooklyn to Manhattan that you preferred, the anticipation of reaching the exact point where you could simultaneously see the Statue of Liberty in the harbor to your left and the downtown skyline looming in front of you, the immense buildings that would suddenly jump into sight, among them the Towers, of course, the unbeautiful Towers that gradually became a familiar part of the landscape, and even though you still marvel at the skyline whenever you approach Manhattan, now that the Towers are gone you can no longer make the crossing without thinking about the dead, about seeing the Towers burn from your daughter’s bedroom window on the top floor of your house, about the smoke and ashes that fell onto the streets of your neighborhood for three days following the attack, and the bitter, unbreathable stench that forced you to shut all the windows of your house until the winds finally shifted away from Brooklyn on Friday, and even though you have continued to cross the bridge two or three times a week in the nine and a half years since then, the journey is no longer the same, the dead are still there, and the Towers are there as well – pulsating in memory, still present as an empty hole in the sky.42

  • 43 Ibid., 227.

20This passage is taken from a long, run-on sentence disclosing a trilogy of life-changing moments at the end of Winter Journal. Three autobiographical events are narrated: the 1978 dance rehearsal that led to Auster’s realization of the sheer inadequacy of language, and shaped a hybrid form of poetic prose, then this personal reflection on the lingering presence of a post-9/11 trauma, and finally the visit of a concentration camp where he heard thousands of victims call out to him in an “auditory hallucination”.43

  • 44 Ibid., 226.

21From the distance of a decade and the second-person narrative, the author’s voice suddenly testifies again to the 9/11 events by focusing on his “thousand crossings” of the Brooklyn Bridge. The text repeats previous nonfiction responses, demonstrating the role of iteration in the act of working and writing through trauma. This extract comprises the negative adjectives “unbeautiful” and “unbreathable”, respectively to describe the towers and the air with privative prefixes. The repetitions of “no longer” and “still” reinforce Auster’s aesthetics of negativity and paradox: “you still marvel at the skyline”, “the dead are still there, and the Towers are there as well – pulsating in memory, still present as an empty hole in the sky” (226).44 Auster follows Spiegelman’s direction, experiencing the sublime as he “still marvel[s]” at the skyline and paradoxically sees and feels the presence of an immense vacuity that fills him in a terrifying way. In this thirty-eight-line uninterrupted sentence, the belated testimony offers an aesthetics mixing terror and wonder, as in most of his post-9/11 novels.

Some aspects of Paul Auster’s post-9/11 fiction

22The sudden background apparition of the ethereal towers is repeatedly staged in Paul Auster’s post-9/11 books. It is one of their predominant motifs, a red thread that binds them even though it is paradoxically obscured. One of the most striking moments of surfacing is the repeated crossing of the Brooklyn Bridge. First in Oracle Night, then in Sunset Park and Winter Journal:

  • 45 Paul Auster, Oracle Night, New York: Henry Holt, 2003, 49.
  • 46 Paul Auster, Sunset Park, New York: Henry Holt, 2010, 304.
  • 47 Paul Auster, Winter Journal, op. cit., 226.

[A]nd as we mounted the roadway of the bridge, crawling along at one mile an hour, suspended over the river with a blaze of buildings behind us and the Statue of Liberty off to our right, I started to talk to her […].45
[A]nd as the car travels across the Brooklyn Bridge and he looks at the immense buildings on the other side of the East River, he thinks about the missing buildings, the collapsed and burning buildings that no longer exist, the missing buildings and the missing hands.46
[N]ow that the Towers are gone you can no longer make the crossing without thinking about the dead, about seeing the Towers burn.47

23These excerpts stage the spectral apparition of the absent towers from different angles. The traumatic vision is propelled into speech by the words “and as”, followed by verbs of motion: not just here in Oracle Night and Sunset Park (“and as we mounted the roadway”; “and as the car travels”), but also in the aforementioned passages from “The Art of Worry” and 4 3 2 1: “and as the smoke continued to hover over the city”; “and as he casts him seven floors down into the basement furnace”. In Oracle Night, the collocation “blaze of buildings behind us” refers to an action set twenty years before September 11, 2001. But the fire of destruction (“blaze”) and its booming alliterative repetitions suddenly bounce out of the fiction’s time frame to haunt the narrator’s and the reader’s post-9/11 present. The vision is proleptic and obsoletely oracular. The sentences echo each other: “blaze of buildings” (Oracle) / “burning buildings” (Sunset), “no longer” (Sunset) / “no longer” (Winter). While the places and movements described are similar, the traumatic vision is represented in the past and present tenses, each time from a different standpoint, involving a narrative shift from first (Oracle Night), to third (Sunset Park) and second person narratives (Winter Journal). Even if the motion of writing constantly defies the immovable vision, the excess of -ing forms materializes the unending, continuous presence of trauma lingering in the prose.

24Paradoxically, in Man in the Dark’s embedded story, America is in ruins but the Twin Towers are said to be “still standing”:

  • 48 Paul Auster, Man in the Dark, London: Faber, 2008, 31.

Good. Now, if I said the words September eleventh to you, would they have any special meaning?
Not particularly.
And the World Trade Center?
The twin towers? Those tall buildings in New York?
Exactly.
What about them?
They’re still standing?
Of course they are. What’s wrong with you?48

25Making up an alternative America undergoing civil war allows the main character August Brill to come to terms with the 9/11 events and his personal trauma. The use of uchronia makes the story uncanny. This passage from Man in the Dark provides an antithetic representation of 9/11 when compared to the testimonial report of Nathan Glass at the end of The Brooklyn Follies:

  • 49 Paul Auster, The Brooklyn Follies, op. cit., 303-304.

It was eight o’clock when I stepped out onto the street, eight o’clock on the morning of September 11, 2001 – just forty-six minutes before the first plane crashed into the North Tower of the World Trade Center. Just two hours after that, the smoke of three thousand incinerated bodies would drift over toward Brooklyn and come pouring down on us in a white cloud of ashes and death.49

26In both novels however, the apparition is sudden and unsettling, and the towers have a profoundly disorienting impact on the narrative. When considered chronologically, the representations of 9/11 in Paul Auster’s fiction might be traced as follows: 1) an a-chronological, obsoletely oracular vision of the towers (Oracle Night); 2) a more direct (yet belated) representation of the events (The Brooklyn Follies) in which the frozen historical images resist the distortion of the imagination; 3) a rewriting of history (Man in the Dark) allowing the events to be reconfigured; 4) a ghostly reminiscence of the missing towers pulsating in the sky at the end of Sunset Park, irradiating the whole narrative backwards. In these four occurrences, the memory of 9/11 is so vivid for the readers, and for Auster’s fellow New York writers and artists, that it suddenly holds a central place.

  • 50 Don DeLillo, Falling Man, New York: Picador, 2007, 31.
  • 51 Ibid., 102.
  • 52 Michael Rothberg, “‘There is no Poetry in this’: Writing, Trauma, and Home”, in Judith Greenberg ( (...)
  • 53 Richard Glejzer, “Witnessing 9/11. Art Spiegelman and the Persistence of Trauma”, in Ann Keniston a (...)

27As a result, Paul Auster’s post-9/11 writing is best illustrated in its silent connections. In Man in the Dark, Auster repeats the key expression “still standing” used in DeLillo’s Falling Man.50 While Auster’s Owen Brick wonders if “those tall towers in New York” are “still standing”, DeLillo’s Justin is a boy convinced that the towers are “still standing”,51 who watches the sky for planes after 9/11. In these two novels published in 2007 and 2008, other expressions, like the Italian “natura morta” in Falling Man, the French “nature morte” in Man in the Dark and the English “still life” in both, confirm this interaction on the aesthetics and “temporality of trauma” whose “fitful and belated understanding”52 impacts Auster’s and DeLillo’s writings. Furthermore, the collections of essays Literature after 9/11 and Trauma at Home: After 9/11 cement the interconnectedness between Auster’s concerns and DeLillo’s or Spiegelman’s. For instance, Richard Glejzer contends that “Art Spiegelman […] in In the Shadow of no Towers […] defines trauma […] as something that resides in the temporality of the witness and more exactly in time’s standing still. […] Time, he says again and again, stands still, and without movement the story cannot be told. There is only a witness who sees”.53

  • 54 In trauma studies, the Freudian concept of belatedness (Nachträglichkeit) was notably used by Cathy (...)

28The term “still life” can be understood both artistically and literally after 9/11. The lingering presence of the towers appearing or disappearing in flashes in Auster’s narratives are examples of the “belatedness”54, the “fitful[ness]” and the “standing still” of trauma. Likewise in Sunset Park, the ghostly towers function as phantom limbs, whose throbbing absence resonates through the embedded narratives. Like Lianne in Falling Man, Auster’s Ellen Brice is an artist who admires the still lifes of Giorgio Morandi. After Don DeLillo, Paul Auster also questions the representation – if not of the Twin Towers – of “innumerable buildings” through Ellen’s artistic questioning:

  • 55 Paul Auster, Sunset Park, op. cit., 115-116.

She thought the delicacy of her touch could lead her to the sublime and austere realm that Morandi had once inhabited. She wanted to make pictures that would evoke the mute wonder of pure thingness, the holy ether breathing in the spaces between things, a translation of human existence into a minute rendering of all that is out there beyond us, around us, in the same way she knows the invisible graveyard is standing there in front of her, even if she cannot see it. But she was wrong to put her trust in things, to trust in things only, to have squandered her time on the innumerable buildings she has drawn and painted […]. No more inanimate objects, she tells herself, no more still lifes. She will return to the human figure.55

  • 56 Ibid., 116.

29This long depiction of an artist’s introspection mirrors Auster’s artistic evolution. Having renounced the representation of those lifeless “buildings”, Ellen Brice then starts to look at her “alien hand”,56 a notion Auster goes back to in Winter Journal when describing Yeats’ poem “The Living Hand” (which recalls the collection of poetry edited by Paul Auster and Mitchell Sisskind in 1973, Living Hand). The object of representation is the hand itself, which includes a process of desubjectification from the writer or in the case of Ellen Brice, the artist. After 9/11, the “austere” and the “sublime” fascinate Auster and his characters, and the “inanimate objects” (the discarded objects strewn in the empty houses, the tombstones or the ghostly towers in the background) connote the memory of the human beings who gave them a sense of purpose. No-thingness becomes a state of being, and objects and human figures tend to melt and share their emptiness.

  • 57 Ibid., 72.

30In Sunset Park, the depiction of the “human figure” hinges on an abandoned house in Brooklyn, where New Yorkers from different walks of life, yet all somehow or other linked to art and trauma, gather illegally to survive after the 2008 financial crisis, and, as suggested by the ghostly subtext, after the 9/11 attacks and other wars and traumas that came before them. The characters’ wounds echo each other in time and space (as the murderous bullet-like baseball figures it by bouncing from one physical trauma to the next). The novel encompasses war trauma (WW2, 9/11), the economic recession and personal trauma (Miles Heller accidently killed his own brother), while the specific setting of a squatted house gives to the book and its “Hospital for Broken Things”57 the stature of a haven for lost objects and characters.

  • 58 John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath (1939), New York: Viking, 1997, 117.
  • 59 Paul Auster, Sunset Park, op. cit., 3.
  • 60 Ibid., 125.

31In turns reminiscent of The Great Gatsby (which is read by Pilar) and The Grapes of Wrath’s “houses […] left vacant on the land”58 following the Great Depression, Sunset Park opens inside random abandoned houses filled with debris; the main character Miles Heller pieces America together through the lens of his camera. While he takes pictures of the “abandoned things” in the context of the subprime mortgage crisis to “document the last lingering traces of […] vanished lives”, the narrator states that “the ghosts of people he will never see and never know are still present in the discarded things strewn about their empty houses.”59 Hence the collocation “still present” occurs again in the opening paragraphs to translate presence in absentia. The houses and the Towers are still present by way of a lexical shift and dissemination, in the words themselves. All the dis-membered characters, the “discarded things” and “missing buildings”, including the spectral towers in the closing scene, are re-membered by the novel. The ambiguous description of the “bombastic architecture of certain plots” in the cemetery60 and the eerily architectural name “Pilar” bring up the shadow of 9/11 lexically. As in The Brooklyn Follies, upon reaching the end, one needs to go back and put the post-9/11 fragments together. Language and narrative are shell-shocked: fragmented, scattered, repetitive yet silent.

  • 61 Paul Auster, Oracle Night, op. cit., 91.
  • 62 Paul Auster, The Brooklyn Follies, op. cit., 102.
  • 63 Ibid., 27.
  • 64 For a study of Travels in the Scriptorium as a post-9/11 novel, see Paolo Simonetti, “Loss, Ruins, (...)

32In Paul Auster’s post-9/11 output, the house is the place, if not of coherence, at least of convergence, of fragmented time, subjects and objects. His poems from the 1970s use the anti-image of stones and bricks in the wall that build the poem as much as they smother the poetic voice. Then, in his first prose writings and novels, the writer’s room is systematically explored. Now, in his 21st-century body of work, houses play a central role. Like the books that hold them, these houses are non-places where history and memory are stored and restored. The characters find themselves either locked in a bomb-shelter, also called “The Bureau of Historical Preservation” and “The House of Memory”, that both drives and stops the embedded narrative in Oracle Night;61 or dreaming of a “Hotel Existence”, coined by Harry Brightman as an imaginary shelter for the “lost children” of WW2 in The Brooklyn Follies,62 a novel whose title possibly alludes to the ornamental fake houses called “follies”, and whose complex architecture, with Harry’s first-edition bookshop referred to as a “paper mausoleum” (27),63 gradually builds a subtext that leads to the final first-person account of the 9/11 attacks. Then in Travels in the Scriptorium, Mr. Blank is locked in a chamber that is an undecidable hospital or containment room. This novella reads as one of Auster’s most anxiety-ridden post-9/11 books, where Anna Blume from In the Country of Last Things reappears as a nurse in yet another post-Babelian and post-war context64; on to Man in the Dark, whose main characters remain lodged in a house of mourning after the death of the young soldier Titus, beheaded by terrorists. Meanwhile, in the embedded story, Owen Brick, as his name suggests, is part of a parallel, reconstructed world. This recurrent book-building-book mise en abyme points to a creative process that we could sum up as literary reconstruction.

  • 65 Paul Auster, Sunset Park, op. cit., 147.
  • 66 See the collage of actual pages from the Warsaw phonebook given to Auster by his Hungarian editor i (...)
  • 67 Paul Auster, 4 3 2 1, op. cit., 328.
  • 68 Ibid., 328.

33In addition to these architectural reminiscences of 9/11, Auster’s novels develop war and trauma narratives of silent torture and “the gloomy realm of dead children”,65 a recurring climax of the unspeakable. In the aftermath of 9/11, national and international tragedies surface in passages exploring the intermedial approach of ekphrasis (in descriptions of still lifes and movies), as well as by way of collage.66 These passages verge on the “unbearable”, an adjective used in 4 3 2 1,67 which features an example, through the description of the Odessa steps sequence in Eisenstein’s film Battleship Potemkin, of an insufferable war narrative involving dead and amputated children. This sequence creates extreme and opposite feelings in Ferguson, who is said to be “so shattered, so exhilarated, so mixed up on a confusion of sorrow and elation that he wondered if any film would ever affect him in that way again.”68 The use of anaphora, climax, cutting sibilant alliterations, and of the words “any,” “ever again,” underlines how language is pushed to the limit.

  • 69 Paul Auster, Oracle Night, op. cit., 112.
  • 70 Paul Auster, Sunset Park, op. cit., 143.

34Similar occurrences of dead children, with similar thematic and aesthetic effects, are found systematically after 9/11: in Oracle Night, with the “BABY DISCARDED” in a toilet in the Bronx,69 or else with Ed Victory’s account of a woman milking a dead baby in Dachau. In Sunset Park, the unspoken death of Miles’s brother and Suki’s “mute” funeral70 invalidate language’s relevance thanks to an over-accumulation of negative forms. Similarly, the early death of young Ferguson 2, struck by lightning in 4 3 2 1, leaves a systematic blank page with each new empty chapter until the end of the novel.

  • 71 Jean Cournut qtd. by Marc Amfreville in Écrits en souffrance. Figures du trauma dans la littérature (...)

35In other words, the death of young children creates silences, gaps and formal reconfigurations of the narrative. In Man in the Dark, the description of the silent video footage of Titus’s murder is belated. August Brill, the disabled main character (whose name arguably blends Auster with Abraham A. Brill, a famous American psychoanalyst) invents bedtime stories for himself when he is not watching movies with his niece Katya to escape trauma. His silent narrative illustrates Maurice Blanchot’s “writing of the disaster”, as the words are not spoken or written. After digressive film descriptions and testimonies of silent WW2 torture, “hiding” by way of dislocation “another” unspeakable “trauma”,71 the narrator describes the unbearable scene that chronologically comes first. A striking set of sentences reads:

  • 72 Paul Auster, Man in the Dark, op. cit., 176.

The other man removes the hood from Titus’s head, and then a third man takes hold of Titus’s long red hair and carries the head closer to the camera. Blood is dripping everywhere. Titus is no longer quite human. He has become the idea of a person, a person and not a person, a dead bleeding thing: une nature morte. […]
The camera rolls for a few more seconds, and then the screen goes black.
Impossible to know how long it had lasted. Fifteen minutes. A thousand years.72

  • 73 Ibid., 175.

36From black to black, the traumatic vision is veiled by two layers: the “hood” and the “screen”. Each night, in the darkness of his own head, August Brill speaks without speaking in order to circumvent traumatic silence, avoiding the “haunting”73 image of the non-subject, a liminal apparition, a visual and verbal contradiction. The temporality of trauma is asserted when the narrator concludes that the soundless images caused a temporal distortion making it “Impossible to know how long it had lasted. Fifteen minutes. A thousand years.” This passage is a response to the real event of the death of Uri, the son of writer David Grossman (to whom the book is dedicated) intertwined with the paintings of Rembrandt’s dead son Titus already explored in The Invention of Solitude.

  • 74 Josh Cohen, “Desertions: Paul Auster, Edmond Jabès, and the Writing of Auschwitz”, The Journal Of T (...)
  • 75 Paul Auster, “The Art of Worry”, in Collected Prose, op. cit, 462.

37This belated passage, whose impossible vision and putting into words actually frame the fragmented narrative of Man in the Dark, formulates one of Auster’s fixations since 9/11: the description of an extreme image in words (here the murder of Titus by terrorists), involving a necessary distance to face the unspeakable (the soundless video, the hood, the foreign language). This is what Maurice Blanchot calls “detour”, as Josh Cohen explains when describing Auster’s early fiction: “to approach the destination by way of […] detour, to come to the absolute by paradoxically turning away from it”.74 Detour is achieved by means of another language or art form, through screens, embedded narratives or allegories. In spite of the “iconoclastic impulse”,75 Paul Auster represents uncanny occurrences of neither life nor death, of neither past nor present, and paradoxically pictures them.

  • 76 Ibid., 463.

38If the words are not to be trusted for saying what they are supposed to say, as Auster puts it in his poems, then the novelist needs to bypass their inner flaws in order to express what resists perception and verbalization, or in the terminology of trauma, what resists witnessing and testimony. Like Reinhardt, Auster is still pushing representation to the “farthest edge of possibility”.76 He creates a fictional universe in which opposites merge, where the horror of death is aestheticized, put into unwords; where love and sex cohabit with war and torture.

Conclusion

  • 77 Charles Reznikoff actually read and studied Auster’s obscure poetry collection Unearth (1974). Conv (...)
  • 78 Paul Auster, The Brooklyn Follies, op. cit., 290.

39The contradiction and liminality of Auster’s aesthetics nurture a metaphysical stance that still needs rephrasing with each book. The room, the wound and the dead children have always been there, but after 9/11 they seem to have gone back at the heart of the creative process. Since 9/11, Auster’s fiction has sheltered a community of wounded characters and helped rephrase history. It has engaged less in postmodern playfulness than in realistic depictions of trauma-induced spatio-temporal and cognitive displacement. Yet his most recent attempt at writing the four parallel lives of a character evolving in the 1960s, in a Paris and a New York similar to those of Auster’s youth in 4 3 2 1 proves that he should not be reduced to being only post-modern or post-9/11. In the 1970s, Auster’s poetry was written after the Modernists, especially the Objectivists, including Charles Reznikoff,77 but it was already resisting labeling, making it new in its own way. Doubtful of any given slot in the American canon, and still skeptical about language itself, Auster has always reinvented his own writing. If it does challenge literary codes, Auster’s act of writing is animated by a broader, more universal act of resistance, a necessary response to the call of history, to the forces of contingence and the impossibility of communication. And this vital impulse is best represented through absence, death and love. For pure love, too, is impossible to express, and thus left unformulated by Rory and Nancy in The Brooklyn Follies.78 Auster’s activity, then, consists in testing the limitations and excesses of human feelings and actions, in registering what it is to be human: feeling, falling, failing. Auster’s writing addresses these essential questions, regardless of the specific 20th or 21st century upheavals it faces. Still, it registers the trauma of 9/11 obliquely, in its very breath and rhythm, in the haunted music of a singular, simple prose.

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Bibliographie

AGAMBEN Giorgio, Remnants of Auschwitz. The Witness & the Archive, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen, Brooklyn, NY: Zone Books, 2002.

AMFREVILLE Marc, Écrits en souffrance. Figures du trauma dans la littérature nord-américaine, Paris : Michel Houdiard, 2009.

AUSTER Paul, Unearth, Weston, CT: Living Hand (#3), 1974.

AUSTER Paul, White Spaces, Barrytown, NY: Station Hill, 1980.

AUSTER Paul, The New York Trilogy (City of Glass, Ghosts, The Locked Room), London: Faber, 1987.

AUSTER Paul, In the Country of Last Things, New York: Viking, 1987.

AUSTER Paul, The Invention of Solitude [1982], London: Faber, 1988.

AUSTER Paul, “Book of the Dead (II)”, in Ground Work: Selected Poems and Essays 1970-1979, London: Faber, 1990.

AUSTER Paul, The Red Notebook (True Stories, Prefaces and Interviews), London: Faber, 1995.

AUSTER Paul, “Random Notes — September 11, 2001, 4 PM”, commissioned by Die Zeit, first published September 13, 2001 (in Collected Prose, New York: Picador/Henry Holt, 2003, 505-506).

AUSTER Paul, “Underground”, The New York Times Magazine, October 2001 (in Collected Prose, New York: Picador/Henry Holt, 2003, 507).

AUSTER Paul, “Authors Paul Auster and Salman Rushdie Reflect on September 11,” in All Things Considered, Natl. Public Radio, November 8, 2002.

AUSTER Paul, “The Art of Worry”, catalogue preface for Art Spiegelman exhibition, Brescia, Italy: Nuage Gallery, 2003 (Collected Prose, New York: Picador/Henry Holt, 2003, 458-463).

AUSTER Paul, Collected Prose, New York: Picador/Henry Holt, 2003.

AUSTER Paul, Oracle Night, New York: Henry Holt, 2003.

AUSTER Paul, Collected Poems, London: Faber, 2004.

AUSTER Paul, The Brooklyn Follies, London: Faber, 2005.

AUSTER Paul, Manhattan, Ground Zero: A Sonic Memorial Sound Walk, New York: Soundwalk, 2005.

AUSTER Paul, Travels in the Scriptorium, London: Faber, 2006.

AUSTER Paul, Man in the Dark, London: Faber, 2008.

AUSTER Paul, Sunset Park, New York: Henry Holt, 2010.

AUSTER Paul, Winter Journal, New York: Henry Holt, 2012.

AUSTER Paul, 4 3 2 1, New York: Henry Holt, 2017.

BAER Ulrich (ed.), 101 Stories: New York Writes After September 11, New York: New York UP, 2002.

BLANCHOT Maurice, The Writing of the Disaster, trans. Ann Smock, U of Nebraska P, 1986.

CARUTH Cathy, Trauma: Explorations in Memory, Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins UP, 1995.

CARUTH Cathy, Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History, Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins UP, 1996.

COHEN Josh, “Desertions: Paul Auster, Edmond Jabès, and the Writing of Auschwitz”, The Journal Of The Midwest Modern Language Association, U of Iowa, vol. 33/34, vol. 33, n° 3 - vol. 34, n° 1, Autumn, 2000 - Winter, 2001, 94-107.

DeLILLO Don, Falling Man, New York: Picador, 2007.

DERRIDA Jacques, Schibboleth, pour Paul Celan, Paris : Galilée, 1986.

EISENSTEIN Sergei, Battleship Potemkin, Moscow: Mosfilm, 1925.

FITZGERALD F. Scott, The Great Gatsby (1926), London: Penguin Books, 2000.

FORTIN-TOURNES Anne-Laure, “Le récit intermédial comme dispositif traumatique dans The Rings of Saturn de W. G. Sebald”, Sillages critiques, 19 | 2015, <http://journals.openedition.org/sillagescritiques/4227>, accessed on February 11, 2020.

GLEJZER Richard, “Witnessing 9/11. Art Spiegelman and the Persistence of Trauma”, in Ann Keniston and Jeanne Follansbee Quinn (eds.), Literature after 9/11, New York, Routledge, 2008.

LEVI Primo, The Drowned and the Saved, New York, NY: Simon & Schuster, 1989.

MANIEZ Claire, “Suspendu entre passé et avenir : Oracle Night de Paul Auster”, Revue française d’études américaines, vol. 121, no 3, 2009: 61-71.

MORRISON Toni, “The Dead of September II”, Vanity Fair, September 13, 2001.

ROTHBERG Michael, “‘There is no Poetry in this’: Writing, Trauma, and Home”, in Judith Greenberg (ed.), Trauma at Home: After 9/11, Lincoln and London: U of Nebraska P, 2003, 147-157.

SIMONETTI Paolo, “Loss, Ruins, War: Paul Auster’s Response to 9/11 and the ‘War on Terror’”, in Stefania Ciocia and Jesús A. González (eds.), The Invention of Illusions, Newcastle: Cambridge SP, 2011, 13-37.

SPIEGELMAN Art, In the Shadow of No Towers, New York: Pantheon Books, Random House, 2004.

STEINBECK John, The Grapes of Wrath (1939), New York: Viking, 1997.

VERSLUYS Kristiaan, Out of the Blue: September 11 and the Novel, New York: Columbia UP, 2009.

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Notes

1 In the novel The Brooklyn Follies, no mention of 9/11 is made until the very end, when Nathan Glass gets out of the hospital and suddenly witnesses the attacks on the street.

2 Paul Auster, Winter Journal, New York: Henry Holt, 2012, 11.

3 Paul Auster, White Spaces, Barrytown, NY: Station Hill, 1980. See also Paul Auster, “White Spaces”, in Collected Poems, London: Faber, 2004, 153-162.

4 Kristiaan Versluys, Out of the Blue: September 11 and the Novel, New York: Columbia UP, 2009, 2.

5 Paul Auster, 4 3 2 1, New York: Henry Holt, 2017, 250-263.

6 Ibid., 263.

7 Ibid., 263.

8 Ibid., 263-268.

9 Ibid., 250.

10 Ibid., 263.

11 Ibid., 251.

12 Ibid., 255.

13 Ibid., 251.

14 Ibid., 252, emphasis mine.

15 Claire Maniez, “Suspendu entre passé et avenir : Oracle Night de Paul Auster”, Revue française d’études américaines, vol. 121, no 3, 2009, 71.

16 Paul Auster, 4 3 2 1, op. cit., 250.

17 Art Spiegelman, In the Shadow of No Towers, New York: Pantheon Books, Random House, 2004, 1.

18 “As he stood in Anne Frank’s room, the room in which the diary was written, […] he suddenly found himself crying. Not sobbing, as might happen in response to a deep inner pain, but crying without sound, the tears streaming down his cheeks, as if purely in response to the world. It was at that moment, he later realized, that the Book of Memory began”. Paul Auster, The Invention of Solitude [1982], London: Faber, 1988, 83.

19 Paul Auster, 4 3 2 1, op. cit., 551, 1.

20 Paul Auster, “White”, in Collected Poems, op. cit., 87.

21 Paul Auster, “S. A. 1911-1979”, in Collected Poems, op. cit., 144.

22 Paul Auster, “Fore-Shadows”, in Collected Poems, op. cit., 78.

23 Paul Auster, The Red Notebook (True Stories, Prefaces and Interviews), London: Faber, 1995, 104.

24 Manhattan, Ground Zero: A Sonic Memorial Sound Walk, New York: Soundwalk, 2005.

25 Paul Auster, “Random Notes — September 11, 2001, 4 PM”, commissioned by Die Zeit, first published September 13, 2001. See Paul Auster, Collected Prose, New York: Picador/Henry Holt, 2003, 505-506.

26 Ibid., 505, 506.

27 Paul Auster, “Random Notes — September 11, 2001, 4 PM” and “Underground”, in Ulrich Baer (ed.), 101 Stories: New York Writes After September 11, New York: New York UP, 2002, 34-36.

28 Paul Auster, Collected Prose, op. cit., 506, 507.

29 Paul Auster, “Underground”, The New York Times Magazine (October 2001), in Collected Prose, op. cit., 507.

30 Jacques Derrida, Schibboleth, pour Paul Celan, Paris : Galilée, 1986, 33-36.

31 Toni Morrison, “The Dead of September II”, Vanity Fair, September 13, 2001.

32 Paul Auster, “Authors Paul Auster and Salman Rushdie Reflect on September 11”, All Things Considered, Natl. Public Radio, 8 November 2002.

33 Paul Auster, “The Art of Worry” (catalogue preface for Art Spiegelman exhibition, Brescia, Italy: Nuage Gallery, 2003), in Collected Prose, op. cit., 462-463.

34 Paul Auster, The Invention of Solitude, op. cit., 98.

35 Paul Auster, “Book of the Dead (II)”, in Ground Work: Selected Poems and Essays 1970-1979, London: Faber, 1990, 202.

36 Primo Levi, The Drowned and the Saved, New York: Simon & Schuster, 1989. See also Giorgio Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz. The Witness & the Archive, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen, Brooklyn, NY: Zone Books, 2002.

37 Paul Auster, The Brooklyn Follies, London: Faber, 2005, 304.

38 “That’s what a holocaust is, great flames, burnt whole. So, I think the word was appropriate, not in the conventional sense of common usage but in the literal sense of the word, to emphasize how monumental it was. Of course, when we hear ‘holocaust’ now, we think of the Second World War. That was not my intention even though I knew the echo would be there in the word”. Paul Auster in conversation with I. B. Siegumfeldt and François Hugonnier, Brooklyn, NY, 14 Nov. 2019, transcript outtake.

39 Paul Auster, 4 3 2 1, op. cit., 453.

40 Anne-Laure Fortin-Tournès,  “Le récit intermédial comme dispositif traumatique dans The Rings of Saturn de W. G. Sebald”, Sillages critiques, 19 | 2015, <http://journals.openedition.org/sillagescritiques/4227>, accessed on February 11, 2020.

41 See Cathy Caruth, Trauma: Explorations in Memory, Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins UP, 1995, and Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History, Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins UP, 1996.

42 Paul Auster, Winter Journal, op. cit., 225-226.

43 Ibid., 227.

44 Ibid., 226.

45 Paul Auster, Oracle Night, New York: Henry Holt, 2003, 49.

46 Paul Auster, Sunset Park, New York: Henry Holt, 2010, 304.

47 Paul Auster, Winter Journal, op. cit., 226.

48 Paul Auster, Man in the Dark, London: Faber, 2008, 31.

49 Paul Auster, The Brooklyn Follies, op. cit., 303-304.

50 Don DeLillo, Falling Man, New York: Picador, 2007, 31.

51 Ibid., 102.

52 Michael Rothberg, “‘There is no Poetry in this’: Writing, Trauma, and Home”, in Judith Greenberg (ed.), Trauma at Home: After 9/11, Lincoln and London: U of Nebraska P, 2003, 149.

53 Richard Glejzer, “Witnessing 9/11. Art Spiegelman and the Persistence of Trauma”, in Ann Keniston and Jeanne Follansbee Quinn (eds.),Literature after 9/11, New York: Routledge, 2008, 99-102.

54 In trauma studies, the Freudian concept of belatedness (Nachträglichkeit) was notably used by Cathy Caruth in Trauma: Explorations in Memory (op. cit.) and Unclaimed Experience (op. cit.).

55 Paul Auster, Sunset Park, op. cit., 115-116.

56 Ibid., 116.

57 Ibid., 72.

58 John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath (1939), New York: Viking, 1997, 117.

59 Paul Auster, Sunset Park, op. cit., 3.

60 Ibid., 125.

61 Paul Auster, Oracle Night, op. cit., 91.

62 Paul Auster, The Brooklyn Follies, op. cit., 102.

63 Ibid., 27.

64 For a study of Travels in the Scriptorium as a post-9/11 novel, see Paolo Simonetti, “Loss, Ruins, War: Paul Auster’s Response to 9/11 and the ‘War on Terror’”, in Stefania Ciocia and Jesús A. González (eds.), The Invention of Illusions, Newcastle: Cambridge SP, 2011, 13-37.

65 Paul Auster, Sunset Park, op. cit., 147.

66 See the collage of actual pages from the Warsaw phonebook given to Auster by his Hungarian editor in Oracle Night, op. cit., 113-114.

67 Paul Auster, 4 3 2 1, op. cit., 328.

68 Ibid., 328.

69 Paul Auster, Oracle Night, op. cit., 112.

70 Paul Auster, Sunset Park, op. cit., 143.

71 Jean Cournut qtd. by Marc Amfreville in Écrits en souffrance. Figures du trauma dans la littérature nord-américaine, Paris : Michel Houdiard, 2009, chapter 8, my translation.

72 Paul Auster, Man in the Dark, op. cit., 176.

73 Ibid., 175.

74 Josh Cohen, “Desertions: Paul Auster, Edmond Jabès, and the Writing of Auschwitz”, The Journal Of The Midwest Modern Language Association, U of Iowa, vol. 33/34, vol. 33, no 3 ­– vol. 34, no 1, Autumn, 2000 – Winter, 2001, 97.

75 Paul Auster, “The Art of Worry”, in Collected Prose, op. cit, 462.

76 Ibid., 463.

77 Charles Reznikoff actually read and studied Auster’s obscure poetry collection Unearth (1974). Conversely, Auster dedicated several essays to his work (see Collected Prose, op. cit., 373-388). His filiation is marked discretely in the incipit of 4 3 2 1 with Ichabod Ferguson’s original name “Reznikoff”. As for the character’s first name, it echoes Washington Irving’s well-known Ichabod Crane.

78 Paul Auster, The Brooklyn Follies, op. cit., 290.

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François Hugonnier, « Paul Auster’s Post-9/11 Writing »Revue LISA/LISA e-journal [En ligne], vol. 18-n°50 | 2020, document 6, mis en ligne le 02 juin 2020, consulté le 19 mars 2024. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/lisa/11564 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/lisa.11564

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François Hugonnier

François Hugonnier is an Associate Professor of American Literature at the University of Angers. He is the author of a dozen pieces (including book chapters, articles, interviews and a forthcoming monograph) on Paul Auster’s poetry, fiction, and nonfiction. His book-length study of Don DeLillo’s Falling Man was published in 2016 (Paris-Nanterre UP). He is the Editorial Assistant of the Journal of the Short Story in English and a core member of The Paul Auster Research Library in Copenhagen, Denmark. https://austerlibrary.ku.dk/

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