The question of genre in Paul Auster’s "The New York Trilogy" De Lu Lostie en LENGUA INGLESA IV 2011 ( Archivos) Archivos) · Editar documento ABSTRACT The aim of this work is to offer a brief analysis of the question of genre in Paul Auster’s The New York Trilogy, and illustrate how he challenges traditional detective fiction by taking some of its stereotypical features to create a new particular form of post-modernist detective fiction. In order to analyse this novel, we base our study on John M. Swales´ definition and characterization of genre. Our main concern is to classify The New York Trilogy according to Swales´ working definition and his critical observations. A contrast will be made between the main features of standard and post-modernist fiction in order to see which of them do apply and which are transgressed in Paul Auster’s work.
INTRODUCTION Paul Auster's The New York Trilogy, published in one volume for the first time in England in 1988 and in the U.S. in 1990, has been widely categorised as detective fiction among literary scholars and critics. There is, however, a striking diversity and lack of consensus regarding the classification of the trilogy within the existing genre forms of the detective novel. Among others, Auster's stories are described as: "meta anti-detective-fiction;" anti-detective-fiction;" "mysteries about mysteries;" a "strangely humorous working of the detective novel;" a "metamystery”.
In order to clarify this question of genre we take into account Swales´ contribution to the definition and classification of genre. According to this author: A genre comprises a class class of communicative events, the members members of which share some set of communicative purposes. These purposes are recognized by the expert members of the parent discourse community, and thereby constitute the rationale for the genre. This rationale shapes the schematic structure of the discourse and influences and constrains choice of content and style. Communicative purpose operates to keep the scope of a genre as here conceived narrowly focused on comparable rhetorical action. In addition to purpose, exemplars of a genre exhibit various patterns of similarity in terms of structure, style, content and intended audience. (Swales, 1990: 58) The literary scholars and critics, based on a traditional view of g enre, have acclaimed for Paul Auster´s creation of a new genre, mixing elements of the standard detective fiction and postmodern fiction. However, they fail to highlight the importance of purpose in the characterization of genre. In this work we aim at discovering dis covering whether The New York Trilogy stands stands for a fusion of both genres main features or it is embedded in a new genre with a different communicative goal. The richness and diversity of Auster's detective trilogy is that his work does not seem to fit neatly into any category. We would rather place The New York Trilogy within within a more general postmodern detective fiction given that the novel´s main goal is to mirror the twentieth century man´s reality through mystery. This classifies Paul Auster as an American writer writer who is part of the generation generation that immediately immediately followed the 'classical 'classical literary literary movement' of American postmodernism' of the 60s and 70s. His writing demonstrates that he has been influenced by the revolutionary and innovative postmodern concepts. He may, however, be distinguished from a 'traditional' postmodern writer through certain coherence in the n arrative discourse, a neo-realistic approach and by showing a certain responsibility for social and moral aspects going beyond mere metafictional and subversive elements. The experiences of Paul Auster´s fictional characters reflect the problems of the 20th century man like alienation, rootlessness and loneliness. Questions of identity are also raised as the plots twist and turn on themselves. Many of the ideas of postmodernism and open literary form were formulated in theoretical literary texts of the 60s and 70s and based on formal experiments including the attempt of corrupting the ability of language to refer truthfully to the world, and a radical t urning away from coherent narrative discourse and plot. These ideas seem to have been internalized by the new generation of postmodern writers of the 80s to such a degree that the ideas themselves turn into objects of investigation and experiment. METHODS In order to analyse the question of genre in this trilogy, we base upon Swales´ perspective of genre and its characterization through a series of critical observations. Taking his approach as a starting point, we enumerate the defining characteristics of standard detective fiction, and compare and contrast them with Paul Auster´s postmodern novel. More specifically, we deeply explore the mystery of the stories through the development of plots, the characters and recurrent themes such as living in their imaginary worlds, issues that deal with the classic problems of postmodernist criticism. criticism. At the same time, we try to apply these notions to the differences among genres suggested by John M. Swales.
SWALES´ WORKING DEFINITION OF GENRE Swales provides five characteristics for the definition of genre which have to be fulfilled if a text is to be included in a given genre 1. A genre is a class of communicative events. A communicative event is one in which language and/or paralanguage play both a significant and an indispensable role. Swales conceives a communicative event of as comprising not only the discourse itself and its participants, but also the roles of that discourse and the environment of its production and reception, including its historical and cultural associations. 2. The principal criterial feature that turns a collection of communicative events into a genre is some shared set of communicative purposes. Except for a few interesting exceptional cases, genres are communicative vehicles for the achievement of goals. It is no uncommon to find genres that have sets of communicative purposes. There remain, of course, some genres for which purpose is unsuited as a primary criterion. Poetic genres are an obvious example. Poems, and other genres whose appeal may lie in the verbal pleasure they give, can thus be separately characterized by the fact that they defy ascription of communicative purpose. 3. Exemplars or instances of genres vary in their prototypicality. Genre membership is based on communicative purpose. Besides, it is also based on the definitional approach (traditional categorization) and the family resemblance approach. (Cognitive categorization). While the former asserts that it is possible to produce small set of simple properties that are individually necessary to identify all the members and only the members of a particular category from everything else in the world, the latter gives rise to a “prototype” or cluster theory designed to account for our capacity to recognize instances of categories. The most typical category members are prototypes . There are privileged properties, which are
insufficient for picking out all and only the class members, and hence family resemblance description is still required. Communicative purpose has been nominated as the privileged property of a genre. Other properties, such as form, structure and audience expectations operate to identify the extent to which an exemplar is prototypical of a particular genre. 4. The rationale behind a genre establishes constraints on allowable contributions in terms of their content, positioning and form. Established members of discourse communities employ genres to realize communicatively the goals o f their communities. The shared set of purposes of a genre is thus recognized by the established members of the parent discourse community. Recognition of purposes provides the rationale, while th e rationale gives rise to constraining conventions. The conventions, of course, are constantly evolving and indeed can be directly challenged, but they nonetheless continue to exert influence. The rationale thus determines the schematic structure of the discourse and also constrains lexical and syntactic choice. 5. A discourse community’s nomenclature for genres is an important source of insight.
Knowledge of the conventions of genres and their rationale is likely to be much greater in those who routinely or professionally operate within that genre. In consequence, active discourse community members tend to have the greatest genre-specific expertise. One consequence is that these active members give genre names to classes of communicative events that they recognize as providing recurring rhetorical action. Particular attention therefore needs to be given to the genre nomenclatures created by those who are most familiar with and most professionally involved in those genres. THE NEW YORK TRILOGY :
ON CHARACTERS AND THEIR SEARCH FOR IDENTITY.
We can state a similarity between the standard detective fiction and the n ovel of search. In both of them the search is about a crime and its culprit. Thus, the main goal of mystery novels is to entertain the reader through the creation of suspense. Throughout the novel the reader is provided with a number of clues that allows him to
reach a conclusion and be able to find out “whodunit”. However, in Paul Auster’s trilogy the characters are concerned with discovering not a culprit but their own identities, and this implies a detachment from the prototypical member of the traditional detective fiction. The New York Trilogy is a story of characters’ confrontation with themselves. This confrontation is an attempt to
try to deal with their past traumatic experiences and repressed memories, and it introduces a state of uneasiness and fear. In this novel, detectives identify themselves with the criminals to discover facts. The central paradox is that the detectives start with an identification of themselves with their counterparts, or doubles, only to perceive later their differences. The struggle for solution transforms into a quest for the s elf, but the only outcome to such quest is disintegration and dissolution. The appearance of the strange double in the novel is the major source of terror: it suddenly emerges obstructs the protagonist and apparently vanishes to return even more intensely. This is shown in the three novellas, as follows. The first novella, City of Glass, introduces the reader to a complicated world of characters and double identities. The hero, Daniel Quinn, is a writer of detective novels, whose fiction becomes reality when his life is turned upsidedown when he answers a mysterious telephone call for help. This is the climax of the intertextual play with characters’ names, doubles and identities. He creates and is doubled with his own ficti onal character, Max Work, a private-eye narrator. On the other hand, the boundaries between the fictional and the real world become blurred. The story explores layers of identity and reality. For example, Paul Auster´s voice is expressed through three different personae: the real writer of the novel, the protagonist of the novel, Quinn, pretending to be Paul Auster, and Paul Auster as the private eye character. The only possibility for Quinn to exist together with himself is to identify with his double. This is precisely what Auster characters do: they dissapear into the process of writing, become invisible and naked both spiritually and physically, while writing and looking for their true selves. In Ghosts, the second novella of the trilogy, the names o f the characters are merely colours and the story doubles several themes introduced in the first book, City of Glass. The central character is also a privete detective, Blue, hired by a man named White to watch Black. Blue´s strange connection to Black becomes more and more highlighted through weird coincidences and phantasmal experiences. As he spends hours and days observing Black from the opposite apartment, he comes to the realization that the person he observes exactly mirrors him: “For in spying out at Black across the street, it is a though Blue were looking into a mirror (…) He finds that he is also watching himself” (Auster 172). The rare feeling Blue experiences is due to the paradoxical
connection between Black and himself. The encounter between Blue and Black brings about the anxiety in this situation, as they may represent two opposite but indivisible forces, who embody two different entities of the same person. Blues´s confrontation with his double is a confrontation with himself, and this is the plot of the story: not the search for a crime but himself. The last novella, The Locked Room, is narrated in the first person through an unnamed character. All we know about him is that he is an old friend of Fanshawe, a writer who dissapears without leaving a trace. He recalls memories from his childhood and adolescence with Fanshawe describing his personality and th eir friendship. When Fanshawe disappears the writer publishes his work and replaces him in his family. This is all done with Fanshawe´s permission; he is the only one who knows that Fanshawe is alive as he receives a letter from him. Fanshawe gradually conquers the mind and the inner world of the narrator, who writes Fanshawe´s biography. The more the narrator immerses himself in this writing, the more he becomes one with him; Fanshawe fulfills all the repressed desires of the narrator, he feels that Fanshawe´s identity dominates his own, he feels like being trapped and he hates Fanshawe because of this. The relationship between the narrator and his friend recalls the same sense of anxiety which occurred in the other two novellas, more specifically in the case of Blue and Black in Ghosts: They also can be seen as two mirroring entities of one and the same person. As in the other two novellas, the protagonist is not able to have access to his own identity. Neither can he reach any reasonable conclusion, and the whole story seems to be a vicious circle. The restoration of certainty can never be fulfilled, as the narrator destroys the red notebook given by Fanshawe, in which everything is explained and the truth is revealed. Eventually, we realise that not only don´t characters know anybody else but neither do they know themselves. The narrator says: “We exist for ourselves, perhaps, and at times we even have a glimpse of who we are, but in the end we can never be sure, and as our lives go on, we become more and more opaque to ourselves, more and more aware of our own incoherence (…) no one can gain access to himself”.
In this last story, the narrator shows h ow not only the three stories are thematically related, but that they represent a single, cohesive work r ather than three repetitive novellas. He claims: “These thr ee stories are finally
the same story (…) each one represents a different stage in my aw areness of what it is about. I don´t claim to solve any problems”. As o pposed to traditional detective fiction, where the crimes are always solved in the end,
Auster´s literary work shows that such satisfying closure is impossible, for as much as we think we know someone, we know in fact nothing. DETECTIVE FICTION AND MYSTERY NOVEL Detective fiction, also known as mystery, is generally driven by a single protagonist and follows the process of detection. Mystery is a genre of fiction in which a detective, either an amateur or a professional, solves a crime or a series of crimes. This genre invites the reader to engage in the process of detection, most commonly of a murderer, through the interpretation of clues. Because detective stories rely on logic, supernatural elements rarely come into play. The detective may be a private investigator, a policeman, an elderly widow, or a young girl, but he or she generally has nothing material to gain from solving the crime. Mystery novels are satisfying to many readers because they know that everything will be resolved in the end. In Swales´ terms, our previous schemata enable us to expect and recognize the aforementioned elements when reading a detective novel. Due to the lack of fulfillment of some of the following features of mystery novels, we shall not include Paul Auster´s novel in this genre. Rules for Mystery Writing Even more than writing in other genres, mystery writing tends to follow standard rules. This is because readers of mysteries seek a particular experience: they want the intellectual challenge of solving the crime before the detective does, and the pleasure of knowing that everything will come together in the end. 1. In mystery writing, plot is everything. Because readers are playing a kind of game when they read a detective novel, plot has to come first, above everything else. Make sure each plot point is plausible, and keep the action moving. 2. Introduce both the detective and the culprit early on. As the main character, the detective must obviously appear early in the book. As for the culprit, the reader will feel cheated if the antagonist, or villain, enters too late in the book to be a viable suspect in their minds. 3. Introduce the crime within the first three chapters of your mystery novel. The crime and the resulting questions are what call the reader´s attention. 4. The crime should be sufficiently violent, preferably a murder. For many readers, only murder really justifies the effort of reading a book while suitably testing your detective's powers. However, some types of violence are still taboo including rape, child molestation, and cruelty to animals. 5. The crime should be believable. While the details of the murder; how, where, and why it's done, as well as how the crime is discovered, are the main opportunities to introduce variety, the crime should be plausible. The reader will feel disappointed if the crime is not something that could really happen. 6. The detective should solve the case using only rational and scientific methods. 7. The culprit must be capable of committing the crime. The reader must believe the villain's motivation, and the latter must be capable of the crime, both physically and emotionally. 8. In mystery writing, the reader should not be underestimated The detective should not commit the crime. All clues should be revealed to the reader as the detective finds them.
9. Wait as long as possible to reveal the culprit. Readers seek to find out, or figure out, whodunit. If you answer this too early in the book, the reader will have no reason to continue reading. PAUL AUSTER´S PARTICULAR FORM OF POSTMODERN DETECTIVE FICTION The New York Trilogy has been allegedly presented as detective fiction but in fact it has to be described as “meta-detective fiction” or “anti -detective fiction”. Auster’s work does not seem to fit neatly into any one
category. However, this novel resembles much of the characteristics of post-modern fiction in terms of structure, style, content and intended audience In contrast to detective narrative, postmodernist fiction rejects the notion of universal truths and plays with the possibilities of interpretations, multiple perspectives, uncertainties, and contradictions. A postmodern novel does not profess to be a coherent whole, and subverts both the expectations of narrative closure and of the disclosures previously provided by the narrator. We do not have a story with a plot; a beginning, a conflict, resolution and an end; instead just as it seems the problems are beginning to be deciphered, new possibilities emerge. Nothing is ever known, and inevitably we come to a place quite different from the one we set out for. As Paul Auster himself puts it, “mystery novels give answers, my work is about asking questions”.
All these notions concerning structure challenge the prototypically of the traditional detective fiction genre. As regards content, the novel is often referred to in terms of postmodernism and it certainly seems to have many of the elements associated with postmodern literature. For instance, it is self referential, with the author, Paul Auster, apparently appearing as a character, but confusingly not as the narrator. Moreover, it can be seen as a piece of literature about literature, with writers such as Quinn, Fanshawe and the narrator of The Locked Room appearing through out the trilogy. On the other hand, the three stories share a particularly important feature of postmodernism as well: a strong theme of identity running through them. A further feature of Auster’s work in relation to content, that differentiates it from the traditionally hard-boiled
novel, is that nothing is grasped in its all, whilst detective novels generally deal with the search for answers, and for truth. Whereas the goal of detection is to uncover the whole story, neither in City of Glass, Ghosts nor in The Locked Room are the cases closed: calculations and representations lead to no final illumination, no climatic discovery. Another characteristic of standard detective fiction that does not apply to Paul Auster’s trilogy, is that the former
tends to have conservative structure with a moral outcome, in which harmony is restored with a highly intellectual detective, ethically responsible for fulfilling the desires of both, society and the reader. In the trilogy, however, the author has in mind a different audience with distinct values and expectations. As a consequence, he makes no attempts to provide any conventional methods to restore harmony. In fact, Auster’s main concern
is that not such harmony exists. All is discordance and fragmentation. The process of discovering clues to the cases in all three stories results in being futile. This is due to the fact that characters themselves go through devastating crisis of identity, each of them feeling his own self fused with their counterpart’s identity or disintegrating almost completely. CONCLUSION This study has shown that The New York Trilogy deviates from the prototypical standard detective fiction in terms of John M. Swales´s definition of genre. Besides, it cannot be considered as a detective novel in the traditional sense of the genre either, but a su bversion of it, as it certainly resembles the structure, style, content, intended audience, and mainly the purpose of postmodern literature. All three stories employ and deconstruct the conventional elements of the detective story, resulting in a recursive linguistic investigation of the nature, function, and meaning of language. The trilogy also parodies and subverts the Romance “realistic” fiction, and autobiography, thereby exploding the narrative traditions related to these
genres. Moreover, it denies conventional schematic structure of fict ional discourse, such as linear movement, realistic representation, finding of the culprit and closure. Having analysed all the main features of both, standard detective fiction and postmodern novels, we conclude that The New York Trilogy is a particular form of postmodern detective fiction which still uses well known elements of the detective novel, but also creates a new form that links the traditional features of the genre with experimental, metafictional and ironic features of postmodernism. BIBLIOGRAPHY
- Auster, P. (1988). The New York Trilogy. Great Britain: Faber and Faber Limited. - Oxford Collocations dictionary for students of English (2003) Oxford: Oxford University Press. - Swales, John M. (1990), “The concept of genre”, Chapter 3. In: Swales, John M., Genre Analysis. Cambridge Applied Linguistics: CUP. - Waite, M., Hollingworth, L., Marshall, D. (2006) Oxford Paperback Thesaurus . Oxford: Oxford University Press. - http://www.myspace.com/detective_stories/blog/386938398. September 29th, 2011. 12.31 p.m. - http://www.goodessaywords.com/2010/02/postmodernism-in-fiction.html. October 8th, 2011. 2.45 p.m. - http://www.49thparallel.bham.ac.uk/back/issue19/Ramin_article.pdf . October 1st, 2011. 8.37 p.m.
