Vanishing books & lost writers: question of authorship in Paul Auster's novels

Abstract

This thesis investigates the notion of authorship as represented in three of Paul Auster's late novels, namely The Book of Illusions (2002), Oracle Night (2003) and Invisible (2009). Focusing on the relationship between the fictional authors and their writing adventures in the novels, this study reads Paul Auster's novels as spheres where the notions of the writer and the text vis-à-vis the author and the work' are juxtaposed. Moreover, analyzing the novels through the lens of Roland Barthes' arguments on authorship and textuality in "The Death of Author" and "From Work to Text", and also Michel Foucault's definition of "author-function" in "What is an Author?", this study mainly argues that Auster's novels- and the stories they nestshould be identified with the notion of "text" and the people who write them should be defined as writers. Auster's fictional authors are not dead only in the metaphorical sense Barthes proposes. They literally write at the moment of death and continue speaking from the land of the dead with the help of another writer who dedicates his life to rewriting the book left behind. Thus, the reader has two authors, the absentee and the surrogate ones whose collaborative efforts ensure rebirth for both the vanishing book and the dead author. Furthermore, the main character- or the surrogate author- who function also as the narrator in the novels also starts a new life for which the story acts as a passage. He can only start writing after he lets go of his previous mode of existence, only when he transcends his self and writes from the eyes of another self that is able to see the totality of time as past, present and future. Paul Auster's novels are also parodies of American hard-boiled detective stories. His writer-protagonists are at the same time detectives and they are placed in the midst of mysteries which they fail to solve. Initially equating an author with a detective and later nullifying the function of the detective figure, Auster aims at two important points. First, he challenges the rules -or as Todorov put it "the typology"- of detective fiction. With this gesture, Auster denounces the notion of genre, which is a further proof of the novels' alignment with the idea of "the text" as opposed to "the work" Consequently, by shattering the role of the detective as the figure who has the capability to unravel the mysteries, Auster once more announces "the death of the author" who holds the key for opening up the ultimate meaning in the book.