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REPRESENTATIONS OF AUTHORSHIP IN THE POSTMODERN AMERICAN NOVEL: JOHN BARTH’S CHIMERA AND PAUL AUSTER’S CITY OF GLASS
Authors: Raluca ŞERBAN
Number of views: 295
The article focuses on the different ways in which the postmodern author is
reflected in/by his writing, on the relationships author – text, author – fictional
world, author – characters, author-as-character – author, in non-autobiographical
writing. The examples provided are two novels by American writers: John Barth’s
Chimera and Paul Auster’s City of Glass, which are analyzed from this perspective. Consequently, special attention is given to the literary technique of la mise-enabyme,
as it is used in these novels.
One of the lessons taught by many postmodern authors is that nothing of what they
say should be taken at face value. Or almost nothing. At least not when they are on
duty, that is, not when they are writing novels.
Postmodern writers, in the second half of the 20th century, started making their own
rules for novel writing. The playful, inconsistent, ironic postmodern author, who
prefers parody and metanarrative to any other form, keen to re-write old texts, their
people’s ‘grand narratives’, as well as tradition itself3
, who questions everything,
even his own role as an author, needed to be visible again for the reader. The
easiest way to do it seemed to be stepping back into their novels, literally, doing
away with the border between the real and the fictional. Maybe this is why la miseen-abyme
(cf. Gide’s definition of the concept, 1948:41) is one of the favorite
devices employed by some postmodern authors.
In this paper I shall attempt to substantiate the following thesis: one of the most
undeniable peculiarities of postmodern novel-writers is their stubbornness not to let
the reader – especially the professional reader, the scholar – make much sense of
their statements, in other words, their ironic playfulness.
Two means of achieving this goal struck me as particularly important in the two
novels I chose to discuss – John Barth’s Chimera and Paul Auster’s City of Glass:
the first is the undermining of both the ‘real’ and the fictional world’s ontological
stability, and, together with it, of the credibility, of the reliability of an authorial
voice that toils – seemingly – to make a statement (about the novel, about the status
and role of the author, about writing in general and even about broader issues like
identity). I shall pay particular attention to the ways in which this boundary
crossing, this destabilization is achieved: the construction of what Brian McHale,
taking over a Foucauldian concept, named a ‘heterotopian space’, in which details
of the ‘real’ world are mixed with fictional ones, the proliferation of authorcharacters,
as unreliable as possible, and especially the projection of the author
inside his fictional universe – what McHale called trompe-l’oeil and what, as I
shall try to prove, would more appropriately be referred to as mise-en-abyme.