The Artist’s Hand: The Aesthetics of Loss in Paul Auster’s
Jørgen Veisland
Ul Wita Stwosza 55, 80-952 Gdańsk, Poland
Department of Scandinavian Studies, University of Gdańsk
Email: [email protected]
Abstract Paul Auster’s novel Sunset Park is an experiement in realism. The
experiment consists in trying to dissolve and then reconstruct the relation between
thing and sign, res and signum. In order to accomplish this reconstruction the
narrative focuses on characters, most of whom are artists and intellectuals, who in
one way or another have become victims of the economic crisis that set in in the
year 2008. Four of these characters squat in an abandoned house in Sunset Park,
Brooklyn, where they attempt to create an alternative life style and, in the case of
one of them, a young woman painter, Ellen, carry the experiment into a series of
nude sketches that combine realism and abstract form in an attempt to capture pure
thingness and the in-betweenness of things. Pain and loss, and the remembrance
thereof, are transmuted into a new existence emanating from Ellen’s unfinished
portraits.
Key words Hand as object; creativity and negativity; the margin; fragment; fetish;
res and signum; economic crisis
Author Jørgen Veisland is professor of Scandinavian Literature and Comparative
Literature at the University of Gdansk, Poland. Prior to his employment at this
institution he held appointments at The University of Wisconsin-Madison, USA,
the University of California-Berkeley, USA, Fudan University, Shanghai, PRC,
and the University of Caen, France. Major scholarly interests are the modern
novel, modern poetry and modern drama. The author has published books on Søren
Kierkegaard, Henrik Ibsen’s drama, the 20th and 21st century American novel,
fiction by John Steinbeck, the Victorian novel, and the philosophy of H.D. Thoreau.
He is serving on the editorial committees of the journals Ïbsen Studies and Forum
for World Literature Studies (FWLS).
See how the sleeping outflung hand, touching the bedside
candle, remembers pain, springs back and free while mind
and brain sleep on and only make of this adjacent heat
some trashy myth of reality’s escape:or that same sleeping
hand, in sensuous marriage with some dulcet surface, is
transformed by that same sleeping brain and mind into that
same figment-stuff warped out of all experience.
— William Faulkner, Absalom, Absalom!
Some shadow’s hands moved with my hands
and everything I touched was turned to darkness
and everything I could not touch was light.
— John Glenday, “Etching of a Line of Trees.”
In his novel Sunset Park (2010) Paul Auster once again focuses on characters
that are marginalized in society; the author, or rather the narrator’s examination
of marginalization strikes me as being radical and unique in several ways. The
narrator’s voice, speaking consistently in the third person, is disseminated across
the field of narration, recording the experience of several characters one by one,
mostly employing the present tense, alternating somewhat with the past tense,
thus achieving the effect of direct, simultaneous reportage, getting close to the
characters and at the same time being distanced from them. The result is a de
facto approach to character and situation where the act of creation does not reside
in the narrator but in the character-artists of whom there are several. Subjective
experience, deepened by an acute sense of loss and marginality, is presented as a
specific mode of creativity in negativity, and the artist’s hand is singled out as the
subjective and objective instrument that presses the button of the camera to take a
snapshot, seizes the marker or brush to draw and paint, and holds the pen to write.
As the mind sleeps, the hand “springs back and free”, recalling pain (Faulkner
115); the hand of the artist is liberated into a negativity not recorded by the brain
but existing in its own right as autonomous creative activity in a space where the
relations between sign and thing are dissolved and where the hand is severed from
the body, picturing, sketching, writing as the subject of art as well as the object of
art. Here the hand of the artist is imbued with knowledge of itself as moving with
some “shadow” that turns everything touched to “darkness” while also indicating
the presence of a “light” — a presence in negativity (Glenday 8). Creating in
negativity, the artist’s hand attempts to name the unnamable, the discarded; and
it also tries to name itself as an unnamable, discarded object, i.e. as an object
participating in the dissolution and (experimental, temporary) reconstitution of the
relation between sign and thing.
Presence means existence at the level of the unnamable, and the line
“everything I could not touch was light” undergoes subtle changes in meaning
according to where the emphasis is put: “I could not touch” would mean “the ‘I’
could not touch”; “I could not touch” would probably mean “unable to touch”
as well as “beyond touch”; and finally, “I could not touch” — most likely the
intended meaning — emphasizes the impalpability of light. But does “impalpable”
signify unknowable or may the “light” be approached in the artwork by applying
a different method, aesthetically and epistemologically? In what follows I will
suggest that the senses — sight, hearing, feeling (touch) — provide a more direct
form of access to “light” than do mind and thought, at least as they persist, still
today, in customary, common psychology and epistemology. The artwork emerges,
then, as a form of sensual refinement and as an object-ification of subjectivity,
combining realistic technique and abstract form. Abstraction involves a radical
separation of sign, signum, from thing, res. Sunset Park is a bold attempt to convey
the artwork as pure, yet not absolute thing, and so the novel manifests itself as a
non-Platonic as well as a non-semiotic approach to art in Modernity. Auster’s text
reverses the history of semiotics in trying to capture existence prior to the sign.
The narrative process itself, the reportage, emulates Faulkner’s “sleeping
outflung hand” that remembers pain; but recollection is turned into “some trashy
myth of reality’s escape” by the sleeping mind. In the post-Civil War South of
Faulkner’s novel real pain is the loss and the disintegration of an entire civilization,
a culture perished in a universal conflagration remembered by the multiple narrators
whose hands and voices constantly weave their own individual “trashy” myths of
“reality’s escape,” and, while doing so, transform the narrative, or narratives into
“figment-stuff warped out of all experience”; thus the narrative assumes a tenuous
and experimental quality. Still, in Faulkner the dual negativity, trashy myth as
fatefully conditioned escape; and figment-stuff, elevated, perhaps, to an imaginative,
poetic reconstruction, the artistic reconstruction of the South one might say,
posits a constructive, supplementary and sublimating creativity in response to
loss. The poetic image springs to life in a modern and Modernist creative process,
remembering pain and inserting it into the textual fabric, thereby absolving it from
“the sleeping brain and mind”. History is sublimated as recollection dispenses
with knowledge of the absolute and the ideal and discards the “remembrance of
things past.” Likewise, in Auster’s novel the artist’s hand “remembers pain,” a pain
caused by its own destructive actions — numerous incidents record punching hands
and fists — and disseminates that pain throughout the narrative, turning it into an
experimental text in the mode of realism that blends subjective experience, the
voices of the character-artists, with the narrator’s recording voice. The result is a
weaving of “trashy myths” and “figment-stuff,” both of which participate in a dual
negativity as in Faulkner. This dual negativity is the effect of a social condition:
economic crisis and cultural disintegration in contemporary America. We may
trace signs of and parallels to the loss of the South in the contemporary loss. As
in Absalom, Absalom! loss and dissolution have produced a narrative, Sunset
Park, that is a simulation of realism; however, simulation undergoes a dialectical
transformation whereby it turns into a negativity positing a new creativity and a
new subjective experience forged by the artist’s hand severed from the body and the
mind. The hand of the artist may create figment-stuff warped out of all experience,
but it is precisely this warping that signifies the dialectics of negativity forming
innovative creative activities in Auster’s artists. The narrative voice in itself is not
poetic as are the voices in Absalom, Absalom!. However, the narrative voice in
Sunset Park indicates, in a subdued manner, the radical supplementariness of the
artwork, suspended in time and space as the negative, or rather, negating pole of a
reality where everything is lost. The negativity of shadow and darkness becomes
light as the artist’s hand touches and does not touch at the same time.
Sunset Park presents a number of marginal persons, male and female, who
for one reason or another have decided or been forced to drop out of society. Miles
Heller is a 28 year old college drop-out, presently working in Florida as member
of a crew of four that go through abandoned houses, i.e. houses people have lost
due to the economic crisis, gathering up discarded objects, cleaning the houses and
then turning them over to the bank; Miles is the son of Morris Heller, owner and
manager of an alternative publishing firm in New York City, himself out on the
margins since he belongs to a small and decreasing number of literary publishers
still printing and selling fiction that is different, mostly literary works that are not
on the popular hitlist. Miles’ mother, the actress Mary-Lee Swann, divorced her
husband a few months after giving birth to Miles in order to pursue a career in
acting, on stage and in film. Morris remarried, to Willa Parks, English Professor,
who had a son, Bobby, from a previous marriage. He is Miles’ stepbrother, then,
and the two of them are so different that they appear as opposites in the narrative,
and the opposition never develops into a productive complementarity but remains
a stark opposition — Miles being studious, introverted yet physically strong and
active, and Bobby being lazy in school, extroverted, temperamental. The difference
in character culminates into a physical confrontation one day they are out walking
on a serpentine country road after the car has broken down. They argue, Miles
shoves Bobby into the middle of the road, a car aprroaches unseen from around
a bend, runs Bobby over and kills him on the spot. Miles does not tell his parents
about his pushing Bobby into the road; he is guiltridden, of course, and this guilt
finally leads to his leaving home, dropping out of college and embarking upon the
life of the eternal drifter, so abundantly present in American fiction. In Florida he
falls in love with a young girl, 17 years old, that is, 11 years his junior, a girl not of
age yet with whom he nevertheless shares an apartment. Pilar Sanchez is her name,
her parents were killed in a car accident but she has three older sisters the oldest of
whom, Angela, “looks after her,” or rather, attempts to control her. Pilar’s sexual
relationship to the older man is accepted by Angela but she exploits the fact that
her sister is a minor by law, pressuring Miles into giving her discarded objects from
the abandoned houses, expensive electronic equipment that has been left behind.
He finally refuses and is forced by Angela’s bullies, two thugs, to hand over the
objects required or get out. Miles gets out, takes the bus to New York where he
moves into another abandoned house in Sunset Park, Brooklyn, occupied by four
squatters, including himself: His friend Bing Nathan, drummer in a band called
Mob Rule and owner of The Hospital for Broken Things where he repairs broken or
outdated electronic equipment, restoring it to life, so to speak; Ellen Brice, painter
and sketcher; and Alice Bergstrom, a PhD student working on a thesis about malefemale
relations as portrayed in post World War II film and fiction. None of them
have any money, barely enough for groceries and utilities. They live in the house
illegally and are finally evicted forcefully after four eviction notices have been
served. During the eviction — which is fairly violent — Miles punches a police
officer in the jaw thus breaking the law in a serious way and losing his chance of
getting married to Pilar who is waiting for him in Florida.
Miles, Bing, Ellen and Alice have something in common: an interest in, perhaps
even an obsession with broken things, or fragments of things, and, particularly in
the case of Ellen, the painter, individual body parts, internal and external, that are
almost fetichized.
Miles takes photos of abandoned objects in the houses he “trashes out,” as it is
called:
Then, always, there are the objects, the fogotten possessions, the abandoned
things. By now, his photographs number in the thousands, and among his
burgeoning archive can be found pictures of books, shoes, and oil paintings,
pianos and toasters, dolls, tea sets, and dirty socks, televisions and board
games, party dresses and tennis racquets, sofas, silk lingerie … (Auster 4).
After moving from Florida to New York Miles starts taking pictures in Green-Wood
Cemetery, a seemingly useless project:
He has embarked on another useless project, employing his camera as an
instrument to record his stray, useless thoughts, but at least it is something
to do, a way to pass the time until his life starts again, and where else but
in Green-Wood Cemetery could he have learned that the real name of Frank
Morgan, the actor who played the Wizard of Oz, was Wuppermann? (102)
Thus the nameless gain names in his photography; a photo-graphic mimesis
temporarily discloses the real identity of “Frank Morgan.” Dissimulation and the
mimetic function merge in an uncanny assembly of shadow and light, death and
life, or death reconstructed.
Miles has no idea why he feels compelled to take these photos. The objects
possess a curious fascination — an aura emanates from them; it is the uncanny aura
of the fetish which Julia Kristeva explores in Revolution in Poetic Language:
In order to keep the process signifying, to avoid foundering in an “unsayable”
without limits, and thus posit the subject of a practice, the subject of
poetic language clings to the help fetichism offers. And so, according to
psychoanalysis, poets as individuals fall under the category of fetishism; the
very practice of art necessitates the reinvesting the maternal chora so that
it transgresses the symbolic order; and, as a result, this practice easily lends
itself to so-called perverse subjective structures. (65)
While employed in trashing-out in Florida Miles had noticed signs indicative
of how the former owners — who during the last few months of their residence
occupied their houses like ghosts — abandoned their houses in haste but often not
without breaking the furniture, smearing the walls with paint, dumping garbage
on the floors in a fit of rage, reacting to bankruptcy and default. These abandoned
houses and Miles’ photos of the objects in them recall his own autobiographical
work Portrait of an Invisible Man, a portrait of his father who after the death of
his wife lived in his house like a ghost, never really present, piling up dirty dishes
in the kitchen and leaving used razor blades in the bathroom and worn shirts in the
bedroom; and Miles’ pictures recall the professor, or ex-professor in Part One of
The New York Trilogy, City of Glass, who picks up broken objects in the streets of
New York City and proceeds to re-name them, dissolving and recreating the relation
between sign and thing. The photos taken by Miles participate in a renaming, or
rather, in a process leading to the unnamable, the pre-verbal, analyzed by Kristeva
in Powers of Horror. An Essay on Abjection:
In that anteriority to language, the outside is elaborated by means of a
projection from within, of which the only experience we have is one of
pleasure and pain. An outside in the image of the inside, made of pleasure and
pain. The non-distinctiveness of inside and outside would thus be unnamable,
a border passable in both directions by pleasure and pain. (61)
In the same work Kristeva talks about “the drive-quality attached to archaic
objects” and how that “drive-quality” must be introjected in the individual
consciousness; without that introjection , Kristeva says, “pre-objects and abjects
threaten from without as impurity, defilement, abomination, and eventually they
trigger the persecutive apparatus” (116).
Kristeva’s analysis is a complex, Freudian interpretation focusing on
anthropology and on certain “primitive” practices and rituals resembling poetic
practice. Miles is a kind of poet, practising the kind of photography that records
objects as the signs of the abject, of abjection, at this point in history a collective
abjection. The 21st century economics and history have determined abjection in the
New World; economic collapse has become conducive to a fatal prevention of the
usual introjection Kristeva talks about; therefore we have abomination and, in the
end the unleashing of the “persecutive powers” in Auster’s text — the fist punching
the officer and the police forcefully evicting the squatters.
Moreover, the narrator’s presentation of the decaying urban environment
is reminiscent of Walter Benjamin’s interpretation of Baroque allegory and its
resemblance to modern fragmentation in the Passagen-Werk, the Arcades Project.
In her work on Benjamin, The Dialectics of Seeing, Susan Buck-Morss notes:
The allegorists heaped emblematic images one on top of another, as if the
sheer quantity of meanings could compensate for their arbitrariness and lack
of coherence. The result is that nature, far from an organic whole, appears in
arbitrary arrangement, as a lifeless, fragmentary, untidy clutter of emblems.
(173)
Not only in view of the proclivity in Auster’s text towards the fragmentary and
the emblematic but also in view of his well-known interest in French poetry and
his year-long residence in Paris it is tempting to see an influence, or parallel to the
poetry of Charles Baudelaire, particularly Les Fleurs du Mal, The Flowers of Evil.
Baudelaire’s poem “The Swan” is especially interesting in this respect; in it the
poet traverses the newly rebuilt Place du Carrousel when, as Buck-Morss writes, “his
memory is suddenly flooded with the image of Andromache, wife of Hector, who
was left a widow with the destruction of Troy”(178-179). In Baudelaire’s poem the
figure of Andromache is superimposed on images of modern Paris:
Andromache, I think of you!
…
The old paris is gone (the face of a city
Changes more quickly, alas! Than the mortal heart)
…
Paris changes, but nothing of my melancholy
Gives way. New palaces, scaffolding, blocks,
Old suburbs, everything for me becomes allegory,
While my dear memories are heavier than rocks. (329-30)
Recalling that Miles Heller’s mother is Mary-Lee Swann it becomes tempting
to view her as a contemporary Andromache; however, in this case it is a “swan”
reconciled to the loss of her first husband through divorce; an Andromache who
has built an impressive career in the theater, integrating heaps of broken images
in her role as Winnie in Samuel Beckett’s play Happy Days. Of course, it is
ironic but also profoundly meaningful that art, theater and literature become a
way out in Sunset Park. Auster’s “swan” does not evoke melancholy reflection
as does Andromache in Baudelaire’s poem. However, it is important to note that
the arts, theater and literature as expressive vehicles focus exactly on decay and
fragmentation, Beckett’s play being one of the primary examples in modern drama.
F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel The Great Gatsby is another. The supreme and subtle
irony is, naturally, that artistic careers may be planned and carried out around
fragmentation, in the midst of the ruins of history. The modern artist — and “artist”
includes, here, not only Mary-Lee Swann and a number of novelists appearing
in the text; it also includes the main characters, Miles, Bing, Ellen and Alice —
is his own impressario, displaying herself or himself in various identities like
Baudelaire: the flâneur is one of them, the ragpicker is another. Miles and the other
young people occupying the abandoned house in Brooklyn are the contemporary
versions of this character, and Miles’ father, Morris, is a version of Baudelaire’s
ragpicker, appearing as what he himself calls the Can Man, disguising himself, as
do numerous other characters in Auster’s works, in order to secretly follow his son
around, observing him from a distance, worried but at the same time fascinated by
his son’s vagrancy, by the adventure of it.
In the Passagen-Werk Benjamin comments that the debasement and decay of
nature and the city in the 19th century find their source in the production process
itself: “The devaluation of the world of objects within allegory is outdone within
the world of objects itself by the commodity” (660). And so in Sunset Park: the
devaluation of objects in modern 20th century literature, e.g. Beckett and Fitzgerald,
is “outdone” by the decay and fragmentation, the mass of broken things collected
not only by Miles in his photos but also by Bing in his Hospital for Broken Things,
by Alice in her PhD thesis on broken down male-female relationships in post
World War II film, and by Ellen in her sketches of body parts, including the hand,
that are intially fetishized then turned into abstract objects. If “fetishism” involves
an emotional or libidinal attachment then this attachment is glossed over and
aesthetically sublimated in Ellen’s sketches. Erasing attachment constitutes the
beginning of an artistic endeavor designed to reconstruct.
Bing Nathan is characterized by the narrator as “the champion of discontent,
the militant debunker of contemporary life who dreams of forging a new reality
from the ruins of a failed world. Unlike most contrarians of his ilk, he does not
believe in political action”(55). The ruins of a failed world, Benjamin’s “ruins of
history,” can only be reassembled or restored through focusing on “the local, the
particular, the nearly invisible details of quotidian affairs”(locus citatus: same page;
loc.cit. ). Bing is right in a sense, of course. But he invests too much emotional
energy even in his particular and highly individualized approach, believing till the
end that it is safe to ignore the eviction notices served by US marshalls, and the
result is disastrous: forceful eviction.
In her work on William Wyler’s film The Best Years of Our Lives Alice
Bergstrom notes how:
The men no longer know how to act with their wives and girlfriends. They
have lost their appetite for domesticity, their feel for home. After years of
living apart from women, years of combat and slaughter, years of grappling
to survive the horrors and dangers of war, they have been cut off from their
civilian pasts, crippled, trapped in nightmare repetitions of their experiences,
and the women they left behind have become strangers to them. (75)
In his work The Philosophy of Literary Form Kenneth Burke comments as follows
in Proposition 11 (from “Twelve Propositions”):
11. Human relations should be analyzed with respect to the leads discovered
by a study of drama.
Men enact rôles. They change rôles. They participate. They develop modes of
social appeal. Even a “star” is but a function of the total cast. Politics above
all is drama. Anyone who would turn from politics to some other emphasis,
or vice versa, must undergo some change of identity, which is dramatic
(involving “style” and “ritual”). People are neither animals nor machines (to
be analyzed by the migration of metaphors from biology or mechanics), but
actors and acters. (310-311)
Burke’s comment applies directly to the “actors” appearing in the theater, film and
literature as well as to the “real life” actors in Sunset Park. The deepest plunge into
a dramatic change of identity involving “style” and “ritual” and, as I shall argue,
tending towards abstraction, is Ellen Brice’s sketches of the naked human body.
Her sketches are inspired by walks on Seventh Avenue during which her mind is
flooded — like Baudelaire’s mind in the poem “The Swan” — with images, here
images of the genitals of both sexes, of young and old, and of … “luxuriant thighs,
skinny thighs, vast, quivering buttocks, chest hair, recessed navels, inverted nipples,
bellies scarred by appendix operations and cesarean births …”(83). Using in part
her imagination, in part Bing as model she proceeds to work on dozens of sketches
portraying body parts, fascinated a she is by the body in its total form as well as by
its separate parts:
The human body can be apprehended, but it cannot be comprehended. The
human body has shoulders. The human body has knees. The human body is an
object and a subject, the outside of an inside that cannot be seen. The human
body grows from the small of infancy to the large of adulthood, and then it
begins to die. The human body has hips. The human body has elbows. The
human body lives in the mind of one who possesses a human body, and to live
inside the human body possesed of the mind that perceives another human
body is to live in a world of others. (163)
Access to “the world of others” is through the work of art only. The drama of
Sunset Park consists in the narrator’s presenting the painful, crisis-ridden lives
of the characters and then providing close-ups where inside and outside both are
transformed by the creative process. Naturally this approach inaugurates a shift
in realism. Ellen’s decision to start drawing and to ask Bing to pose for her in the
nude is logically prompted by a significant change in her mind as regards realism in
drawing; the new realism emerging in the nude sketches parallels the realistic mode
of the narrative, or narrative voice which becomes increasingly abstract while at the
same time assuming a fuller note, sometimes approximating a musical crescendo
— a crescendo heard from a distance, though, and the distancing effect is that of
minimalization: a minimal intensity signifying the reduced function of the sign.
Ellen’s early paintings were photography-like pictures of buildings and urban
scenes that in her own words did not “speak to anyone”. Now she embarks upon an
entirely different project, inspired in part by Morandi:
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. (87)
Ellen realizes that “all she has ever wanted is to draw and paint representations
of her own feelings”(88). Ellen’s drawing hand that “remembers pain” refuses to
make a “trashy myth of reality’s escape”; rather, she is bold enough to risk losing
reality in an approach to representation that evokes Faulkner’s “figment-stuff”:
representations of her own feelings. I see the toning down of the narrative voice
to a minimalistic recording of intensity as a prelude to and implicit anticipation
of Ellen’s drawings. These drawings fuse subject and object as much as this is
possible; it is possible because it is facilitated by the transformation, a genuine
metamorphosis, that occurs when the subject projects itself into an objectivized
image that contains the subject immanently to a greater extent than the subject can
be said to contain itself. The figment of feelings and dreams leap into immediate,
unmediated portraits of body parts, drawn in anatomic verisimilitude and yet,
paradoxically, showing the artist’s and the artwork’s interest in “the spaces
between things”: the artwork as an inter-esse and the human body as an abstract
form. Indeed, abstraction in Sunset Park is as refined as the poetic voices in
Absalom, Absalom! From a dialectical perspective, abstraction as artistic method,
here in drawing, is a response to the sociocultural condition determined by the
economic crisis, as were the poetic voices in Absalom, Absalom!; the drawing
hand of the artist sublimates the pain of crisis and loss, personal and collective,
societal. Paradoxically, in the process of abstraction the drawing hand salvages the
subjective, disclosing its unique existence in the “spaces between things”; these
“spaces” somehow emanate “pure thingness” as well as “all that is out there beyond
us.” The artwork as inter-esse, then, becomes a refined coalescence of “thingness,”
res divorced from signum, and a subjectivity that is almost erased through being
fused with a “beyond” that includes the cemetery.
In Augustine’s De doctrina christiana I we learn that “All instruction is either
about things or about signs; but things are learnt by means of signs/Omnis doctrina
vel rerum est vel signorum, sed res per signa discuntur”(9). However, Ellen’s
drawings illuminate res in its pure form, even discarding what Augustine calls
verbum interius, mental concepts, the “internal word,” in her “representations of
her own feelings.” The Paradise Lost of the Sunset Park community in New York
City, bordering Green-Wood Cemetery, is a fallen world where signs have lost their
meaning so that things are not learned “by means of signs,” but in the process of
this loss Sunset Park restores res. Restoration and reconstruction are enhanced by
abstract form in drawing and painting, and abstraction absolves the subject from
itself through letting it merge with the world: inside is turned into an outside and
this outside is the artwork. This process is initiated at the moment when Ellen starts
drawing her own hand:
She takes her drawing pad and a Faber-Castell pencil off the top of the bureau,
then sits down on the bed and opens the pad to the first empty page. Holding
the pencil in her right hand, she raises her left hand in the air, tilts it at a fortyfive-
degree angle, and keeps it suspended about twelve inches from her face,
studying it until it no longer seems attached to her body. It is an alien hand
now, a hand that belongs to someone else, to no one, a woman’s hand with
its slender fingers and rounded nails, the half-moons above the cuticles, the
narrow wrist with its small bump of bone sticking out on the left side. (88)
As in Absalom, Absalom! the substance of remembering is:
sense, sight,smell: the muscles with which we see and hear and feel – not
mind, not thought:there is no such thing as memory: the brain recalls just
what the muscles grope for:no more, no less:and its resultant sum is usually
incorrect and false and worthy only of the name of dream. (115)
For Ellen, getting it right as a painter means getting close to the world of objects
by letting her muscles “grope for” them; in this act there is an absence of personal
involvement and “memory”; the world becomes alien as does the artist’s own “alien
hand.” The alien-ness of the artist is the pre-condition for really seeing, feeling
and hearing the world and without this pre-condition there can be no artwork.
Therefore Ellen must begin by drawing her own hand, thus turning it into an “alien
hand”. The drawing hand is the method; the artistic method must participate in the
very alien-ness immanent in the world.
The artwork follows as the form of everything the artist could not touch:
everything is “light” when the artist’s “mind and thought” are called by “the name
of dream.” Paradoxically, the senses provide immediate access to the physical as
well as the metapysical, or: objects as the in-betweenness of things. When method
and medium merge with the alien, i.e. other world, the creative process erases
mimesis; the process of artistic creation is one with the process of the world itself.
Res is presented without the mediation of signum. In the simple act of drawing
her own hand Ellen abolishes the borderline between subject and object. This is
accomplished spontaneously, without theoretical or philosophical preparations.
Spontaneity, intuition and sensation facilitate the coming into existence of the
artwork as any other object in the world. In Comment 12 of 39 Comments on the
Creative Process John Glenday says: “The creative process begins with the need to
exist, not to express” (2014).
This is precisely the meaning of Ellen’s new method as it is described in the
following passage:
For the first hour after setting to work, she warms up by concentrating on
details, isolated areas of a body culled from her collection of images or found
in one of the two mirrors. A page of hands. A page of eyes. A page of buttocks.
A page of arms. Then she moves on to whole bodies, portraits of single figures
in various poses: a naked woman standing with her back to the viewer, a
naked man sitting on the floor, a naked man stretched out on a bed, a naked
girl squatting on the ground and urinating, a naked woman sitting in a chair
with her head thrown back as she cups her right breast in her right hand and
squeezes the nipple of her left breast with her left hand. These are intimate
portraits, she tells herself, not erotic drawings, human bodies doing what
human bodies do when no one is watching them. (164)
The drawings evoke stimulating, arousing “pictures bubbling in her head”, but
she concludes that sexual arousal is only a “minor bi-product of the effort”; what
she really wants is to get it right.The drawings are usually left unfinished because
she wants “her human bodies to convey the miraculous strangeness of being alive
— no more than that, as much as all that”(165). It is precisely the unfinished
image that points to the in-betweenness of the artwork; the drawings are as real
as representations can be and yet they are endowed with a strangeness, another
reality, a submerged world of human bodies surfacing in a disintegrating culture
and coming to life only in the work of art. The biography of Ellen, her private
life, is a record of pain and loss; but it is this experience that precipitates the act of
creativity on the canvas where she attempts to attain the sublime. This endeavor
must go on, must be infinitely prolonged since, as John Glenday puts it: “Because
each poem ultimately is a failure, we write on”(38). The attainment of the sublime
cannot be finished; for it it were to be finished it would cease to be sublime. It
would also cease to exist as a real image of the in-betweenness of things. Existing
in this reality is Ellen’s interest as an artist, her inter-esse.
In addition, Ellen’s artwork represents the culmination of what we may
call a displacement of identity involving all the other characters as well. This
displacement occurs as part of an artistic endeavor; it is compelled by what Slavoj
Žižek in The Ticklish Subject refers to as “the threat of nonexistence”; under this
threat subjects are “emotionally blackmailed into identifying with the imposed
symbolic identity (‘nigger’, ‘bitch’, etc.)” but it is, nevertheless, possible for them
“to displace this identity, to recontextualize it, to make it work for other purposes,
to turn it against its hegemonic mode of functioning …” (265-266)
The “symbolic identity” in Auster’s novel is that of the contemporary
rebel, drifter, vagabond and artist, the marginalized individual who has given up
belonging to a center because that center does not exist. Sunset Park moves the
margin into the center, or rather, turns everything and everyone into a margin. How
and where do you represent a margin while simultaneously displacing oneself
from it and, ultimately, also displacing the margin and, with it, representation?
In carrying out a work of art; and in the work of art, subject and object become
“figment-stuff warped out of all experience” since the artwork engages what
John Glenday calls “averted vision” so that it “looks to one side of its subject
matter”. Like stars, “abstractions are so dim they are all but unknown to us” (34).
— Even the group of four’s modest existence as squatters does not work as an
alternative social experiment since they are evicted; and their resistance does not
work since they themselves, at least the two men, Miles in particular, use force
when confronted with force. Miles’ fist hitting the police officer is a powerful and
subtle reminder of the fact that fragmentation as applied to the human body may
have tragic results. And yet, Miles’ punching fist stands in a subtle dialectical
relationship to Ellen’s drawn and drawing hand; the hand as an aggressive tool
is at the negative pole of an opposition whose positive pole is the creative hand.
But the opposition is not binary: the punching fist and the drawing hand constitute
supplementary positions of exchange whereby one metamorphoses into the other.
The punching fist is a primal force whose manifestation as violence is an inherent
rebellion against “hegemony”; thus the hand as an instrument of physical revolt
contains the drawing hand immanently within itself. The drawing hand becomes
the fist transformed into a creative instrument but “fist” and “hand” are akin in their
being poised to “strike at” existence as inter-esse.
The closing incident of the novel makes Miles think of “the missing buildings,
the collapsed and burning buildings that no longer exist, the missing buildings and
the missing hands”, and the incident makes him wonder “if it is worth hoping for
a future when there is no future”; he tells himself that from now on “he will stop
hoping for anything and live only for now, this moment, this passing moment, the
now that is here and then not here, the now that is gone forever” (227-228).
The final passage is reminiscent of Baudelaire. It is, in a way, Baudelaire in
a new vein. The new mode, the 21st century mode of existing, experiencing and
creating, takes place in a passing moment. Since time itself is unfinished how
can the artwork ever be finished? The very structure, or unstructuredness of time
is “figment-stuff warped out of all experience,” and the artist’s hand, when best
applied, moves along an axis propelled by “averted vision.”
In another one of his 39 Comments John Glenday says: “The self must be
expunged from the poem” (9). Expanding the statement to cover the work of art
in general and Sunset Park in particular, the expunging of the self is the ultimate
loss generating a (skewed) artistic vision. Auster’s novel and his character-artists
practice an aesthetics of loss. But the loss of self and the collapse of the social order
make for existence, make for “the strangeness of being alive.”
Works Cited
Augustine. De doctrina christiana I. In: W.M. Green, ed. Sancti Augustini Opera. Vienna: CSEL
80, 1963.
Auster, Paul. Sunset Park. New York: Picador, 2010.
Baudelaire, Charles. Les fleurs du mal. New York: New Directions Books, 1962.
Benjamin, Walter. Gesammelte Schriften. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1972.
Buck-Morss, Susan. The Dialectics of Seeing. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 1989.
Burke, Kenneth. The Philosophy of Literary Form.Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of
California Press, 1941.
Faulkner, William. Absalom, Absalom! New York: Vintage International Edition, 1990.
Glenday, John. Grain. London: Picador Poetry, 2009.
—. 39 Comments on the Creative Process. Shanghai, Wuhan, West Lafayette: Forum for World
Literature Studies, 2014.
Kristeva, Julia. Powers of Horror. An Essay on Abjection. Trans. Leon S. Roudiez. New York:
Columbia University Press, 1982.
—. Revolution in Poetic Language. Trans. Margaret Waller. New York: Columbia University
Press, 1984.
Žižek, Slavoj. The Ticklish Subject. London & New York: Verso, 1999.
Ul Wita Stwosza 55, 80-952 Gdańsk, Poland
Department of Scandinavian Studies, University of Gdańsk
Email: [email protected]
Abstract Paul Auster’s novel Sunset Park is an experiement in realism. The
experiment consists in trying to dissolve and then reconstruct the relation between
thing and sign, res and signum. In order to accomplish this reconstruction the
narrative focuses on characters, most of whom are artists and intellectuals, who in
one way or another have become victims of the economic crisis that set in in the
year 2008. Four of these characters squat in an abandoned house in Sunset Park,
Brooklyn, where they attempt to create an alternative life style and, in the case of
one of them, a young woman painter, Ellen, carry the experiment into a series of
nude sketches that combine realism and abstract form in an attempt to capture pure
thingness and the in-betweenness of things. Pain and loss, and the remembrance
thereof, are transmuted into a new existence emanating from Ellen’s unfinished
portraits.
Key words Hand as object; creativity and negativity; the margin; fragment; fetish;
res and signum; economic crisis
Author Jørgen Veisland is professor of Scandinavian Literature and Comparative
Literature at the University of Gdansk, Poland. Prior to his employment at this
institution he held appointments at The University of Wisconsin-Madison, USA,
the University of California-Berkeley, USA, Fudan University, Shanghai, PRC,
and the University of Caen, France. Major scholarly interests are the modern
novel, modern poetry and modern drama. The author has published books on Søren
Kierkegaard, Henrik Ibsen’s drama, the 20th and 21st century American novel,
fiction by John Steinbeck, the Victorian novel, and the philosophy of H.D. Thoreau.
He is serving on the editorial committees of the journals Ïbsen Studies and Forum
for World Literature Studies (FWLS).
See how the sleeping outflung hand, touching the bedside
candle, remembers pain, springs back and free while mind
and brain sleep on and only make of this adjacent heat
some trashy myth of reality’s escape:or that same sleeping
hand, in sensuous marriage with some dulcet surface, is
transformed by that same sleeping brain and mind into that
same figment-stuff warped out of all experience.
— William Faulkner, Absalom, Absalom!
Some shadow’s hands moved with my hands
and everything I touched was turned to darkness
and everything I could not touch was light.
— John Glenday, “Etching of a Line of Trees.”
In his novel Sunset Park (2010) Paul Auster once again focuses on characters
that are marginalized in society; the author, or rather the narrator’s examination
of marginalization strikes me as being radical and unique in several ways. The
narrator’s voice, speaking consistently in the third person, is disseminated across
the field of narration, recording the experience of several characters one by one,
mostly employing the present tense, alternating somewhat with the past tense,
thus achieving the effect of direct, simultaneous reportage, getting close to the
characters and at the same time being distanced from them. The result is a de
facto approach to character and situation where the act of creation does not reside
in the narrator but in the character-artists of whom there are several. Subjective
experience, deepened by an acute sense of loss and marginality, is presented as a
specific mode of creativity in negativity, and the artist’s hand is singled out as the
subjective and objective instrument that presses the button of the camera to take a
snapshot, seizes the marker or brush to draw and paint, and holds the pen to write.
As the mind sleeps, the hand “springs back and free”, recalling pain (Faulkner
115); the hand of the artist is liberated into a negativity not recorded by the brain
but existing in its own right as autonomous creative activity in a space where the
relations between sign and thing are dissolved and where the hand is severed from
the body, picturing, sketching, writing as the subject of art as well as the object of
art. Here the hand of the artist is imbued with knowledge of itself as moving with
some “shadow” that turns everything touched to “darkness” while also indicating
the presence of a “light” — a presence in negativity (Glenday 8). Creating in
negativity, the artist’s hand attempts to name the unnamable, the discarded; and
it also tries to name itself as an unnamable, discarded object, i.e. as an object
participating in the dissolution and (experimental, temporary) reconstitution of the
relation between sign and thing.
Presence means existence at the level of the unnamable, and the line
“everything I could not touch was light” undergoes subtle changes in meaning
according to where the emphasis is put: “I could not touch” would mean “the ‘I’
could not touch”; “I could not touch” would probably mean “unable to touch”
as well as “beyond touch”; and finally, “I could not touch” — most likely the
intended meaning — emphasizes the impalpability of light. But does “impalpable”
signify unknowable or may the “light” be approached in the artwork by applying
a different method, aesthetically and epistemologically? In what follows I will
suggest that the senses — sight, hearing, feeling (touch) — provide a more direct
form of access to “light” than do mind and thought, at least as they persist, still
today, in customary, common psychology and epistemology. The artwork emerges,
then, as a form of sensual refinement and as an object-ification of subjectivity,
combining realistic technique and abstract form. Abstraction involves a radical
separation of sign, signum, from thing, res. Sunset Park is a bold attempt to convey
the artwork as pure, yet not absolute thing, and so the novel manifests itself as a
non-Platonic as well as a non-semiotic approach to art in Modernity. Auster’s text
reverses the history of semiotics in trying to capture existence prior to the sign.
The narrative process itself, the reportage, emulates Faulkner’s “sleeping
outflung hand” that remembers pain; but recollection is turned into “some trashy
myth of reality’s escape” by the sleeping mind. In the post-Civil War South of
Faulkner’s novel real pain is the loss and the disintegration of an entire civilization,
a culture perished in a universal conflagration remembered by the multiple narrators
whose hands and voices constantly weave their own individual “trashy” myths of
“reality’s escape,” and, while doing so, transform the narrative, or narratives into
“figment-stuff warped out of all experience”; thus the narrative assumes a tenuous
and experimental quality. Still, in Faulkner the dual negativity, trashy myth as
fatefully conditioned escape; and figment-stuff, elevated, perhaps, to an imaginative,
poetic reconstruction, the artistic reconstruction of the South one might say,
posits a constructive, supplementary and sublimating creativity in response to
loss. The poetic image springs to life in a modern and Modernist creative process,
remembering pain and inserting it into the textual fabric, thereby absolving it from
“the sleeping brain and mind”. History is sublimated as recollection dispenses
with knowledge of the absolute and the ideal and discards the “remembrance of
things past.” Likewise, in Auster’s novel the artist’s hand “remembers pain,” a pain
caused by its own destructive actions — numerous incidents record punching hands
and fists — and disseminates that pain throughout the narrative, turning it into an
experimental text in the mode of realism that blends subjective experience, the
voices of the character-artists, with the narrator’s recording voice. The result is a
weaving of “trashy myths” and “figment-stuff,” both of which participate in a dual
negativity as in Faulkner. This dual negativity is the effect of a social condition:
economic crisis and cultural disintegration in contemporary America. We may
trace signs of and parallels to the loss of the South in the contemporary loss. As
in Absalom, Absalom! loss and dissolution have produced a narrative, Sunset
Park, that is a simulation of realism; however, simulation undergoes a dialectical
transformation whereby it turns into a negativity positing a new creativity and a
new subjective experience forged by the artist’s hand severed from the body and the
mind. The hand of the artist may create figment-stuff warped out of all experience,
but it is precisely this warping that signifies the dialectics of negativity forming
innovative creative activities in Auster’s artists. The narrative voice in itself is not
poetic as are the voices in Absalom, Absalom!. However, the narrative voice in
Sunset Park indicates, in a subdued manner, the radical supplementariness of the
artwork, suspended in time and space as the negative, or rather, negating pole of a
reality where everything is lost. The negativity of shadow and darkness becomes
light as the artist’s hand touches and does not touch at the same time.
Sunset Park presents a number of marginal persons, male and female, who
for one reason or another have decided or been forced to drop out of society. Miles
Heller is a 28 year old college drop-out, presently working in Florida as member
of a crew of four that go through abandoned houses, i.e. houses people have lost
due to the economic crisis, gathering up discarded objects, cleaning the houses and
then turning them over to the bank; Miles is the son of Morris Heller, owner and
manager of an alternative publishing firm in New York City, himself out on the
margins since he belongs to a small and decreasing number of literary publishers
still printing and selling fiction that is different, mostly literary works that are not
on the popular hitlist. Miles’ mother, the actress Mary-Lee Swann, divorced her
husband a few months after giving birth to Miles in order to pursue a career in
acting, on stage and in film. Morris remarried, to Willa Parks, English Professor,
who had a son, Bobby, from a previous marriage. He is Miles’ stepbrother, then,
and the two of them are so different that they appear as opposites in the narrative,
and the opposition never develops into a productive complementarity but remains
a stark opposition — Miles being studious, introverted yet physically strong and
active, and Bobby being lazy in school, extroverted, temperamental. The difference
in character culminates into a physical confrontation one day they are out walking
on a serpentine country road after the car has broken down. They argue, Miles
shoves Bobby into the middle of the road, a car aprroaches unseen from around
a bend, runs Bobby over and kills him on the spot. Miles does not tell his parents
about his pushing Bobby into the road; he is guiltridden, of course, and this guilt
finally leads to his leaving home, dropping out of college and embarking upon the
life of the eternal drifter, so abundantly present in American fiction. In Florida he
falls in love with a young girl, 17 years old, that is, 11 years his junior, a girl not of
age yet with whom he nevertheless shares an apartment. Pilar Sanchez is her name,
her parents were killed in a car accident but she has three older sisters the oldest of
whom, Angela, “looks after her,” or rather, attempts to control her. Pilar’s sexual
relationship to the older man is accepted by Angela but she exploits the fact that
her sister is a minor by law, pressuring Miles into giving her discarded objects from
the abandoned houses, expensive electronic equipment that has been left behind.
He finally refuses and is forced by Angela’s bullies, two thugs, to hand over the
objects required or get out. Miles gets out, takes the bus to New York where he
moves into another abandoned house in Sunset Park, Brooklyn, occupied by four
squatters, including himself: His friend Bing Nathan, drummer in a band called
Mob Rule and owner of The Hospital for Broken Things where he repairs broken or
outdated electronic equipment, restoring it to life, so to speak; Ellen Brice, painter
and sketcher; and Alice Bergstrom, a PhD student working on a thesis about malefemale
relations as portrayed in post World War II film and fiction. None of them
have any money, barely enough for groceries and utilities. They live in the house
illegally and are finally evicted forcefully after four eviction notices have been
served. During the eviction — which is fairly violent — Miles punches a police
officer in the jaw thus breaking the law in a serious way and losing his chance of
getting married to Pilar who is waiting for him in Florida.
Miles, Bing, Ellen and Alice have something in common: an interest in, perhaps
even an obsession with broken things, or fragments of things, and, particularly in
the case of Ellen, the painter, individual body parts, internal and external, that are
almost fetichized.
Miles takes photos of abandoned objects in the houses he “trashes out,” as it is
called:
Then, always, there are the objects, the fogotten possessions, the abandoned
things. By now, his photographs number in the thousands, and among his
burgeoning archive can be found pictures of books, shoes, and oil paintings,
pianos and toasters, dolls, tea sets, and dirty socks, televisions and board
games, party dresses and tennis racquets, sofas, silk lingerie … (Auster 4).
After moving from Florida to New York Miles starts taking pictures in Green-Wood
Cemetery, a seemingly useless project:
He has embarked on another useless project, employing his camera as an
instrument to record his stray, useless thoughts, but at least it is something
to do, a way to pass the time until his life starts again, and where else but
in Green-Wood Cemetery could he have learned that the real name of Frank
Morgan, the actor who played the Wizard of Oz, was Wuppermann? (102)
Thus the nameless gain names in his photography; a photo-graphic mimesis
temporarily discloses the real identity of “Frank Morgan.” Dissimulation and the
mimetic function merge in an uncanny assembly of shadow and light, death and
life, or death reconstructed.
Miles has no idea why he feels compelled to take these photos. The objects
possess a curious fascination — an aura emanates from them; it is the uncanny aura
of the fetish which Julia Kristeva explores in Revolution in Poetic Language:
In order to keep the process signifying, to avoid foundering in an “unsayable”
without limits, and thus posit the subject of a practice, the subject of
poetic language clings to the help fetichism offers. And so, according to
psychoanalysis, poets as individuals fall under the category of fetishism; the
very practice of art necessitates the reinvesting the maternal chora so that
it transgresses the symbolic order; and, as a result, this practice easily lends
itself to so-called perverse subjective structures. (65)
While employed in trashing-out in Florida Miles had noticed signs indicative
of how the former owners — who during the last few months of their residence
occupied their houses like ghosts — abandoned their houses in haste but often not
without breaking the furniture, smearing the walls with paint, dumping garbage
on the floors in a fit of rage, reacting to bankruptcy and default. These abandoned
houses and Miles’ photos of the objects in them recall his own autobiographical
work Portrait of an Invisible Man, a portrait of his father who after the death of
his wife lived in his house like a ghost, never really present, piling up dirty dishes
in the kitchen and leaving used razor blades in the bathroom and worn shirts in the
bedroom; and Miles’ pictures recall the professor, or ex-professor in Part One of
The New York Trilogy, City of Glass, who picks up broken objects in the streets of
New York City and proceeds to re-name them, dissolving and recreating the relation
between sign and thing. The photos taken by Miles participate in a renaming, or
rather, in a process leading to the unnamable, the pre-verbal, analyzed by Kristeva
in Powers of Horror. An Essay on Abjection:
In that anteriority to language, the outside is elaborated by means of a
projection from within, of which the only experience we have is one of
pleasure and pain. An outside in the image of the inside, made of pleasure and
pain. The non-distinctiveness of inside and outside would thus be unnamable,
a border passable in both directions by pleasure and pain. (61)
In the same work Kristeva talks about “the drive-quality attached to archaic
objects” and how that “drive-quality” must be introjected in the individual
consciousness; without that introjection , Kristeva says, “pre-objects and abjects
threaten from without as impurity, defilement, abomination, and eventually they
trigger the persecutive apparatus” (116).
Kristeva’s analysis is a complex, Freudian interpretation focusing on
anthropology and on certain “primitive” practices and rituals resembling poetic
practice. Miles is a kind of poet, practising the kind of photography that records
objects as the signs of the abject, of abjection, at this point in history a collective
abjection. The 21st century economics and history have determined abjection in the
New World; economic collapse has become conducive to a fatal prevention of the
usual introjection Kristeva talks about; therefore we have abomination and, in the
end the unleashing of the “persecutive powers” in Auster’s text — the fist punching
the officer and the police forcefully evicting the squatters.
Moreover, the narrator’s presentation of the decaying urban environment
is reminiscent of Walter Benjamin’s interpretation of Baroque allegory and its
resemblance to modern fragmentation in the Passagen-Werk, the Arcades Project.
In her work on Benjamin, The Dialectics of Seeing, Susan Buck-Morss notes:
The allegorists heaped emblematic images one on top of another, as if the
sheer quantity of meanings could compensate for their arbitrariness and lack
of coherence. The result is that nature, far from an organic whole, appears in
arbitrary arrangement, as a lifeless, fragmentary, untidy clutter of emblems.
(173)
Not only in view of the proclivity in Auster’s text towards the fragmentary and
the emblematic but also in view of his well-known interest in French poetry and
his year-long residence in Paris it is tempting to see an influence, or parallel to the
poetry of Charles Baudelaire, particularly Les Fleurs du Mal, The Flowers of Evil.
Baudelaire’s poem “The Swan” is especially interesting in this respect; in it the
poet traverses the newly rebuilt Place du Carrousel when, as Buck-Morss writes, “his
memory is suddenly flooded with the image of Andromache, wife of Hector, who
was left a widow with the destruction of Troy”(178-179). In Baudelaire’s poem the
figure of Andromache is superimposed on images of modern Paris:
Andromache, I think of you!
…
The old paris is gone (the face of a city
Changes more quickly, alas! Than the mortal heart)
…
Paris changes, but nothing of my melancholy
Gives way. New palaces, scaffolding, blocks,
Old suburbs, everything for me becomes allegory,
While my dear memories are heavier than rocks. (329-30)
Recalling that Miles Heller’s mother is Mary-Lee Swann it becomes tempting
to view her as a contemporary Andromache; however, in this case it is a “swan”
reconciled to the loss of her first husband through divorce; an Andromache who
has built an impressive career in the theater, integrating heaps of broken images
in her role as Winnie in Samuel Beckett’s play Happy Days. Of course, it is
ironic but also profoundly meaningful that art, theater and literature become a
way out in Sunset Park. Auster’s “swan” does not evoke melancholy reflection
as does Andromache in Baudelaire’s poem. However, it is important to note that
the arts, theater and literature as expressive vehicles focus exactly on decay and
fragmentation, Beckett’s play being one of the primary examples in modern drama.
F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel The Great Gatsby is another. The supreme and subtle
irony is, naturally, that artistic careers may be planned and carried out around
fragmentation, in the midst of the ruins of history. The modern artist — and “artist”
includes, here, not only Mary-Lee Swann and a number of novelists appearing
in the text; it also includes the main characters, Miles, Bing, Ellen and Alice —
is his own impressario, displaying herself or himself in various identities like
Baudelaire: the flâneur is one of them, the ragpicker is another. Miles and the other
young people occupying the abandoned house in Brooklyn are the contemporary
versions of this character, and Miles’ father, Morris, is a version of Baudelaire’s
ragpicker, appearing as what he himself calls the Can Man, disguising himself, as
do numerous other characters in Auster’s works, in order to secretly follow his son
around, observing him from a distance, worried but at the same time fascinated by
his son’s vagrancy, by the adventure of it.
In the Passagen-Werk Benjamin comments that the debasement and decay of
nature and the city in the 19th century find their source in the production process
itself: “The devaluation of the world of objects within allegory is outdone within
the world of objects itself by the commodity” (660). And so in Sunset Park: the
devaluation of objects in modern 20th century literature, e.g. Beckett and Fitzgerald,
is “outdone” by the decay and fragmentation, the mass of broken things collected
not only by Miles in his photos but also by Bing in his Hospital for Broken Things,
by Alice in her PhD thesis on broken down male-female relationships in post
World War II film, and by Ellen in her sketches of body parts, including the hand,
that are intially fetishized then turned into abstract objects. If “fetishism” involves
an emotional or libidinal attachment then this attachment is glossed over and
aesthetically sublimated in Ellen’s sketches. Erasing attachment constitutes the
beginning of an artistic endeavor designed to reconstruct.
Bing Nathan is characterized by the narrator as “the champion of discontent,
the militant debunker of contemporary life who dreams of forging a new reality
from the ruins of a failed world. Unlike most contrarians of his ilk, he does not
believe in political action”(55). The ruins of a failed world, Benjamin’s “ruins of
history,” can only be reassembled or restored through focusing on “the local, the
particular, the nearly invisible details of quotidian affairs”(locus citatus: same page;
loc.cit. ). Bing is right in a sense, of course. But he invests too much emotional
energy even in his particular and highly individualized approach, believing till the
end that it is safe to ignore the eviction notices served by US marshalls, and the
result is disastrous: forceful eviction.
In her work on William Wyler’s film The Best Years of Our Lives Alice
Bergstrom notes how:
The men no longer know how to act with their wives and girlfriends. They
have lost their appetite for domesticity, their feel for home. After years of
living apart from women, years of combat and slaughter, years of grappling
to survive the horrors and dangers of war, they have been cut off from their
civilian pasts, crippled, trapped in nightmare repetitions of their experiences,
and the women they left behind have become strangers to them. (75)
In his work The Philosophy of Literary Form Kenneth Burke comments as follows
in Proposition 11 (from “Twelve Propositions”):
11. Human relations should be analyzed with respect to the leads discovered
by a study of drama.
Men enact rôles. They change rôles. They participate. They develop modes of
social appeal. Even a “star” is but a function of the total cast. Politics above
all is drama. Anyone who would turn from politics to some other emphasis,
or vice versa, must undergo some change of identity, which is dramatic
(involving “style” and “ritual”). People are neither animals nor machines (to
be analyzed by the migration of metaphors from biology or mechanics), but
actors and acters. (310-311)
Burke’s comment applies directly to the “actors” appearing in the theater, film and
literature as well as to the “real life” actors in Sunset Park. The deepest plunge into
a dramatic change of identity involving “style” and “ritual” and, as I shall argue,
tending towards abstraction, is Ellen Brice’s sketches of the naked human body.
Her sketches are inspired by walks on Seventh Avenue during which her mind is
flooded — like Baudelaire’s mind in the poem “The Swan” — with images, here
images of the genitals of both sexes, of young and old, and of … “luxuriant thighs,
skinny thighs, vast, quivering buttocks, chest hair, recessed navels, inverted nipples,
bellies scarred by appendix operations and cesarean births …”(83). Using in part
her imagination, in part Bing as model she proceeds to work on dozens of sketches
portraying body parts, fascinated a she is by the body in its total form as well as by
its separate parts:
The human body can be apprehended, but it cannot be comprehended. The
human body has shoulders. The human body has knees. The human body is an
object and a subject, the outside of an inside that cannot be seen. The human
body grows from the small of infancy to the large of adulthood, and then it
begins to die. The human body has hips. The human body has elbows. The
human body lives in the mind of one who possesses a human body, and to live
inside the human body possesed of the mind that perceives another human
body is to live in a world of others. (163)
Access to “the world of others” is through the work of art only. The drama of
Sunset Park consists in the narrator’s presenting the painful, crisis-ridden lives
of the characters and then providing close-ups where inside and outside both are
transformed by the creative process. Naturally this approach inaugurates a shift
in realism. Ellen’s decision to start drawing and to ask Bing to pose for her in the
nude is logically prompted by a significant change in her mind as regards realism in
drawing; the new realism emerging in the nude sketches parallels the realistic mode
of the narrative, or narrative voice which becomes increasingly abstract while at the
same time assuming a fuller note, sometimes approximating a musical crescendo
— a crescendo heard from a distance, though, and the distancing effect is that of
minimalization: a minimal intensity signifying the reduced function of the sign.
Ellen’s early paintings were photography-like pictures of buildings and urban
scenes that in her own words did not “speak to anyone”. Now she embarks upon an
entirely different project, inspired in part by Morandi:
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. (87)
Ellen realizes that “all she has ever wanted is to draw and paint representations
of her own feelings”(88). Ellen’s drawing hand that “remembers pain” refuses to
make a “trashy myth of reality’s escape”; rather, she is bold enough to risk losing
reality in an approach to representation that evokes Faulkner’s “figment-stuff”:
representations of her own feelings. I see the toning down of the narrative voice
to a minimalistic recording of intensity as a prelude to and implicit anticipation
of Ellen’s drawings. These drawings fuse subject and object as much as this is
possible; it is possible because it is facilitated by the transformation, a genuine
metamorphosis, that occurs when the subject projects itself into an objectivized
image that contains the subject immanently to a greater extent than the subject can
be said to contain itself. The figment of feelings and dreams leap into immediate,
unmediated portraits of body parts, drawn in anatomic verisimilitude and yet,
paradoxically, showing the artist’s and the artwork’s interest in “the spaces
between things”: the artwork as an inter-esse and the human body as an abstract
form. Indeed, abstraction in Sunset Park is as refined as the poetic voices in
Absalom, Absalom! From a dialectical perspective, abstraction as artistic method,
here in drawing, is a response to the sociocultural condition determined by the
economic crisis, as were the poetic voices in Absalom, Absalom!; the drawing
hand of the artist sublimates the pain of crisis and loss, personal and collective,
societal. Paradoxically, in the process of abstraction the drawing hand salvages the
subjective, disclosing its unique existence in the “spaces between things”; these
“spaces” somehow emanate “pure thingness” as well as “all that is out there beyond
us.” The artwork as inter-esse, then, becomes a refined coalescence of “thingness,”
res divorced from signum, and a subjectivity that is almost erased through being
fused with a “beyond” that includes the cemetery.
In Augustine’s De doctrina christiana I we learn that “All instruction is either
about things or about signs; but things are learnt by means of signs/Omnis doctrina
vel rerum est vel signorum, sed res per signa discuntur”(9). However, Ellen’s
drawings illuminate res in its pure form, even discarding what Augustine calls
verbum interius, mental concepts, the “internal word,” in her “representations of
her own feelings.” The Paradise Lost of the Sunset Park community in New York
City, bordering Green-Wood Cemetery, is a fallen world where signs have lost their
meaning so that things are not learned “by means of signs,” but in the process of
this loss Sunset Park restores res. Restoration and reconstruction are enhanced by
abstract form in drawing and painting, and abstraction absolves the subject from
itself through letting it merge with the world: inside is turned into an outside and
this outside is the artwork. This process is initiated at the moment when Ellen starts
drawing her own hand:
She takes her drawing pad and a Faber-Castell pencil off the top of the bureau,
then sits down on the bed and opens the pad to the first empty page. Holding
the pencil in her right hand, she raises her left hand in the air, tilts it at a fortyfive-
degree angle, and keeps it suspended about twelve inches from her face,
studying it until it no longer seems attached to her body. It is an alien hand
now, a hand that belongs to someone else, to no one, a woman’s hand with
its slender fingers and rounded nails, the half-moons above the cuticles, the
narrow wrist with its small bump of bone sticking out on the left side. (88)
As in Absalom, Absalom! the substance of remembering is:
sense, sight,smell: the muscles with which we see and hear and feel – not
mind, not thought:there is no such thing as memory: the brain recalls just
what the muscles grope for:no more, no less:and its resultant sum is usually
incorrect and false and worthy only of the name of dream. (115)
For Ellen, getting it right as a painter means getting close to the world of objects
by letting her muscles “grope for” them; in this act there is an absence of personal
involvement and “memory”; the world becomes alien as does the artist’s own “alien
hand.” The alien-ness of the artist is the pre-condition for really seeing, feeling
and hearing the world and without this pre-condition there can be no artwork.
Therefore Ellen must begin by drawing her own hand, thus turning it into an “alien
hand”. The drawing hand is the method; the artistic method must participate in the
very alien-ness immanent in the world.
The artwork follows as the form of everything the artist could not touch:
everything is “light” when the artist’s “mind and thought” are called by “the name
of dream.” Paradoxically, the senses provide immediate access to the physical as
well as the metapysical, or: objects as the in-betweenness of things. When method
and medium merge with the alien, i.e. other world, the creative process erases
mimesis; the process of artistic creation is one with the process of the world itself.
Res is presented without the mediation of signum. In the simple act of drawing
her own hand Ellen abolishes the borderline between subject and object. This is
accomplished spontaneously, without theoretical or philosophical preparations.
Spontaneity, intuition and sensation facilitate the coming into existence of the
artwork as any other object in the world. In Comment 12 of 39 Comments on the
Creative Process John Glenday says: “The creative process begins with the need to
exist, not to express” (2014).
This is precisely the meaning of Ellen’s new method as it is described in the
following passage:
For the first hour after setting to work, she warms up by concentrating on
details, isolated areas of a body culled from her collection of images or found
in one of the two mirrors. A page of hands. A page of eyes. A page of buttocks.
A page of arms. Then she moves on to whole bodies, portraits of single figures
in various poses: a naked woman standing with her back to the viewer, a
naked man sitting on the floor, a naked man stretched out on a bed, a naked
girl squatting on the ground and urinating, a naked woman sitting in a chair
with her head thrown back as she cups her right breast in her right hand and
squeezes the nipple of her left breast with her left hand. These are intimate
portraits, she tells herself, not erotic drawings, human bodies doing what
human bodies do when no one is watching them. (164)
The drawings evoke stimulating, arousing “pictures bubbling in her head”, but
she concludes that sexual arousal is only a “minor bi-product of the effort”; what
she really wants is to get it right.The drawings are usually left unfinished because
she wants “her human bodies to convey the miraculous strangeness of being alive
— no more than that, as much as all that”(165). It is precisely the unfinished
image that points to the in-betweenness of the artwork; the drawings are as real
as representations can be and yet they are endowed with a strangeness, another
reality, a submerged world of human bodies surfacing in a disintegrating culture
and coming to life only in the work of art. The biography of Ellen, her private
life, is a record of pain and loss; but it is this experience that precipitates the act of
creativity on the canvas where she attempts to attain the sublime. This endeavor
must go on, must be infinitely prolonged since, as John Glenday puts it: “Because
each poem ultimately is a failure, we write on”(38). The attainment of the sublime
cannot be finished; for it it were to be finished it would cease to be sublime. It
would also cease to exist as a real image of the in-betweenness of things. Existing
in this reality is Ellen’s interest as an artist, her inter-esse.
In addition, Ellen’s artwork represents the culmination of what we may
call a displacement of identity involving all the other characters as well. This
displacement occurs as part of an artistic endeavor; it is compelled by what Slavoj
Žižek in The Ticklish Subject refers to as “the threat of nonexistence”; under this
threat subjects are “emotionally blackmailed into identifying with the imposed
symbolic identity (‘nigger’, ‘bitch’, etc.)” but it is, nevertheless, possible for them
“to displace this identity, to recontextualize it, to make it work for other purposes,
to turn it against its hegemonic mode of functioning …” (265-266)
The “symbolic identity” in Auster’s novel is that of the contemporary
rebel, drifter, vagabond and artist, the marginalized individual who has given up
belonging to a center because that center does not exist. Sunset Park moves the
margin into the center, or rather, turns everything and everyone into a margin. How
and where do you represent a margin while simultaneously displacing oneself
from it and, ultimately, also displacing the margin and, with it, representation?
In carrying out a work of art; and in the work of art, subject and object become
“figment-stuff warped out of all experience” since the artwork engages what
John Glenday calls “averted vision” so that it “looks to one side of its subject
matter”. Like stars, “abstractions are so dim they are all but unknown to us” (34).
— Even the group of four’s modest existence as squatters does not work as an
alternative social experiment since they are evicted; and their resistance does not
work since they themselves, at least the two men, Miles in particular, use force
when confronted with force. Miles’ fist hitting the police officer is a powerful and
subtle reminder of the fact that fragmentation as applied to the human body may
have tragic results. And yet, Miles’ punching fist stands in a subtle dialectical
relationship to Ellen’s drawn and drawing hand; the hand as an aggressive tool
is at the negative pole of an opposition whose positive pole is the creative hand.
But the opposition is not binary: the punching fist and the drawing hand constitute
supplementary positions of exchange whereby one metamorphoses into the other.
The punching fist is a primal force whose manifestation as violence is an inherent
rebellion against “hegemony”; thus the hand as an instrument of physical revolt
contains the drawing hand immanently within itself. The drawing hand becomes
the fist transformed into a creative instrument but “fist” and “hand” are akin in their
being poised to “strike at” existence as inter-esse.
The closing incident of the novel makes Miles think of “the missing buildings,
the collapsed and burning buildings that no longer exist, the missing buildings and
the missing hands”, and the incident makes him wonder “if it is worth hoping for
a future when there is no future”; he tells himself that from now on “he will stop
hoping for anything and live only for now, this moment, this passing moment, the
now that is here and then not here, the now that is gone forever” (227-228).
The final passage is reminiscent of Baudelaire. It is, in a way, Baudelaire in
a new vein. The new mode, the 21st century mode of existing, experiencing and
creating, takes place in a passing moment. Since time itself is unfinished how
can the artwork ever be finished? The very structure, or unstructuredness of time
is “figment-stuff warped out of all experience,” and the artist’s hand, when best
applied, moves along an axis propelled by “averted vision.”
In another one of his 39 Comments John Glenday says: “The self must be
expunged from the poem” (9). Expanding the statement to cover the work of art
in general and Sunset Park in particular, the expunging of the self is the ultimate
loss generating a (skewed) artistic vision. Auster’s novel and his character-artists
practice an aesthetics of loss. But the loss of self and the collapse of the social order
make for existence, make for “the strangeness of being alive.”
Works Cited
Augustine. De doctrina christiana I. In: W.M. Green, ed. Sancti Augustini Opera. Vienna: CSEL
80, 1963.
Auster, Paul. Sunset Park. New York: Picador, 2010.
Baudelaire, Charles. Les fleurs du mal. New York: New Directions Books, 1962.
Benjamin, Walter. Gesammelte Schriften. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1972.
Buck-Morss, Susan. The Dialectics of Seeing. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 1989.
Burke, Kenneth. The Philosophy of Literary Form.Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of
California Press, 1941.
Faulkner, William. Absalom, Absalom! New York: Vintage International Edition, 1990.
Glenday, John. Grain. London: Picador Poetry, 2009.
—. 39 Comments on the Creative Process. Shanghai, Wuhan, West Lafayette: Forum for World
Literature Studies, 2014.
Kristeva, Julia. Powers of Horror. An Essay on Abjection. Trans. Leon S. Roudiez. New York:
Columbia University Press, 1982.
—. Revolution in Poetic Language. Trans. Margaret Waller. New York: Columbia University
Press, 1984.
Žižek, Slavoj. The Ticklish Subject. London & New York: Verso, 1999.
