Multi-dimensions Of The Perceived City

Contemporary American writer Paul Auster(1947-)is best known for his postmodernist writing style.It is generally acknowledged that his works are concerned with the nature of language,coincidence,and intertextuality;therefore,they have been consistently interpreted as postmodernist texts.A review of existing academic readings on Auster reveals that a large amount of critical essays focus on the form of his fictions.And a crude generalization of his fictions as meta-fiction or mere textual fabrications has,to a large extent,underestimated Auster's concerns about social reality.Auster is a writer with a keen sense of place.Throughout his opus,Auster demonstrates sensitivity to the metropolitan life and has often been called "the spokesperson on contemporary American urban life".This dissertation seeks to shift its critical attention away from Auster's literary techniques to his city writing,a subject that Auster is preoccupied with.Through examining heterogeneous forms of city representation in Auster's works,the dissertation attempts to uncover Auster's complex views of New York.It is understood by the author that a writer's depiction of a city constitutes what Lefebvre calls "the representation of space",an act infused with authorial intention and is susceptible to the social-historical context.And the representation is realized through the working of various narrative strategies and rhetorical methods the writer adopts.Thus,cities in literary works are both physical space and a kind of space invested with the writer's emotion and imagination,i.e.space produced by the writer himself.Governed by this assumption,the dissertation sees the city depicted by writers as "perceived city",a concept that provides a useful approach to understanding Auster's city writing.The dissertation thus looks at how Auster configures New York through writing and traces his relationship with the city as reflected in his varied perceptions of it.The body of the dissertation explores the following aspects:first,the author's own metropolitan experience and its representation in the texts;second,the representation of city as a social space filled with social relations and ideologies;third,the construction of imaginative and alternative utopian spaces in Auster's fictions.The three dimensions identify different cityscapes in Auster's works;also,they trace the broadening of geographical scales and spatial experience in Auster's city writing,moving from the private space of the writer's room onto social space and symbolic space.The first chapter focuses on The Invention of Solitude and The New York Trilogy,exploring Auster's metaphysical reflection on the city.In these two works,Auster presents a New York that is heavily tinted with his own metropolitan experiences and aesthetic views.Auster's experiences at home and in Europe and his engagement with these experiences as a writer combined to foreground a concern with the disquieting relationship between the "word",the metropolitan world and the individual's inner world.What emerges most strongly in response to this concern is the image of the writer isolated in his lonely room.To Auster,the room represents a place from which one can observe the city while sheltering himself from its overwhelming turmoil and confusion,thus,it constitutes a spatial code for both Auster and his characters in which self-isolation and self-generation could take place at once.The metaphor of the room finds prominent expression in The New York Trilogy.In this novel,characters experience the metropolis in a solipsistic way and the urban space is frequently interrelated with textual space and ontological space.The interlacing of the three spaces helps to enhance the sense of confusion and disorientation New York brings to people.This sense of the city suggests Auster's distancing himself from New York and his resistance to metropolitan life.Chapter two deals with Leviathan,In the Country of Last Things,and Moon Palace,works in which the city is not represented as projection of personal experiences,but a "social space" loaded with power relations and cultural mythology.Leviathan bemoans the fading of urban civilization and citizenship,displaying Auster's impulse to step out of the enclosed room and address social concerns.The transformation of Auster's literary view finds its way into works like In the Country of Last Things and Moon Palace in which Auster condemns the production of power and the nationalist ideology embedded in the city.Cast in the form of dystopia narrative,In the Country of Last Things presents to us an imagined doomed city.Through laying bare the institutional organization's monopoly of urban space and discourse and how the oppressed rebel against it by adopting strategies like walking and writing,Auster suggests that city is a site wherein social production and power relations are constantly inscribed and re-inscribed.Moon Palace employs the genre of bildungsroman and the protagonist's quest is juxtaposed with that of his country.In the novel,Auster correlates New York with the American national myth.Through a subversive parody of the traditional coming-of-age story,he satirizes the national myth featuring progress and the desire to ceaselessly conquer space and expand national territory.Chapter three explores the utopian dimension in Auster's works.Auster shares Lefebvre's view of space as being replete with conflicts and contradictions thus open to perpetual changes and re-conceptualization.He responds critically to the static and idealistic vision in traditional utopianism,yet the redemptive power of utopia is not eluded by him.In his late works,Auster constructs alternative visions of space that are subject to different social forces shaping the real space of the city.Auster's utopian vision seems based not so much on the composition of a blueprint in the remote future,but rather on a different experience of self,space,and social relations situated in "here and now".In Sunset Park,Auster presents an alternative utopia emerging from the protagonist's abandoning socially-imposed identities and accommodating selfhood,the relationship between self and others through artistic practices and a return to corporeal sensibility.This kind of vision of utopia is extended to group living in The Brooklyn Follies,in which alternative utopia is embodied in a heterogeneous and dynamic urban community created out of Brooklyn.Auster's ambivalent attitude toward the city is made manifest throughout the above three dimensions in his city writing.Also,they give us a sense of the interaction between the writer and the city.The early stage of Auster's writing witnesses his anxiety over identifying with the city:he alienates himself from the city while at the same time tries to address the social and cultural issues within it.After the"9·11" terror attack,this kind of personal anxiety is replaced by the society's general ideological anxieties toward New York.Auster then presents his concerns over the city from a relatively optimistic view.His affirmative account of New York helps to appease the external pressure brought about by the "9·11" and financial crisis,and strengthens New York residents' identification with the city.In this regard,Auster's re-enchantment of New York is also symptomatic of the social condition,thus participates in the social-historical context insidiously.