How Paul Auster’s Poetry Got into the Locked Room: Interdependence of Poetry and Fiction in Auster’s Early Work

Abstract

The present article argues that Paul Auster’s early poetry, critically ignored when first published, gains renewed relevance when it is set in relation to his fiction, in particular with The New York Trilogy. Characters that appear in that work, like Quinn, Stillman Jr., Blue or Fanshawe, act as vessels through which Auster’s poetic endeavors resurface, not in the form of direct quotations but as referred to, described and evaluated, setting thus the aesthetic parameters of the work, and creating, in the broader context of Auster’s literary career, the effect of a mise en abyme. This narrative treatment of Auster’s poetic voice makes it appear removed from the influence of Paul Celan, of whom Auster as poet, we argue here, is an epigone. Celan’s linguistic negation, fragmented syntax, and symbolic minimalism informs Auster’s poetry to the point that the latter becomes a derivative extension of Celan’s work, a fact that the critique has not emphasized enough. The New York Trilogy becomes for Auster the narrative frame that allows him to explore influence in writing –the three novels in the trilogy deal with writers who investigate the example of another previous writer–, making his poetic work appear –especially in The Locked Room– as unshackled from Celan’s powerful influence. Edmond Jabès and the noir genre inform Auster’s framing technique to achieve such distance. The New York Trilogy develops into a reversal of influence: starting from the Celan-like writers present in City of Glass, continuing with the inversion of influence taking place between Black and Blue in Ghosts, and finally re-situating Auster’s poetry as influential through its attribution to the absent figure of Fanshawe in The Locked Room. The New York Trilogy is, thus, both an exploration of poetic influence on Auster’s poetry and a vindication of his own poetry.