Halfway Paul Auster’s postmodern detective story Ghosts, protagonist “Blue” dresses up as a tramp and calls himself Jimmy Rose. His disguise includes ‘a flowing white beard and long white hair’. This is the effect:
“These final details give him the look of an old testament prophet. Blue as Jimmy Rose is not a scrofulous down-and-outer so much as a wise fool, a saint of penury living in the margins of society.”
To describe Blue’s disguise in these words is kind of a wry joke. In the past months, the real Blue has come to resemble such a fool more and more, ‘living in the margins of society’.
Initially, in February 1947, he was your perfect average guy, content to live the life carved out for him. Ok, he was a private detective, that’s a bit unusual. But he was a very sensible one, level-headed, down-to-earth. He expected to marry his girfriend and settle down, just like everybody else. He would certainly not question his life.
But then he stumbled upon a real strange assignment. For months he was to sit in a small rented room, spying on the man across the street, named “Black”. Black, living in a similar room, did nothing but read and write. So Blue’s life slowed down dramatically: no chases, no danger, no excitement. Many times he could only report: Black is still writing.
This unsettles Blue. He starts brooding and worrying over things that never troubled him before. His girlfriend and his old supervisor become strangers to him. He grows obsessed with Black’s ‘real thoughts’. Ironically he clipped out a newspaper article at the beginning of the story, about a man with a similar obsession. On an enclosed photograph the man was portrayed: ‘The look in his eyes is so haunted and imploring that Blue can scarcely turn his own eyes away.’ A few months later, Blue could well look the same.
This tragic story about Blue’s downfall was one of Auster’s first (1986). He would write many more about average individuals who stop being average. The thing that disrupts them varies. It can be a nearly fatal disease (Oracle Night), a large inheritance (The Music of Chance) or a plane crash killing off one’s wife and children (The Book of Illusions). Every time the protagonist becomes an outcast.
So what about all these outcasts? Maybe the point is just that it can happen to anybody. Or perhaps we are to realise that outcasts may teach us something, just like the bible’s prophets. Then again, Ghosts could be a defense of the writer’s profession. Writers just sit in a room and write. An easy life? After his strange assignment Blue knows better.
By the way, Paul Auster's Jimmy Rose is probably named after Melville's, another outcast, starring in the 1855 short story of the same name.
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4 comments:
Its been a long time since I read New York Trilogy. I remember loving it, for all the weird illusions to the bible (the prelapsarian language) and the life of of Hawthorne. I looked so many things up, thanks to that book. It opened a window for me on American culture. It;s odd that I seem to have forgotten so much of the story, particularly the twisted detective story. Watching other people and thereby slowly becoming them (or sometimes narrowly escaping) is a theme of his work, I'm now reconstructing from memory. I always read an angst of suddenly going insane in his work. It might as you suggest be the madness of the circumstances that had a life- (but also personality-) changing effect. But watching the madness of others seems to have the same effect. It seems like a post-modern take on the instability of character. After all, who are we, if we can change so dramatically overnight.
thanks for your comment!
I've read it twice because it's so interesting and rather complex too. You sure this is all from memory? I especially like your remark on postmodern instability of character. Good point.
ok, fair enough. But maybe the point is not so much that outcasts occur in these stories, rather than the reasons that make them outcasts. Melville thematised outcasts all his life, but he never said that brooding about the gap between language and reality could create outcasts. Auster, the postmodernist, does say so. A bit broader: when coincidence hits his protagonists, then they're put off-balance.
Good words.
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