Writing in a Post-Derridean Era

Description

"Following in Derrida's Footsteps: Auster's Encrypted Writing"

“What does it mean to follow a ghost?” (Specters of Marx 10) asks Jacques Derrida and, this paper argues, asks Paul Auster. The American author has written about ghosts and writers since his first major work, The Invention of Solitude. There, he writes of a dead father and of a son who follows him by writing about (and for) him, becoming a ghost writer who must himself be entombed. Auster’s questioning, “What does it mean to follow a ghost?” is the focus of this paper, which will suggest also that Derrida is among the ghosts that Auster follows in his writing.

In his most famous work, City of Glass, for example, Auster clearly engages with questions of repetition, iterability, context, and the materiality of the word. In this story, a rational and logical writer, working as a detective, follows a man through the streets of New York, wanting “to believe that all his steps were actually to some purpose” (61), but finding that any meaning he discovers in these repeating same-but-different steps, in this “labyrinth of endless steps” (3), is marked by uncertainty, by absent origins and ends, by chance and accidents, even from the first step. And the step itself, which is a form of writing, is “out of joint,” being both the footstep just taken and the footstep soon to be taken, marking “the articulation between what absents itself and what presents itself” (Specters of Marx 25). To use Derrida’s words, the ghost “does not walk straight” (Specters of Marx 20).

Following a step behind those they trail, Auster’s writers shadow 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. His writers, therefore, speak to “the figure of the acolyte, which accompanies, with its negative, the anacoluthon, which does not accompany” (Derrida, “‘Le Parjure,’ Perhaps” 182); they find themselves in their writing for another, in this way stepping between death and life. Auster’s work, therefore, theorises on the nature of reading and writing as ethical practices, as living practices, related to the past and future, to mourning, to betrayal, and responsibility. His writing after Derrida is about learning to live, finally, but in memory of those who lived before.

Period	2008
Event type	Conference
Location	Växjö, SwedenShow on map
Degree of Recognition	International