Vanishing Houses, Vanished Selves: A Hauntological Reading of Paul Auster’s Sunset Park

Abstract

«Each house is a story of failure» (Auster, 2010a: 3). So begins Paul Auster’s Sunset Park, his 2010 novel set against the backdrop of the so-called Great Recession of 2007-2009, the subprime mortgage crash, and the first election of Barack Obama as President of the United States. Critics have argued that while Sunset Park seems to promise an engagement with an emerging new landscape of socioeconomic precarity in the United States, the novel’s focus seems to remain, however, on the realm of the aesthetic, with characters whose literary and artistic backgrounds ̶̶ «all with talent and intelligence» (39) and hopelessly underemployed– lead away from a straightforward representation of the material toll of the crisis. The poor remain, as Andrew Lawson (2013) suggests, stubbornly obfuscated, as if the very idea of poverty and precarity were antithetical to the notion of the «American Dream», a symbolic mandate that the novel keeps at the forefront with its invocation of Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. This article examines what is entailed by this kind of representational opacity, whether it can be interpreted as a reflection of a «blind spot» in American culture, as suggested by Lawson and, more broadly, by the work of critics like Gavin Jones (2008), or whether it can be read as Auster’s hauntological representation of the American present, which is marked by the spectral presence of what Mark Fisher (2014) has called our «lost futures». Amid new waves of austerity and neoliberal acceleration in the twenty-first century, perfectly described in Fisher’s theorization of «capitalist realism» (2009) and exemplified by the very occurrence of the global financial crisis, this article argues that a hauntological reading serves to showcase Auster’s accurate representation of the affective dimension of the present in the twenty-first century, haunted by the lost potentialities of the American past.