Description
"Paul Auster's Ghost Writers"Paul Auster has written of ghosts and writers since his first major work, The Invention of Solitude, where he wrote of the dead father and of the writer son. His works, however, are not about writers and ghosts, but about writers as ghosts; “’In some sense, a writer has no life of his own. Even when he’s there, he’s not really there.’ ‘Another ghost’” (Ghosts 175).
Auster’s writers haunt two locations, the room and the city, uncanny places. Alone in the room, Auster’s characters give their lives over to the text, and become ghosts writing, uncannily undead or buried alive; for example, in Oracle Night the main character, a writer in recovery who states “They had given me up for dead” (1), writes his own character, “a literary man” (52), into a sealed room underground, and admits “he was eventually going to die in there” (121).
Alone in labyrinthine cities, Auster’s characters tend to lose themselves unless they follow others, shadowing their subjects in a doubling which is, initially, a reading of the other’s passage, but then, inevitably, a re-writing of a path which is their own. As Derrida describes in “Perjuries,” speaking of trying to be faithful to those writers he follows like an acolyte, such as Freud and Heidegger, writing about, or for, another person, ghost writing so to speak, means an inevitable betrayal, means finding a new path. But what does this mean for those who follow in mourning, like the writer David Zimmer in The Book of Illusions who is “carrying on [his sons’] little phantom lives for them by repeating the gestures they had made when they still had bodies” (8)?
This paper will analyse the significance of ghostly writing, taking place in cities and rooms, as a recurring theme in Auster’s work, arguing that, through this, Auster theorises on the nature of reading and writing as ethical practices related to the past, to mourning, to betrayal, and responsibility.
| Period | 2006 |
|---|---|
| Event type | Conference |
| Location | Karlstad, SwedenShow on map |
| Degree of Recognition | International |
Keywords
- Paul Auster
- Ghosts
- Writing