Performing Authorship: Strategies of »Becoming an Author« in the Works of Paul Auster, Candice Breitz, Sophie Calle, and Jonathan Safran Foer 9783839434604

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Sonja Longolius Performing Authorship

for Niko

Sonja Longolius is a literary scholar, art historian, and curator based in Berlin. Her interests include, among others, art and literary theory and contemporary art and literature: http://sonja.longolius.com.

Sonja Longolius

Performing Authorship Strategies of »Becoming an Author« in the Works of Paul Auster, Candice Breitz, Sophie Calle, and Jonathan Safran Foer

This book began as a dissertation at the Graduate School of North American Studies at the John-F.-Kennedy-Institute, Freie Universität Berlin. I am grateful for the funding by the Excellence Initiative of the German Federal and State Governments and the Ernst-Reuter-Gesellschaft der Freunde, Förderer und Ehemaligen der Freien Universität Berlin e.V.

Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available in the Internet at http: //dnb.d-nb.de © 2016 transcript Verlag, Bielefeld

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. Cover layout: Kordula Röckenhaus, Bielefeld Cover illustration: Candice Breitz, Becoming Julia; Stills from Becoming Julia, 2003. From the series Becoming, 2003. Dual-Channel Installation. Duration: 39 seconds, 3 frames. Printed in Germany Print-ISBN 978-3-8376-3460-0 PDF-ISBN 978-3-8394-3460-4

Table of Contents

Becoming: An Introduction | 7 Who Is This Mysterious Other? | 19 Becoming an Author | 27 Authorial Representation as a Performative Act | 34 Performative Authorship | 44 Positioning | 51

Auto/Biography | 52 He: The Invention of Solitude | 61 I: Hand to Mouth | 75 You: Winter Journal | 83 Self/Portrait | 98 “Factum” | 107 True Stories I | 120 Eating Animals | 134 Staging | 141

Stage Names | 144 Staging Oneself | 155 Everything Is Illuminated | 155 “City of Glass” | 164 “The Detective” | 173 Individual Mythologies | 186 True Stories II | 194 The Red Notebook: True Stories | 200

Playing | 205

Playing Authorial Games | 209 A Convergence of Birds | 210 “King” and “Queen” | 217 Authors in Collaboration | 226 The Story of My Typewriter | 227 Double Game | 234 Tree of Codes | 260 Conclusion | 269 Bibliography | 273 Acknowledgment | 285

Becoming: An Introduction

When asked by Sinda Gregory why he introduced the possibility of reading “City of Glass” as a disguised autobiography, Paul Auster answered: I think it stemmed from a desire to implicate myself in the machinery of the book. I don’t mean my autobiographical self, I mean my author self, that mysterious other who lives inside me and puts my name on the covers of books. […] The self that exists in the world – the self whose name appears on the covers of books – is finally not the same self who writes the book. (My emphasis, Hunger 308)

In my book, I will develop a concept of performative authorship by revealing and examining different strategies of becoming an author in order to understand the author figure whom Auster described as “that mysterious other.” My aim is to show authors as performative self-constructions in perpetual becomings.1 Authors have not only created works of art, but in the conscious and unconscious creation process, they have simulateneously created their own author personae. In the aftermath of postmodernism, this second creation process, formerly detectable on a meta level, has noticeably moved to the forefront. More than ever, the formation of authorial identity has been made visible by authors, who often make it the theme of their artworks. Thereby, authorial identity, like any identity, is not a fixed entity but finds itself in a state of constant flux. Authorial identity is made up of and influenced by different players and factors: readers, critics, and journalists, home stories, art prices, and literature rankings. It may change and develop with any new work but also underlies the constraints and challenges that authors have to face in their “real” lives. Authorial identity is thus a perpetual construction. I argue that cultural analysis should increasingly take into account the active performances of authors in the creation of their author personae. Certainly, the idea of an author persona, as an image of the author, is not new, if we consider, for example, Wayne C. Booth’s concept of the implied author. In The Rhetoric of Fiction (1961), Booth described how the image of an author, which is neither the narrator nor the real person writing, is conveyed in the text. According to

1

By author I mean all creators of aesthetic objects whether visual or textual.

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Booth, readers draw this author image mainly from information authors convey in their texts. However, Booth’s implied author, as an image readers draw from the artwork, appears to be a quite passive and random description of how author personae come into being.2 By contrast, I will describe the creation of an author persona as a performative act that is bidirectional. On the basis of Wolfgang Iser’s performative approach to aesthetic experience, I argue that authors have become more and more active in this act of imagination and authorial self-invention. In order to become an author, authors have thus staged themselves as authors. In Prospecting (1989), Iser described this staging process for the part of the reader, who actively uses role play to engage in an imaginary transfer while reading, as Iser explained: “For the duration of the performance we are both ourselves and someone else. Staging oneself as someone else is a source of aesthetic pleasure; it is also the means whereby representation is transferred from text to reader” (Prospecting 244). I believe that staged performances are a pleasure for readers and authors alike. Thus, I argue that we should no longer speak of passive implied authors, but rather of very “explicit authors” who actively engage and invest in the construction of their authorial identities. I would like to establish the term performative author for this phenomenon following in the trajectory of performance theory initiated by John L. Austin’s speech act theory. This performative author is an active and acting subject. I argue that in contemporary art and literature authors have increasingly contributed to the images that their audiences draw of them. Through different performative strategies they have thereby shaped their authorial identities and have made visible universal strategies of identity formation. My book offers a critical and comparative analysis of performative authorship in the artworks of Paul Auster (born 1947 in Newark, N.J.), Candice Breitz (born 1972 in Johannesburg, South Africa), Sophie Calle (born 1953 in Paris, France) and Jonathan Safran Foer (born 1977 in Washington, D.C.). Auster/Calle and Breitz/Foer each form a generational pair of opposites that lend themselves to a discussion of postmodern and post-postmodern artistic strategies of performative authorship. Auster and Calle have long taken up the challenge that postmodernism placed on

2

Cf. Ingo Berensmeyer et al. in their introduction to “Authorship as Cultural Performance:” “Authorship studies, […], needs to be distinguished from traditional approaches of biographical studies, literary sociology or psychoanalysis, i.e. from reading works of individual authors in order to find meanings in literary texts that can be related to information about the author’s life; or from the ‘implied author’ debate, a narratological category introduced by Wayne C. Booth on the level between the empirical author and the narrator of a narrative text – a category that many narratologists, applying Occam’s razor, find they can easily do without” (“Authorship” 8).

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their professions. In their works, they have struggled with different authorship concepts in all possible extremes. On the one hand, they have openly integrated the voices of others in their texts,3 thus revealing their references and acknowledging their sources. Auster, for example, in his novel Leviathan (1992) invented the character of Maria, who is based on the real artist, Calle. This short factual/fictional episode in Auster’s book marks the beginning of the Calle-Auster collaboration that later led to their mutual publication, Double Game (1999). On the other hand, Auster and Calle have made public their most “personal” stories, using “autobiographical” writings to approach their author selves. In “The Book of Memory” (1980/81), Auster created the autobiographical character “A.” to find “this ‘no one’ [who] has really written the words you’re reading,” as Auster described his fascination with his own author persona (my emphasis, Hunger 308). Similarly, in her True Stories (19882003), Calle revealed intimate anecdotes to create an individual mythology that embeds her author persona in a cohesive network of self-referentiality. In many of their works, Calle and Auster explicitly performed their authorship to become the authors they desired to be. It is thus meaningful to compare Calle’s and Auster’s work in regard to the notion of performative authorship and, furthermore, to analyze their aspiration to comprehend this “no one” that is the author self. Their methods may differ, as one is a writer, the other a conceptual artist, yet, their impulses are similar. It is, therefore, all the more instructive to compare the works of these two postmodern authors with the work of their contemporary colleagues, that means authors belonging to a younger generation who are developing new concepts of authorship. The South African artist Candice Breitz and the American writer Jonathan Safran Foer form a productive counterpart to Calle and Auster. The idea of authorship has a different significance and another impact for these younger authors. In direct comparison with Calle’s and Auster’s works, the younger authors reveal new tendencies and developments in contemporary art and American literature after the postmodern experiment. Countless other authors and artists could have served as examples, from Philip Roth to Marina Abramović, Siri Hustvedt to Joseph Beuys, and David Shields to Pipilotti Rist. While I intersperse key examples from other authors, I mainly concentrate on Foer, Calle, Breitz, and Auster. Each author has significantly challenged the effectiveness of traditional authorship by experimenting with its different forms. Playfully, Auster, Foer, Breitz, and Calle have integrated diverse voices into their works, thus disclosing the process of collective authorship. Their artworks often blur the boundaries between autobiography and fiction; all have integrated themselves as author figures in their works. In this respect, all four authors have done what Roland Barthes formulated in his text S/Z (1975):

3

By text I mean all aesthetic objects whether visual or textual.

10 | P ERFORMING A UTHORSHIP The author himself […] can or could someday become a text like any other: […]; he has only to see himself as being on paper and his life as a bio-graphy (in the etymological sense of the word), a writing without referent, substance of a connection and not a filiation: the critical undertaking […] will then consist in returning the documentary figure of the author into a novelistic, irretrievable, irresponsible figure, caught up in the plural of its own text. (S/Z 211212)

Breitz, Auster, Calle, and Foer have experimented with the inclusion of their author selves in their texts. Their methods and results differ from each other, yet their considerations and intentions reveal similar origins from which general conclusions about performative authorship can be drawn. In this book, I will develop three main strategies of performative authorship that I define as positioning, staging, and playing. The main chapters are arranged and named accordingly. I concentrate on these three main routes through which I detect and demonstrate key aspects of what I term performative authorship. I argue that performative authorship takes shape within this theoretical framework. Through different performative practices that follow my conceptual trajectory, authorial becoming is rendered possible and, furthermore, becomes visible. My approach explores different authorial practices in order to show how, why, and with what means authors perform authorial self-invention. In the following pages, I will give an overview of the book’s chapters to set forth my main thesis of perpetually performed authorship and to present my theoretical framework. My general introduction, entitled “Becoming: An Introduction,” is divided into four subsections: In the first, “Who Is This Mysterious Other?,” I will give a concise historical overview of the field and the development of the authorship debate in the post- and post-postmodern age. This subchapter will also introduce Barthes, by reading “The Death of the Author” (1967) as a performative manifesto. Inspired by Séan Burke’s revisitation of The Death and Return of the Author: Criticism and Subjectivity in Barthes, Foucault and Derrida (1992), Barthes’s lifelong passion with and commitment to authorship questions from Mythologies (1957) to Camera Lucida (1980) constitutes a parallel narrative that underlies my discussion of performative authorship. Second, in “Becoming an Author,” based on Gilles Deleuze’s and Félix Guattari’s concept of becoming, I will explain my terminology of becoming an author to, then, illustrate the idea of becoming by examining Breitz’s work of the same title. In “Authorial Representation as a Performative Act,” the third part, I will transfer Iser’s notion of representation as a performative act from the reader to the author perspective by expanding his argument to authorial representation. At this point, I will also introduce Austin’s performative speech act theory as well as Gérard Genette’s understanding of paratext, which are so crucial for processes of authorial

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self-invention. The last part of my introductory chapter, “Performative Authorship,” will then deal with the framework questions of the aesthetic function of performative authorship and the cultural meaning and significance of this phenomenon. Supported by Mark McGurl’s notion of the Program Era (2009), Martin Klepper’s concept of a reconstructive postmodernism (Pynchon, Auster, DeLillo, 1996), and Erika Fischer-Lichte’s definition of the performative turn (The Transformative Power of Performance, 2004), I will situate Foer’s, Breitz’s, Calle’s, and Auster’s authorial performances in the larger framework of reflexive postmodernism and postpostmodernism. My first main chapter, “Positioning,” consists of two subsections, “Auto/Biography” and “Self/Portrait.” By positioning I mean the deliberate genealogical approach to locate oneself and one’s work within the larger field of cultural production. Here, I concentrate on two main aspects of intentional positioning: auto/biography and self/portrait, treating both text forms as homologous techniques of performative authorship. In “Auto/Biography,” I will read Auster’s “autobiographies” as texts of authorial self-invention. For my discussion, I critically question Philippe Lejeune’s notion of the autobiographical pact and draw on Pierre Bourdieu’s field of cultural production. In “Self/Portrait,” I will discuss three very different texts by Breitz, Calle, and Foer, as portraits of their author selves, readings that rely on Deleuze’s concept of difference and repetition, a comparison to Barthes’s auto/biographies, and an engagement with Michel de Montaigne’s essays. For this reason, I will enlarge my theoretical framework to include art and visual scholars, such as Ernst Kris and Otto Kurz, and Susan Sontag, as well as interdisciplinary researchers of autobiographical texts and images, such as Paul John Eakin and Timothy Dow Adams. In this chapter, thus, I will show how authors develop their authorial selves in and through auto/biographical self/portraits. Yet I do not read these texts as conventional autobiographies, in the sense of “self-life-writing,” but rather as a productive means to invent authorial selves. These texts, I argue, are not about a “real” author person, but rather an author persona, who is to be invented, positioned, and staged incessantly in the creative process. These position-takings are then brought onto stage in my second main chapter, “Staging,” which discloses further authorial strategies of self-invention and comprises three subsections, “Stage Names,” “Staging Oneself,” and “Individual Mythologies.” By staging I mean the conscious act of staging one’s author self in the text and in the world-beyond-the-text. The theoretical premise of this chapter will rely on Iser’s notion of staging as an anthropological category, or, as Iser wrote, as “the indefatigable attempt to confront ourselves with ourselves, which can be done only by playing ourselves” (Fictive 303). In “Stage Names,” I will show how Foer by assuming his grandfather’s name Safran, created his author name as a meaningful identity feature. Austin’s performative speech act of naming will be at the center of

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this subchapter. In “Staging Oneself,” I will subsequently scrutinize the performative practice of staging oneself as a character to create different versions of one’s authorial self. Using Foer, Auster, and Calle as examples I argue that the act of staging oneself as an author is a powerful performative means of self-invention. Lastly, in “Individual Mythologies,” I will explain how authors fabricate an all-embracing network of personal myths to embed their author personae within their individual mythologies. For this subchapter, I borrowed Harald Szeemann’s neologism individual mythologies to pinpoint the unique yet equally universal superstructures that Calle and Auster construct in their true stories to link and frame their author personae and their works. In their universal expression, these individual mythologies embody, at the same time, a gateway to the other, which will be the subject of my following chapter. My third main chapter is called “Playing,” and is divided into two subsections, “Playing Authorial Games” and “Authors in Collaboration.” By playing, I introduce the fundamental quality of all artistic expression and reception, namely the aesthetic pleasure of playfully engaging with words, images, and ideas. This chapter will bring together under the umbrella of play, Deleuze’s concept of difference and repetition, Iser’s notion of play as an anthropological category, as well as Bourdieu’s insights of the field of cultural production. I will enlarge my discussion of performative authorship to the workings of appropriation and collaboration between and among the authors discussed, thereby developing and extending the notion of the play of the text to the pleasurable play of the author. I will thus tackle the fundamental question as to why authors play the game of authorial becoming. In “Playing Authorial Games,” I will analyze imaginary authorial games that reach out to the “other” via appropriation, such as Foer’s inaugural anthology of new texts inspired by Joseph Cornell’s boxes or Breitz’s interplay between stars and fans. In “Authors in Collaboration,” I will subsequently show real forms of collaborative authorship that display direct exchange and inspiration among multiple authors, such as Auster’s and Sam Messer’s artists’ book The Story of My Typewriter, Calle’s and Auster’s team play Double Game, as well as Foer’s “corporeal” confrontation with the work of Bruno Schulz in Tree of Codes. My conclusion will summarize my findings and present generational differences between Auster/Calle and Breitz/Foer, respectively, to show how performative strategies of authorial becoming have altered over time. Let me prelude with a placement of my theoretical framework. Certainly, to bring together Gilles Deleuze, Wolfgang Iser, and Roland Barthes is a daring, if not bold, venture for these three theorists come from different schools of philosophical thought and mostly pursue different lines of arguments. Yet despite their many differences, I see corresponding aspects in their work in regard to questions of performative

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authorship. By this challenging selection of scholarly voices, I therefore hope to achieve a prolific and inspirational exchange to gain new insights in the practices of authorial performances. However, this unusual confrontation certainly has its limits. Barthes and Deleuze did not have a pronounced dialogue despite their close sphere of action in the academic milieu of French Poststructuralism. Their cross references are rare and rather sketchy. Iser, founder of the German Constance School of reception aesthetics, also responded very seldom to Barthes’s texts directly,4 and, as far as I am aware of, not a single time to the writings of Deleuze. Yet my intention is not to smooth out the contrasts between these three different thinkers, but to bring together selective and particular concepts in support of my own argument of performative authorship. Simon Schleusener discussed the “possible uses of Gilles Deleuze in the field of American Studies” in his essay “Deleuze und die American Studies” (2004), concluding that scholars in this field should “make use” of Deleuze’s tool box “despite existing differences – just as Deleuze has made use of American Literature for the sake of his own philosophy” (“Deleuze” 219).5 Thus, I will borrow from Deleuze’s tool box the idea of becoming as a continuously mobile state of being to show how authors are perpetually becoming authors in and through their authorial performances. For Deleuze, identity formation is constituted as a constant becoming, driven by the force of difference in repetition. This, I believe, is equally valid for authorial identity formation. Deleuze’s notion of difference and repetition, another one of his tools I will make use of, also plays an important role in regard to the arts, because for him “art does not imitate, above all because it repeats; it repeats all the repetitions, by virtue of an internal power,” as he wrote (Difference 365). In addition, Schleusener explained Deleuze’s approach to literature not as a question of ideology, origin, or ‘essence’ of a literary work, but as a question of its use (cf. “Deleuze” 224), or, to put it in Deleuze’s and Félix Guattari’s own words in A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (1980): “[L]anguage is the transmission of the word as order-word, not the communication of a sign as information. Language is a map, not a tracing” (Thousand 85). Not the meaning of this map is thus of importance to Deleuze but to put it to use. At this particular point, I see an analogy to Iser. Deleuze’s understanding of language in general and literature in particular shares common ground to Iser, who

4

Most evidently, Iser was able to relate to Barthes’s notion of the pleasure of the text that Iser took as a source for his conception of literature as play. See, for example, pp. 278-280 in The Fictive and the Imaginary (1991), where Iser extensively quoted from Barthes’s The Pleasure of the Text (1975).

5

Also see Schleusener, Kulturelle Komplexität: Gilles Deleuze und die Kulturtheorie der American Studies. Bielefeld: transcript (2015).

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argued already in 1975 that “the time has surely come to cut the thread [of fiction as an antonym of reality] altogether and replace ontological arguments with functional, for what is important to readers, critics, and authors alike is what literature does and not what it means” (“Reality of Fiction” 7). To ask for the uses and deeds of artworks instead of their meanings is a clear expression of the performative turn of the early 1960s that Erika Fischer-Lichte well described in a nutshell in The Transformative Power of Performance (2004): “The dissolution of boundaries in the arts, repeatedly proclaimed and observed by artists, art critics, scholars of art, and philosophers, can be defined as a performative turn. Be it art, music, literature, or theatre, the creative process tends to be realized in and as performance” (Transformative 22). Like Deleuze 6 and Iser, Fischer-Lichte thereby likewise relied on Austin’s speech act theory that describes linguistic utterances not only as statements but also as performed actions. However, whereas Austin solely applied the word “performative” to speech acts, Deleuze, Iser, and Fischer-Lichte appropriated the term for literature and the arts in general (cf. Fischer-Lichte, Transformative 24-25). As a result, Iser developed his concept of representation as a performative act that seeks to release literature from the traditional bonds of mimesis. Iser’s idea of representation as performance operates as an oscillation between difference and semblance and is performed by the recipients in the form of role play. In consequence, for Iser and Deleuze alike, difference in repetition is the driving force of any artistic expression. Furthermore, Iser’s idea of representation not as mimesis but as performative acts, in turn, corresponds well with Barthes’s objection to “the reduction of language to any representational aesthetics,” as Burke formulated (Death 40). Burke further argued that [t]his is the message – indeed the ‘single message’ – of ‘The Death of the Author’. To wit, that the abolition of the author is the necessary and sufficient step to bring about the end of a representational view of language, for it is only through the function of the author as the possessor of meaning that textual language is made obeisant to an extratextual reality. (Death 41)

Thus, without generally lumping together Deleuze’s, Iser’s, and Barthes’s different ways of thinking, I nevertheless intend to show certain thematic overlaps in terms of specific key ideas and tools, such as becoming, difference and repetition, and conceptualizing representation not as mimesis but as performative acts. I thereby hope to overcome a few obstructive stereotypes and to establish some unfamiliar yet yielding relations.

6

Deleuze/Guattari, Thousand 85-86.

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The attempt to discard some reflexive prejudices is especially strong in the case of Barthes’s work. With the help of Burke, I seek to show that to read Barthes only from his structuralist and post-structuralist pigeonhole misses out on the refreshing complexity, and sometimes vexing inconsistency, of his expressions regarding the role(s) of the author. Thus, I will pursue a reading of his work which clearly exceeds the catch phrase of the death of the author that appears to be permanently attached to Barthes.7 Instead, I will follow Susan Sontag’s invitation to see beyond Barthes’s “contributions to the would-be science of signs and structures,” to discover the “literary one: the writer organizing, under a series of doctrinal auspices, the theory of his own mind” (Barthes viii). Correspondingly, Burke called Barthes’s manner “a poet’s conception.” Sontag continued her argument for a revisitation of Barthes in her introduction to A Barthes Reader (1982): “[W]hen the current enclosure of reputation by labels of semiology and structuralism crumbles, as it must, Barthes will appear, I think, as a rather traditional promeneur solitaire, and a greater writer than even his more fervent admirers now claim” (Barthes viii). Not a fervent admirer of Barthes myself, I would, at any rate, like to complicate the debate on his argument(s) about authorship by showing a wider spectrum of his thoughts. Burke argued that, prior to “The Death of the Author,” which I will read as a performative manifesto below, Barthes approached the problem of authorship in On Racine (1963) and Criticism and Truth (1966), focusing in the former “on the nature of the text in and for itself,” while arguing in the latter that “a science of discourse could only be established if literary analysis took language rather than authors as the starting-point of its enquiry” (Death 19). “The Death of the Author,” then, formed a first “theoretical outline” of Barthes’s project to replace the authorial perspective “by that of the reader as producer of the text” in his subsequent publication S/Z (1970), as Burke further explained: Commentators of Barthes’s career are united in seeing a decisive change in direction as occurring in the late 1960s, and are all but united in seeing that change as occurring decisively in S/Z. This text also constitutes a certain crossroads for Barthes in terms of his attitude to authorship in that it at once puts into practice the principles of ‘The Death of the Author’, and at the same time willingly relinquishes some of the ground that the essay hoped to gain. (Death 27)

7

In his lecture session of January 19, 1980 with the title “Return of the Author” Barthes said: “I don’t like it when people shut me up, so to speak, in the first kind of immortality – the immortality of always being in the same place –, however immortal that immortality may be! […] I change places, I want to be reborn; I’m not where you expect me to be” (Preparation 215).

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In S/Z, Barthes made some of the ground for the return of the author, at least to his own text: “The Author himself […] can or could some day become a text like any other: […] he has only to see himself as a being on paper and his life as a bio-graphy […] a novelistic, irretrievable, irresponsible figure, caught up in the plural of its own text” (S/Z 211-212). At this point of the argument, Burke attested a “twisted dialectic” or even “no dialectic at all,” as Barthes clearly contradicted himself by articulating the paradox, as Burke formulated, that “[t]wo balls must be constantly kept up in the air: the author will return, but the death of the author must stand” (Death 28, 29). Sontag described this kind of non-dialectic approach as Barthes’s “aphorist’s ability to conjure up a vivacious duality,” and continued to argue that “Barthes’s writing is seeded with such ostensibly paradoxical, epigrammatic formulas” (Barthes xii). Yet as Burke explained Barthes’s ingenious mind-twisting maneuver, the “authorial return does not impinge upon the idea of the birth of the reader,” but rather, “the author will reappear as a desire of the reader’s, a spectre spirited back into existence by the critic himself” (Death 28). Hence, the author does return to the text, yet as an ephemeral, fragmentary figure and “on condition,” as Burke wrote “that his life is discontinuous, fictive; that he ‘puts the work into the life’” (Death 29). This “chiasmic movement from life-into-work to work-into-life is addressed to the question of priority” for Barthes, as Burke insisted (Death 30).8 One year later, in 1971, Barthes published Sade Fourier Loyola, which introduced his idea of ‘founders of language’ to the authorship debate. Here, Barthes described the thinkers Marquis de Sade, Charles Fourier, and Ignatius of Loyola as initiators or inventors of language or discourse, 9 which clearly constitutes a contradiction to his previous work, as Burke explicated: The conviction that language, any language, however idiosyncratic it might appear in particular hands, invariably precedes and indeed determines the subjects of its writing is a constant premise of Barthes’s work during the 1960s, […]. But with the concept of the ‘founder of language’ he would seem to entirely subvert his thesis. (Death 32)

Burke then argued that Barthes’s “idea of the logothete also necessitates the renewal of the concept of the oeuvre,” which, in turn, means to put “faith in the author or in

8

Barthes in his lecture session of January 19, 1980: “The innovation of the Life / Work relationship, the positioning of the life as work is now slowly emerging as a veritable historical shift in values, in literary prejudices” (Preparation 210).

9

The question in how far Barthes’s ‘founders of language’ were inspired but are also different from Michel Foucault’s ‘initiators of discursive practices’ (as formulated in his 1969 “What Is an Author?”) is certainly interesting, but exceeds the scope and goal of my book.

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his signature at least,” because in “absolutely minimalist terms, the author is that principle which unites the objects, […], that gather under his proper name” (Death 33, 34). Via the ‘founders of language,’ Barthes reintroduced the concept of “the oeuvre as an ever-present inter text” as well as the author’s proper name as an umbrella term subsuming the work, as Burke explained (Death 34-35). Hence, along with oeuvre and proper name, an author persona is reestablished. At the latest in Sade Fourier Loyola, the author’s biography and corpus have therefore returned when “Barthes adds the author’s life to the oeuvre in the ‘Lives’ section just as elsewhere he joins corpus to corpus by reading the body writing to the body of writing,” as Burke stated (Death 35). Barthes, in his own words, explained this paradoxical interchange and convertibility between author and text, life and literature as follows: “The author who leaves his text and comes into our life has no unity; he is a mere plural of ‘charms’, the site of a few tenuous details, [...] he is not a (civil, moral) person, he is a body” (Barthes in: Burke, Death 28-29). These different bodies, the body of the text and the body of the author,10 have to be constantly negotiated, which Barthes aimed for in his subsequent “autobiographical” writings as Burke summarized: Following upon S/Z, which sought to work through and beyond structuralist categories, Sade Fourier Loyola makes the decisive break with the scientism Barthes practised in the 1960s, and along with The Pleasure of the Text makes a theoretical clearing for Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse and Camera Lucida. A reworked conception of the author is the first move in this direction. To reintroduce the author and the author’s life is to create a thaw in the cold dream of structuralist objectivity. (Death 38)

In pursuing my own argument of performative authorship, I am interested in what is hidden beneath the ice once Barthes’s (post-)structuralism begins to melt and crumble with his contradictory arguments on the simultaneous death and return of the author. In his lecture session of January 19, 1980, with the title “Return of the Author,” Barthes quoted from a text by Jean Bellemin-Noël to then show a possible return path for the author: “Everything comes out of a lack of curiosity with regard to authors. For me, this is of the order of fact, I am not touched, drawn to, even less I am mobilized by the lives or the

10 Cf. Burke: “[T]he ideas of writing the body, and the body writing, dominate the discourse. However, somewhat typically, Barthes refuses to clarify either what is meant or what is at issue here. […] Once again ‘body’ arises via an ‘ellipsis which is not supported’: once again Barthes cunningly tempts us to ask what the ‘body’ means or what it does in his discourse” (Death 56, 57).

18 | P ERFORMING A UTHORSHIP personalities of writers …”; a good quote (even if today I take the completely opposite view) because it uses the right expression: lack of curiosity with regard to the author → Death, Lack of Curiosity → Return of Curiosity, return of the author. (Preparation 208)

In this quote, Barthes advanced the view that the return of the author is not only a possibility but that, indeed, “in the history of French literature, there have been several ‘returns of the author’ of varying types and of varying values” (Preparations 207). Nevertheless, my revisitation of Barthes’s changing notion(s) of authorship will not constitute the main theoretical premise of my argument. Rather, the metanarrative of the Barthesian trajectory will unfold parallel to my readings of the works of Auster, Breitz, Calle, and Foer. At times, my intention is to show striking thematic and methodological reverberations between Barthes and, especially, Calle and Auster. Sontag described Barthes’s writing sensibility as “a dramatic act, subject to dramatic elaboration. […] Under the meta-category of performance, not only the line between autobiography and fiction muted, but that between essay and fiction as well” (Barthes xv).11 In this regard, I value Barthes’s model role as a hybrid author-thinker who performed his theoretical concepts of authorship in situ. As Sontag wrote: “Barthes’s writing, with its prodigious variety of subjects, has finally one great subject: writing itself” (Barthes vii). This, I believe, is equally true of Auster’s writing and also corresponds well to Calle’s lifetime project of authorial selfinvention. Both authors have been interested in the processes of text formation and, respectively, of becoming authors. They have approached their author personae via the anecdote, oftentimes in the form of individual mythologies – as did Barthes, for example, in Camera Lucida. Their subjective practice of text production has a playful note, which demonstrates the pleasure of the text from the authorial perspective. Thus, I see a strong affinity between Barthes’s, Auster’s, and Calle’s understanding of authorship that will echo in my readings of the works of the latter two. Despite all reverberations between these authors, my theoretical framework will rely, most importantly, on Iser’s notion of representation as a performative act. Iser’s anthropological approach to literature and his work in reader-response theory might appear as a curious choice to start discussing performative authorship. Yet I chose this trajectory, because I see a resilient bridge between Barthes’s “birth of the reader” and Iser’s “reader-response theory,” the former of which made possible to think from the reader perspective and the latter of which provided a viable path to describe this perspective. Barthes strengthened the focus on the text and, simultaneously,

11 Sontag described Barthes as “the latest major participant in the great national literary project, inaugurated by Montaigne: the self as vocation, life as reading of the self” (Barthes xxxiii).

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established the sovereignty of the reader. Iser, on the other hand, methodically installed the reader as the performing agent in the production of texts. Yet where Barthes remained vague, Iser was specific; where Barthes appears chaotic and ambiguous, Iser seems systematic and clear. I was drawn to this confusing dichotomy in order to describe the complex rebirth of the author via the birth of the reader. The outcome of this unusual juxtaposition of thinkers is my very own concept of performative authorship. Thereby, I do not, at any time, intend to neglect or diminish the achievements in regard to the reader’s agency by strengthening the agency of the author in my argument for performative authorship. Rather, I see these two practices as equally valuable twins that closely belong to each other and only together arrive at the production of the text. Or, as Barthes wrote in The Pleasure of the Text (1973), “[o]n the stage of the text, no footlights: there is not, behind the text, someone active (the writer) and out front someone passive (the reader); there is not a subject and an object” (Pleasure 16). In consequence, the detour via the reader-response theory is necessary to avoid stepping into any revisionist trap of an author’s resurrection at the expense of an anew neglect of the reader. Let me begin by restating Auster’s urgent question of principle: “Who is this mysterious other to whom we refer to as author?”

W HO I S T HIS M YSTERIOUS O THER ? The author is dead. Long live the author. More than forty years have passed since Roland Barthes “overthrew” the author and “crowned” the reader. Only dead authors are good authors. Since then many authors have seemingly internalized this credo. But what to do with this “person” who writes onto paper (or types on laptops) the words that create a text? How do we comprehend this “no one” who produces the text, this “tissue of quotations” (Barthes in: Burke, Authorship 128),12 as Barthes referred to it in his influential essay? With his controversial text, Barthes not only challenged literary theory but also the ways authors thought and continue to think about themselves. In a single blow, the sacrosanct authority of the author was called into question, leaving writers with a blankness, equal to the empty page in front of them. Literary criticism, on the other hand, has increasingly struggled with authorship questions after Barthes’s attack on the traditional notion of the author. Who actually creates (a) text? Who is this person who puts her name on the book’s

12 All quotes from Barthes’s “The Death of the Author” are taken from Seán Burke’s publication Authorship: From Plato to the Postmodern (1995).

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cover? Are authors fiction themselves? Literary theory has since tried to find answers to these vexing questions. As early as the 1940s, American New Criticism scholars such as W.K. Wimsatt and M.C. Beardsley labeled traditional understandings of author concepts as “intentional fallacy,” declaring the author’s intention as meaningless in the assessment of a work of (literary) art. At the beginning of the 1960s, Wayne C. Booth tried to introduce his “implied author,” the notion of an author’s second self, as an intermediate figure to describe the author’s image in his text. Then, in 1967, Barthes radicalized earlier deconstructions of traditional author concepts and was followed shortly after by his fellow countryman, Michel Foucault, who, in his own iconic essay, also bid farewell to classical notions of the author. Foucault tried to answer the question of his essay’s title, “What Is an Author?,” with the notion of the authorfunction. The author, as a substitute of the subject, ought “to be stripped of its creative role and analyzed as a complex and variable function of discourse,” Foucault argued (“Author?” 138). Literary critics have since been struggling with authorship concepts. These include Gérard Genette, who, among other things, heavily criticized Booth’s “implied author,” Nancy K. Miller and Cheryl Lawson Walker, who analyzed the special situation of female writers, and their compatriots Martha Woodmansee and Peter Jaszi, who argued for new possibilities of collective authorship in digital media that is changing the notion of authorship yet again. By the 1980s, critical discourse had finally overcome grief with Eugene Simion’s The Return of the Author (1981) and Seán Burke’s The Death and Return of the Author (1992). In Germany, Heinrich Bosse described authorship as work authority to analyze questions of authorship and copyright (Autorschaft ist Werkherrschaft 1981), while his colleagues around Fotis Jannidis likewise celebrated the return of the author (Die Rückkehr des Autors 1999). Since the turn of the twenty-first century, the applied arts have equally discovered the author as a worthwhile topic for critical discourse. The Swiss art historians Hans Peter Schwarz, Corina Caduff, and Tan Wälchli worked on questions of authorship in the applied arts (Autorschaft in den Künsten 2007), as did Beatrice von Bismarck in her publication on the appearance as artist (Auftritt als Künstler 2010). From 2009 to 2014, the research group “Authorship as Performance” around Ingo Berensmeyer, Gert Buelens, and Marysa Demoor at Ghent University in Belgium “aimed to reexamine material conditions and historical views of literary authorship as cultural performance in the light of recent developments in the theory […] of authorship, authority and agency.”13 This research group has developed performative models of authorship by including in their analyses questions of material dimensions, theories of performances and performativity, gender, professionalization of writing, processes

13 See Research on Authorship as Performance: http://www.rap.ugent.be/.

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of canon-formation, cultural networks, and self-fashioning, thereby following the performative turn in cultural analysis. In her very original book Unoriginal Genius: Poetry by Other Means in the New Century (2010), Marjorie Perloff argued for a ‘poetic turn’ and called for a conceptual understanding of poets and their work and Benjamin Widiss proclaimed The Persistence of the Author in Twentieth Century American Literature, as the subtitle of his publication Obscure Invitations (2011) reads. However dynamic this ongoing transatlantic academic debate is, I argue that it was especially Barthes’s “The Death of the Author” that – paradoxically – marked a great opportunity for authors. After dismantling the author’s single authority on a text, Barthes’s essay gave many authors space for previously unthinkable experiments. Genre definitions were thus blurred, different voices were integrated into one text, and fact and fiction were no longer presented as opposites. Parallel to the academic discourse, authors have taken up the challenge to revive ideas from Barthes and present them in new forms. The challenge was and still is to accept that texts are not only the outcome of one author’s voice but also the product of many voices. There is no such thing as one single authority on a text. Instead, there are rather innumerable voices that are clustered in the author’s mind, like an archive of ideas. Authors, consciously or unconsciously, draw from this imaginary archive anecdotes, images, and concepts for their stories. Fragmentary components from various stories are thus collected. Authors then combine these with other fragments, process them, transform them, and eventually mold their own stories from them. For the most part, this has been an unconscious process or, at least, one that has not been openly revealed to readers. However, since withdrawing from their prominent positions as sole authorities on their texts, many authors have acknowledged that texts are, ultimately, the outcome of collective efforts. These authors are increasingly willing to share their sources with their readers. Without a doubt, authors are inspired by “real” events that happen around them. Sometimes fictional stories cross over into “real” life. Burke formulated this idea by positing that “[w]ork and life commute through a channel which can be traversed in both directions and not as has been traditionally supposed, only in the direction, author-to-text” (Death 31). To read authorship as a performative act of self-invention is one way of acknowledging and celebrating this multi-directional passage from author to text to reader and vice versa. What this amounts to is that authors do not simply create stories out of nothing. Therefore, the metaphor of the white page, commonly used to illustrate the creative process of writing, is actually a symbol of a traditional understanding of authorship that continues to regard the author as the single authority on a text. However, the empty page is not simply white and void but, rather, wildly colorful and crowded with all the pre-existing stories. Authors have to create their own stories in the context of this stew of stories, texts, and words. Barthes’s essay marked a watershed moment in freeing authors from their duty to be

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the single authorities on their texts. His ideas gave them the opportunity to more openly reveal their sources and consciously play with them. Beyond that, this new liberty offered authors a way to integrate themselves as authors into their texts. This way, their voices became one of the many elements woven into the fabric of their texts. Unusual genre mixes have evolved from this new kind of aesthetic expression that finds itself in the “no one’s” land between fact and fiction, which has become an experimental ground for literary and visual artists alike. It is therefore worthwhile to revisit Barthes’s text and read it in terms of performative authorship. As we have seen, even though Barthes’s 1967 essay “The Death of the Author” was certainly not the first attempt to dismantle the “Author-God” from her throne, Barthes’s text is by far the most radical approach in this tradition. To begin with, Barthes, with both ignorance and arrogance, neglected and minimized earlier undertakings to diminish the significance of the author figure in the creation of a text. He failed to mention, for example, the Russian Formalists or the Prague Structuralists, hence omitting a whole succession of earlier critical authorship theories. Further, Barthes belittled the approach of New Criticism scholars who focused on texts rather than authors. Literary criticism, such as close reading, Barthes claimed, “has often done no more than to consolidate” the authority of the author (Authorship 126). Burke explained Barthes’s approach as follows: The large body of critics who work with a more modest conception of authorship are not considered, nor the ameliorative influence such critics bring to bear upon the role of the author in literary studies. All author-positions are subsumed under an essentially nineteenth-century theocentrism, a tactic which naturally lends to the death of the author a greater urgency, a more direful necessity. (Death 25)

Literary critics prior to Barthes do not fare well in his essay, in which he stated that “there is no surprise in the fact that, historically, the reign of the Author has also been that of the Critic, nor again in the fact that criticism (be it new) is today undermined along with the Author” (Authorship 129). Since Barthes was certainly aware of his important predecessors in the field of literary criticism, there must be another reason for his drastic neglect and denunciation of them. Before trying to explain this highly conspicious oversight, let me add that Barthes did name a few legitimate forerunners of his cause. Yet, he found visionaries in fields other than literary criticism: Literary writers, visual artists, and linguists of different times and schools had been among the first, he claimed, to focus on language rather than on individual authors. Stéphane Mallarmé, Paul Valéry, and Marcel Proust suppressed and called into question the grand authority of the author, to replace the latter with language itself. The Surrealists introduced the notions of automatic and collective writing, which put strong emphasis on the writing process of a text, not on

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its creator. And, finally, it took linguists to deconstruct the figure of the author by providing analytical tools to show that in language there are subjects and not persons. To give just one example, the intertextuality that Barthes stressed and described as “collages of quotations” is clearly a distinct structuralist concept developed by scholars like Julia Kristeva and Barthes himself. The above-mentioned groups and individuals are somewhat legitimate predecessors for Barthes, who urgently needed forerunners to anticipate his own thoughts. This is not because he had to establish a genealogy or is deficient of academic or literary recourse. Barthes’s need for forebears becomes apparent when we look closely at his text. Barthes was obliged to position his essay within the very kind of network of intertextuality that he demanded and postulated so strongly in his own writing. He could not simply claim originality in his approach, because, according to him, there was no longer any original, only “a multidimensional space in which a variety of writings, none of them original, blend and clash” (Authorship 128). Therefore, Barthes had to perform what he postulated. Despite all novel radicalism, Barthes needed to present his readers a view of the “multidimensional space” that his text opened up. To intertextually contextualize his text ultimately equaled to remain truthful to his project. For this, Barthes needed to present his readers at least a glimpse of the genealogy (that is the poets, artists, and linguists) in which his text was embedded. This is one of the many ways that “The Death of the Author” is highly performative. We can now return to the question as to why Barthes was unwilling to open up the same multidimensional space of his text to the writings and analysis of literary criticism. Despite similar intentions, literary criticism is willfully excluded from the “tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centres of culture” that constitutes his own text (Authorship 128). Not only was the author declared dead, so was the critic. The exclusion of related ideas from the Prague Structuralists, the Russian Formalists, or the New Criticism School, made Barthes’s claim even more radical. “The Death of the Author” is not just another academic treatise, nor is it simply a well-argued essay in which Barthes pursued a serious contribution to the debate on authorship. It is, rather, a radical polemic – a call to arms – that must be read as an avant-garde manifesto. In The Author (2005), Andrew Bennett explained the environment in which Barthes’s text appeared for the first time: The essay was first published in an avant-garde, iconoclastic and formally experimental US magazine, Aspen, […]. The issue was dedicated to Stéphane Mallarmé and included work by, amongst others, Marcel Duchamp, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Michel Butor, Merce Cunningham, Samuel Beckett and John Cage. The collection as a whole and Barthes’s essay in particular were aimed at confronting and subverting conventional ways of thinking about, of approaching or theorizing, literature and art, particularly with respect to conventional oppositions of ‘high’ art to low cultural values. (Author 13-14)

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The impetus and style of Barthes’s manifesto explain the great appeal that his text has retained over the decades. It seems so easy and alluring to quote from his provocative text, because it expresses a strong position within the authorship debate. Many scholars simply took it for granted that “The Death of the Author” was written as a serious contribution to an academic literary discussion about the author. As Bennett explained: Barthes’s essay was often taken as the last word on the author. The essay was often conceived of in terms of a theorist reading the last rites over the corpse of the idea of the author. And such an understanding often went no further than the ‘stark extremity’, […], of the essay’s title. (Author 9-10)

Yet as Burke argued, Barthes’s text must really be seen as his first radical attempt to free himself from the chains of an orthodox notion of authorship. Only a few years later, in his 1970 S/Z, Barthes developed the missing logical arguments that supported his call to arms against the traditional author. The polemical dimension of “The Death of the Author” offered an entrée for Barthes to radically rethink the form and meaning of author- and readership and to push a new aesthetic based on these concepts. However, before Barthes could seriously engage in an academic debate about authorand readership, which he did shortly after in S/Z, he needed to develop certain aesthetic views and representations of authorship. Thus, instead of offering yet another literary criticism on the role and function of the author, Barthes wrote an avant-garde manifesto that expresses and promotes strong aesthetic goals. The essay is therefore far more of an aesthetic performance than an analytical theorem. It is a performance that came out of a clearly disernable theoretical and political background. On the one hand, Barthes developed his essay on the theoretical premises of Structuralism. On the other hand, he formulated his ideas in the political climate of the “Paris May 1968” ideology. Let me begin with the latter. Barthes was part of a generation of thinkers who challenged traditional notions of the role of the author and the meaning of authorship at a time of upheavel and radical social change. In “Paris May 1968,” the antiauthorial student movement questioned established social forces of power and control in the realms of politics, education, and domestic relationships. The traditional author, long admired as the grand authority of an artwork, and representational art, long connected to notions of truth, were deconstructed. Authors were thought to have authorial control over their art, and representational art, such as realism and naturalism, were thought to express “reality.” As Burke explained: The death of the author might be said to fulfill much the same function in our day as did the death of God for late nineteenth-century thought. Both deaths attest to a departure of belief in

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authority, presence, intention, omniscience and creativity. For a culture which thinks of itself to have come too late for the Gods or for their extermination, the figure of the author and the human subject are said to fill the theological void, to take up the role of ensuring meaning in the absence of metaphysical certainties. (Death 21)

Barthes intellectually detested any illusionary claims of individual authors to control “reality” and thus “meaning.” Representation signified the worst form of art for him, as Burke showed: “This is the message […] of ‘The Death of the Author.’ To wit, that the abolition of the author is the necessary and sufficient step to bring about the end of a representational view of language” (Death 41). Only in experimental art did Barthes see a creative potential that could possibly liberate the individual from superordinate powers. Therefore, he linked creativity to experimental texts which he later termed writerly texts, because only these texts offered a possibility for readers to “rewrite” them. It was in S/Z that Barthes further developed his distinction between writerly and readerly texts. The latter are representational forms of writing, whereas the former are more open texts, enabling readers to enter into a productive endeavor with texts. As he explained in detail: What can be written (rewritten) today: the writerly. Why is the writerly our value? Because the goal of literary work (of literature as work) is to make the reader no longer a consumer, but a producer of the text. […] Opposite the writerly text, then, is its countervalue, its negative, reactive value: what can be read, but not written: the readerly. We call any readerly text a classic text. (S/Z 4)

The multiplicity of references in an experimental text, in Barthes’s view, make the formation of one single meaning impossible. Readers have to work with a plentitude of simultaneous references, with, what Barthes in S/Z termed, “codes” within a given text to create their own meaning, which changes with each new reading of a text. In experimental texts, the full meaning potential can thus never be exhausted, as readers are always rewriting the texts. In this open and ever-repeated process, Barthes detected the only creative potential for individuals to escape superordinate powers. Reading, that is rewriting texts, was a method for Barthes that had the potential to liberate us from authoritative structures. To Burke, “the two enduring principles” of Barthes’s manifesto are “the refusal of an instrumentalist conception of language, and the promise of the ‘birth of the reader’” (Death 45). Yet neither writers nor readers can play outside the language game. In Barthes’s understanding of an artificial place “without history,” the reader rewrites texts in accordance with the logic of language, which leads directly to the structuralist premise on which “The Death of the Author” rests. According to Barthes, and Structuralism as a whole, language not the author or individual speaks. Language has its own logic, and writers,

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as well as readers, are only “guests” within the language game. Barthes elaborated on this idea in an essay from 1971 published in his later book, Image-Music-Text: It is not that the Author may not ‘come back’ in the Text, in his text, but he then does so as a ‘guest’ […] his life is no longer the origin of his fictions but a fiction contributing to his work; there is a reversion of the work on to the life (and no longer the contrary); it is the work of Proust, of Genet which allows their lives to be read as text. (Image 161)

The language game, in which the author is only one guest among many others, has well-defined rules determined by history, culture, and, in particular, linguistics. The argument is that no matter how innovative and creative writers or readers are, they are nevertheless always subject to the power of language. There is no loophole to escape language and its dominant normative force. Even the search for meaning itself, so grave in Western thought, is dominated by language and its powerful rules. Hence, the liberating potential for readers, which Barthes identified in experimental texts, is nevertheless limited to or operates within the system of rules of the language game. In sum, “The Death of the Author” is based on a structuralist argument and framed by the politics of Barthes’s era. The text was Barthes’s violent entrée into an entire intellectual exploration of concepts that were later fully developed in publications like S/Z and others. Examined in isolation of its larger context, the text reads as a polemical if not naïve essay. This is not to diminish Barthes’s accomplishments in this early text, but rather to explain why critics and scholars, even today, struggle with and dispute over this text so profoundly. To approach “The Death of the Author” in the context of Barthes’s later publications, enables us to comprehend and appreciate its significance beyond the “stark extremity” of its title. After all, Barthes’s text should not be read only as a well-argued scholarly essay that develops a position about the role of the author. Instead, it should be understood as a radical, avant-garde manifesto that persuasively pushed a new aesthetic order in relation to concepts of author- and readership. Barthes performed his own becoming an author in this essay by genealogically positioning and staging his author persona as the enfant terrible of literary criticism. 14 Later I will establish authorial representation as a performative act, with the help of Wolfgang Iser’s theoretical insights. But first let me define my terminology with regard to my theoretical framework of becoming an author.

14 Cf. Berensmeyer et al.: “When Roland Barthes wrote ‘The Death of the Author,’ his own authorship may still have been modeled on this anti-bourgeois attitude of the avant-garde, while being related to the French new novel’s anti-humanist reaction against the traditional norms of literary realism” (“Authorship” 21).

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At first glance, my chapter title, becoming an author, might sound awkward, calling for a thorough explanation. In the following pages, I will therefore explicate how I intend to use the concept of becoming an author. I carefully coined the term with the intention to emphasize the process of individuals turning themselves into authors. Authors are not simply born authors. Authors are made authors and, more importantly, authors perpetually turn themselves into authors. I am interested in the continuous venture of self-invention and aim to scrutinize the transformative and performative acts of authorial becoming. My terminology becoming relies on Gilles Deleuze’s and Félix Guatteri’s notion of becoming as an ambivalent transformation discussed primarily in their work, A Thousand Plateaus (1980). Deleuze and Guattari explained becoming as a constant flow that must be seen in contrast to the static verb being. 15 Becoming, to them, is a movement, a transformation, or a nascent metamorphosis between different states of being: It is never completed. Rather, becoming is the constant condition of the self, of one’s identity, 16 described by Deleuze and Guatteri as “only a threshold, a door, a becoming between two multiplicities” (Thousand 275). This crossing between, or transformation of, multiplicities can be pictured in the form of a “vital” or “life-assemblage”17 that is defined by “a longitude and latitude, by speeds and affects, independently of forms and subjects” (Thousand 289). For Deleuze and Guatteri, accordingly, the longitude entails the sum total of the material elements in regard to movement and rest, as well as rapid and slow speed. The latitude subsumes the sum total of the affects available to the body in question.18 Deleuze and Guatteri located a process of individuation on the spatiotemporal plane of consistency19 and used the term haecceity20 to delineate this mode of self-realization that observes and understands the body, thing, or subject only within and as part of its environment. They pointedly argued that “you will yield

15 Deleuze/Guattari: “Becoming is a verb with a consistency all its own; it is not to reduce to, or lead back to, ‘appearing,’ ‘being,’ ‘equaling,’ or ‘producing’” (Thousand 263). 16 Cf. Deleuze: “[B]eing is said of becoming, identity of that which is different, the one of the multiple etc. That identity not be first, that it exist as a principle but as a second principle, as a principle become” (Difference 50). 17 Deleuze/Guattari, Thousand 315. 18 Deleuze/Guattari, Thousand 287. 19 Deleuze/Guattari, Thousand 294. 20 Deleuze/Guattari, Thousand 287-288, 290. The term haecceity literarily translates as ‘thisness’ and derives from John Duns Scotus, a Scottish theologian and philosopher of the High Middle Ages.

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nothing to haecceities unless you realize that that is what you are, and that you are nothing but that” (Thousand 289). Instead of speaking of things and subjects, and their developments and formations, they therefore began to speak of events and of becoming events.21 This becoming takes place, not on a molar, but on a molecular level: Starting from the forms one has, the subject one is, the organs one has, or the functions one fulfills, becoming is to extract particles between which one establishes the relations of movement and rest, speed and slowness that closest to what one is becoming, and through which one becomes. This is the sense in which becoming is the process of desire. (Thousand 300-301)

Deleuze’s and Guatteri’s work is specifically significant for their discussion of the process of writing, the larger production of cultural texts, as well as for their ideas on the individuation of writers, or authors in general. They described the writing or creating of texts as a process of desire, a special form of becoming: “If the writer is a sorcerer, it is because writing is a becoming, writing is traversed by strange becomings” they wrote (Thousand 265). Alongside writers and their literary works (such as Virginia Woolf, Herman Melville’s Moby Dick, and D.H. Lawrence),22 they discussed the music of composer John Cage,23 the films of directors Daniel Mann, Jean-Luc Godard, and Alfred Hitchcock,24 and the paintings of Piet Mondrian25 as exemplary cases of becoming. Deleuze and Guattari argued that these authors “were able to tie their writing to real and unheard-of becomings” (Thousand 269). Producing cultural texts is described as a specific and unique case of becoming that discloses this desire-driven process of individuation, because “singing or composing,

21 Deleuze/Guattari, Thousand 289. 22 Deleuze/Guattari: “Virginia Woolf – who made all of her life and work a passage, a becoming, all kinds of becomings between ages, sexes, elements, and kingdoms” (Thousand 278). Also: “Moby-Dick in its entirety is one of the greatest masterpieces of becoming; Captain Ahab has an irresistible becoming-whale” (268). As well as: “But the objection is raised against Lawrence: ‘Your tortoises aren’t real!’ And he answers: Possibly, but my becoming is, my becoming is real” (269-270). 23 Deleuze/Guattari: “It is undoubtedly John Cage who first and most perfectly deployed this fixed sound plane, which affirms a process against all structure and genesis, a floating time against pulsed time or tempo, experimentation against any kind of interpretation, and in which silence as sonorous rest also marks the absolute state of movement” (Thousand 294295). 24 Deleuze/Guattari, Thousand 257, 295, 336. 25 Deleuze/Guattari, Thousand 336.

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painting, writing have no other aim: to unleash these becomings” (Thousand 300). To “unleash these becomings” is to multiply and amplify the desire and render it visible for oneself and others in writing, painting, or musical composition. As their diverse examples show, it is especially with authors and in cultural texts that we can best locate the spatiotemporal plane of consistency that Deleuze and Guatteri defined as “a means of transportation” in or on which “no form develops, no subject forms; affects are displaced, becomings catapult forward and combine into blocks” (Thousand 296). My expression becoming an author thus signifies the processual and continuous individuation of authors alongside the development of cultural texts. Spatiotemporal planes of consistency are not only constituted by texts but by authors as well. In her book The Thought of Becoming: Gilles Deleuze’s Poetics of Life (2008), Kathrin Thiele argued that Deleuze’s thought of becoming is, above all, an ethical thinking, a “concern for the world” (Thought 161) that draws on philosophical inspirations from Baruch Spinoza, Henri Bergson, and Friedrich Nietzsche. Thiele wrote that “while Deleuze thinks (conceptualizes) the world in a Spinozist way, while he senses (envisions) it in a Bergsonian way, it will be the task […] to exemplify that Deleuze acts (intervenes) in it in a Nietzschean manner” (Thought 116). In her detailed analysis, Thiele traced the philosophical thoughts of Spinozist immanence, Bergsonian difference, and Nietschean repetition, linking them to “Deleuze’s thought of becoming as inherently expressing an ‘attitude,’ i.e. an ethos” (Thought 161). Thiele defined Deleuze’s task of becoming as follows: “‘To become!’ is (=) to bring to the highest degree the (in)capacity to be affected while at the same time to intensify the force to affect” (Thought 192). Becoming an author is such an effort “to be affected while at the same time to intensify the force to affect” through one’s authorship. Becoming an author indeed allows for such an intensification of force, because of its acute focus on the onward constructive process of creation. Creating is becoming and vice versa. Nowhere is this immanent part of our being more visible than in the creative process of authorial self-invention itself. Authors constantly reinvent themselves in their works and beyond. Becoming an author thus illustrates Deleuze’s thought of becoming, which Thiele conceived of as an attitude, even an ethos. Becoming an author exemplifies the Deleuzian thought of becoming in the sense that authors (publicly) perform becomings, and thus disclose those mechanisms of becoming that concern us all. In his manifesto Reality Hunger (2010), David Shields described this indicative mode of authors as follows: “One is not important, except insofar as one’s example can serve to elucidate a more widespread human trait and make readers feel a little less lonely and freakish” (Reality 160). I will now elaborate on the concept of becoming and of becoming an author with an example from Candice Breitz’s 2003 body of work entitled “Becoming,” in which the artist “becomes” different public personas in her performances. “Becoming” is a

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Fig. 1: Candice Breitz, Becoming Cameron

Stills from Becoming Cameron, 2003. From the series Becoming, 2003. DualChannel Installation. Duration: 31 seconds, 22 frames.

fourteen channel video installation consisting of seven pairs of screens, each pair standing back-to-back. On one side of each screen, a short sequence of a Hollywood movie is displayed, and on its rear side, Breitz is seen re-enacting the same scene. Drawing on clichéd feminine roles from different romatic comedy films, Breitz is performing, in lip-synching pantomimes, the expressions and gestures of seven famous lead Hollywood actresses, namely Cameron Diaz, Julia Roberts, Jennifer Lopez, Meg Ryan, Neve Campbell, Reese Witherspoon, and Drew Barrymore. All other actors, more precisely the male counterparts to the women, from the original film footage are visually removed, with the exception of a few short aural sequences that show the actors in conversation with one of the actresses. Breitz’s re-enactments of the short sequences are never shown directly next to their “original” versions, but always on a screen facing the other side. This makes the direct comparison of the “original” and the “copy” impossible. Likewise, on Breitz’s website, viewers can either watch the “original” or the “copy” by keeping the scroll above the corresponding video, but cannot watch both performances simultaneously.26 Viewers thus have to draw on their own memories for comparisons of the two performances. Using their own bodies, either viewers walk around the screens or scroll in order to bring together the two parts. Breitz herself suggested that [i]n viewing the work, the viewer completes the loop between the original piece of footage […] and the copied piece of footage […], such that the ‘before and after’ structure breaks down,

26 See http://www.candicebreitz.net/. All quotes are taken from Breitz’s website.

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undermining the primacy of the Hollywood footage, and suggesting the deeply scripted nature of both performances. (Breitz in: Burke, “Breitz” 12)

Each set of conjoined twin screenings shares the same audio channel, so that Breitz is seen performing to the voices of the seven aforementioned actresses. The “master copies” are screened in their original colored versions, while Breitz’s imitations are shown in black and white. She is shown performing in front of plain backgrounds, with different shades of light to dark grey. Props appear only when necessary, for example, when Drew Barrymore is seen speaking into a telephone receiver or when Cameron Diaz is seen waving a book entitled True Love. The neutrality of the settings that Breitz attempted to evoke is further emphasized through her attire: a plain white blouse and blond pixie-bob hair-do. Her outfit bespeaks a neutral, almost unisex, appearance that obliterates anything characteristic of Breitz’s own personality. Her identity is thus visually reduced to a bare projection screen onto which the Hollywood performances are re-performed. Breitz mimicked each performance painstakingly and, for viewers became (and continues to become) an “exact duplicate” of the “master version.” This observation is elaborated upon in my later discussion of Breitz’s work. In her series, Breitz, for example, re-enacted the famous scene from Pretty Woman (1990) in which Julia Roberts, as the beautiful, lascivious prostitute, Vivian Ward, leans backwards over the balcony balustrade of a luxury hotel, teasingly daring Richard Gere, alias Edward Lewis: “It’s making you nervous? What if I just lean back a little bit like this? Would you – would you rescue me, if I fell? It’s really high. Look – no hands, no hands.” ‘Would you rescue me’ is, of course, the crucial question that condenses the whole storyline of the romance movie. Will the wealthy yet lonely corporate raider Edward rescue the fun-loving prostitute Vivian from her precarious environment? ‘Would you rescue me, if I fell?’ is thus a question as well as a calling, because as a prostitute, Vivian is already a fallen woman27 and depends entirely on a man like Edward for rescue and rehabilitation. In Breitz’s “Becoming Julia” (see book’s cover) Vivian’s role is displayed as a blatant stereotype of women’s social dependency on men’s goodwill, as portrayed in countless romance stories. This is best exemplified by Margaret Mitchell’s Scarlett O’Hara in Gone With the Wind (1936), whose social standing depends entirely on her status as a married woman or, at least as a widow. Breitz’s 39-second clip from Pretty Woman further distills Vivian’s role to that of a bold yet totally dependent woman whose only hope, through seduction, is to be rescued by a man.

27 In the past, people described a woman as a fallen woman when she was no longer respected because she had had sex with someone that she was not married to.

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The subtitle of each sequence, “Becoming Julia,” “Becoming Cameron,” and so forth, indicates that Breitz’s mimicry is not her attempt to become the characters of the different movies, for example, Vivian Ward of Pretty Woman or Christina Walters of The Sweetest Thing (2002). The focus of Breitz’s becoming lies in the actresses themselves, the stars who have embodied the different characters, rather than in the individual roles they have enacted. This, on the one hand, points to Breitz’s sincere interest in celebrity culture and star-fan relationships, which her later projects of 2005, such as “King (A Portrait of Michael Jackson)” or “Queen (A Portrait of Madonna),” further attest. On the other hand, putting the focus on the actresses and not on their roles gives the concept of becoming a double twist. In Breitz’s installation, not only is Julia Roberts becoming Vivian Ward, but Breitz is becoming Julia Roberts becoming Vivian Ward, who herself transforms from a prostitute into a “socially respectable” woman. The repetitive continuum of becoming, intrinsic to our all “being,” is demonstrated and exemplified here. As such, Breitz’s “Becoming” reveals the continuous process of becoming as a never-ending desire that is the essence of our individuation. Breitz’s installation makes three possible modes of becoming-woman28 visible – becoming Julia, becoming Vivian, and becoming well-respected – all of which show that (women’s) identity is forever a construction of perpetual repetitions. Yet the key aspect of becoming, in Deleuze’s and Guatteri’s sense, is not imitation or transformation, but the expansion and extension of the assemblage to the next multiplicity. Their example of Hollywood actor Robert De Niro well illustrates how to understand their conception of becoming in the context of play-acting: The actor Robert De Niro walks ‘like’ a crab in a certain film sequence; but, he says, it is not a question of his imitating a crab; it is a question of making something that has to do with the crab enter into composition with the image, with the speed of the image. (Thousand 303)

This is also well illustrated in Breitz’s own performances that flip from “appropriation […] over into mimicry and then back again,” as Edgar Schmitz observed (Breitz, Scripted 137). Breitz connected the limitations of expressions and gestures provided by mass media to the construction of the self. Thus, Schmitz continued, “the work tests the availability/unavailability of media stereotypes to the modalities of self-invention” (Breitz, Scripted 137), and, I argue, reveals the limited possibilities of these stereotypes. All three women, Ward, Roberts, and Breitz, are performing stereotypical roles that are restricted to normative cultural boundaries, predetermined by mainstream Hollywood. Breitz’s work suggests that an escape from these pre-set masks, these “convenient” identities, is almost impossible, or, only

28 Deleuze/Guattari, Thousand 303-304.

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possible in slight deviations. Specific modes of behavior for female seduction, for example, are culturally well established and have been endlessly repeated in hegemonic narratives. Individual expressions, gestures, and speech are culturally stamped and internalized. In an interview, Breitz described that idea further: “You could say that we are to some extend condemned to living scripted lives, scripted in the sense that we must work with the language that pre-exists us and try to make it specific to our own experience” (Breitz in: Burke, “Breitz” 12). Visually, “Becoming” has a disturbing effect that renders the notions of “original” and “copy” ad absurdum. The plain, neutral appearance of Breitz’s blackand-white re-enactments suggests “originals” as opposed to remakes. Her performances evoke black-and-white films of the classical studio era and, thus, give the impression that Breitz’s clips are, in fact, the templates from which copies are created. Aesthetically, her performances picture her as the prototype that others attempt to mimic or appropriate. Breitz’s black-and-white reenactments leave viewers questioning whether contemporary identities are shaped by everyday life, or whether our needs, fears, and desires are a reflection of the images from the entertainment industry. Breitz elaborated on this confusion: “Becoming was an attempt to engage what ends up being a chicken-and-egg question without necessarily answering it. Rather than attempting to weigh the authenticity of either screen life or lived life, the work suggests the conventionality of all expression and gesture” (Breitz in: Burke, “Breitz” 12). To put it bluntly, according to Breitz, there are no original identities, only endless repetitions and becomings. Or, as Deleuze formulated in Difference and Repetition (1968): Returning is being, but only the being of becoming. The eternal return does not bring back ‘the same,’ but returning constitutes the only Same of that which becomes. Returning is the becoming-identical of becoming itself. Returning is thus the only identity, but identity as a secondary power: the identity of difference, the identical which belongs to the different, or turns around the different. Such an identity, produced by difference, is determined as ‘repetition.’ (Difference 50-51)

In repetition, difference is created. Repetition or looping is certainly a crucial feature in Breitz’s work, which makes use of the various strategies that our contemporary “remix culture” offers, from re-enactment to appropriation to other performative acts of repetition. Furthermore, I see a connection between Deleuze’s idea of repetition as difference and Wolfgang Iser’s concept of representation as recipient’s performance. For Iser, “[r]epresentation arises out of and thus entails the removal of difference, whose irremovability transforms representation into a performative act of staging something” (Prospecting 245). In the following chapter, I will make use of Iser’s recipient’s approach for reading authorial representation as performance.

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A UTHORIAL R EPRESENTATION

AS A

P ERFORMATIVE A CT

In this chapter, I will extend Wolfgang Iser’s reader-response theory, which describes literary representation as a performative act of the reader to my discussion of authorship. I argue that authors equally engage in a form of role play when producing their texts, thus simultaneously creating their works and their author selves. Hence, there are (at least) two performative acts involved in the arts: the performative act of production and the performative act of reception. Iser was well aware of this multilateral process, as he explained in “The Play of the Text,” part of his seminal publication Prospecting: From Reader Response to Literary Anthropology (1989). He wrote “author, text, and reader are thought of as interconnected in a relationship that is the ongoing process of producing something that did not previously exist” (Prospecting 249). Earlier, in 1977, Iser described the literary work, or aesthetic object, as a result of two linked poles: “[W]e may conclude that the literary work has two poles, one the ‘artistic’ and the other the ‘aesthetic.’ The artistic pole is the author’s text and the aesthetic is the actualization or the realization accomplished by the reader” (“Defense” 21-22). However, while Iser clearly focused on the recipient’s participation in the production of representation, I aim to scrutinize the author’s role in this process. Differences in the performative acts of text production and text reception must be acknowledged. It is striking to note, for example, that once a work of art is produced or published, the performance of the author has largely ended, 29 while the performative acts of the reader have just begun and may never end. Yet a deeper analysis of the performative act of the author reveals this process to be more complex, promosing perspectives on authorship as a cultural performance. In his chapter “Representation: A Performative Act,” Iser argued for a notion of representation in literary criticism not as mimesis but as performance, stressing “the qualities through which the act of representation brings about something that hitherto did not exist as a given object” (Prospecting 236). He delineated how representation as performance, as distinct from representation as mimesis, involves two relating acts: the act of selection and the act of combination. The act of selection, Iser argued, is a form of doubling that echoes the overall “doubling structure of fictionality,” which he detected in the production of literary texts (Prospecting 236). This process of selection is integral to fictionality, for each text forcefully advances into “extratextual fields of reference” in order to create an interpretation of the world. The act of selection is a kind of break, or disruption, which creates, what Iser called, “an eventful disorder” in the structure and semantics of these extratextual fields. In this process, structure and semantics are subjected to

29 If we do not take into account such things as interviews, readings, signings, and so forth.

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certain deformations and are restructured in the text to take on new forms. In the act of selection, each field of reference is thereby split up, because “the chosen elements can only take on their significance through the exclusion of others” (Prospecting 237). New meaning is thus assembled, yet this new form “includes and indeed depends on the function of that field” of reference in a kind of double helix. The act of selection, thereby, reveals the doubling structure of fictionality as a whole. Extratextual fields are activated and are, at once, reshaped in their structure and semantics, while, simultaneously, “something that hitherto did not exist as a given object” (Prospecting 236) is created. This new meaning, or new form, is not representation as mimesis, but representation born out of performance. Furthermore, the act of selection creates intertextuality, which renders the doubling process more complex, because it triggers an interplay between the written texts and the texts alluded to: “The one discourse becomes the theme viewed from the standpoint of the other, and vice versa,” Iser explained (Prospecting 237). From the interplay between these discourses emerges, what Iser called, “semantic instability,” which brings about a “dynamic oscillation” between the texts to ensure that their “old meanings now become potential sources for new ones” (Prospecting 237). It is here where Iser located the aesthetic dimension of a text and its potential of plurivocity: “The text itself,” he confirmed, “becomes a kind of junction, where other texts, norms, and values meet and work upon each other” (Prospecting 238). The act of combination, the second act in Iser’s theory of representation as performance, works within the same structure as the act of selection. Yet here we are concerned with intratextual boundary crossings, such as lexical meanings and constellations of characters. “Every word,” Iser wrote, “becomes dialogic, and every semantic field is doubled by another” (Prospecting 238). On the lexical level, the act of combination thus facilitates manifold possibilities of associations. Through its “double-voiced discourse” it also “enables what is not said to become present” (Prospecting 238). What is written brings to light what is not written and, paradoxically, often results in highlighting that which is absent. The double meaning of each word or field, therefore, “opens up a multifariousness of interconnections within the text,” as Iser stated (Prospecting 238). The extratextual act of selection and the intratextual act of combination are the two areas from which the aesthetic quality of a text comes and where it is located. According to Iser: The act of selection brings about a network of relationships by invoking and simultaneously deforming extratextual fields of reference, thereby giving rise to the aesthetic quality, while the act of combination – by inscribing the absent into the present – becomes the matrix of that aesthetic quality. (Prospecting 238)

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Both acts, the act of selection and the act of combination, are the means by which representation in terms of performance – not mimesis – functions. Iser’s two acts demonstrate the enactment of “the performative qualities through which the act of representation brings about something that hitherto did not exist as a given object” to, once again, use this significant quote (Prospecting 236). Old meanings become potential sources for new ones through the disruption of the structure and semantics of the extratextual field as well as through the duplication of the constellation and meaning of the intratextual field. Representation is, in other words, not a mimetic description or depiction of something already in existence, but is, in fact, the emergence of something new through performative acts. Literary fiction, therefore, is described by Iser as “an enabling structure generating an aesthetic potential” (Prospecting 241). This is where Iser’s reader-response theory sets in. Readers take up the aesthetic potential and engage in an active role play while reading. Iser argued that “[r]epresentation can only unfold itself in the recipient’s mind, and it is through his active imaginings alone that the intangible can become an image,” (Prospecting 243). The reader or recipient finds herself in a similar situation to an actor “who in order to perform his role must use his thoughts, his feelings, and even his body as an analogous for representing something he is not” (Prospecting 244). There is, yet again, a certain form of doubling involved. The act of representation is transferred to the side of the readers, who need to perform their respective acts of selection and acts of combination while reading the text. Reading involves the active participation of the reader’s imagination to, as Iser explained, “become an image.” Readers thereby make active use of intra- and extratextual fields of reference by associating and drawing on analogies and affects. Iser wrote of this reader participation in the act of representation as a performance: It follows, then, that representation, by bridging difference and thus making the intangible conceivable, is an act of performing and not – as Western tradition has repeated time and again – an act of mimesis, since mimesis presupposes a given reality that is to be portrayed in one way or another. (Prospecting 243)

He further argued that for the duration of the reader’s role play, or performance, we are both ourselves and someone else. Iser concluded his analysis by stressing that “staging oneself as someone else is a source of aesthetic pleasure; it is also the means whereby representation is transferred from text to reader” (Prospecting 244). Can we argue, therefore, that role play and performance are also the means by which representation is transferred from author to text and to the world-beyond-thetext? How can we bring forward the argument for the transition from the reader’s role play to the author’s role play in the act of representation as a performative act? Role play, or performance, I argue, works for authors as well. Authors stage

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themselves as authors in acts of authorial self-invention. This self-invention takes place inside and outside of the text proper, for example, in form of the appearance of an author within her own text or in form of paratexts. Gérard Genette, who described paratexts as thresholds between the inside and the outside of texts, wrote that “this fringe, in effect, always bearer of an authorial commentary either more or less legitimated by the author, constitutes, between the text and what lies outside it, a zone not just of transition, but of transaction” (“Paratext” 261). Clearly, Genette’s emphasis lied on the action, or, as I would say, on the performance. Authors perform representation within and beyond their texts; in other words, they extend their texts to incorporate their author persona into the interior as well as the exterior of the text proper. The paratext, thereby, is a promising place to detect authorial self-invention and self-representation, because it is especially in this gray area, or “indeterminate zone,” where authors have conventionally and most frequently been able to present and represent themselves as authors. It is in the paratext where authorial representation as performance operates most visibly. The phenomenon of the paratext thus deserves a closer examination, before we return to Iser’s concept of representation as a performative act. In Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation (1987), Genette delineated possible means and functions of paratexts. He outlined five basic characteristics of paratexts: the spatial, the temporal, the substantial, the pragmatic, and the functional.30 Genette gave many examples to show the possible range of paratext: title and preface, interviews and private journals, advertisement, illustrations, typography and composition as well as information about the age and the sex of the author. “Every context creates a paratext,” Genette wrote and continued that “[t]hose who know it do not read in the same way as those who do not” (“Paratext” 266). Genette’s fourth paratextual characteristic, pragmatic, is the most interesting one for the question of representation as authorial performance in paratexts. Under the term pragmatic status, Genette subsumed all communicative instances or situations of paratext that include the nature of the addresser, her authority and responsibility, the addressee, and the illocutionary force of the message itself. Before we look at the paratextual message and its striking attribute of illocutionary force, let me begin with the addresser and addressee. Genette further differentiated the addresser with three subgroups of the paratext: the authorial, the editorial, and the allographic paratext, which is a text written by a third person who is neither the author nor the editor. To clarify the degree of responsibility for the paratext, Genette introduced the terms official and officious to the discourse: “Any paratextual message for which the author and/or the editor assumes a responsibility which he cannot escape is official.” Genette’s examples of official paratexts are the title or the original preface of an anthumous

30 Genette, “Paratext” 263.

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paratext, whereas “the greater part of the authorial epitext – interviews, conversations and confidences – is officious,” as he wrote (“Paratext” 267). In these cases, authors can deny responsibility by contradicting their statements. Allographic paratexts, written by a third person who is neither author nor editor, fall into the category of the officious, and can function as the author’s mouthpiece: “It is sometimes to one’s interest that certain things ‘should be known,’ without having (publicly) said them oneself,” as Genette described (“Paratext” 268). Genette roughly defined the addressee as the “public.” He then elaborated on what he described as the illocutionary force of the paratextual message. Illocutionary force, of course, is the terminology of John L. Austin, who explained in his benchmark publication How to Do Things with Words (1955/1962) the performative quality of an illocutionary act in its constitution as “an act in saying something as opposed to performance of an act of saying something” (How 99-100). Genette attributed illocutionary force to the message of the paratext and thereby further stressed its performative aspect. Again, different kinds of illocutionary messages within the paratext are possible. First, there can be, what Genette called, pure information, that is anything like the name of the author or the date of publication. Second, there is authorial and/or editorial intention or interpretation, including genre indication such as the word “novel” on the cover or title page. Indeed, Genette elaborated, “novel does not mean ‘this book is a novel,’ an assertive definition which is not in control of any single person, but suggests instead to: ‘Please consider this book a novel’” (“Paratext” 268). Third, a real decision may be involved, such as a decision for a pseudonym or a title. Fourth, it can be a matter of what Genette termed an undertaking, which may include genre indications such as a contractual value of, for example, autobiography or a promise that accompanies statements like First Volume. Fifth, the message may have the illocutionary force of advice or injunction. Here Genette offered the very convincing example of Roland Barthes whose text Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes (1975) starts with the handwritten epigraph: “It must all be considered as if spoken by a character in a novel.” 31 Lastly, and most important for my argument, paratextual messages may imply the power of the performative, “that is the power to accomplish what they describe” (“Paratext” 268). For instance, this holds true for dedications, “a borderline case of paratextual efficacy, since it is sufficient to say it in order to do it” (“Paratext” 269). Furthermore, Genette also detected comparable mechanisms in the choice of a title or a pseudonym, which he described as “actions mimetic of all creative power” (“Paratext” 269). However, at the end of his introduction to the paratext, Genette restrictively added:

31 See my chapter “Self/Portrait” for a reading of Barthes’s R.B.

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No matter what aesthetic or ideological pretensions (‘fine title,’ preface-manifesto), no matter what coquetry, no matter what paradoxical inversion the author puts into it, a paratextual element is always subordinate to ‘its’ text, and this functionality determines the essentials of its aspect and of its existence. (“Paratext” 269)

This means, on the one hand, that the paratext, in order to function as a paratext, is always dependent on its proper text. On the other hand, the actual text also depends on its paratext, because it gives the text a frame and it functions as the threshold to the outside world, that is the world-beyond-the-text. The paratext’s intermediate position enables it to operate between the interior and the exterior of the text proper. Matters of information, intention, and decision are also performed on this textual level and are indispensable to the text proper because, as Genette suggested: “[T]here does not exist, and there never has existed, a text without paratext” (“Paratext” 263). Besides the text proper, it is within the paratext that authors present and represent themselves as the authors they want to become. This self-representation is performed in diverse manners and forms, such as in the author’s name, the title, the sub-title, the cover, dedications, the preface, epigraphs, illustrations, emblems, pictures, the epilogue, acknowledgements, the author’s photograph, and her short biography on the spine. It is also performed in the press or peer-reviewed commentaries on the back of the book. In short, the whole physical object of the text – the book or artwork to put it bluntly – can be used as a space for authorial self-invention and selfrepresentation.32 Nevertheless, in whatever form or style presented, paratext is text after all. And all paratexts, as Genette explained, “share the linguistic status of the text. Most frequently, then, the paratext is itself a text; if it is not yet the text it is already textual,” as he clarified (“Paratext” 265). The paratext is not the text proper, yet, it is neither outside the actual text nor inside the world but right in between these two permeable zones. That means that, after all, paratexts are linguistic constructions and, even more so, constructions with highly conventional and stylized formulas. Paratexts, as we have seen with Genette, convey the illocutionary force of their message. It was Austin himself who pointed out that illocutionary acts, that is, acts with illocutionary force, are conventional acts and thus “have a certain (conventional) force” (How 109). Austin elaborated: We must notice that the illocutionary act is a conventional act: an act done as conforming to a convention. [...] Strictly speaking, there cannot be an illocutionary act unless the means

32 Certainly authors cannot determine all aspects of the published text, for example the size of the book or the quality of the paper. Publishing houses, editors, and booksellers demand to keep their standards of cooperate design, especially for promotional reasons.

40 | P ERFORMING A UTHORSHIP employed are conventional, and so the means for achieving it non-verbally must be conventional. But it is difficult to say where conventions begin and end. (How 105, 119)

This description is valid for the paratext as well, as Genette concluded at the end of his introduction: “[O]ne is dealing here with a discourse much more ‘constrained’ than many others, in which authors innovate less often than they imagine” (“Paratext” 270). There are distinct rules and requirements for the paratext that have been well established and that cannot be overcome easily. 33 Many authors, mainly due to editors’s demands, cannot be, or dare not to be, extraordinarily creative in their paratextual messages, at least when it comes to form. The imaginative authorial potential thus unfolds most strongly through the content of the paratext, through the title, pseudonym, or preface. By choosing one’s author name (either as a pseudonym or as a variation of one’s proper name), and by choosing a title and/or by composing a dedication, the author performs her representational power and generates “something that hitherto did not exist as a given object,” to return to Iser’s definition of representation (Prospecting 236). At the very least, already within the paratext, the author as object and the text as object, represented by its title, are created and established through performative means. This detour to Austin’s speech act theory and Genette’s definition of the paratext was necessary to tie together the open ends between authorial (self)-representation as performance and the text, that is, the complete text including all paratextual practices. Furthermore, the excursion was already a short demonstration of how representation as authorial performance may work and function, most convincingly explained through the examples of pseudonyms, titles, and dedications. Thus, in order to examine authorial performance in the production of representation, we can now return to Iser’s concept of representation as a performative act and my aim to extend his work from the side of the recipient to that of the author. To understand the transfer of representation from text to reader, we must first understand Iser’s conceptual framework as well as its meaning for and function in representation. First, there is Iser’s notion of difference and its significance for literary discourse. Second, there is Iser’s concept of semblance as the basic ingredient of representation. And lastly, there is Iser’s idea of repetition that introduces performative activity to the nature of representation. Difference and semblance are interdependent in Iser’s scheme, because “although difference downgrades representation to the level of semblance, it also needs this semblance in order to manifest itself” (Prospecting 243). Fiction in literary discourse is a staged discourse that discloses its own fictional nature and that cannot be falsified. Thereby, literary discourse encompasses two mutually exclusive realms, the text and the world-beyond-the-text, which are

33 Does a book without title exist? How would readers recognize such a “title-less” book?

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“bracketed together” yet “nevertheless retain their difference” (Prospecting 241). Difference to Iser is, therefore, not only the precondition for doubling, and, consequently, the “hallmark of literary fictionality” but “also the driving force behind its own removal” (Prospecting 241). Difference is always retained, otherwise “that which appears as doubled would instead merge into one” (Prospecting 241). Therefore, difference, as the origin of representation, “defies determination by any form of representation,” as Iser concluded (Prospecting 242). The second feature in the framework of representation is semblance, or rather aesthetic semblance, which gives rise to a representation of something “that has no given reality of its own, and is therefore only the condition for the production of an imaginary object,” as Iser explained (Prospecting 243). Iser thereby strongly differentiated his aesthetic semblance from Friedrich Schiller’s “beautiful semblance” and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel’s “sensuous appearance of the idea,” because aesthetic semblance “neither transcends a given reality nor mediates between idea and manifestation” (Prospecting 243). Rather, aesthetic semblance evokes an image of the invisible that points to something in the world-beyond-the-text, that is “reality.” Yet, at the same time, semblance denies this image “the status of a copy of reality” (Prospecting 243). Aesthetic semblance is, therefore, not to be confused with resemblance, because of its interdependence with difference, which is always retained. Semblance can rather be pictured as a blurred ghost version of “reality” which is, at the same time, recognizable yet alien to us and, thus, always different from what we call “reality.” Repetition, Iser’s third category, is necessary for the recipient to “initiate and ensure the transfer from text to reader of what is to be represented” (Prospecting 243). The reader must repeat the performance of representation by bringing in her own thoughts and feelings to make the invisible present. “In this respect,” Iser wrote, “the required activity of the recipient resembles that of an actor, who in order to perform his roles must use his thoughts, his feelings, and even his body as an analogous for representing something he is not,” (Prospecting 244). Like an actor on stage (and literary discourse is a staged discourse), recipients must get engaged and repeat the very performance out of which representation arose to enable the emergence of “what representation seeks to make present in us” (Prospecting 244). Readers, thereby, enact their performances in a kind of role play, imagining themselves as someone else during the performance. Iser summed up the three qualities of difference, semblance, and repetition, which amount to representation as a performative act: The aesthetic semblance can only take on its form by way of the recipient’s ideational, performative activity, and so representation can only come to full fruition in the recipient’s imagination: it is the recipient’s performance that endows the semblance with its sense of reality. And so representation causes the recipient to repeat the very same performance out of

42 | P ERFORMING A UTHORSHIP which it arose, and it is the repeat of this performance that initiates and ensures the transfer from text to reader of what is to be represented. (Prospecting 243)

Representation operates as an oscillation between difference and semblance, performed through repetition by the recipients in the form of role play. The staged discourse of “fictionalizing acts” 34 has to be staged over and over again by the recipients in order to unfold its representational quality and power. Iser compared the staging of fictionality to the phenomenon of dreaming, for it involves “both the structures of our everyday reality and our psychic patterning” and, thus, “produces a specifically aesthetic quality” (Prospecting 239). It is this aesthetic potential35 that Iser defined as the fundamental element to all literary discourse: “Representation is first and foremost an act of performance, bringing forth in the mode of staging something that in itself is not given” (Prospecting 248). According to Iser, staging oneself as someone else is a source of aesthetic pleasure, and staging “is also the means whereby representation is transferred from text to reader,” as he concluded (Prospecting 244). I am convinced that staging is also the means whereby representation is transferred from author to text. Already in this phase of the triangular production of representation delineated by author, text, and reader, representation can only unfold itself when authors engage in a form of role play as well. Iser already hinted at this possibility when he wrote: “[R]epresentation causes the recipient to repeat the very same performance out of which it arose” (Prospecting 243). So representation arises out of a performance by the author and must be re-performed, time and again, by the recipient. Just like readers, authors also have to place their “own thoughts and feelings at the disposal of what representation seeks to make present” (Prospecting 244). What applies for readers therefore also applies for authors: To imagine what has been stimulated by aesthetic semblance entails placing our thoughts and feelings at the disposal of an unreality, bestowing on it a semblance of reality in proportion to a reducing of our own reality. For the duration of the performance we are both ourselves and someone else. (Prospecting 244)

Imagining, or creating, is a matter of staging the unseeable in order to render it visible. Authors are, for the duration of the performance of production, both

34 Cf. Iser: “Fictionality is not to be identified with the literary text, although it is a basic constituent of it. For this reason I refrain from using the word ‘fiction’ whenever I can and speak instead of fictionalizing acts. These do not refer to an ontologically given, but to an operation, and therefore cannot be identical to what they produce” (Prospecting 236-237). 35 Iser has also called it “aesthetic dimension,” “aesthetic character,” or “aesthetic pleasure.”

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themselves and someone else. The same mechanisms of representation as performance, and not as mimesis, are in operation during the performance of production as they are during the performance of perception. During the production stage, both the act of selection, with its double structure inroads into extratextual fields, and the act of combination, with its intratextual potential for countless associations, are at play. Authors, necessarily, draw on extratextual fields of reference for their work, while they also make use of intertextuality and are dependent on the double-voiced discourse of the intratextual interconnectedness.36 These fictionalizing acts may occur randomly or are deployed consciously by authors. Most importantly, though, these acts display the performative quality of the creative process that uses the means of staging to make the absent present in representation. Authors likewise gain aesthetic pleasure through staging themselves as both themselves and someone else. Iser pursued the universal rationale behind the phenomenon of staging, which equally applies to recipients and authors: The need for such a staging arises out of man’s decentered position: we are, but do not have ourselves. Wanting to have what we are, that is, to step out of ourselves in order to grasp our own identity, would entail having final assurances as to our origins, but as these underlie what we are, we cannot ‘have’ them. [...] we know that we live, but we don’t know what living is, and if we want to know, we have to invent what is denied us. (Prospecting 244)

‘Wanting to know’ and ‘wanting to have ourselves’ are strong universal urges that apply to everyone, recipients and authors alike. Authors, without question, are interested in, if not obsessed with, grasping (their own) identities. Staging themselves as authors is a pleasurable means to play with such identity questions, not only within the text proper but also on the fringes of the world-beyond-the-text. Iser explained that “knowledge of what man is can only come about in the form of play” (Prospecting 245), and, in literary discourse, this play is a mutual one. Representation is not an act of mimesis but, rather, an act of performance enacted by recipients in the form of role play. Representation is, likewise, not an act of authorial mimesis but an act of performance enacted by authors in the form of role play. The mimetic author, that is, the author who tries to “duplicate reality,” is dead, according to Barthes, but the representational performative author, that is, the author who performs representation, is alive and well and ready to play.

36 Iser, Prospecting 237-238.

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P ERFORMATIVE A UTHORSHIP Before we can address these fascinating authorial performances, several questions must be asked. What is the aesthetic function of performative authorship? What are the cultural meanings of this phenomenon? To answer these fundamental questions, it is necessary to acknowledge the diversity of motivations and manifestations of performative authorship, which I will illustrate with my four selected authors. It is my intention to show a spectrum of ways that authorship has been performed, using authors who are representative rather than exhaustive. Why Paul Auster, Sophie Calle, Candice Breitz, and Jonathan Safran Foer each chose to perform their respective authorships will be explored in detail throughout this book. But first I offer introductory remarks on the functions of performative authorship in their works in order to set the framework for my subsequent analyses of their individual expressions of this larger cultural phenomenon. My approach of discussing authors from different generations, origins, and genders reveals a range of reasons for performative authorship in contemporary art and literature. Yet commonalities do exist among these authors. Collectively, Auster’s debut publication The Invention of Solitude (1982), Foer’s forthcoming book Escape from Children’s Hospital,37 Calle’s early work “The Sleepers” (1979),38 and one of Breitz’s latest productions “Extra” (2011),39 display significant shifts in the cultural field. Such tendencies are typically categorized under postmodernism

37 “A fictionalized account of a life-changing event that happened to the author as a nineyear-old [...]. Weaving precariously between non-fiction and fiction, and existing at the intersection of different styles (suspense, memoir, imaginative storytelling), the book moves out from that moment in 1985 to the repercussions on the ever-expanding circle of those affected by it” (Foer, “Escape from Children’s Hospital” (book review). GoodReads, http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/13610162-escape-from-children-s-hospital. 38 Cf. Calle: “I asked people to give me a few hours of their sleep. To come and sleep in my bed. To let themselves be looked at and photographed. To answer questions. To each participant I suggested an eight hour stay” (M’as tu vue 145). 39 Kerr Houston: “Candice Breitz’s Extra (2011), [is] the centerpiece of a recent survey exhibition of Breitz’s work— her first in her native South Africa […] Extra is a video project in which the artist worked with the cast and crew of the immensely popular South African soap opera Generations. After the cast completed a shoot for broadcast purposes, Breitz inserted herself into the mise en scène [...]: sitting in the background, or lying on a table, or draped on the shoulders of an actor—and the scene was shot once more, with the actors instructed to ignore her as fully as possible. Breitz was thus an extra in a series of extra takes” (“Absent Presence” 52).

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and post-postmodernism, even though “nobody likes the term” postmodernist, as Brian McHale stated in his 1987 book Postmodern Fiction (3). What seems to unite all these cultural expressions in the post-World War II period – an era that Ulrich Beck, Anthony Giddens, and Scott Lash called reflexive modernity40 – is a decisive move towards self-reflexivity and self-referentiality. Mark McGurl, in his book The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing (2009), used the concept of reflexive modernity to explain this metafictional impulse41 in the arts. He summarized the idea as follows: “To be subject to reflexive modernity is to feel a ‘compulsion for the manufacture, self-design, and self-staging’ of a biography and, indeed, for the obsessive ‘reading’ of that biography even as it is being written” (Program 12-13). Convincingly, McGurl described reflexive modernity as “a hall of mirrors in which the subject engages in an endlessly entertaining but, on another level, frighteningly compulsory performance of self” (Program 365). Selfreflexivity, in this respect, is a double-edged phenomenon that is simultaneously selfimposed as well as inflicted upon individuals who are “condemned to individualization,” yet who are also allowed to partake in a “thrilling panoply of choices about how they will live their lives” (Program 12). Effective self-reflexivity thus ranges from compulsive self-monitoring to liberating self-invention. All authors, on some level, take part in these processes of self-optimization and self-discovery. But contemporary authors increasingly engage in self-reflexive and self-referential approaches in order to be seen and heard in the literary and art marketplace, for “being the dominant figure in Shakespeare’s or even Pound’s time was, by comparison to today, easy as pie,” as McGurl declared (Program 410). The practice of self-reflexivity in the postmodern Program Era, however, is not only connected to current “marketing strategies,” but is also linked to the pre-modern or what McGurl called the Pound Era, where it finds it origins.42 In his publication Pynchon, Auster, DeLillo: Die amerikanische Postmoderne zwischen Spiel und Rekonstruktion (1996), Martin Klepper argued that postmodernity broke away from the perceived backwardness of the realistic tradition

40 See: Beck, Giddens, and Lash, Reflexive Modernization: Politics, Tradition and Aesthetics in the Modern Social Order, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994. 41 Cf. McGurl: “[I]t was of a piece with a broader postwar codification and intensification of modernist reflectivity in the form of what came to be called ‘surfiction’ or, more durably, ‘metafiction’” (Program 9). Also see: Patricia Waugh’s Metafiction: The Theory and Practice of Self-Conscious Fiction, 1984. 42 McGurl: “The rise and spread of creative writing programs over the course of the postwar period has transformed the conditions under which American literature is produced. […] It has in other words converted the Pound Era into the Program Era.” (Program 281).

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of American modernity by pushing self-reflexivity beyond its modernist experiments.43 Klepper noted a developmental shift and an aesthetic transformation with the postmodern project in literature, from an aesthetics of playfully dismantling (“zerspielende Ästhetik”) in the 1960s and 1970s to one of reconstruction (“rekonstruktive Ästhetik”) in the 1980s and 1990s. 44 Regarding Auster, Klepper discussed The New York Trilogy (1987) as an illustration of deconstruction, and Moon Palace (1989), The Music of Chance (1990), and Leviathan (1992) as texts revealing reconstructive impulses, such as textuality as self-constitution (cf. Pynchon 375). Klepper thus delineated a complex reconstructive postmodernism, which he defined as follows: That way, a functional transformation in postmodern literature has taken place. The common playful dismantling of conventions and certainties through authors and readers is no longer the dominant impulse of this literature. Rather, it is about the quest for orientation on a floating surface of language and media, literature and the remains of conventions. Storytelling becomes more important again – however not as didactics or representation (mimesis), but as an attempt to find new structures or structuring possibilities through storytelling. Thereby, the significance of authors is again increased. (My translation, Pynchon 377)45

According to Klepper, this increased significance of storytelling, in general, and of the author figure, in particular, reopens the scope for action and offers “agency” (cf. Pynchon 48) in the process of authorial identity formation. Klepper identified this reinforced agency in the “intensive attempt to escape from the action paralysis of early postmodern theory formation and to reconstruct possibilities to act and

43 Cf. Klepper: “Gegen die so empfundenen Rückständigkeiten setzte die Postmoderne eine Überbietung modernistischer Selbstreflexivität” (my translation, Pynchon 51). 44 Klepper, Pynchon 48. 45 The original reads: “So hat sich in der postmodernen Literatur ein Funktionswandel vollzogen. Das gemeinsame Zerspielen von Konventionen und Gewißheiten durch AutorInnen und LeserInnen ist nicht mehr der dominante Impuls dieser Literatur. Vielmehr geht es um die Suche nach Orientierung auf einer fließenden Oberfläche von Sprache und Medien, Literatur und Konventionsresten. Das Erzählen wird wieder wichtiger – jedoch nicht als Didaktik oder Realitätsdarstellung (Mimesis), sondern als Versuch durch das Erzählen neue Strukturen oder Strukturierungsmöglichkeiten zu finden. Dabei steigert sich die Bedeutung der AutorInnen wieder.”

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overcome the same” (my translation, Pynchon 76).46 This takes place, as Klepper explained, in the form of “self-reflexive imitations of literary and artistic forms” (my translation, Pynchon 209).47 Like McGurl, Erika Fischer-Lichte, in her study of The Transformative Power of Performance (2004), developed a related concept of the self-reflexive and selfreferential trajectory in post- and post-postmodern art. She used the terminology of the autopoietic (or autopoetic), thereby “taking advantage of a common Greek root in autopoiesis (self-making) and poetics,” as McGurl explained (Program 49). Yet McGurl and Fischer-Lichte approached the autopoetic processes of both spectator and author from diverging perspectives. While Fischer-Lichte focused on the interplay between artists and their audiences, McGurl concentrated on the very act of authorship in the Program Era, highlighting “autopoetic agendas” such as “the portrait of the artist” or “the thematic representation of authorship” (Program 49). He saw “part of the value of the modern literary text” in “the act of authorship that it records, offering readers a mediated experience of expressive selfhood as such” (Program 19). Finally, both scholars arrived at similar observations on the performative character of the arts since the 1960s. “What has been described throughout this book,” McGurl summarized, “as ‘autopoetics’ – the routine reflexivity of literature embodied most explicitly in the literary genre of the portrait of the artist – is obviously nested in this larger reflexive-performative matrix” (Program 366). This new performative paradigm, illustrated by McGurl with the image of a “hall of mirrors,” was defined by Fischer-Lichte and others as the performative turn “which not only made each art form more performative but also led to the creation of a new genre of art, so-called action and performance art” (Transformative 18). By tracing the term performative from its original appearance in John L. Austin’s language philosophy of the 1950s to its theoretical reconsideration in literary and cultural studies of the 1990s by figures like Judith Butler and others, Fischer-Lichte arrived at a notion of culture as performance, replacing its predecessor of culture as text, “in order to accommodate explicitly bodily acts”48 (Transformative 26). For her

46 The original reads: “In Austers Romanwerk schließlich läßt sich der intensive Versuch beobachten, aus der Handlungsparalyse früher postmoderner Theoriebildung auszubrechen und Möglichkeiten des Handelns und Überwindens zu rekonstruieren.” 47 The original reads: “Bei Auster wird das Erzählte in selbstreflexiven Imitationen von literarischen und künstlerischen Formen wiedergegeben.” 48 Fischer-Lichte described the human body not as “a material like any other […] to be shaped and controlled by will,” but rather as “a living organism, constantly engaged in the process

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exegesis of an aesthetics of the performative,49 Fischer-Lichte disclosed the notion of the autopoietic feedback loop between author and audience. She wrote: [T]he autopoietic feedback loop is generated and kept in motion not just through visible and audible actions and attitudes of the actors and spectators but also through the energy circulating between them. […] perception plays a crucial role in the autopoietic processes of the feedback loop. […] The audience’s perception influences the performance from the outset and affects all participants reciprocally. (Transformative 59)

Fischer-Lichte thus stressed the indispensable participation of the audience in the creation of a performative artwork or, as she called it, event.50 This applies to many of Breitz’s artworks, which arise from the interplay between herself and others. Breitz even explicitly described herself as “someone who’s making loops, and working in the […] ‘loop business,’”51 thereby echoing Fischer-Lichte’s concept of the feedback loop of autopoiesis. Fischer-Lichte described the performative turn as the “dissolution of boundaries in the arts,” and explained that “[b]e it in art, music, literature, or theater, the creative process tends to be realized in and as performance. Instead of creating works of art, artists increasingly produce events which involve not just themselves but also the observers, listeners, and spectators” (Transformative 22). Calle’s and Auster’s “Gotham Handbook” (1994) certainly counts as such an event, involving not only Auster’s manuscript and Calle’s performance of it, but also her interaction with random people on the streets of New York City (cf. my chapter “Double Game”). Physical and intellectual participation and collaboration between

of becoming, of permanent transformation. The human body knows no state of being; it exists only in a state of becoming” (Transformative 92). 49 Fischer-Lichte summarized her aesthetics of the performative as such: “I will employ the findings produced by my analyses of mediality, materiality, and semioticity in performance as a basis to grasp the specific aestheticity of performance since the 1960s. In particular, three aspects have crystallized that directly constitute the nature of performance as event […]. These are: first, the feedback loop’s autopoiesis, […]; second, a destabilization, even erasure, of binary oppositions; and third, situations of liminality that transform the participants of the performance” (Transformative 163). 50 Cf. Fischer-Lichte: “The pivotal point of these processes is no longer the work of art, detached from and independent of its creator and recipient, which arises as an object from the activities of the creator-subject and is entrusted to the perception and interpretation of the recipient-subject. Instead, we are dealing with an event, set in motion and terminated by the actions of all the subjects involved – artists and spectators” (Transformative 22). 51 Breitz, “I’ll Be Your Mirror” s.p.

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author and audience mark these kinds of performative events. Furthermore, FischerLichte wrote about a “new self-understanding of the artists. No longer god-like creators of the work of art, they instead established similar conditions to laboratory researchers to which they exposed themselves and others” (Transformative 164). This surely applies to Calle who is well known for her staged self-experiments like “The Birthday Ceremony” (1980-1993), in which she acts out instructions or practices rituals.52 Fischer-Lichte also provided a new understanding of performative authorship when she wrote: “The artists relinquish their powerful positions as the performance’s sole creators; they agree to share – to varying degrees, of course – their authorship and authority with the audience” (Transformative 50). This new kind of artistic self-awareness, marked by performative practices of remix and appropriation, is evident in Breitz’s works such as “Soliloquy Trilogy” (2000)53 and “King” and “Queen” (2005) – a series that involved a “chorus of amateurs,” as I will show in the forthcoming chapters. While performative art of the postwar period has introduced and advanced forms of (physical) exchange and collaboration, it has thematically displayed, as McGurl argued, “a body of work [which] is fair to describe as self-involved even when its interests are patently social and historical. Explicitly or not, every work of serious fiction in this period is, on one level, a portrait of the artist” (Program xi). Explaining the reasons for this phenomenon, McGurl cited the tremendous increase of creative writing graduate programs at U.S. universities, with their programmatic agendas encouraging the self-expression and self-promotion of its students, which made a profound contribution to postwar American literature.54 McGurl traced the careers of

52 Calle: “On my birthday I always worry that people will forget me. In 1980, to relieve myself of this anxiety, I decided that every year, if possible on 9 October, I would invite to dinner the exact number of people corresponding to my age, including a stranger chosen by one of my guests. I did not use the presents received on these occasions. I kept them as tokens of affection. In 1993, at the age of forty, I put an end to this ritual” (M’as tu vue 261). 53 Breitz: “The Soliloquy Trilogy crafts a series of portrait-like short films by isolating key Hollywood protagonists from the contexts of their blockbuster films. Cutting back “The Witches of Eastwick” (starring Jack Nicholson), “Basic Instinct” (starring Sharon Stone), and “Dirty Harry” (starring Clint Eastwood), to only those moments in which each of the films’ lead actors is vocally present, the Trilogy distill the material of iconic Hollywood performances down to a paradoxical form of portraiture” (Scripted 103). 54 Cf. McGurl: “By 1984 there were some 150 graduate degree programs [...], and as of 2004 there were more than 350 creative writing programs in the United States, all of them staffed by practicing writers, most of whom, are themselves holders of an advanced degree in

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Raymond Carver and Joyce Carol Oates, the latter of whom started as an undergraduate at Syracuse University, “where her talent for writing was quickly perceived and nurtured by creative writing instructor Donald Dike. Thus began a lifelong affiliation with universities, first at Syracuse, later in and around Detroit, and finally at Princeton” (Program 299). Princeton University was also the place where Foer started his undergraduate career and where he took an introductory writing class with Oates who, for her part, encouraged him in his writing. Thus, we’ve come full circle, as Foer himself is currently a writer-in-residence in the creative writing program at New York University and exemplifies the kind of contemporary author that McGurl has described. For McGurl, every artist on campus is half a performance artist: making his name, doing his job, owning the product of his labor of ‘self-expression,’ the artist or writer-in-residence is in a sense the purest version of the kind of worker, the white-collar professional, that so many college students are preparing to be. (Program 408)

Performative authorship – the subject of my investigation – proves to be a complex and multi-faceted topic. The aesthetic function of this phenomenon varies with its actors and their specific circumstances and needs. Auster, as Klepper has shown, has engaged in processes of reconstructive postmodernism by performing an assertive authorial agency. Calle and Breitz, according to Fischer-Lichte’s conceptualization, have both contributed to the aesthetics of the performative55 by dissolving boundaries “between art and life, high culture and popular culture, and Western art and nonWestern art” (Transformative 203-204). Foer, in McGurl’s assessment of JewishAmerican authors, has performed his authorship as a “high pluralist writer” who “is additionally called upon to speak from the point of view of one or another hyphenated population, synthesizing the particularity of the ethnic – or analogously marked – voice with the elevated idiom of literary modernism” (Program 57). All four authors have performed their authorship within the larger framework of reflexive postmodernism and post-postmodernism. All have engaged in autopoetic processes, embracing the aesthetics of the performative. How the practice of becoming an author has transpired and taken shape in the works of Auster, Breitz, Calle, and Foer will be closely examined and interpreted in the following chapters.

creative writing. […] [David] Fenza estimates that the total contribution […] runs to at least 200 million dollar annually” (Program 24). 55 Cf. Fischer-Lichte: “The aesthetics of the performative focuses on art that crosses borders” (Transformative 203).

Positioning

‘Making one’s mark’, initiating a new epoch, means winning recognition, in both senses, of one’s difference from other producers, especially the most consecrated of them; it means, by the same token, creating a new position, ahead of the positions already occupied, in the vanguard. (My emphasis, Bourdieu, “Field” 60)

In my chapter “Positioning,” I will analyze how authors consciously locate themselves and their work within the larger field of cultural production. While the process of positioning occurs involuntary with every ‘mark’ authors leave, I will concentrate on deliberate genealogical approaches employed by authors to ‘create a new position’ in the field. Thereby, I describe two main aspects of intentional positioning, which I term auto/biography and self/portrait. In doing so, I treat both text forms as corresponding strategies of performative authorship. In what follows, I will show how authors develop their author persona in and through auto/biographical self/portraits. However, I do not analyze these texts as conventional autobiographies, in the sense of “self-life-writing,” but rather as productive means to invent authorial selves. These texts, I argue, are not about a “real” author person, but rather, they are about an author persona who is to be invented, positioned, and staged incessantly in the creative process. In the first part, “Auto/Biography,” I will read Paul Auster’s “autobiographies” as such texts of authorial self-invention. For my discussion, I will critically question Philippe Lejeune’s notion of the autobiographical pact and further build upon Pierre Bourdieu’s field of cultural production. In the second part, “Self/Portrait,” I will focus on three significantly different texts by Candice Breitz, Sophie Calle, and Jonathan Safran Foer analyzing them as portraits of their author selves. My readings rely on a theoretical discussion of Gilles Deleuze’s concept of difference and repetition, a comparison to Roland Barthes’s auto/biographies, and an engagement with Michel de Montaigne’s essays.

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A UTO /B IOGRAPHY Autobiography is certainly one of the most ambiguous and slippery text forms. Attempts to categorize autobiography as a genre have generally been highly criticized. Despite this critique, however, autobiographical writings are worthwhile texts for analyzing authorial self-invention, because authorship is most visible in them. Philippe Lejeune wrote in his seminal study “The Autobiographical Pact” (1975): “Indeed, by bringing up the problem of the author, autobiography brings to light phenomena that fiction leaves in doubt” (“Pact” 6). The “problem of the author,” or, more generally, questions of authorship, can effectively be addressed in autobiographical texts, because the author figure appears simultaneously as the author, the narrator, and the protagonist. Likewise, autobiographical texts are worthwhile sources because they are “referential texts,” as Lejeune explained. Autobiographical texts “claim to provide information about a ‘reality’ exterior to the text, and so to submit to a test of verification. Their aim is not simple verisimilitude, but resemblance to the truth. Not ‘the effect of the real,’ but the image of the real” (“Pact” 22). Even though loaded terms such as real or truth must be used carefully, I see in Lejeune’s words the link between Wolfgang Iser’s concept of representation as a performative act and my interest in autobiographies as referential texts. Iser defined representation as a performative act, as an act that “brings about something that hitherto did not exist as a given object” (Prospecting 236). To view autobiographical texts as no more but not less than ‘images of the real,’ as referential texts that refer to something that ‘hitherto did not exist,’ is to read “autobiographies” as performances of authorial self-invention that bring about the becoming an author. As this chapter illustrates, autobiographical texts are not solely personal narratives of individuals but also textual strategies to invent and create author subjects. Or, to put it in the words of the author Siri Hustvedt,1 as expressed in her insightful essay “The Real Story”: “The art of autobiography, as much as the art of fiction, calls on the writer to shape himself as a character in a story, and that shaping requires a form mediated by language” (Living 103). Autobiographical writings are therefore to be read as self-conscious and explicit ways to foster one’s own becoming an author by facilitating a productive force of perpetual authorial self-invention. Thus, this subchapter’s title, with its ambiguous orthography of auto/biography, emphasizes that autobiography is the biography of an author subject, since the self (auto) is not a solid, established entity, but, rather, an ephemeral concept in a state of becoming.

1

Hustvedt, celebrated author of essays and novels such as What I Loved (2003), The Sorrows of an American (2008), and The Summer Without Men (2011), has been married to Paul Auster since 1982.

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Trying to define autobiography, Lejeune gave the following general definition: autobiography is “[r]etrospective prose narrative written by a real person concerning his own existence, where the focus is the individual life, in particular the story of his personality” (“Pact” 4). This dry definition of autobiography clearly spawned vehement criticism from literary scholars, such as the prominent Paul de Man. In “Autobiography as De-Facement” (1979),2 de Man wrote: “Empirically as well as theoretically, autobiography lends itself poorly to generic definition; each specific instance seems to be an exception to the norm” (“De-Facement” 920). Likewise, I am not interested in the discourse of autobiography as a genre but rather auto/biographical texts as performative strategies of authorial self-invention. Significantly, however, Lejeune described and analyzed autobiography from the position of the reader, “which is mine, the only one I know well” (“Pact” 4). In looking at texts from the reader’s perspective, I see yet another similarity between Iser’s and Lejeune’s approaches. Furthermore, as I extended Iser’s reader-response theory to the author in the previous chapter, here I will emphasize the author’s role in Lejeune’s idea of autobiographical pact in order to expose the performative qualities of autobiographical texts. Despite the aforementioned criticism, I see in Lejeune’s autobiographical pact a useful analytical concept for approaching the challenges of autobiographical narratives, allowing for degrees of differentiation in what otherwise remains a very ambiguous text form. Lejeune was one of the first to describe autobiography as a contractual genre that equally builds on the type of writing – the author’s side – and the mode of reading – the reader’s side. Autobiography defined as such depends on two conditions. First, Lejeune drew an ‘unbreakable’ link between the person writing and her proper name through the notion of the author. Second, he chose the perspective of the reader to examine autobiographical writings. 3 Lejeune explained that the sameness of the name of the author, the narrator, and the character is mandatory for autobiography because it “is not a guessing game: it is in fact exactly the opposite” (“Pact” 13). Rather, author and reader enter into a contract. The autobiographical pact is thus the

2

Cf. Séan Burke’s reevaluation of de Man’s text in view of the discovery of de Man’s 170 articles published in the collaborationist Belgian newspaper Le Soir between 1940 and 1942, “a certain number of which articles express anti-Semitic and pro-Nazi sentiment,” and: “Not surprisingly, since his Le Soir articles have come to light, many commentators have seen factors beyond those of textual epistemology urging his flight from the self. De Man’s denial of biography, his ideas of autobiography as de-facement, have come to be seen not as disinterested theoretical statements, but as sinister and meticulous acts of selfprotection, by which he sought to (a)void his historical self” (Death 1, 2).

3

Lejeune, “Pact” 19.

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affirmation, within the text, of the identity (sameness) of the author, narrator, and protagonist who are one in the same and who refer back to the name on the cover of the book.4 After all, Lejeune assessed, “[t]he deep subject of autobiography is the proper name” (“Pact” 20). Thereby, the name on the book cover does not necessarily have to be the proper name of the person writing, as Lejeune specified: “The pseudonym is the name of the author. It is not exactly a false name, but a pen name, a second name [...]. The pseudonym is simply a differentiation, a division of the name, which changes nothing in the identity” (“Pact” 12). I agree that pseudonyms are author names but would like to argue that the author name, whether given or taken, forms and constitutes the author identity, at least in part. The name of an author does indeed shape and alter her authorial identity and can thus never be as referential to the “real person” as Lejeune wished it to be when he wrote: [T]here is no need to go back to an impossible world-beyond-the-text; the text itself offers this last word at the very end, the proper name of the author, which is both textual and unquestionably referential. If this reference is beyond doubt, [...]; there is, then, no reason to doubt identity. (“Pact” 21)

Yet doubt remains and must remain, because authorial identity is and will always be an evolving construction of perpetual becomings. However, author and reader make a pact with each other, determining whether a text could and should be read as autobiographical or fictional. 5 “What defines autobiography for the one who is reading,” Lejeune explained, “is above all a contract of identity that is sealed by the proper name. And this is true also for the one who is writing the text” (“Pact” 19). The latter thought, of course, is relevant for authorial self-invention, because it foregrounds the performative quality of autobiographical writing. “The contract of identity that is sealed by the proper name” is not only accepted by the reader but equally by the author. I would even go so far as to say that the author identity, signified by her author name, is only made possible through an inner contract of identity between the author and herself. Lejeune asked: “If I write the story of my life without mentioning my name in it, how will my reader know that it was I?” (“Pact” 19-20). How will I, as the author, know who that “I” is? The inner contract of authorial identity, the autobiographical pact with oneself, temporarily allows for the person and the author to be subsumed under the same author name.

4

Lejeune, “Pact” 14.

5

Cf. Lejeune: “Parallel to the autobiographical pact, we could place the fictional pact, which would itself have two aspects: obvious practice of nonidentity (the author and the protagonist do not have the same name), affirmation of fictitiousness (in general it is the subtitle novel which today performs this function on the cover” (“Pact” 14-15).

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The name of the author, in turn, allows for repetitive yet ever-changing images of identity that render the possibility of autobiographical writing. The author figure, which is, using Iser’s phrase once again, “something that hitherto did not exist as a given object,” is brought about only with and through the author name. In modernity, the author name thus became the locus of authorial identity for readers and authors alike, revealing that the autobiographical pact simultaneously functions on different levels and between various participants. Using examples from the writings of André Gide, François Mauriac, and Jean-Paul Sartre, Lejeune convincingly disclosed that modern narrative production is often written and read in the autobiographical register: This form of indirect pact is becoming increasingly widespread. Formerly it was the reader who, despite the denials of the author, took the initiative and the responsibility for this type of reading; today, on the contrary, authors and publishers start off from the beginning in this direction. [...] All these games, which show clearly the predominance of the autobiographical project, are found again, to varying degrees, in many modern writers. (“Pact” 28)

I agree with Lejeune’s observation, which can easily be extended to much post- or post-postmodern narrative production. Hustvedt confirmed this tendency. Pursuing the argument to the demands of the contemporary book market, she discussed “a form of hybrid” book marketed as fiction but based on facts: “There is nothing new about novelists using their own experience to make a fiction. What seemed new was the need for the publisher to declare what those experiences were” (Living 109). Despite these valid observations, the question as to why the autobiographical register has become increasingly desirable for authors, readers, and publishers alike has generated lively discussion for decades. Ihab Hassan, in his intriguing essay “Quest: Forms of Adventure in Contemporary American Literature” (1987), reformulated the key questions of our autobiographical hunger and offered some suggestions: Why this rage for self-witness? Perhaps because we live in a self-regarding age; perhaps through autobiography we debt the obsolescence of the self in mass society, and hope to refute Nietzsche who proclaimed the self a fiction; perhaps because we lack consensus in our values, and so must ground our deepest articulations on the self, on death itself, the invisible ground of every autobiography. But perhaps, too, we choose autobiography because it expresses all the ambiguities of our postmodern condition. Autobiography is, of course, literature itself, the impulse of a living subject to testify in writing, as the Greek etymology of the word shows. But in the current climate of our ironic self-awareness, autobiography loses its innocence; it becomes the vehicle for our epistemic invasions, our social and psychic vexations. (“Quest” 124)

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If we understand the self as a complex form of fiction and seak to analyze its constructedness, do we gain more agency in the creation of this self? Is autobiographical writing, then, not a form of expression to generate and position different versions of the self? Or, to ask it in Hassan’s words: “Isn’t autobiography, therefore, itself a quest rather than the record of a quest, a labour of self-cognizance no less than of self-expression?” (“Quest” 124). As far back as 1871, when he had decided to become a poet, Arthur Rimbaud wrote to his friend Paul Demeny: “Je est un autre,” expressing a difference between the person and the author Rimbaud. We therefore must recognize the important grammatical construction of his famous locution, which states the “I is another” and not “I am another.”6 In the writing process, there is a clear distinction between the person – the somatic being with feelings, thoughts, and physical needs – and the narrated author figure. The moment the ‘I’ writes about itself, it begins to narrate and thus fictionalize itself. So the narrated ‘I’ is always another entity and not identical with the person, even if one writes ‘I’ in a text. The ‘I’ is as much a fictional construction as is any character in a text. This concept of the ‘I’ signifies a new understanding of modern subjectivity that entails the altered notion of an everpresent fluidity of identity. Modern and, even more so, contemporary selves are in constant flux to create their identities anew, both actively and passively. These identities can never be fixed or solidified but must be continuously invented and reinvented. The term identity, from Latin identitas, means sameness. Sameness connotes that something is identical to itself, thus constant and unchangeable.7 The contemporary self is constantly performing identity construction to perpetually produce new versions of itself. One can never be “the same” again, just another version or reading of oneself. As such, the self is a simulacrum,8 because there is no original, no reality, only a hyperreality with new copies or images of the self. In Difference and Repetition (1968) Deleuze formulated that: Everything has become simulacrum, for by simulacrum we should not understand a simple imitation, but rather the act by which the very idea of a model or privileged position is challenged and overturned. The simulacrum is the instance which includes a difference within

6

I owe this insight to Ulla Haselstein.

7

Misleadingly, we speak of identical twins whose sameness is apparently present in two separate individuals, which, taken literally, is impossible. Cf. Candice Breitz’s work on twins entitled “Factum” discussed in the following chapter.

8

The term simulacrum was famously described and updated by Jean Baudrillard in Simulacra and Simulation (1981). However, I do not follow Baudrillard’s reading of the simulacrum as total ideology but apply the term in the Deleuzian sense of repetition and difference.

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itself, such as (at least) two divergent series on which it plays, all resemblance abolished so that one can no longer point to the existence of an original and a copy. (Difference 82)

The self as a simulacrum is a challenging, if not frightening vision. Thus, the uncertainty of the self is, or can be, experienced as dangerous and disruptive, as Lejeune described: “[E]ach of us indeed feels the danger of this indetermination of the first person, and it is no accident if we try to neutralize it by grounding it in the proper name” (“Pact” 20). The proper name, or author name, therefore, functions as a kind of anchor to which ever-changing parts and pieces of identity are attached and from which they are drawn. For most people, their name is one of a few fixed points of identity.9 If our name is the anchor of identity, our autobiography or life story10 is the vessel that carries that identity. Or, put differently, what we regard as identity is only possible through various modes and methods of autobiographical expression. Only in and through different autobiographical utterances can identity become visible to others, but even more significantly, to ourselves. In the late 1970s, de Man pointed out that [w]e assume that life produces the autobiography as an act produces its consequences, but can we not suggest, with equal justice, that the autobiographical project may itself produce and determine the life and that whatever the writer does is in fact governed by the technical demands of self-portraiture and thus determined, in all its aspects, by the resources of the medium? (“De-Facement” 920)

Within the past thirty years, the creation of identity through narrative has been extensively researched. There has been research on life writing and narrative identity, which has expanded literary studies from autobiographical to more interdisciplinary approaches that bring together literature, philosophy, psychology, and neuroscience. Texts from various disciplines such as Paul Ricoeur’s Time and Narrative (198385), 11 Paul John Eakin’s How Our Lives Become Stories (1999) and Living Autobiographically (2008), and Antonio Damasio’s Self Comes to Mind (2010) have enriched and advanced the discourse of the self and identity construction through narrative. Current research on identity and autobiography often attempts to combine

9

Other entities such as sex, mother tongue, or cultural community come to mind, but all of these are not fixed regimes either. Rather they too are often ambiguous and complex.

10 It is of no importance whether an actual autobiography is written or established by “living autobiographically,” as John Paul Eakin called his latest publication. Cf. Eakin, Living Autobiographically: How We Create Identity in Narrative, 2008. 11 Also see Ricoeur’s articles “Narrative Time” (1980) and “Narrative Identity” (1988).

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neuroscientific ontology, such as Damasio’s model of the autobiographical self,12 with literary epistemology, like Eakin’s interpretation of autobiographical consciousness.13 Despite the daring aspect of these interdisciplinary approaches, in the end, they privilege the natural sciences over the humanities. Literary metaphors14 in science, for example, are able to broaden the mindset for new understandings, but discussions of the exact positioning of “the self” in the brain are of little interest to the arts. How do we proceed from Eakin’s sentence that “[f]or Damasio, self is not an effect of language but rather an effect of the neurological structure of the brain. He [Damasio] radically expands the meaning of self, suggesting its deep implication in the life of the human organism at every level” (Living 67)? Do we gain more understanding of identity formation when we “explore the somatic, bodily sources of narrative identity” (Living 61)? I argue that it far more exciting to ask how “the self,” or new versions of the self, are actively created in the subject’s mind through performance, rather than to locate the self somatically in the brain. I will therefore concentrate on the question of how the self, that is the authorial self, is constructed in and through performative ways and means. What narrative techniques are used for authorial self-invention? How do authors situate themselves in certain authorship discourses? What topoi are activated in this process? In 1973, Harold Bloom wrote his influential book on the theory of poetry, The Anxiety of Influence, which introduced the notion of “genealogy of imagination” to literary discourse. Bloom addressed a question that every author has to face: What can I bring new to the world of the written word? “If this book’s argument is correct,” Bloom summarized, “then the covert subject of most poetry for the last three centuries has been the anxiety of influence, each poet’s fear that no proper work remains for him to perform” (Anxiety 148). What can I bring new? This fundamental question is at the core of each text that is about to be written. Something fresh, “original,” and of high quality has to be produced, something which must overcome or even supersede earlier texts, otherwise it need not to be written. Naturally, along with this pressure comes the anxiety of failure that is, to fail the influence or to be failed by the influence. Bloom wrote: “The precursors flood us, and our imagination

12 Cf. especially Damasio’s chapter 9 “The Autobiographical Self.” 13 Cf. especially Eakin’s chapter 2 “Autobiographical Consciousness.” 14 Take, for example, Damasio’s use of metaphors as described by Eakin: “Pursuing his movie metaphor for the stream of consciousness, Damasio asks, how does the brain generate ‘the movie-in-the-brain,’ and how does it generate ‘the appearance of an owner and observer for the movie within the movie’?” As well as: “He draws his second metaphor from T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets: ‘you are the music while the music lasts.’ Both metaphors address perception by refusing any split between perceiver and perceive, and both stress process and duration” (Living 69, 73).

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can die by drowning in them, but no imaginative life is possible if such inundation is wholly evaded” (Anxiety 154). There is no way around these literary precursors; a multitude of voices preexists in one’s mind before one even starts writing. Because we cannot wholly liberate ourselves from all these influences, authors must directly confront those who came before them. To overcome this anxiety of influence many authors situate themselves within a particular artistic or literary tradition that they emulate, master, and ultimately supercede. This strategy enables authors to create their own distinct positions within the greater field of art or literature. The challenge thereby is to acknowledge the accomplishments of one’s forebears, yet not to be overwhelmed by their grandeur, because according to Bloom, “if they return wholly in their own strength, then the triumph is theirs” (Anxiety 141). The act of putting oneself in a literary tradition can be refined even further. Bloom elaborated on the idea of a successful genealogy of imagination when he wrote: I mean something more drastic and (presumably) absurd, which is the triumph of having so stationed the precursor, in one’s own work, that particular passages in his work seem to be not presages of one’s own advent, but rather be indebted to one’s own achievement, and even (necessarily) to be lessened by one’s greater splendor. The mighty dead return, but they return in our colors, and speaking in our voices, at least in part, at least in moments, moments that testify to our persistence, and not to their own. (Anxiety 141)

This strategy entails a certain amount of “misreading” or what Bloom called creative misprision of the works of the forebears, which today we would call appropriation. Certain features, styles, or topics of the predecessor’s work are thereby appropriated, re-interpreted according to one’s own needs and used for one’s own purposes. The idea is to “overwrite” the precursors’ works with one’s own writing; the trace of the former still visible in the latter, resulting in a kind of palimpsest. The older works peak through the newer ones or, when successfully established, readers curiously experience the new work when reading the old work and not the other way around. A successful genealogy of imagination means that authors and their texts are positioned and take positions within the field of cultural production, as accurately described by Pierre Bourdieu in his seminal work “The Field of Cultural Production, or: The Economic World Reversed” (1983). Bourdieu set himself the task “of constructing the space of positions and the space of the position-takings” (“Field” 30),15 arguing that

15 One could certainly criticize Bourdieu for a certain determinism in his thoughts, following or, at least, anticipating a neoliberal trajectory of success, profit, and recognition. Thus his text can also be read as a self-fulfilling prophecy that leaves no space for other motivations besides capital and celebrity.

60 | P ERFORMING A UTHORSHIP the generative, unifying principle of this ‘system’ is the struggle, with all the contradictions it engenders (so that participation in the struggle – which may be indicated objectively by, for example, the attacks that are suffered – can be used as the criterion establishing that a work belongs to the field of position-takings and its author to the field of positions). (“Field” 34)

Determing how much of a “conscious strategy, a cynical calculation” (“Field” 72) this multiple positioning is, cannot be easily answered according to Bourdieu. To his judgment, one possible response to the question what “the literary mechanism” is, can be found in the works of Stéphane Mallarmé, who answered boldly: “A game” (“Field” 72). Questions of authorial strategy, calculation, and game-playing will thus be of concern throughout my chapters. How are authors coming about? In what follows, I will look at different forms of auto/biographical texts to explore how authors create their author selves and how they position themselves within the field of cultural production. Paul Auster has written to date four texts that are generally categorized as autobiography, including genres of memoir, chronicle, journal, and report. The first text, The Invention of Solitude (1982), 16 is a two-part book. The first part of the publication, “Portrait of an Invisible Man,” is a biographical text about Auster’s father. The second part, “The Book of Memory” (1980-81), is a slim text of under 100 pages, written in the third person singular. In “The Book of Memory,” Auster used the pronoun he to refer to himself, thereby distancing himself from himself while simultaneously disguising the narrator of the account. Auster’s second autobiographical text, Hand to Mouth: A Chronicle of Early Failure (1996), is a first person singular account of 125 pages. The first person singular I classically confers upon the genre of autobiography an “autodiegetic narration” (Lejeune, “Pact” 5).17 Auster’s next to last autobiographical publication to date,18 Winter Journal (2012), is written in the second person singular and within the broader space of 230 pages.19 Winter Journal suggests inner dialogue, using the pronoun you, which, at the same

16 In the first Penguin edition (1982), the book carries the subtitle “A Memoir” as Timothy Dow Adams noticed (Light 26). 17 Cf. Lejeune: “The identity of the narrator and the principle character that is assumed in autobiography is marked most often by the use of the first person” (“Pact” 5). 18 I do not analyze Auster’s Report from the Interior. This book was generally promoted as “Paul Auster’s most intimate autobiographical work to date,” but does not offer many new insights to my argument. It has 271 pages and an appendix album of 105 photographs and illustrations. 19 The increase in volume of these consecutive auto/biographies is striking, because it seems that the need to explore oneself does not wither.

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time, plays a face-to-face game with the reader, who feels directly addressed by Auster’s words. These narratives written from the point of view of he, I, and you form the basis of my discussion of how autobiographical writing fosters the becoming an author and how authorial self-invention is performed in autobiographical texts. Auster’s three auto/biographies, written over the course of the last thirty years, offer three versions of the author Paul Auster through different narrative styles and different narrator points of view. Earlier, Paul Valéry meditated in his notebooks on the idea that within one person a trinity of persons exists represented by the three personal pronouns I, you, and he/she. Valéry’s cahiers were his lifelong intellectual “diary,” consisting of 260 original notebooks that were published posthumously in numerous volumes. Valéry wrote: “The ‘I’ calls itself me or you or him. ‘I’ am made up of all 3 persons. Trinity. One that is on intimate terms with the ‘I’; one that refers to it in the 3rd person.” He explained: I – You – He. This fundamental relation of discourse – always present in language. The real main sentence = the I says to You that He... The I and the You are often implicit, being given by the circumstance, furnished by the surroundings of the discourse. These 3 persons are not persons. They are the essential elements of a figure constructed by the target. (Cahiers 4 96, 106)

Auster, an expert in French poetry20 who certainy knows the work of Valéry, is well aware of this triadic concept of authorial identity. The three singular personal pronouns I, you, and he/she are three different forms of expression with three different points of view from which the self can be examined. The pronouns allow for different degrees of distance and proximity to what authors try to describe as their authorial self. I will therefore scrutinize the three voices of he, I, and you in Auster’s autobiographical texts in order to expose his authorial agency in the continuous becoming and positioning of the author figure, Paul Auster. He: The Invention of Solitude The Invention of Solitude (1982) is constructed in two parts. The first part, “Portrait of an Invisible Man,” focuses on the personal family history of the Paul Auster family, while the second part, “The Book of Memory,” draws on the imaginary family of authors in whose tradition Auster would like to position himself. The twopart structure of the book suits Auster’s attempt to narrate personal experiences

20 Auster is the editor of The Random House Book of 20th Century French Literature (1984) and translator of French poetry, for example of Mallarmé’s A Tomb for Anatole (1983).

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within a universal discourse. Both auto/biographical stories travel backwards into private and universal history, outlining a personal filiation as well as a professional genealogy of the author-to-be, Paul Auster. The Invention of Solitude is concerned with one major topic: father-son or predecessor-successor relationships. In the first part of the book, Auster sought to understand his personal origins and upbringing. He described his relationships within his own family, with special focus on his grandfather, father, and son, observing: “When the father dies, he writes, the son becomes his own father and his own son. He looks at his son and sees himself in the face of the boy” (Invention 81). Auster also refered to a self-chosen father figure named S., once considered a promising young composer, whom Auster met in Paris in 1965: “S. and A. drew together out of a congruent want: the one for a son who would accept him as he was, the other for a father who would accept him as he was” (Invention 92). Described in a nutshell, “Portrait of an Invisible Man” is Auster’s obituary of his father, who had recently died. Auster tried to come to terms with his father’s sudden death and to finally understand this stranger that his father had remained to him throughout his life. Yet the biographical attempt to reconstruct his father’s life-story and to describe him as a person is destined to fail, as the title indicates. How to draw a portrait of someone invisible? Auster himself expressed this dilemma early on: “To recognize, right from the start, that the essence of this project is failure” (Invention 20). As Auster stated later: In the act of trying to write about him, I began to realize how problematical it is to presume to know anything about anyone else. While that piece is filled with specific details, it still seems to me not so much an attempt at biography but an exploration of how one might begin to speak about another person, and whether or not it is even possible. (Hunger 276)

“Portrait of an Invisible Man” does not claim to speak biographical “truth” about the father, but rather speaks to the difficult endeavor speaking about another person. The figure of the father remains opaque, yet the traces of this ghost, who “for fifteen years […] haunted an enormous house, all by himself” (Invention 7) point to Auster himself. Thus, “Portrait of an Invisible Man” is, above all, Auster’s quest for his own identity through the figure of the father. In this journey, Auster drew on prominent literary examples and continuously refered to the theme of Pinocchio, among others, who saves his father Geppetto from the belly of the shark/whale.21 Auster asked: “Is

21 In Carlo Collodi’s The Adventures of Pinocchio (1883) it is a “terribile Pescecane,” which is translated as a “terrible dogfish,” meaning shark. In the Walt Disney animated musical production Pinocchio (1940), the shark has become a whale named Monstro. As an American Jew, Auster felt more affected by the whale version, which echoes the narratives

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it true that one must dive to the depths of the sea and save one’s father to become a real boy?” (Invention 79). So the quest for personal and professional ancestors, blood relatives, and one’s chosen and imaginary family, is highly visible throughout Auster’s narration. In the second part of The Invention of Solitude, Auster tried to position himself as an author within the literary field. “The Book of Memory” is best described as Auster’s intentional entrée into the literary succession and his self-conscious attempt to find and create his own author’s position within the literary field. Auster named many of his self-chosen predecessors, most prominently Carlo Collodi, Blaise Pascal, Stéphane Mallarmé, Arthur Rimbaud, Friedrich Hölderlin, Emily Dickinson, Anne Frank, Daniel Defoe and many others more to whom he only alluded.22 “Everything, in some sense, can be read as a gloss on everything else,” Auster stated, clearly refering to the inescapable intertextuality of all texts (Invention 83). What comes into existence is thus a network of citations and allusions within a field of literary interconnectedness. Auster used perpetual intertextuality as a method to engage in an identity quest to find his own position as an author in the literary arena. He delved into memory, not to arrive at an end, at a telos, but at a vibrant network. Auster later recalled: I felt as though I were looking down to the bottom of myself, and what I found there was more than just myself – I found the world. That’s why the book is filled with so many references and quotations, to pay homage to all the others inside me. That book has dozens of authors, and I wanted them all to speak through me. In the final analysis, ‘The Book of Memory’ is a collective work. (Hunger 315-316)

This explains and highlights the ambiguous meaning of the book’s title, The Invention of Solitude. On the one hand, it can be read as inventing solitude, as in sitting alone in a room writing about oneself. On the other hand, the invention of solitude can also mean the fiction of solitariness. Ultimately, Auster deconstructed solitude as a misconception by exposing his genealogical ties and familial networks. Further, for Auster to associate with writers like Defoe and Frank clearly connects

of Jonah and the Whale from the “Book of Jonah” (Old Testament 1:17) and Herman Melville’s 1851 novel Moby Dick. 22 Especially the poets Dickinson, Hölderlin, and Mallarmé are of great importance to Auster. He had written and translated poetry for the last decade before he ventured into prose with The Invention of Solitude. Auster recalled: “I struggled along during those years to find my own way, and in the process I discovered that translation was an extremely helpful exercise. Pound recommends translation for young poets, and I think that shows great understanding on his part” (Hunger 272).

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him to the genre of journal writing and, again, to its innate solitude. Auster wrote: “Then shipwreck. Crusoe on his island. […] Solitary consciousness” (Invention 79). And recalling a visit to the Anne Frank house (her hideout) in Amsterdam, he remembered: “It was at that moment, he later realized, that The Book of Memory began. As in the phrase: ‘she wrote her diary in this room’” (Invention 83). Writing to remember and to be remembered, writing so as not to become crazy, writing to overcome despair. All these motives become apparent in Auster’s network of references and allusions. Auster’s referencing of journals reminds us of the loneliness of the writing process. Journals are usually not meant to be published but are, rather, personal, private, and typically autobiographical. They therefore represent the inwardness of the writing process, symbolized in Auster’s book with images of Crusoe’s remote island and Frank’s claustrophobic hiding place. Auster’s own writing room represents a withdrawal from the personal despair of loss and separation: “The world has shrunk to the size of this room for him, and for as long as it takes him to understand it, he must stay where he is” (Invention 79). So the image of the solitary writing room also serves as a refuge, where one writes to escape from the crazy world, as in the “popular mythology about the whale notwithstanding, the great fish that swallows Jonah is by no means an agent of destruction. The fish is what saves him from drowning in the sea” (Invention 125). Earlier Auster wrote in a similar vein about Hölderlin: “By 1806, schizophrenia, and thereafter, for thirty-six years, fully half his life, he lived alone in the tower built for him by Zimmer, the carpenter from Tubingen – zimmer, which in German means room” (Invention 99). 23 Regarding a visit to Dickinson’s house in Amherst, Massachusetts, Auster recalled thinking of the “seventeen hundred poems that were written there, trying to see them as a part of those four walls, and yet failing to do so. For if words are a way of being in the world, he thought, then even if there were no world to enter, the world was already there, in that room” (Invention 123). For Auster, physical rooms became symbols to inner rooms, in his search of his identity and position as an author: “The words rhyme, and even if there is no real connection between them, he cannot help thinking of them together. Room and tomb, tomb and womb, womb and room” (Invention 159-160). Apparently, Auster’s image of the room is quite an ambivalent metaphor. Regarding this motif, he quoted Blaise Pascal: “All the unhappiness of man stems from one thing only: that he is inescapable of staying quietly in his room” (Invention 76). Yet for Auster the matter presented itself as even more complex. On the one hand, the room symbolizes the solitude and inwardness of the writing process: “Every book is an image of solitude. […] A man sits alone in a room and writes” (Invention 136). Yet at the same time, writing solely in one’s room is characterized as a special and strong connection to the world: “To

23 In Moon Palace (1989), Auster named the roommate of his protagonist Fogg, Zimmer.

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withdraw into a room does not mean that one has been blinded” (Invention 100). Rather, writing itself seems to bridge the gap of these ambivalent sides, as Auster described: What he experienced, perhaps, during those few moments on Christmas Eve, 1979, as he sat alone in his room on Varick Street, was this: the sudden knowledge that came over him that even alone, in the deepest solitude of his room, he was not alone, or, more precisely, that the moment he began to speak of that solitude, he had become more than just himself. Memory, therefore, not simply as the resurrection of one’s private past, but an immersion in the past of others, which is to say: history. (Invention 139)

Auster here connected his personal struggles to a larger history and thus linked his personal quest with an ontological discourse. Disordered and fragmented, Auster’s The Invention of Solitude displays not a unified body of writing, but rather a perpetual expression of thoughts and beliefs in a cumulative fashion without beginning or end. It is for this reason that Auster “ended” The Invention of Solitude as he “started” it: “He finds a fresh sheet of paper. He lays it out on the table before him and writes these words with his pen. It was. It will never be again. Remember” (Invention 172). Auster thus circled back to the beginning: “He lays out a piece of blank paper on the table before him and writes these words with his pen. It was. It will never be again” (Invention 75). It is astonishing that Auster chose The Invention of Solitude as his prose debut. Even though Auster himself did not consider The Invention of Solitude to be an autobiography,24 readers and critics have recognized it as such, which has produced noticeable confusion.25 One can surely ask: Why did a completely unknown author of poetry and essays suddenly turn to prose in his mid-thirties to compose his auto/biography? Lejeune saw such rarities as operating in what he termed, the autobiographical space:26

24 Cf. Auster: “I don’t think of it [The Invention of Solitude] as an autobiography so much as a mediation about certain questions, using myself as the central character” (Hunger 276). 25 Lejeune showed that the autobiographical pact is based on the author’s name and the reader’s perspective: “[E]verything depends, on the one hand, on the link that I establish, through the notion of author, between the person and the name; on the other hand, on the fact that I have chosen the perspective of the reader in defining autobiography” (“Pact” 19). I agree with Lejeune, however in my argument, I emphasize the performative role of the author in the production of autobiographical texts. 26 Cf. Lejeune: “It is no longer necessary to know which of the two, autobiography or novel, would be truer. It is neither one nor the other; autobiography will lack complexity,

66 | P ERFORMING A UTHORSHIP [I]f the autobiography is a first book, its author is thus unknown, even if he relates his own story in the book. He lacks, in the eyes of the reader, that sign of reality which is the previous production of other texts (nonautobiographical), indispensable to that which we will call ‘the autobiographical space.’ (“Pact” 11-12)

But I think this is taking matters too simple, at least from the authorial perspective. There is a distinct choice and effort in Auster’s debut feature to create the author-tobe Auster, who will henceforward be “straddling the world-beyond-the-text and the text,” as “the connection between the two” (Lejeune, “Pact” 11). I agree with Lejeune that an author is not a person, but someone who writes and publishes.27 However, this authorial identity is not a given, but instead something constructed along the process of writing and publishing. Becoming an author, therefore, is not just a matter of using one’s proper name on the book’s cover, as Lejeune explained: In printed texts, responsibility for all enunciation is assumed by the person who is in the habit of placing his name on the cover of the book [...]. The entire existence of the person we call the author is summed up by this name: the only mark in the text of an unquestionable worldbeyond-the-text, referring to a real person. (“Pact” 11)

Rather, becoming an author means, above all, that one has to make one’s mark, as Bourdieu argued: “In a universe in which to exist is to differ, i.e. to occupy a distinct, distinctive position, they [the newcomers] must assert their difference, get it known and recognized, get themselves known and recognized (‘make a name for themselves’)” (“Field” 58). At this point, however, I use the idiom to make a name for oneself not so much to stress the newcomer’s problem of jettisoning the established or to point to the commercial nor celebrity aspects of authorship.28 I use

ambiguity etc.; the novel, accuracy. [...] What becomes revealing is the space in which the two categories of text are inscribed, and which is reducible to neither of the two. This effect of contrast obtained by this procedure is the creation, for the reader, of an ‘autobiographical space’” (“Pact” 27). 27 Cf. Lejeune: “Straddling the world-beyond-the-text and the text, he [the author] is the connection between the two. The author is defined as simultaneously a socially responsible real person and the producer of a discourse” (“Pact” 11). 28 Cf. Lejeune: “The desire for fame and eternity [...] rests entirely on the proper name become author’s name. Do we imagine the possibility of an anonymous literature today? [...] The Tel Quel group, by calling into question the notion of the author (replacing it by that of ‘scripteur’), heads in the same direction but does not pursue the thing any further”

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the idiom, rather, to call attention to the fact that names themselves are complex constructions. Names, in particular author names, are “distinctive signs which produce existence,” as Bourdieu explained for literary schools and groups.29 Lejeune also placed special emphasis on the importance of the proper name, or signature, because it lies at the basis of his concept of the autobiographical pact as a contract between author and reader. According to Lejeune, the proper name “is the affirmation in the text of this identity [of author, narrator, and protagonist], referring back in the final analysis to the name of the author on the cover” (“Pact” 14). But proper names or name variations or pseudonyms, are not simply given, invariable constants, but rather complex modifiable signifiers that convey and initiate discourse on various levels. Names, and their accompanying connotations, are of great relevance to their authors, a significance which Lejeune indirectly confirmed when he wrote “few authors are capable of renouncing their own name” (“Pact” 15). To make a name for oneself can thus be described as an effort inherent in all autobiographical writing, if not writing in general. In autobiographical writing, form and content are directed towards the same aim, as the author writes about herself, whether this takes shape in the first, second, or third person. Lejeune worked out two main reasons (and their corresponding effects) for the use of the third person singular in autobiographical writing: “[T]remendous conceit, [...], or a certain kind of humility,” which allow “either a distancing from the perspective of history or a distancing from the perspective of God” (“Pact” 6). Auster himself, in an interview, broached the issue of the third person perspective in “The Book of Memory:” I don’t think of it as an autobiography so much as a mediation about certain questions, using myself as the central character. [...] In order to write about myself, I had to treat myself as though I were someone else. It was only when I started all over again in the third person that I began to see my way out of the impasse. (Hunger 276-277)

Auster also addressed the problem quite openly within “The Book of Memory” itself: “In the same way, A. realizes, as he sits in his room writing The Book of Memory, he speaks of himself as another in order to tell the story of himself. He must make himself absent in order to find himself there. And so he says A., even as he means to

(“Pact” 20). Noticeably, Lejeune avoided to directly name Roland Barthes as a member of the Tel Quel here, but only alluded to him by quoting the term scripteur. 29 Cf. Bourdieu: “Hence the importance, in this struggle for survival, of all distinctive marks, such as the names of schools or groups – words which make things, distinctive signs which produce existence” (“Field” 60).

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say I” (Invention 154).30 In a performative move, Auster tried to distance himself not from history or God, but from himself. No longer was he writing about himself, but about “someone” called A. whom Auster addressed as he. “The Book of Memory,” is the “urtext” of Auster’s oeuvre, published at the beginning of his career as a prose writer. It is a very dense and complex text, both in content and structure. The genre of the text, or rather texts, is thus not easily described. For John Zilcosky, Auster in The Invention of Solitude “turned to autobiographical prose” (“Revenge” 205), while Pascal Bruckner called the prose debut “the ars poetica and the seminal work of Paul Auster. To understand him we must start here; all his books lead us back to this one. Novel-manifesto in two parts” (“Heir” 27). For William Dow, The Invention of Solitude challenges the idea that autobiography issues from a pre-existing self or a unique and autonomous self. Auster’s ‘autobiography,’ consequently, constructs a self that requires negotiation, complicity, and collusion (terms that refer not to a single individual but to relationships) as it shapes the materials of the past ‘to serve the needs of the present consciousness.’ (“Glimmers” 51)

Auster himself, when asked whether The Invention of Solitude was his first attempt to write prose, answered: Not exactly. Although you might say that it was only then that I began to think of myself as a prose writer. But the fact is that I had always dreamed of writing novels. My first published works were poems, and for ten years or so I published only poems, but all along I spent nearly as much time writing prose. I wrote hundreds and hundreds of pages, I filled up dozens of notebooks. (Hunger 298)

“The Book of Memory” is neither a novel nor a “conventional” autobiography. The text displays certain essay-like features in its personal tone and experimental style.31 Yet Auster’s text is not a classical essay either. Rather, its incomplete narrative structure, repeated disjunctions and conjunctions, and performance of time, point to the genre of diary or journal writing. The text does not display a narrative flow, but rather reads like a sequence of entries of Auster’s thoughts and feelings. Each entry is followed by another entry, often without any conjunction. The entries refer back

30 Cf. Valéry: “One needs an Other to be Oneself. Thus Other and Self are relative conditions – of the functioning of the mental machine, which operates between these two” (Cahiers 1 363). 31 The word essay stems from the Latin word exagium, with means to “test” or to “try.”

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to each other and are linked loosely through key topics such as “the invention of solitude,” “the belly of the whale,” or the “nature of chance.” Overall, the text is fragmented and appears like a sketchbook or notebook. The notebook itself is a reappearing theme and symbol in Auster’s oeuvre.32 In 1992, he published The Red Notebook – True Stories. Notebooks appear in almost all his novels as symbolic tools of writers to collect stories and record memories. Thus it comes as no surprise that in “The Book of Memory,” notebooks play an important role: “When he reads over what he has written, he finds only one paragraph of any interest. Although he is not sure what to make of it, he decides to keep it for future reference and copies it in to a lined notebook” (Invention 81). Here the notebook is established as a decisive device for writers. Later in the text, Auster also linked the usage of notebooks to a family tradition, telling of his grandfather: “He was equally fond of jokes, which he called ‘stories’ – all of them written down in a little notebook that he carried around in his coat pocket” (Invention 120). In his early texts, Auster established notebooks as important symbolic tools of writers, both for structure and content. Auster’s choice to narrate in the genre of journal writing and to give his “The Book of Memory” the appearance of a notebook suggests its content. The text is, after all, a narration on the process, the significance, and the complexity of writing itself and, is thus, a highly performative text about becoming an author. At the same time, “The Book of Memory” marks the exact moment of Auster’s authorial becoming. In a performative act of self-invention, Auster created his own author identity. In its performativity, the text presents itself as a complex and experimental literary work. Its narrator, A., is the autobiographical alter ego of the author Auster: “He decides to refer to himself as A.” (Invention 75). The text, therefore, falls in between two of Lejeune’s possible combinations in the articulation of the two criteria that classify “the relationship of the name of the protagonist and the name of the author,” as well as “the nature of the pact concluded by the author” (“Pact” 15). Since Auster’s protagonist does not have a real name, but goes by the letter A., one could argue both ways. Either the text falls into the category that Lejeune described as the one where “[t]he protagonist does not have a name in the narrative, but the author has declared explicitly in an initial pact that he is identical to the narrator (and thus to the protagonist, since the narrative is autodiegetic)” (“Pact” 17) or, we read the protagonist ‘name’ A. as a real name identical to the author’s name, which would make the text an example of the “most frequent case, because very often, so as not to appear in a formal way at the beginning of the book,

32 Valéry’s cahiers clearly had a precursory influence on Auster’s interest in notebooks.

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the pact nevertheless appears scattered and repeated throughout the text” (“Pact” 18). The A. can also be read as A. as in Autobiography.33 Either way, in both cases Auster’s text falls into the category of auto/biography marked by the autobiographical pact between author and reader eventually determined by the reader and according to her mood.34 As in the case with “The Book of Memory,” it is ultimately the reader who decides whether a text is read as an autobiography, regardless of any claims or disclaims of the author. Lejeune explained: “The author talks about himself as if it were someone else who was talking about him, or as if he were talking about someone else. This as if concerns enunciation alone: utterance continues to be subjected to the strict and proper rules of the autobiographical contract” (“Third Person” 32). According “to the strict and proper rules of the autobiographical pact,” Auster’s protagonist A. is consequently read as his autobiographical alter ego. As a psychological term, alter ego, which is Latin for “the other I,” describes the “second self” of a split personality or a multiple personality or schizophrenic disorder. In literary analysis, the alter ego signifies a fictional character whose behavior, speech, or thoughts intentionally represent those of the author. 35 Auster referred here to a technique that is not new in modern or contemporary literature. Most famously, one might think of Franz Kafka’s character Josef K. in The Trial (Der Prozess). Albert Camus outlined the idea of Kafka’s alter ego as follows: “In The Trial the hero might have been named Schmidt or Franz Kafka. But he is named Joseph K. He is not Kafka and yet he is Kafka. He is an average European. He is like everybody else. But he is also the entity K. who is the x of this flesh and blood equation” (Sisyphus 125). The same holds true for the character A. in Auster’s text: A. is not Auster, yet he is Auster after all. Auster was conscious and explicit about the creation of his alter ego and revealed to his readers at the outset the technique of authorial self-invention. Auster wrote: “The ‘I’ has vanished from itself. It cannot speak about itself, therefore, except as another. As in Rimbaud’s phrase: ‘Je est un autre’” (Invention 124). Auster later

33 Cf. Timothy Dow Adams: “Stein writes in her autobiography section of The Geographical History of America that ‘be is for bio. And for autobiography.’ [155] With this, she prefigures The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas in which ‘to be’ is for her a combination of her identity as seen from within and without, from herself and from letting Alice ‘be’ Toklas” (Telling 24-25). 34 Cf. Lejeune, “Pact” 18. 35 The idea of the alter ego is similar but not identical with Booth’s concept of the implied author. In contrast to the implied author, the alter ego is always an intentional construction of oneself as other as Auster’s example illustrates: “He speaks of himself as another in order to tell the story of himself” (Invention 154).

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revealed the significance of Rimbaud’s locution for his own writing in an interview from 1989-90: It opened a door for me, and after that I worked in a kind of fever, as though my brain had caught fire. What it came down to was creating a distance between myself and myself. If you are too close to the thing you’re trying to write about, the perspective vanishes, and you begin to smother. I had to objectify myself in order to explore my own subjectivity – which gets us back to what we were talking about before: the multiplicity of the singular. The moment I think about the fact that I’m saying ‘I,’ I’m actually saying ‘he.’ It’s the mirror of self-consciousness, a way of watching yourself think. (Hunger 319)

Yet these new versions of the self have to be created and narrated in order to function for the subject and her actions in the contemporary world. As Roland Barthes wrote: “Yet today the subject apprehends himself elsewhere, and ‘subjectivity’ can return at another place on the spiral: deconstructed, taken apart, shifted, without anchorage.” He connected this idea to writing about oneself: “Why should I not speak of ‘myself’ since this ‘my’ is no longer ‘the self’” (R.B. 168). So how does this ‘narrating of the self’ work? Auster’s “The Book of Memory” is certainly an effort to speak of oneself. By closely observing himself while writing about himself, Auster tried to understand and reveal the performative aspects of writing. At first he decided to “refer to himself as A” in order to create a clear distance from and distinction between himself and his alter ego A. According to Barthes, this performative step would not have been necessary “since this ‘my’ is no longer ‘the self’” and thus can be written about without claiming “truth” from the writing subject. For Auster, this step was necessary to establish and signal the tone and mode of his text as a meta-narrative about the work and the workings of writing. He explicitly disclosed his techniques and methods, trying to make clear to his readers and to himself what usually remains opaque: Once upon a time there was a little boy named Daniel, A. says to his son named Daniel, and these stories in which the boy himself is the hero are perhaps the most satisfying to him of all. In the same way, A. realizes, as he sits in his room writing The Book of Memory, he speaks of himself as another in order to tell the story of himself. He must make himself absent in order to find himself there. And so he says A., even as he means to say I. (Invention 154)

Auster’s experiment implied the creation of his authorial self in order to become the “other” outside his fiction. Or, put differently, by fictionalizing himself in narrative, he scripted himself in life. For Barthes, “[y]ou have to ‘figure yourself,’ to see yourself as a figure: I project an image of myself playing a role, and the strength of that role will help me to do what I want. […] I act the part of the writer, in the fully

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sacred sense of the role, as a way of enabling myself to become one” (Preparation 225). So to “act the part of a writer” has the performative function of establishing oneself as a writer, of becoming an author. In “The Book of Memory” Auster thus openly performed his self-genesis as an author. The first few sentences on the first page of the text reveal this attempt: “He lays out a piece of blank paper on the table before him and writes these words with his pen.” This is shortly followed by: “Later that same day he returns to his room. He finds a fresh sheet of paper and lays it out on the table before him. He writes until he has covered the entire page with words.” Auster continued: “Then he writes. It was. It will never be again” (Invention 75). Readers are invited to follow Auster on this performative journey of becoming an author while writing. Lejeune offered a surprisingly corresponding analysis of a similar writing situation at the beginning of his text, “Autobiography in the Third Person” (1980): If I sit down at my table to write this study, and I write: ‘He sat down at his table to write...,’ the meaning of this sentence will depend above all on the reading contract that I will propose to my reader. It is this contract that will define the genre [...] and establish eventually, the relationships of identity that order the deciphering of personal pronouns and of the enunciation. It would be the same if I wrote: ‘I’ve just sat down at my table to write.’ This contract, which informs the reading, is already what is guiding the writing. (“Third Person” 32)

Why is it necessary to become an author at all? Why is it not enough to state that one is a writer or to let the body of work speak for the writer? Barthes gave answers to these questions and offered a description of the processual and performative notion of becoming an author: “Once again, I want to make clear that the one to be sacralized is the Operator, the one who produces, not the Scriptor, the one who produced. […] I don’t consider myself a writer, but I have to consider myself someone who wants to write” (Preparation 225). “The Book of Memory” is not about a finished text, but rather, it is about the process of writing and of authorial selfinvention. Readers witness the creation process as well as the creation of its operator, to use Barthes’s terminology. In his early and now famous pamphlet, Barthes stated: “The modern scriptor is born simultaneously with the text, is in no way equipped with a being preceding or exceeding the writing, is not subject with the book as predicate; there is no other time than that of the enunciation and every text is eternally written here and now” (in: Burke, Authorship 127). Auster openly vocalized and emphasized the difficulties that writing and becoming an author bring about: the terror of the empty white page, the constant struggles with oneself, the inevitable failures that come with putting thoughts into words; and many self-assertions that writers make while producing a text:

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In the interim, in the void between the moment he opens the door and the moment he begins to reconquer the emptiness, his mind flails in a wordless panic. It is as if he were being forced to watch his own disappearance, as if, by crossing the threshold of this room, he were entering another dimension, taking up residence inside a black hole. (Invention 77)

Writing entails bravely conquering the emptiness and the void that the process of writing demands. Auster remarks here on the absolute solitude of writing that can lead to the “disappearance” of the self. Becoming an author thus implies loosing oneself, one’s identity, or letting go of it. Famously, Barthes asked his rhetorical question: “Who is speaking thus?” and provided his readers with the following answer: “We shall never know, for the good reason that writing is the destruction of every voice, of every point of origin. Writing is that neutral, composite, oblique space where our subject slips away, the negative where all identity is lost, starting with the very identity of the body writing” (in: Burke, Authorship 125). But the “body writing” is present, after all, at least in “The Book of Memory,” where Auster tried to reintroduce himself as a subject through a performative self-genesis as the author. He did not intend to fully disappear behind his text, but strove to reinscribe himself into his text to explore and exhibit his own becoming an author. Zilcosky made this point very clear: Paul Auster quite literally rejects theory’s imperative to die or disperse: he appears, conspicuously, throughout his novels. Leaving behind disconnected, yet obvious fragments of autobiography. […] He reveals his authorship, […], the better to investigate the concept of authorship itself. Instead of writing himself out of history […], Auster experiments, in fictional practice, with the possibilities of life after authorial death. (“Revenge” 197)

Auster often claimed, or reclaimed his author position within his own writing. Yet this position is truly distinct from traditional author concepts, because it is not that of an omniscient genius with authorial demands. Rather, Auster’s author position and its scope of action are comparable to that of any other character in the text. His authorial position as a figure in his own text is as fragile and dependent, as extrinsically controlled and directed, as all the other figures in the text. Seán Burke saw authors such as Stéphane Mallarmé, Comte de Lautréamont, James Joyce, and Antonin Artaud in this tradition: [A]ll of whom have managed to recapture the musical, Dionysian illogicalities of language. Such writers take up the position of the ‘subject in progress’, a subject unstable within the order of discourse but consequently free to change, to inert itself within textuality without acquiring the transcendental solitude of the epic author. (Death 47)

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Clearly, Auster followed in their footsteps to become such a “subject in progress.” In the final analysis, the author Auster and his alter ego A. are as subject to narration and to language, as is any other figure in the text. The character A. and his creator Auster are likewise only guests in the ‘language game’ and have to play according to its rules. Auster may have fictionalized and thus reinscribed himself in his text, but could not escape his entanglement in the irrepressible workings of narration. Reclaiming his author position entailed another loss: the loss of the self in the text. Barthes previously elaborated on this idea in S/Z (1970): The Author himself – that somewhat decrepit deity of the old criticism – can or could some day become a text like any other: he has only to avoid making his person the subject, the impulse, the origin, the authority, the Father, whence his work would proceed, by a channel of expression; he has only to see himself as a being on paper and his life as a bio-graphy (in the etymological sense of the word), a writing without referent, substance of a connection and not of a filiation: the critical undertaking (if we can still speak of criticism) will then consist in returning the documentary figure of the author into a novelistic, irretrievable, irresponsible figure, caught up in the plural of its own text. (S/Z 211-212)

Authors can include themselves in their own texts, as a part of their fictionalization. Barthes rendered this idea even more precisely in an essay from 1971 published in Image-Music-Text: “It is not that the Author may not ‘come back’ in the Text, in his text, but he then does so as a ‘guest’ […] his life is no longer the origin of his fictions but a fiction contributing to his work; there is a reversion of the work on to the life (and no longer the contrary)” (Image 161). Writing, especially writing about oneself, according to Barthes, involves the simultaneous losing and gaining control of one’s own identity. Another example from Auster’s text further illuminates this: “He writes until he has covered the entire page with words. Later, when he reads over what he has written, he has trouble deciphering the words. Those he does understand do not seem to say what he thought he was saying” (Invention 75). Auster, as many writers, is well aware of the curious fact that shortly after writing, a certain distance arises between him and his words. First, Auster had trouble deciphering his own words even though he had just written them. This insight reveals the unconscious aspect of the writing process; not even what has been written shortly before is always recognizable to its author. Writing, this supposedly intentional and conscious endeavor, has an indubitably unintentional and arbitrary side to it that Auster pointed to in the passage quoted. Where did these words, which now seem so foreign and even illegible to him, come from? With a certain distance, the written word, at times, becomes illegible or unintelligible to its creator. The curious distance or gap that arises between thoughts and words estranges the author from her text and reveals an odd principle inherent to writing. Writing entails an immanent dichotomy between the internal and the

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external, between the personal and the general. The written word stems from within the subject, while at the same time, it has its origin in the common world. Auster’s text wafts within that fragile construct between self and other trying to articulate an existential condition within the fields of personal experience and ontological discourse. In an interview, he explained what this fruitful antagonism meant to him and “The Book of Memory:” I don’t feel that I was telling the story of my life so much as using myself to explore certain questions that are common to all of us: how we think, how we remember, how we carry our past around with us at every moment. […] Myself, yes – but myself as anyone, myself as everyone. (Hunger 307)

Yet Auster was not solely interested in “questions that are common to all of us,” but especially in the ones that concern the performative aspects of writing and of becoming an author. “The Book of Memory” is thus Auster’s effort to write about the emergence, the significance, and the complexity of writing itself and to simultaneously perform authorial self-invention. Yet it is only the beginning of Auster’s narrative quest for his author self, as the following chapters will show. I: Hand to Mouth Paul Auster’s interest in his own authorial self-invention was made absolutely clear in his second autobiographical text Hand to Mouth, which is concerned almost entirely with his early failures of and struggles for becoming an author. Published in 1997, Hand to Mouth is a recollection of a writer who had made a name for himself (at least in part of the literary world). Ten years earlier, in 1987, the publication of The New York Trilogy marked Auster’s breakthrough and gained him worldwide recognition among critics and scholars.36 Hand to Mouth is a retrospective account: Auster’s years of apprenticeship. Written in the first person singular, it tells the story of his desperate attempts to make a living as a writer and to become an author: All along, my only ambition had been to write. I had known that as early as sixteen or seventeen years old, and I have never deluded myself into thinking I could make a living at it. Becoming a writer is not a ‘career decision’ like becoming a doctor or a policeman. You don’t choose it so much as get chosen, and once you accept the fact that you are not fit for anything else, you have to be prepared to walk a long, hard road for the rest of your days. Unless you turn out to be a favorite of the gods [...], your work will never bring enough to support you, and if you

36 The New York Trilogy was originally published sequentially as “City of Glass” (1985), “Ghosts” (1986), and “The Locked Room” (1986).

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The mode and mood of Auster’s writing considerably changed in the fifteen years between “The Book of Memory” (in The Invention of Solitude) and Hand to Mouth. The former text could be described as Auster’s attempt to bring into being an image of the intangible author self through creating maximum distance with the pronoun he. The latter text tries instead to locate this ephemeral author figure, pinpointing its origins through creating close proximity to the reader, using the seductive yet precarious pronoun I. Narrating in the first person singular is, after all, the classic mode of autobiography as a form of autodiegetic narrative. 37 The disguised yet intrinsic uncertainty of the first person pronoun is properly described by Philippe Lejeune: “[W]hen an autobiographer talks to us about himself in the third person or talks to himself about himself in the second, this is no doubt a figure with regard to accepted usages, [...]. In general, these gaps, these divisions, these encounters are both expressed and masked by the use of the single ‘I’” (“Third Person” 34). However, the identities of author, narrator, and protagonist certainly pose a dilemma: Who is this I? Or, as Lejeune has complicated the matter: “[W]ho is it who says ‘Who am I?’” (“Pact” 8). Lejeune argued that what the third person achieves in the form of splitting, “the first person achieves in the form of confusion: the inescapable duality of the grammatical ‘person.’ Saying ‘I’ is more customary (hence more ‘natural’) than saying ‘he’ when one talks about himself, but it is not simpler” (“Third Person” 33). The use of the first person singular is, most of the time, successful in its seduction, because readers are well accustomed to accepting the identity of the person speaking with the grammatical I. Readers are typically convinced and assured that a person “knows” who she means when she writes I. Despite the readers’ general acceptance of the identity of person and author through the use of the pronoun I, we are faced, anew, with the problem of identity. Who is writing? And who is narrating about whom to whom? Once again, I intentionally use the word person instead of author, because I want to make the distinction absolutely clear. The person writing is not synonymous with the author persona. On this point, I disagree with Lejeune, who believed that all narrative in the first person implies that the protagonist, even if some distant adventures about him are being told, is also at the same time the real person who produces the narration:

37 Cf. Lejeune, “Pact” 5, 8.

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the subject of the utterance is double because it is inseparable from the subject of enunciation. (“Pact” 25)

Quite the contrary, I think that even though in Auster’s first person narrative Hand to Mouth the protagonist (I-1) and narrator (I-2) share the same point of view, they are not identical with each other, the author (figure) or the real person (Auster). Rather, the protagonist, narrator, and author figure are different versions of an author self that Auster has constantly constructed in and through his autobiographical writings. The protagonist is the young version of the author self who has to endure, retrospectively, “the life of a starving poet” (Hand 22). The narrator is the older version of the author self who has meanwhile become famous. He can now comment and reflect on the “hand-to-mouth existence” (Hand 68) of the earlier version of the author self. The author figure is that ephemeral construct of himself as an author that Auster has built time and again in his writings and beyond. Roland Barthes called this “the imaginary I” (R.B. 56). For the images of himself as an author, Auster relied on well-established myths and tropes common in the field of cultural production: the unsuccessful, starving, yet relentless and passionate author who endures manifold hardships before his “genius” is finally identified and accepted. Drawing on common literary topoi of the writer-to-be, Auster thus developed a version of his early author self in Hand to Mouth who breaks away from his literary studies in graduate school to concentrate solely on writing: I didn’t want to talk about books anymore, I wanted to write them. Just on principle, it felt wrong to me for a writer to hide out in a university, to surround himself with too many likeminded people, to get too comfortable. The risk was complacency, and once that happens to a writer, he’s as good as lost. [...] If this sounds like a rather old-fashioned approach, perhaps it was. Young writer bids farewell to family and friends and sets out for points unknown to discover what he’s made of. (Hand 5)

This is indeed a clichéd and much repeated narrative of an author’s years of apprenticeship. Before the poet can discover his own voice, he must travel the unknown to face solitude, hunger, and failure. The figure of the hunger artist is a well known trope that has fascinated Auster for a long time, first expressed by his interest in Knut Hamsun’s novel Hunger (1890) and Franz Kafka’s short story “A Hunger Artist” (1922). In 1970, Auster meditated on “The Art of Hunger” in an essay (later published in a book of the same name), in which he developed an aesthetics of hunger in Hamsun’s novel and Kafka’s story: Hunger: or a portrait of the artist as a young man. But it is an apprenticeship that has little in common with the early struggles of other writers. [...] Something new is happening here, some

78 | P ERFORMING A UTHORSHIP new thought about the nature of art is proposed in Hunger. It is first of all an art that is indistinguishable from the life of the artist who makes it. That is not to say an art of autobiographical excess, but rather, an art that is the direct expression of the effort to express itself. (Hunger 17-18)

Auster argued for a new modernist aesthetics with hunger not as its metaphor but as “the very crux of the problem itself” (Hunger 18). He described the art of hunger “as an existential art” (Hunger 20) and located the new modernist aesthetics in the body of the artist. Ultimately, therefore, Auster read Hamsun’s and Kafka’s texts as auto/biographical expressions. Hunger is, without question, a physical experience, yet it is also an expression of the condition of the mind, imaging the longings of the body and soul. Hunger is seen in Auster’s interpretation of what happens to Hamsun’s character: “Having withdrawn into a nearly perfect solitude, he has become both the subject and the object of his own experiment. Hunger is the means by which this split takes place, the catalyst, so to speak, of altered consciousness” (Hunger 12). This is exactly what happens in auto/biography: The author becomes both the subject and the object of her own observation and presentation. A split takes place in autobiographical writings as well, necessary to expand self-awareness in order to perform authorial self-invention. Many authors have written about hunger as a condition of mind-altering dimension. Ernest Hemingway, for example, included a chapter entitled “Hunger Was Good Discipline” in his autobiography A Moveable Feast (1936) and explained the meaning of hunger for him and his work as a writer: You got very hungry when you did not eat enough in Paris [...]. There you could always go into the Luxembourg museum and all the paintings were sharpened and clearer and more beautiful if you were belly-empty, hollow-hungry. I learned to understand Cézanne much better and to see truly how he made landscapes when I was hungry. [...] Hunger is healthy and the pictures do look better when you are hungry. [...] Hunger is good discipline and you learn from it. (Feast 39, 41, 44)

Hunger is presented here as a conscious form of abstinence that sharpens the senses and the mind. Physical hunger stands symbolically for intellectual hunger. Both forms of hunger must be bravely endured and frequently fed for a person to become a real author. Auster affirmed that he was up to this “life of a starving poet” somewhere “scrounging for crumbs at the far edges of the workaday world” (Hand 23). Presenting his own hardships as a young writer, he wrote: When I didn’t have work, I was looking for work. When I had work, I was thinking about how to find more. Even at the best of times, I rarely earned enough to feel secure, and yet in spite

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of one or two close calls, I managed to avoid total ruin. It was, as they say, a hand-to-mouth existence. (Hand 68)

In addition to the prominent hunger motif, Auster has also been drawn to another topos of writers and artists from the first decades of the twentieth century: the city of Paris.38 In 1967 Auster moved to Paris for the first time to live among the literati and bohemians, to translate French poetry, and to come to terms with his own writing: “I went to Paris with all sorts of grandiose plans, assuming I would be able to attend any lectures and courses I wanted to (Roland Barthes at the Collège de France, for example)” (Hand 30). This sounds rather hackneyed. Moving to Paris can be read as a performance of another well-established pattern of authorial self-invention, as a famous Hemingway quote from 1950 reveals: “If you are lucky enough to have lived in Paris as a young man, then wherever you go for the rest of your life, it stays with you, for Paris is a moveable feast” (Feast epigraph). And not unexpectedly, in Hand to Mouth, Auster directly refered to one of the most famous American expatriates in Paris, Gertrude Stein, author of The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1933). Stein, the key figure among American intellectuals in Paris at the beginning of the twentieth century, functions here as an archetype for Auster’s own professional becoming as well as for his take on autobiographical writing. Stein’s The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas circles largely around the important year of 1907, focusing on the professional life of Stein as a cultural networker in Paris at the time of Cubism’s rise. Stein artfully worked with repetitions and suspension techniques, displaying the unfolding of memory in a kind of uncontrollable, cyclical stream of memory. The text blatantly breaks with any of Lejeune’s genre conventions and definitions of autobiography, since author, narrator, and character are not identical, and are playfully intermingled. The real person writing is Gertrude Stein, while her life partner Alice is the narrator (I-1) and, together with Gertrude Stein, the main protagonist (I-2 and she) of the story. “Stein is not merely the author, a shadowy prime mover lurking behind the book, but also an exhaustively and winningly described character in its pages,” as Benjamin Widiss concluded in Obscure Invitations (53). Yet it is not until the very last paragraph of the book when its real authorship is revealed, which Stein does with a bang: About six weeks ago Gertrude Stein said, it does not look to me as if you were ever going to write that autobiography. You know what I am going to do. I am going to write it for you. I am

38 Before Auster moved to Paris for the first time, he had gone to Dublin to follow the trail of James Joyce, another writer of Auster’s genealogical “masterminds.”

80 | P ERFORMING A UTHORSHIP going to write it as simply as Defoe did the autobiography of Robinson Crusoe. And she has and this is it. (Autobiography 272)

Ultimately, the author figure in Stein’s autobiography emerges as a complex amalgamation of Gertrude Stein and Alice Toklas. It transforms the disguised autobiographical-I into a tricky autobiographical-we, as Widiss argued: “[I]t remains the case that until its last page, the book holds before us two women with distinct identities, personalities, and – most importantly trajectories” (Obscure 58). The author figure, at first assumed to be Alice, in the end becomes confused and obliterated. Who is writing about whom to whom? Stein’s felicitous play with perspectives and disguises alludes to the constructed nature of any author figure, regardless of the identity of the author, narrator, and protagonist. Furthermore, Stein clearly commented on the fictitious nature of autobiography as a whole, when she refered to Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719). Recapitulating the reception of the publication of Defoe’s early novel, Danny Heitman wrote: After its release, many readers embraced Robinson Crusoe as a travelogue recorded by a real, flesh-and-blood Crusoe. Defoe [...] promoted the illusion by telling readers that Robinson Crusoe had been written by Crusoe himself, including a preface, supposedly written by the book’s editor, asserting the story as ‘a just History of Fact.’ (“Fiction” s.p.)

In The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, Stein placed the fictional autobiography of Robinson Crusoe on the same level as her own authentic and thus real autobiography. This is first seen on a structural and lexical level, when Stein began her autobiography with the exact same words as Defoe: “I was born in…” (Autobiography 7). 39 It continued when Stein concluded: “I am going to write it as simply as Defoe did the autobiography of Robinson Crusoe” (Autobiography 272). Using Robinson Crusoe as the frame of reference for her autobiography, Stein marked her own text as fictional. Like Crusoe, Alice emerges as a literary rather than a real figure, as does Gertrude Stein and all the other real people who appear in the text.40 Stein’s smart and witty text, therefore, questions autobiography as to whether it is fact or fiction. Instead, it introduces faction, which is a third category of writing about the author self that is a textual mixture of fact and fiction. Auster’s interest in Stein is certainly

39 Defoe began with the following words: “I was born in the year 1632, in the city of York, of a good family, tho’ not of that country, my father being a foreigner of Bremen, who settled first at Hull” (Crusoe 5). 40 Cf. Widiss: “Indeed, this suggests one way to read Stein’s invocation of Defoe and Crusoe in the final paragraph: as a reminder that the Toklas here effectively is a character, and is managed accordingly” (Obscure 58).

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linked to her own self-invention as an author in The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas. Her example functions as a role model and offers a framework within which to develop his own authorial positioning. This is seen in Hand to Mouth’s meticulous description of a prestigious job Auster had in New York in the early 1970s with the Jewish American scholar and rare-book dealer, Arthur A. Cohen: My chief task was to help him write the Ex Libris catalogues, [...]. I spent four or five hours there every afternoon, and it was a bit like working in a museum, a small shrine to the avantgarde. [...] Anything having to do with French and English was given to me; [...] I was in charge of all things literary. [...] Arthur gave me free rein to express my opinions about them [rare books], even to inject an occasional dose of humor if I felt like it. (Hand 88-89)

Like Stein, but with more humility, Auster also engaged in a good amount of namedropping as an authorial strategy to position himself within the cultural field.41 He noted his connection (however remote) with authors and artists like John Lennon, Robert Motherwell, James Merrill,42 and Jerzy Kosinski: A few weeks after I started working for him, Arthur recommended me to a friend who was looking to hire someone for a short-term job. Arthur knew that I could use the extra money, and I mention this small favor as an example of how well he treated me. That the friend turned out to be Jerzy Kosinski, and that the job involved me in editing the manuscript of Kosinski’s latest book, makes the episode worth talking about a little more. (Hand 94)

This episode once again calls to mind the trope of the struggling author who needs extra money to survive. Furthermore, it shows the existential dependency of (many) artists on patronage and the goodwill of others, as well as their reciprocal cooperation with each other. Auster mentioned “this small favor,” because it allowed him to talk about his editorial work for Kosinski and his advancing position within the cultural field in New York in the mid-1980s. This, after all, in Auster’s words, “makes the episode worth talking about.” Auster then explicitly stated four examples of catalog entries that he wrote during his time at Ex Libris. The illustrious selection that the now established author of Hand to Mouth chose gives us “some idea of what that job entailed” (Hand 89). It furthermore reveals with whom the emergent author intellectually associated with in the field of cultural production. Auster’s citing of the Testimony: Against Gertrude Stein (1935) is of special importance for understanding autobiographical writings and authorial self-invention. The Testimony: Against

41 Cf. Stein: “Derain and Braque became followers of Picasso about six months after Picasso had, through Gertrude Stein and her brother, met Matisse” (Autobiography 71). 42 Cf. Auster, Hand 96-98.

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Gertrude Stein includes texts by George Braque, Eugene Jolas, Maria Jolas, Henri Matisse, André Salmon, and Tristan Tzara. The pamphlet was published as a supplement to the literary journal Transition, which was founded by Eugene and Maria Jolas in 1927 and which published 27 issues until 1938. The authors fulminated strongly against Stein’s The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, because they felt misunderstood and mistreated by her description of them. In the preface, for example, Eugene Jolas explained that “Transition has opened its pages to several of those she [Stein] mentions who, like ourselves, find that the book often lacks accuracy. [...] we are happy to give the opportunity to refute those parts of Miss Stein’s book which they consider require it” (“Testimony” 2). In his assessment for the Ex Libris catalog, Auster subscribed to the critique expressed in the pamphlet about which he wrote: It serves as an antidote to literary self-serving and, in its own right, is an important document of literary and artistic history. Occasioned by the inaccuracies and distortions of fact in The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, Transition produced this forum in order to allow some of the figures treated in Miss Stein’s book to rebut her portrayal of them. (Hand 90)

Even though Auster’s text is primarily an advertisement, not a literary review, it is nevertheless noteworthy that Auster, who claimed that he had “free rein to express [his] opinions about” the offered books, accepted the accusatory attitudes of Jolas and others at face value, without questioning the categories of fact and fiction and accuracy and fantasy in Stein’s auto/biography (Hand 89). “Literary self-serving” is therefore a negative assessment of authorial self-invention that Auster himself, like the writers and artists of the Testimony, pursued consistently. That Stein’s contemporaries in the 1930s lacked the courage to read her auto/biography as fictional is one thing; that the young, well-educated Auster, forty years later, was not able to detect Stein’s humorous impetus is quite another. Auster quoted at length another of his catalog entries on a “five-by-seven index card” (Hand 89). It is about Marcel Duchamp’s and Vitaly Halberstadt’s book on chess endgames, called L’opposition et cases conjuguées sont réconciliées (1932).43 Like Stein, Duchamp was another ideal role model for the aspiring author Auster. As Pierre Bourdieu showed, Duchamp himself was a master of authorial selfpresentation: Duchamp, born into a family of painters, the younger brother of painters, has all the tricks of the artist’s trade at his fingertips, i.e. an art of painting which (subsequently) implies not only the art of producing a work but the art of self-presentation; like the chess player he is, he shows

43 The English title reads Opposition and Sister Squares are Reconciled.

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himself capable of thinking several moves ahead, producing art objects in which the production of the producer as artist is the precondition for the production of these objects as works of art. (“Field” 61)

The game of chess, with its unequally powerful figures and diverse strategic moves, can certainly be compared to the field of cultural production where different players interact and effect one another. Becoming an author in the advanced cultural field is, after all, a matter of strategic decisions and position-takings. “[T]here is no place for naïfs” to win recognition in “the logic of the game” (“Field” 60, 72) as Bourdieu put it, and Auster has not been naive in his autobiographical writings.44 As we have seen, the Ex Libris catalog entries that Auster quoted at full length in Hand to Mouth comment on rare and specialized publications written by the major intellectuals and cultural figures of their times. These entries, therefore, say much about the cultural field Auster strove to be part of, genealogically. He drafted a version of his younger self as a hungry, persistent, yet still unsuccessful author who acquainted himself with the important cultural agents and their discourses. In other words, Auster performed the proper habitus45 to enter the field and play the game. Hence, Auster’s use of the I in Hand to Mouth. His use signals a high degree of confidence, because it implies a unity of voices that the third person pronoun he of “The Book of Memory” did not pretend. While the earlier he openly acknowledges the fragmentation of the self under description, the first person singular in Hand to Mouth revokes this separation of voices by binding them into a single version of a unified self signified by the pronoun I. As we have seen, though, the person writing, the author figure, the narrator, and the protagonist, can never be identical; thus this subsumption under the “umbrella term” I does not provide certainty of identity. Even Lejeune admitted that when he wrote: “But also in terms of autobiography itself, we find evidence that the first person is a role” (“Pact” 9). The first person is a role, a narrated version of the self, or, as I argue in Auster’s example, yet another authorial self-invention through position-taking. This is likewise the case in Auster’s third auto/biographical work, Winter Journal, which I will discuss in my next chapter. You: Winter Journal In Winter Journal (2012), Paul Auster chose the second person singular pronoun you with which to write about himself. This might seem like a curious choice, because of its unusual and unexpected form. Rarely are readers confronted with this direct

44 Auster’s two remaining catalog entries are on Paul Gauguin’s publication Noa Noa. Voyage de Tahiti (1924) and on Man Ray’s photo book Mr. and Mrs. Woodman (1970). 45 Cf. Bourdieu, “Field“ 64.

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address in writing, let alone in autobiographies. But, as Philippe Lejeune rightly asked: “What would prevent me from writing my life’s story and calling myself ‘you’?” Yet Lejeune restrictively added: I am not aware of any autobiographies that have been written entirely in this way; but this method appears somewhat fleetingly in the speeches (discourse) that the narrator addresses to the person that he was, either to cheer him up if he’s in a bad mood, or to lecture him or to repudiate him. There is certainly a distance from this point of narrative, but such a thing is possible. This type of narrative would show clearly, at the level of enunciation, the difference between the subject of the enunciation and the subject of the utterance treated as addressee of the narrative. (“Pact” 7)

A certain distance between the subjects of enunciation and utterance is apparent, yet it is questionable whether this really explains Auster’s narrative choice. The impersonal form of he, as employed in “The Book of Memory,” would have been sufficient to create this desired distance. Rather, I see two options that the pronoun you offers: First, a strange double structure that addresses the author at the same time as the reader. The you can be read as “you, Paul Auster,” as a form of inner dialogue, and, simultaneously, it can be read as “you, the reader.” Here the reader is directly addressed, at least grammatically, which calls her attention to the process of reading itself. The second option offers an even more promising interpretation of Winter Journal. I argue that Auster addressed his own body, his physical self, with the pronoun you in order to point to the traditional dichotomy of mind and body. Thematically, Winter Journal is largely concerned with somatic matters or, as Auster wrote to his pen pal John M. Coetzee in 2011, it is “an autobiographical work, a collection of fragments and memories, a curious project that revolves around the history of my body, the physical self I have been dragging around with me for sixtyfour years now” (Here 234). Speaking of the physical self that the I has been dragging around, Auster reiterated the traditional binary structure of mind and body. 46 Adressing oneself as you can thus be read as a splitting of mind and body, which stresses the long-established dichotomy between the two. In the course of the text, Auster tried to approximate his own body in an attempt to transcend the mind-body dualism and suggest a final interplay between the two. His interest in the duality problem of mind and body is well described in his latest auto/biography, Report from the Interior (2013). Also written from the perspective of the second person singular you, Auster expressed his lifelong fascination:

46 For a good introduction to the concept of the body and the “corporeal turn” in academia see Lisa Blackman, The Body: The Key Concepts, 2008.

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[A]nd much later, when you were putting together your Collected Poems (2004), you saw fit to include a short prose text written when you were twenty, ‘Notes from a Composition Book,’ a series of thirteen philosophical propositions, the first of which reads: The world is in my head. My body is in the world. You still stand by that paradox, which was an attempt to capture the strange doubleness of being alive, the inexorable union of inner and outer that accompanies each beat of a person’s heart from birth until death. (Report 192)

Whether this union, or rapprochement, is persuasive in the final analysis of Auster’s work, remains to be seen. To start, let me state that this new perspective provided Auster with yet another possible way to examine and locate his authorial self. The “facts” offered in his third auto/biography are mostly well known from his previous writings and interviews. Thus, the attentive reader or fan will learn little more about her “author,” as the book is very repetitive in terms of its “autobiographical information.” The book also raises the question of Auster’s egocentrism, as it is the third of four auto/biograhies he wrote in thirty-five years. Yet I argue that Winter Journal is valuable precisely because of its repetitiveness, which reveals the book’s performative quality.47 As the title states, Winter Journal is written in the form of a personal journal or diary, which are commonly written in the first person singular. The winter motif, with its sensory evocations of coldness and tranquility, is recurrent throughout the book. This is seen as early as the first page, where Auster described a childhood memory: “You are six years old. Outside the snow is falling” and ending on the last page with the grave final sentence: “You have entered the winter of your life” (Winter 1, 230). The writing of the journal itself takes place in winter, which Auster directly addressed: “No snow of any significance since the night of February first, but a frigid month with little sun, much rain, much wind, hunkered down in your room every day writing this journal, this journey through winter” (Winter 219-220). Journal writing is described here as a journey, echoing Ihab Hassan’s concept of autobiography as a quest, the well-known trope of life as a cycle, metaphorically depicted by the four seasons. Auster, in the winter of his life, wrote his daily journal to bring himself through an actual winter. As long as he kept on writing, he seemed to say, the journey (of life) would continue. Cyclical forms and motifs thus recur throughout the publication, as Auster formulated: “[T]hat is where the story begins, in your body, and everything will end in the body as well” (Winter 12). A journal can be described as a cross between a diary and a notebook. A journal is less chronological than the

47 Furthermore, Winter Journal is Auster’s literary answer to Siri Hustvedt’s outstanding auto/biographical publication The Shaking Woman or A History of My Nerves (2010) that “illuminates the perennially mysterious connection between mind and body and what we mean by ‘I’” (Shaking book jacket).

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former, yet better structured than the latter. Journals are personal, yet not necessarily private. Journal means diary in English and French, and the prefix jour, French for day, puts extra emphasis on the process of writing it “every day.” Auster described his journal as a “catalogue of sensory data. What one might call a phenomenology of breathing.” A few pages later, he called it an “inventory” (Winter 1, 5). What he inventoried are mostly somatic matters: scars, wounds, accidents, panic attacks, births, deaths, baseball games, fights, girls, love affairs, sex, drugs, and various body parts in order “to examine what it has felt like to live inside this body” (Winter 1). Auster spoke of “this body,” not of “your body,” let alone “my body.” So we ought to read his third auto/biography from the perspective of the body, that is Auster’s body, which he separated from his mind at the outset. The story, his story, will start and “end in the body” (Winter 12) to, once again examine himself, only this time as a somatic being. Auster described his body mostly in fragile and dissolving becomings. This certainly has to do with his advanced age. The aging body brings along pain, illness, failure, and eventually death. Only the young and healthy can ignore the eventual mortality of the body. In youth, the body usually runs smoothly, like a functional machine that needs care only periodically. Seldom does this illusion burst as when the body is damaged or violated with an outer force or disease. Auster wrote not about the healthy body, but rather the aging and aching body. Here the body is described as something that one must rely on, as something that one is usually not aware of until it hurts or fails. Concentrating on the somatic instead of the linguistic, Winter Journal is a mediation on the body, that is, the body in time and space, or, put differently, the body in a state of becoming. Auster revealed his interest in the author’s body, not just anyone’s body. He imagined himself as a physical entity and thereby invented his own author-body. Becoming an author entails imagining oneself as a writer, which means performing penmanship, or as Roland Barthes wrote: “I act the part of the writer, in the fully sacred sense of the role, as a way of enabling myself to become one” (Preparation 225). Auster especially scrutinized the author as a somatic being and his distinct operations such as sitting, walking, writing with a pen or a typewriter, smoking, and reading (to name some of the “professional” tasks of authors). Through writing about these processes, Auster performed authorship as a form of self-inspection, creating yet another version of the author Auster. Within his somatic inventory, Auster gave his hands special attention. On three exhausting pages, he described what his hands have performed during his lifetime, from opening doors to wiping his children’s bottoms (Winter 164ff.). The artist’s hand, of course, is a well-known trope. The hand is that part of the body of which the author is constantly aware, as it moves within her eyeshot while writing. An author constantly looks down at her own hands, which come to resemble the threshold between brain and page, between mind and text. Commonly, the hand has been seen

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as an extension of the brain, and thus an extension of the mind. The artist’s hand, therefore, can be seen as the performing tool of the author’s genius or mastermind.48 In fact, Auster reinforced this idea with the prominent literary example of John Keats’s writing hand: “Looking at your right hand as it grips the black fountain pen you are using to write this journal, you think of Keats looking at his own right hand under similar circumstances, in the act of writing one of his last poems” (Winter 164). Because Keats died at age of 25, and was writing his last poems while he suffered with tuberculosis, he did not literally share “similar circumstances” with Auster. However, Auster’s association with Keats is still a powerful one. Pen, typewriter, and keyboard are the physical instruments, the working tools of the author’s (hand)craft. Auster stressed the manual aspect of the writing performance, thereby challenging the common perception of writing as a solely mental procedure. “Writing begins in the body,” Auster stated, as the brain signals to the hand, which moves the pen, or touches the keyboard. As he further described: In order to do what you do, you need to walk. Walking is what brings the words to you, what allows you to hear the rhythms of the words as you write them in your head. [...] You sit at your desk in order to write down the words, but in your head you are still walking, always walking, [...] Writing as a lesser form of dance. (Winter 224-225)

Auster gave expression to the corporeal experience of his craft. According to him in writing, the hand dances across the page, guiding the pen like a dance partner. The fingers fly across the keyboard, sometimes too fast for the mind to follow. The body eventually rests, almost motionless at the desk, while the intellect is still roaming. Ealier, Paul Valéry in his Cahiers, included sketches of his own hand and its activities, holding a cigarette or a pen, as Robert Pickering observed in “Writing and the Page: Rimbaud, Mallarmé, Valéry” (1992). Pickering discussed the possibility of “the page as canvas” and “the painterly mode” of letters, while carving out Valéry’s “view of the active, ‘muscular’ nature of writing” (“Writing” 70-71). Auster also connected his writing with the visual art of the painter Sam Messer 49 in a book

48 The hands of artists have played a significant role throughout the history of art. Albrecht Dürer’s drawing “Praying Hands” (c. 1508, 11.5 in x 7.8 in, Albertina Vienna) is a prominent example. Dürer took his own left hand as a model and visually doubled it in a mirror to compose the folded hands. 49 Samuel (Sam) Messer is a Brooklyn-based painter and Associate Dean at the Yale University School of Art. Messer received a B.F.A. from Cooper Union in 1976 and an M.F.A. from Yale University in 1981. He is represented by Nielsen Gallery, Boston, and Shoshana Wayne Gallery, Los Angeles.

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entitled The Story of My Typewriter (2002). This illustrated book includes Messer’s still lifes of Auster’s Olympia typewriter, his portraits of Auster, as well as Auster’s auto/biographical short story about his own typewriter. Significantly, Auster’s hands play an important role in all of Messer’s portraits, as they hold the author’s head in a thinker’s pose,50 hold a book51 or a cigarette,52 or make a defensive gesture (by revealing palms) that could be read as a gesture of blessing. 53 Two portraits by Messer that capture Auster’s hands are: “My Name is Paul Auster, that is not my real name” (1998),54 and “The Wizard of Brooklyn” (2001).55 Curious things happen with and around Auster’s hands in these paintings. Let me begin with “My Name is Paul Auster,” which depicts Auster en face sitting on what appears to be a desk in front of an urban skyline that offers a view onto several skyscraper facades. Fore- and background seem to curiously merge in antique white colors, or the faces of the buildings behind the figure are reflected on the surface of the table. The table is evoked only through the body’s sitting position and several objects apparently lying on the desk. Compositionally, the painting is divided into two horizontal sections: the upper two-thirds (the clearly structured background) and the lower third (the messy table). These sections are divided by thick black horizontal lines that could be the edges of the desk, or another skyscraper facade emerging beneath Auster’s arms. Auster is pictured sitting at the intangible desk looking straight into the beholder’s eyes. In front of him are several

50 Messer, Swift and Lean. Oil on canvas, 54 x 37 in, 2001. Collection of Josefine Messer. 51 Messer, Reading. Pencil on paper, 17 x 14 in, 2000. 52 Messer, Broke. Pencil on paper, 20,5 x 16 in, 1998. 53 Messer, As One. Oil on canvas, 58 x 48 in, 2002. 54 Messer, “My Name is Paul Auster, that is not my real name.” Oil on canvas, 68 x 66 in, 1998. Private collection. The title is a reminiscence to Auster’s story “City of Glass” (1985), which sees its protagonist and pseudo private detective Daniel Quinn using the pseudonym Paul Auster only to later meet the “real” Paul Auster. Whereas his employer Peter Stillman introduces himself with the same words: “My name is Peter Stillman. [...] That is not my real name” (Trilogy 16). 55 Messer, “The Wizard of Brooklyn.” Oil on canvas, 78 x 109 in, 2001.

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Fig. 2: Sam Messer, My name is Paul Auster, that is not my real name

My name is Paul Auster, that is not my real name, 1998. Oil on canvas, 173 x 168 cm, private collection.

characteristic objects staged like theater props.56 At his right stands a typewriter with a wound-up paper with the words “SWIFT AND LEAN” typed on it twice.57 In other paintings, the prominence of Auster’s Olympia typewriter suggests that it is a major figure if not the protagonist of the painting.58 Next to the typewriter lies a red book, presumably a notebook, with the word “RED” written in white letters on its cover. 56 Portraits and self-portraits have been traditionally equipped with attributes of the portrayed’s trade or art, such as brush and easel for the artist or feather and paper for the scholar. Compare, for example, Hans Holbein the Younger’s portrait of Erasmus of Rotterdam (1523) writing at his high desk or Diego Velásquez’ famous self-portrait Las Meninas (1656) with the artist in front of a canvas within a canvas. 57 “Swift and lean” is Auster’s motto as he revealed in an interview: “In fact, I have a little motto for myself when I’m writing novels because I have a tendency sometimes to go too much. And I say to myself, ‘Swift and lean. Swift and lean’” (Figgis, “Conversation” s.p.). 58 Messer’s still lifes of Auster’s Olympia typewriter can also be described as extended portraits depicting the author through the symbol of his typewriter. As Gilles Deleuze wrote: “[N]o two typewriters have the same strike” (Repetition 29).

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In front of Auster stands a glass of red wine. To his left are a black, well-stocked ashtray and an old black dial-operated telephone. Above Auster’s head, we can read the following handwritten words “MY NAME IS PAUL AUSTER (That is not my REAL NAME),” which is also the painting’s title and, thus, a form of mise en abyme,59 an image containing an image of itself. Auster’s figure at the center appears in colors of antique white, ochre, and different shades of brown. His head and hands are fully colored and appear “finished,” while his upper body is only thinly contoured with black lines and is thus suggested rather than defined. This coloring draws much attention to his head and hands. Auster smokes a small cigar stuck between his lips and is surrounded by a green-yellow-gray cloud of smoke rising from the area of his chest that is streaming above his head. He appears with at least seven hands. One right hand props his head in a thinker’s pose, two hands are folded and rest in front of him on the desk, two hands type on the typewriter; one hand, probably a left hand, is stubbing out a small cigar, and one right hand, holding another cigar, is crossed with one of the typing left hands on the desk. One other left hand is hinted at, erected with the elbow prop on the desk. This suggests a total of eight hands,60 showing Auster’s multitasking in his creative work: thinking, smoking, typing, resting, drinking, writing, and communicating. Most apparent is the contrast between Auster’s head and his hands: the latter are mostly agile, while the former is still. Like the urban landscape in the background, Auster’s head and his upper part of the body are static. Like the cloud of smoke and the messy desk, his hands are mostly in motion. This dichotomy between rest and action at once creates friction and aesthetic pleasure for viewers. In Messer’s portrait, the common notion of the author’s handcraft is thus inverted: it is not the calm body and active mind, but rather, the

59 The term mise en abyme comes from heraldry and was used by André Gide to describe self-reflexive embeddings in the arts, as he explained in his 1893 journal: “In a work of art I rather like to find transposed, on the scale of the characters, the very subject of that work. [...] Thus, in certain paintings of Memling or Quentin Metzys a small convex and dark mirror reflects the interior of the room in which the scene of the painting is taking place. Likewise in Velázquez’s painting of the Meniñas (but somewhat differently). [...] None of the examples is altogether exact. What would be much more so, and would explain much better what I strove for in my Cahiers, in my Narcisse, and in the Tentative, is a comparison with the device of heraldry that consists in setting in the escutcheon a smaller one ‘en abyme,’ at the heart-point” (my emphasis, Journals 29-30). 60 Eight is the number of arms an octopus has. Octopuses use distraction as a defense mechanism, ejecting a thick, blackish ink in a large cloud to aid in escaping from predators. Ink is also the “defense mechanism” of writers at least metaphorically. Cf. Roland Barthes: “I am writing this day after day; it takes it sets: the cuttlefish produces its ink: I tie up my image-system (in order to protect myself and at the same time to offer myself)” (R.B. 162).

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moving hands (the synecdoche for his whole body) and the motionless head (for his mind). Certainly, the act of creation can be visualized only in the moment of execution (body), not in the instant of conception (mind). Messer’s depiction speaks to the impossibility of painting the actual process of thinking, as it also emphasizes the somatic aspects of the act of writing, which are not (e)motionless. Fig. 3: Sam Messer, The Wizard of Brooklyn

The Wizard of Brooklyn, 2001. Oil on canvas, 198 x 277 cm.

The second Messer portrait I discuss, “The Wizard of Brooklyn,” is very similar to “My Name is Paul Auster.” Yet the former portrait not only addresses the specific corporeality of the author in his working process and environment but raises significant issues of authorship in general. Again, the figure of Auster is seated at a clearly defined blue desk in front of a whitish Manhattan skyline seen from Brooklyn. Behind Auster are the twin towers of the World Trade Center as well as the Brooklyn Bridge. The choppy waters underneath and the cloudy skies above are inflamed in colors of red, orange, and yellow.61 The light-colored skyline is echoed by another interior “skyline” that turns out to be a row of books behind the figure. On the books’ 61 The painting is dated 2001, thus it was finished or nearly finished before the attacks on the World Trade Center and its collapse.

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covers we can read the titles of Auster’s own novels such as Moon Palace (1989), The Music of Chance (1990), Timbuktu (1999), as well as Miguel de Cervantes’s Don Quixote (1605) a genealogical literary reference for Auster.62 This “literary skyline” is in between the figure and the outside world, physically supporting the author. Auster’s body of work thus stands in between the author’s “real body” and the outside world, linking or bridging the two over the East River. Auster is painted en face, looking into the beholder’s eyes with his head rested on one right hand. His head, body, and hands are painted in rough, thick brushstrokes in a simple execution. His body appears to have more gravitas and is less ephemeral than in “My Name is Paul Auster.” Auster’s seven hands are again engaged in various activities: resting his head, stubbing out a small cigar, typing on the white Olympus typewriter, grabbing a glass of whiskey, holding a pencil, and dialing a number on the old telephone. Auster’s accompanying short story, “The Story of My Typewriter,” is, in itself, an homage to his Olympus and thus a textual pendant to Messer’s visual adoration of the symbolically charged typewriter. Even today, a typewriter is still used by Auster, who writes his texts with pen or pencil on paper. During the writing process, he typewrites certain paragraphs to see them in black and white and later typewrites the whole manuscript in a tedious yet worthwhile process of revision and recapitulation. Auster explained his writing process in an interview: “Typing allows me to experience the book in a new way, to plunge into the flow of the narrative and feel how it functions as a whole. I call it ‘reading with my fingers,’ and it’s amazing how many errors your fingers will find that your eyes never noticed” (in: Wood, “Art” s.p.). The whole process or method of operation is antiquated, as symbolized by the dated Olympus typewriter that Auster has described as “an endangered species, one of the last surviving artifacts of twentieth-century homo scriptorus” (Typewriter 2223). A good dose of nostalgia and stubbornness is involved in this staging of the author or artist as the “last” representative of the manual labor of writing or painting – a handcraft that Auster described in the same interview: I’ve always written by hand. Mostly with a fountain pen, but sometimes with a pencil— especially for corrections. If I could write directly on a typewriter or a computer, I would do it. But keyboards have always intimidated me. I’ve never been able to think clearly with my fingers in that position. A pen is a much more primitive instrument. You feel that the words are coming out of your body and then you dig the words into the page. Writing has always had that tactile quality for me. It’s a physical experience. (In: Wood, “Art” s.p.)

62 I discuss the importance of Cervantes’s novel for Auster in my chapter “City of Glass.”

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In The Story of My Typewriter, Messer and Auster gave expression to the corporeal experience of their crafts, thus adding to the polarizing and ongoing debate about authorship as a collaborative endeavor or as an intellectual performance of the individual.63 Another physicality is expressed in Messer’s portrait title “The Wizard of Brooklyn,” a title which seems to insinuate what Brooklyn is for Auster: a space for the imaginary.64 One only has to think of The New York Trilogy (1987), Moon Palace (1989), or The Brooklyn Follies (2005) to argue that New York City, and especially Manhattan and Brooklyn, play a significant role in Auster’s oeuvre. In Winter Journal, Auster acknowledged the many places that he has lived and worked over the years. He painstakingly listed and described his 21 addresses numerically, from his parents’s homes in New Jersey to his student apartments in Manhattan to his apprentice rooms in Paris, Amsterdam, and Dublin, and finally to his permanent settlement “[s]omewhere in Park Slope; Brooklyn” (Winter 110). This created an autobiographical topography, which mapped the movements and locations of the author’s body in space and time. Echoing literary paragons like Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass (1891-92)65 and James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922)66 in theme and style, Auster prefaced his topographical mapping accordingly: Your body in small rooms and large rooms, your body walking up and down stairs, your body swimming in ponds, lakes, rivers, and oceans, your body traipsing across muddy fields, your body lying in the tall grass of empty meadows, your body walking along city streets, [...] leaning back in chairs with your legs propped up on desks and tables as you write in notebooks, hunched over typewriters, [...] but most of all the sensation of sidewalks, for that is how you see yourself whenever you stop to think about who you are: a man who walks, a man who has spent his life walking though the streets of cities. (Winter 58-59)

Rooms and streets, sitting and going, writing and walking are pairs of opposites that express the main binary structure of mind and body, which is the authorial challenge

63 Cf. Martha Woodmansee: “As late as the 1750s in Germany the writer was still being represented as just one of the numerous craftsmen involved in the production of a book – not superior to, but on a par with other craftsmen” (“Author Effect” 15). 64 The reference to L. Frank Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz is discussed in my chapter “The Story of My Typewriter.” 65 Cf. Whitman: “Space and time! now I see it is true, what I guess’d at, What I guess’d when I loaf’d on the grass, What I guess’d while I lay alone in my bed, And again as I walk’d the beach under the paling stars of the morning” (Leaves 53). 66 See Leopold Bloom’s stroll through the city of Dublin (Joyce, Ulysses 62ff.) or Molly Bloom’s interior dialogue (Ulysses 640ff.).

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of Winter Journal. The book attempts to reunite this dichotomy through the act of writing itself. In this way, Winter Journal is also a return to Auster’s beginnings. From the end of 1978 to early 1979, Auster regained his authorial voice when writing White Spaces (1980), while “[t]he snow is falling endlessly in the winter night” (White 30). This text was his personal breakthrough, after a long and devastating writer’s block, which Auster described in Winter Journal as “the darkest moment of your life. [...] you had not written a poem in more than a year, and you were slowly coming to the realization that you would never be able to write again” (Winter 221). What ended his writer’s crisis, Auster continued, was a visit to an open dance rehearsal with his friend, the painter David Reed: “The dancers saved you. They are the ones who brought you back to life that evening in December 1978, who made it possible for you to experience the scalding, epiphanic moment of clarity that pushed you through a crack in the universe and allowed you to begin again” (Winter 220). Euphorically, Auster described this miraculous moment of watching the dancers dance “to silence rather than to music” (Winter 222) in spiritual, if not religious, terms and linked his epiphany to a unifying experience of body and mind: Bodies in motion, bodies in space, bodies leaping and twisting through empty, unimpeded air, [...] the mere sight of their bodies in motion seemed to be carrying you to some unexplored place within yourself, and little by little you felt something lifting inside you, felt joy rising through your body and up into your head, a physical joy that was also of the mind. (Winter 220, 222)

This intense emotional experience of the body and the mind also functioned as a trigger that helped him to return to his work and to write White Spaces, “the first work of your second incarnation as a writer, the bridge to everything you have written in the years since then” (Winter 224). Both Winter Journal and White Spaces offer analogies of movement through time and space, when Auster described his latest “journey through the winter” (Winter 220) and his earlier “journey through space” (White 27). Furthermore, both texts echo the allusion to the white page in front of the author. Walking on snow-white-covered streets, thereby, corresponds to writing on blank white sheets. Both spaces have to be seized67 physically and mentally. Auster clearly thought of these spaces synonymously:68

67 I mean to seize in the sense of to grasp something mentally, but also in the sense of to take possession of something physically. 68 Cf. Laura Barrett’s essay “Framing the Past” in which she formulated: “For Auster, an empty room, like a blank page, once furnished with memories and thoughts, becomes a viable space for growth” (“Framing” 107).

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I remain in the room in which I am writing this. I put one foot in front of the other. I put one word in front of the other, and for each step I take I add another word, as if for each word to be spoken there were another space to be crossed, a distance to be filled by my body as it moves through this space. It is a journey through space, even if I get nowhere, even if I end up in the same place I started. (White 27)

Auster is neither the first nor the only author to have engaged in discussions of space and page. The interest in space and differing conceptions of it has concerned artists and writers for a long time. As far back as the early Renaissance, Leon Battista Alberti in his De Pictura (1435/36) described the evolutionary concept of central perspective for rendering the illusion of three-dimensional space. 69 For Arthur Rimbaud, Stéphane Mallarmé and Paul Valéry, to take three literary forebears important for Auster’s genealogy, “an active interface between writing and the page assumes particular significance” (Pickering, “Writing” 56). As Pickering convincingly showed, these three authors elaborated on the ideas of “the page as ‘canvas’” and “the painterly mode of the poem’s composition” (“Writing” 69). In brief, I will state a few examples of these authors’s concerns: the physical paradoxes of the size and frame of the page, the black ink on white paper, as well as the metaphysical question of “spatialization as the projection of intellect and imagination” (“Writing” 65).70 The page becomes the space of the imaginary and the imaginary is located on the page. Auster’s White Spaces is, indeed, a large-size publication that leaves a great amount of white space in the margins. The text is surrounded by much whiteness and each of the three parts of the publication begins with a cover page that states the title (for example, “SPACE – A Dance for Reading Aloud”) and an empty, white box that accentuates the open space. In both White Spaces and Winter Journal, Auster heavily engaged in disclosing different spaces within which to position his authorial body and mind. To walk in the space, to sit in one’s room, and to write on the page, are all authorial performances intended to overcome the body-mind dualism and reunite their long-established dichotomy.

69 Cf. Pickering: “In ‘re-viewing’ the page and its spatial polyvalence, it is instructive to turn back briefly to some of the founders of perspective in Western painting. Apart from the technical revolution stemming from the formulation of the principle, [...] the most immediate impact of those paintings where perspective dominates can arguably be held to be associated less with rational proportioning than with the shock of direct visual involvement” (“Writing” 59). 70 For example Leonardo da Vinci’s “conception of space as an anisotropic structure parallels suggestively Valéry’s approach to the empty page, as similarly the changing locus for experimentation and potentialization, the theatre for the coursing energies which make it vibrant with a sense of becoming” (Pickering,“Writing” 71).

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Within these performative acts, real places give room to imaginary spaces within the mind: 20A. 300 Eighth Avenue, Apartment 1-I; Brooklyn. A one-room studio on the ground floor of a six-story apartment building [...] The number of your studio apartment pleased you for its symbolic aptness. 1-I, meaning the single self, the lone person sequestered in that bunker of a room for seven or eight hours a day, a silent man cut off from the rest of the world, day after day sitting at his desk for no other purpose than to explore the interior of his own head. (Winter 106-107)

Real places define the frame for the restless body while they offer release for the mind: “I put one foot in front of the other, and then I put the other foot in front of the first, [...] I walk within these four walls, and for as long as I am here I can go anywhere I like. [...] there is always the floor to welcome my body” (White 27). Imaginary places, furthermore, open up spaces for the authorial body and mind in becoming: “Reluctantly, I [...] began, slowly and painfully, to empty my mind. Now emptiness is all that remains, a space, no matter how small in which whatever is happening can be allowed to happen” (White 28). As Laura Barrett wrote in “Framing the Past: Photography and Memory in Housekeeping and The Invention of Solitude” (2009), Auster recognized “that all framed spaces, rooms, pages, photographs, are reverberations of one’s own mind” (“Framing” 89). I would add that the opposite is equally true. To conclude, let me return to the idea of authorial trinity and Valéry’s intriguing thoughts: “I – You – He. This fundamental relation of discourse – always present in language. [...] These 3 persons are not persons. They are the essential elements of a figure constructed by the target” (Cahiers 4 106). These three pronouns do not represent actual persons, but are positions of and in language that are assembled by the reader, and as I have argued, by the author as well. This brings to mind another famous trinity in literature or in general discourse: author, reader, and text (or in models of communication: sender, receiver, and message). If we fuse these trios, fascinating matches evolve: the first person pronoun I could stand for the author; the third person pronoun he/she could represent the reader; and the second person pronoun you could signify the text. If we now transfer these fused trios back to Auster’s three auto/biographies written from the perspectives of he, I, and you, I would like to argue the following: Auster’s first auto/biography, “The Book of Memory,” written in the third person singular, is a version of the author figure from the perspective of a potential reader. Auster envisioned his author persona from a distance, detaching himself linguistically from his author position to be able to locate his authorial self: “He must make himself absent in order to find himself there” (Invention 154). His second auto/biographical text, Hand to Mouth, written in the

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first person singular, strove for the identity of author and author figure using the autobiographical I to suggest sameness. Here Auster performed authorial individuation, indicating that he no longer saw his authorial self solely “in fragments” and no longer had “a different idea of who I was” (Hand 35). His third auto/biography, Winter Journal, written in the second person singular, is a version of the author persona seen through the corpus of his own texts. By bringing to mind the corporeality of his author figure in words and images, Auster located his authorial self within his own body of work: “[A]lthough you have already written about some of the things that happened to you in that house (The Red Notebook, Story No. 2), there was much that you did not talk about in those five pages” (Winter 78). Somatic corpus and textual corpus are juxtaposed and intertwined. “The so-called personal pronouns: everything happens here” Barthes stated in his own auto/biography, thereby noting the uncertainties of these “shifters” with which everything [...] can be reversed: in ‘myself, I,’ the ‘I might not be ‘me,’ the ‘me’ he so ostentatiously puts down; I can say to myself ‘you’ as Sade did, in order to detach within myself the worker, the fabricator, the producer of writing, from the subject of the work (the Author). (R.B. 168)

Barthes thus attributed certain affects to the different personal pronouns and disclosed their application as conscious performative choices of the author. 71 Auster’s use – in his auto/biographical texts – of the three singular personal pronouns he, I, and you corresponds well to the concept of reader, author, and text in its triadic structure, as well as in expression. Auster actively engaged in the position-taking of and in language by exploring the performative possibilities of these different pronouns. He thus exposed his authorial agency in the continuous becoming and positioning of the author figure Paul Auster in and through his auto/biographical writings.

71 In the previous section Barthes addressed another well-known triangle of discourse, namely the signifier, signified, and referent. He argued that these three are no longer the same in signification: “[O]ne is known, which is the process of signification, [...], but the others are less familiar. They are notification (I plant my message and I assign my auditor) and signature (I display myself, I cannot avoid displaying myself)” (R.B. 166). Once again, Barthes stressed the performative aspects of signification through the acts of “planting,” “assigning,” and “displaying,” thus granting authors further agency.

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S ELF /P ORTRAIT “[P]hotography and autobiography operate in parallel fashion, both deliberately blurring the boundaries between fact and fiction, between representation and creation,” 72 Timothy Dow Adams argued in his study on photography in autobiography, Light Writing & Life Writing (2000). In the same vein, Paul John Eakin in Touching the World: Reference in Autobiography (1992), described autobiography as “nothing if not a referential art, and the self or subject as its principal referent,” 73 which holds equally true for photography. The parallels between autobiography and self-portraiture in form and content are multiple and multifaceted. I would therefore like to enlarge my corpus of textual auto/biographies to include visual forms of autobiographical expression that involve authorial selfinvention and positioning. I will specifically examine different forms of the self/portrait74 that are the visual equivalents of textual auto/biographies. Using what at first glance looks an eclectic choice, I will display a broad and illuminating spectrum of visual auto/biographies or textual self/portraits. This chapter thus offers contrasting juxtapositions of different self/portraits in images and texts by and through which authors have developed and positioned their authorial figures within their work as well as within the larger field of cultural production. Gilles Deleuze’s inaugural philosophical work, Difference and Repetition (1968),75 will be the theoretical ground on and against which my readings of these

72 Cf. Adams, Light, 20. In his conclusion he summarized: “Many scholars of autobiography have unpacked the three Greek words from which we derive the term ‘autobiography’; however, most of this etymological analysis of ‘self-life-writing’ has concentrated on autos and bios rather than the third root, graphe, which autobiography shares with photography. Because graphe is often translated as ‘writing,’ rather than as the broader ‘depiction’ or ‘delineation,’ too often literary scholars have thought of autobiography only in terms of written texts. If, however, we use Patrick Maynard’s more precise definition of graphe as ‘marking,’ then we are more likely to begin to take into account not only the uses of photography in autobiography, but also the larger question of autobiography in photography” (Light 225). 73 Cf. Eakin, Touching 3. Later he added: “[A]utobiography is nothing if not a referential art; it is also and always a kind of fiction” (Touching 31). 74 I will concentrate on self/portraits in photography, text, and video, leaving out other possible forms in performance art, sculpture, installation, dance et al. 75 Paul Patton wrote in his translator’s preface about Difference and Repetition: “It was Deleuze’s principal thesis for the Doctorat D’Etat. [...] Difference and Repetition is the

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self/portraits are situated. When analyzing images of the self, one is immediately confronted with questions of sameness, difference, and repetition that need to be addressed. Accordingly, I rely on Philippe Lejeune’s brief text, “Looking at the SelfPortrait” (1980), which despite ist shortness acknowledges that “[b]ecause the selfportrait is first of all intended to be seen among other works by the same painter: this is where it breathes, where it plays, where it really means something, through resemblance and difference, through recall and rapture” (“Looking” 117).76 I will interrogate how authors make use of self/portraits to perform repetition in difference and difference in repetition, thereby becoming, time and again, authorial personae. I will begin with Candice Breitz’s video work “Factum” (2009-10), a series of double portraits of identical twins and one triple portrait of identical triplets first exhibited in an exhibition entitled Same Same (2009) at the Power Plant in Toronto.77 Though “Factum” can hardly be described as a self-portrait, which I will argue, it nonetheless visualizes questions of sameness and difference so inherent in the concept of identity. In my analysis, I will interrogate whether and how “the same is not the same, it is different,” as Gordon C.F. Bearn argued in his striking juxtaposition of Jacques Derrida’s and Deleuze’s writings on repetition (“Differentiating” 459).78 My second analysis will focus on Sophie Calle’s long-term series True Stories (1994). Calle’s auto/biographical True Stories use text and image side by side, while blurring the boundaries between portrait and self-portrait, biography and autobiography, and searching “to provide photographic evidence of [Calle’s] existence” (Calle, Double

first book in which Deleuze begins to write on his own behalf. As such, it occupies a pivotal place in his oeuvre” (Difference vii). 76 Lejeune added: “Perhaps I have also been influenced by the self-portraits of writers – sketches with the pen done without any notion of ostentation, without the premeditation and the slowness that the execution of a painting implies – physiognomy and expression trapped impromtu in the margin of a text. I am thinking of the black self-portraits of Baudelaire, of the sketches of faces and hands that we find regularly in Valéry’s Cahiers (Notebooks), of the drawings of Antonin Artaud. Anguish and questioning are read here more clearly than in many of the self-portraits of painters – but how can we not assume that the painter, too, if he has done his own portrait, has gone through this? ‘Me – this?’” (“Looking” 115). 77 See Candice Breitz: Same Same. Toronto: The Power Plant, 2009. 78 “The difference between Derrida and Deleuze is simple and deep,” Bearn argued, “it is the difference between No and Yes ... [...] It is the difference between a philosophy trapped in the frame of representation and one which breaks on through (to the other side)” (“Differentiating” 441). Taking this into account, I will only concentrate on Deleuze’s concept of repetition.

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122-123). My third example, Jonathan Safran Foer’s Eating Animals (2009), will take us back to matters of textual self/portraits. Although Eating Animals is sold as a nonfiction work, parts of the book – especially the two chapters called “Storytelling” – can be read as auto/biographical stories of the author and his grandmother, reflecting familial eating habits and contemporary food culture. Before I scrutinize these diverse self/portraits, I will briefly discuss two of the most prominent examples of visual auto/biography or textual self/portraiture presented by Roland Barthes: Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes (henceforth called R.B., 1975) and Camera Lucida (1980).79 Barthes wrote: “In the same way, I like certain biographical features which, in a writer’s life, delight me as much as certain photographs; I have called these features ‘biographemes’; Photography has the same relation to History that the biographeme has to biography” (Camera 30). The auto/biography and the self/portrait are thus analogous and complementary texts. Starting with Barthes’s earlier texts, 80 helps me tie Auster’s auto/biographies as forms of authorial position-taking to the performative self/portraits of Breitz, Calle, and Foer. All self/portraits discussed are auto/biographical hybrids that connect the self to another person, 81 more specifically, to close family members: the twin siblings

79 Cf. Eakin’s Touching the World (1992), especially his introduction, for a thorough reading of R.B. and Camera Lucida. Eakin used the terms autobiography and self-portrait interchangeably (for example, Touching 3), as I will do. 80 “In contrast to Roland Barthes,” Eakin wrote, “recognized by some as the quintessential postmodernist autobiography (or ‘anti-autobiography’), Camera Lucida may seem, in its own way, to be a second autobiography, espousing assumptions about the self and reference of a much more traditional sort. In fact, when one rereads the earlier work in the light of the later one, it is hard not to find the burden of the latter already present in the pages of the former, especially in the opening section of photographs” (Touching 20-21). 81 Barthes’s self/portraits are strongly intertwined with his mother as Eaking reminded us: “In ‘Barthes puissance trois’ (Barthes to the third power), Barthes’s review of Roland Barthes in La Quinzaine Littéraire of 1975, he could not resist drawing attention to the maternal bond informing his autobiographical project. [...] In giving this final image of the triptych a Lacanian caption in the text of Roland Barthes – ‘The mirror stage: “That’s you”’ (Barthes 21) – Barthes prompts recognition of the all-encompassing mother’s position” (Touching 21). The second part of Camera Lucida, on the other hand, starts with Barthes’s proposition: “No, what I wanted – as Válery wanted, after his mother’s death – was ‘to write a little compilation about her, just for myself’” (Camera 63).

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in Breitz’s videos, the mothers in Barthes’s and Calle’s82 texts, the father and son in Auster’s83 work, and the grandmother and son in Foer’s book. These portraits of the self are therefore at the same time biographies of the “other” and likewise only possible through the “other,” because “[i]t is the Other-structure that ensures individuation within the perceptual world,” as Deleuze insisted. He further explained: “It is not the I, nor the self: On the contrary, these need this [Other-]structure in order to be perceived as individualities” (Difference 352). Furthermore, my opening with Barthes’s two auto/biographical self/portraits also addresses the question of how photography, as the ultimate “system[ ] of representation” (Camera 76), signifies the farewell to representation in favor of repetition84 that Deleuze declared as follows: “[T]he game of difference and repetition has replaced that of the Same and representation” (Difference 354). Barthes’s Camera Lucida is a collection of “Reflections on Photography,” as the subtitle indicates, in which he “decided to take myself as mediator for all Photography” to ask “[w]hat does my body know of Photography?” (Camera 8, 9). A few iconic images by photographers ranging from Joseph Niepce to Nadar, and Alfred Stieglitz to Robert Mapplethorpe, served him not to create a coherent “corpus: only some bodies,” but rather to discuss the “fundamental feature” of photography and its aesthetics (Camera 8, 9).85 Barthes’s earlier R.B., on the other hand, is a private photo album and an autobiographical journal that begins with a photographic series from Barthes’s personal collection and is followed by short textual fragments cataloged (somewhat) alphabetically by title. The beginning of R.B. surprises readers with two oddities in the autobiographical discourse: the inclusion of over forty pages of personal photographs of Barthes and his family from child- to adulthood,86 and the

82 Calle’s latest exhibition and catalog Rachel, Monique… (2013) circle around her mother and her death in 2006. Three short stories about her mother are also included in the True Stories collection. 83 See Auster’s depiction of his father in “Portrait of an Invisible Man” in The Invention of Solitude but also his account of his mother in Winter Journal. Also compare Auster’s own becoming a father, as an impetus for “The Book of Memory” to Foer’s impulse to write Eating Animals when his first son was born. 84 Bearn argued that “it is precisely this difference that accounts for the most exciting features of Deleuze’s work: the possibility of breaking through to the other side of representation, beyond authenticity and inauthenticity, becoming-becoming” (“Differentiating” 441). 85 Eakin argued that “Barthes proposes in Camera Lucida an aesthetic of photography founded precisely on this bearing of witness” (Touching 18). 86 These photographs do not simply stand by themselves (“speak for themselves”), but are mostly accompanied by text in form of captions or whole paragraphs. The only exceptions

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handwritten epigraph that famously reads: “It must all be considered as if spoken by a character in a novel” (R.B. preface). Later in the text, the epigraph is even extended with the addendum: “[O]r rather by several characters” (my emphasis, R.B. 119).87 The combination of the private photo album and the distancing epigraph establishes the inherent contradiction of the auto/biographical self/portrait. From the outset, readers must come to terms with the discrepancy between a “fictional” autobiographer and his “verifiable” visual referents. 88 This (con)fusion of fact and fiction explains the prompt reflex in academia that classified Barthes’s text as either “autobiography in the age of poststructuralism” or “as an anti-autobiography,” as Eakin summed up the discussion (Touching 3).89 Yet again, I am not interested in a genre discussion, but rather in Barthes’s performative strategies to perpetually renew his author persona,90 which he did here with a variety of self/portraits. The selections from his private photo album anticipate what Barthes coined later in the text the image-repertoire, which is the pool of images that everyone has of the world and, more importantly, of him- or herself. Thereby, the pictures of this image-reservoir may be actual (photographic) images as well as

are the first photograph, which prefaces the whole book, depicting “the narrator’s mother” (R.B. preface, 185) as well as several self-portraits during Barthes’s stay in the sanatorium (because of his tuberculosis) and in different work situations (R.B. 37, 39). 87 When Barthes asked his readers to consider all “as if” spoken by a character in a novel, he canceled the autobiographical pact from the beginning, because as Lejeune explained, “novel, in current terminology, implies fictional pact” (“Pact” 15). 88 In Report from the Interior (2013), Auster took Barthes as an example, but proceeded reversely, starting with a personal, slightly fractured text and then including 107 public images. These iconographic images draw a generalizing picture of Auster’s book, marking his “autobiographical” recollections largely as collective memories, in Maurice Halbwachs’s understanding of the term (Cf. On Collective Memory 1992). 89 Eakin explained: “Poststructuralist criticism of autobiography characteristically – and mistakingly – assumes that an autobiographer’s allegiance to referential truth necessarily entails a series of traditional beliefs about self, language, and literary form.” He objected: “To the contrary, I shall argue for the presence of an antimimetic impulse at the heart of what is ostensibly a mimetic aesthetic” (Touching 30-31). 90 Adam Phillips described R.B. as “[a]n autobiography without an author that is the autobiography of an author” (R.B. vi-vii). I disagree with the first part, because R.B. is certainly not without an author, but I agree with the second part that evokes the idea of authorial self-invention in autobiographical writing.

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the mental images we have of ourselves and those that others have of us.91 Barthes’s presentation of his actual photographic image-repertoire is thus a specific form of visual auto/biography that is supplemented by a textual self/portrait. In autobiographical discourse, Barthes explained, “anyone who speaks about himself gets lost – the image-repertoire is taken over by several masks (personae), distributed according to the depth of the stage (and yet no one – personne, as we say in French – is behind them)” (R.B. 120). Accordingly, speaking about oneself, or “taking” a photograph of oneself, is essentially a matter of masking, of pulling one mask over another, as there is no ‘original’ mask or person behind the mask. Barthes’s idea of the imagerepertoire therefore connects him to Deleuze, who attended to the meanings and workings of masks and masking to develop his concept of repetition: The disguises and the variations, the masks or costumes, do not come ‘over and above’: they are, on the contrary, the internal genetic elements of repetition itself, its integral and constituent parts. [...] Repetition is truly that which disguises itself in constituting itself, that which constitutes itself only by disguising itself. It is not underneath the masks, but is formed from one mask to another, [...]. The masks do not hide anything except other masks. There is no first term which is repeated [...]. There is no bare repetition which may be abstracted or inferred from the disguise itself. The same thing is both disguising and disguised. (Difference 19)

The concept of ‘disguising disguises’ is even more persuasive in self/portraiture than it is in auto/biography, because visual images have an all-encompassing and forceful immediacy, whereas texts are more indirect if not obscure. Barthes himself had formulated in his Mythologies (1957) that “pictures, to be sure, are more imperative than writing, they impose meaning at one stroke, without analyzing or diluting it. But this is no longer a constitutive difference. Pictures become a kind of writing as soon as they are meaningful: like writing, they call for a lexis” (Mythologies 110). In R.B.’s series of self/portraits, we are presented with varying images of a person that visualize (physical) change over time and thus difference. Self/portraits in general, or at least photographic ones, claim sameness (the identity) of a person, that is their immediate connection to the “real,” as Susan Sontag famously described: “Photographed images do not seem to be statements about the world so much as pieces of it, miniatures of reality that anyone can make or acquire” (Photography

91 Cf. Barthes: “In Morocco, they evidently had no image of me; my efforts, as a good European, to be this or that received no reply: [...] they unwittingly refused to feed and flatter my image-repertoire” (R.B. 43).

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4).92 So photographic images of the self contribute to and complicate ones imagerepertoire, because of their ‘photographic referent,’ which Barthes described as the “necessarily real thing which has been placed before the lens, without which there would be no photograph” (Camera 76).93 Ultimately, the masks and costumes, or the image-repertoire, is all that we see of ourselves, as Barthes argued, because “[y]ou are the only one who can never see yourself except as an image: you never see your eyes unless they are dulled by the gaze they rest upon the mirror or the lens [...]: even and especially for your own body, you are condemned to the repertoire of its images” (R.B. 36). Here, with Barthes’s shift to the personal pronoun you,94 we are reminded of Paul Auster’s Winter Journal: “You can’t see yourself. [...], your own face is invisible to you. [...], and in the end – at least as far as others are concerned – your face is who you are, the essential fact of your identity” (Winter 163).95 Only in one’s self/portrait (or in the mirror)96 can we “face” our own bodies. Like Auster, Barthes concerned himself with his (aging) body (and, in fact, both men wrote their texts in their early to mid sixties). And, like Auster, Barthes juxtaposed and intertwined

92 Sontag wrote further: “The picture may distort; but there is always a presumption that something exists, or did exist, which is like what’s in the picture. Whatever the limitations (through amateurism) or pretensions (through artistry) of the individual photographer, a photograph – any photograph – seems to have a more accurate, relation to visible reality than do other mimetic objects” (Photography 5). 93 Adams wrote: “[S]o literary scholars, I believe, must come to terms with the realization that no amount of sophisticated poststructuralist theorizing will ever replace a persistent belief in the referentiality of autobiography, what Paul John Eakin names as an ‘existential imperative,’ a will to believe that is, finally, impervious to theory’s deconstruction as reference as illusion.” Adams used the metaphor of light, impossibly comprised of waves and particles at the same time, to describe lives: “Maintaining the balance between revealing and concealing, between developing the latent image but not overexposing it, between negatives and positives, is at the heart of both light writing and life writing, for lives, like light, exist simultaneously as both particle and wave” (Light 242). 94 In R.B., Barthes wildly mixed the personal pronouns referring to himself as I, you, and he (and even as ourselves on p. 28). 95 R.B. is comparable to Auster’s auto/biographies: the genre of journal writing, the use of the second and third personal pronoun singular to refer to himself, the separation into fragments ordered by their titles. Barthes once even refered to R.B. as “the book of the Self” (R.B. 119), which is echoed in Auster’s idea of “The Book of Memory.” 96 Barthes included one photograph showing his mother sitting in front of a mirror holding the infant Roland on her lap. The picture has the following caption: “The mirror stage: ‘That’s you’” and is listed in the appendix as “Cherbourg, 1916” (R.B. 21, 185). Barthes had been born in Cherbourg the previous year.

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somatic and textual bodies when he “cast[s] over the written work, over the past body and the past corpus, [...], a kind of patchwork” and is thus “willing to read the body in the corpus” (R.B. 142, 161). Eakin described “the union of language and body” as “decisive for Barthes” and explained further that “[t]his notion of bodies expressing, of discourse ‘welling up’ from the body, underlines the body’s importance in Barthes’ conception of the subject” (Touching 12). The physical body is characterized by Barthes as a means of transportation or hotbed for the body of work to evolve and to become: “So you will find here, mingled with the ‘family romance,’ only the figurations of the body’s prehistory – of that body making its way toward the labor and the pleasure of writing” (R.B. 3). According to Barthes, the physical body, in the process of writing, becomes intertwined with the corpus of work. “The image-repertoire will therefore be closed at the onset of productive life [...]. Another repertoire will then be constituted: that of writing” (R.B. 4). Barthes’s imagerepertoire and his written corpus complement each other. Images and texts are strongly associated with and localized within his physical body. “What does my body know of Photography?” (Camera 9), Barthes thus asked in Camera Lucida and accurately described the process of posing in front of the camera lens: Now, once I feel myself observed by the lens, everything changes: I constitute myself in the process of ‘posing,’ I instantaneously make another body for myself, I transform myself in advance into an image. This transformation is an active one: I feel that the Photograph creates my body or mortifies it, according to its caprice. (Camera 10-11)

Posing in photography is a conscious, concrete form of positioning and performing. Situating one’s body in front of the camera’s lens involves arranging oneself according to an inner (or pre)image of what one’s body should or could look like. A body is thus “created” to look as the sitter wishes it to look, or else the body is “mortified,” as the sitter fears. A self-portrait may well (re)affirm an image of the self or create an image that one is unaware of. It may reflect a certain emotional state: “I look sad – I am sad;” contradict our senses: “I look old, but I feel young;” or surprise us with an unusual image: “I do not look like myself at all.” One can see oneself in new light, which may be perceived positively or negatively. The potential of the photographic image to signify on multiple levels explains the perpetual fascination with self/portraits. This potential is further strengthened by the participation of sitters in the shaping of their own images through pose, facial expression, and gesture. Self/portraits exist between the representational anti-poles of identity: difference and repetition. Thus, naively but understandably, Barthes formulated a bold yet impossible wish: “If only Photography could give me a neutral, anatomic body, a body which signifies nothing” (Camera 12). Self/portraiture strives to reify identity but ultimately fails in this endeavor, as Barthes wrote:

106 | P ERFORMING A UTHORSHIP Ultimately a photograph looks like anyone except the person it represents. For resemblance refers to the subject’s identity, an absurd, purely legal, even penal affair; likeness gives out identity ‘as itself,’ whereas I want a subject – in Mallarmé’s terms – ‘as into itself eternity transforms it.’ (Camera 102-103)

I see in this quote another connection between Barthes’s wish for a “subject in internal transformation” and Deleuze’s concept of “difference in repetition,” which “tried to show that it is a question of simulacra, and simulacra alone,” because “the eternal return affirms difference, it affirms dissemblance and disparateness, chance, multiplicity and becoming” (Difference 372-373). “No one,” Barthes wrote correspondingly, “is ever anything but the copy of a copy, real or mental” (Camera 76), which leaves us in the end with a processual self, devoid of any origin. As Barthes’s image-repertoire echoes Deleuze’s masks and costumes, Deleuze’s “eternal return of difference” reverberates with Barthes’s “subject of eternal transformation.” Yet how can a “subject of eternal transformation” or a processual self be represented at all? Representation of a processual self, if possible, might be best achieved in and through processual media such as photography97 or video. What does photography tell us about the body, to reverse Barthes’s question. Despite Barthes’s conclusion that the referent in photography and photographic selfportraiture can never resemble the subject, he nevertheless attempted to disclose “(even if it is a simple thing) how Photography’s Referent is not the same as the referent of other systems of representation” (Camera 76). This is by no means “a simple thing,” as the manifold histories and theories of photography show, but it nonetheless affirms Barthes’s fascination with photography in general and selfportraiture in particular: Contrary to these imitations [painting and discourse], in Photography I can never deny that the thing has been there. There is a superimposition here: of reality and of the past. And since this constraint exists only for Photography, we must consider it, by reduction, as the very essence, the noeme of Photography. What I intentionalize in a photograph [...] is neither Art nor Communication, it is Reference, which is the founding order of Photography. (Camera 76-77)

In Camera Lucida, Barthes defined the subject of a photograph as “a kind of little simulacrum.” He named it Spectrum, in “relation to ‘spectacle,’” (Camera 9) which is synonymous with performance. In photographs and videos, and especially in

97 Photography is a very processual medium that involves many different stages: light is captured on light sensitive negative film (or recorded on memory cell), film is developed in chemicals (or edited on screen), a negative image is projected on photographic paper which is then developed in chemical baths (or printed on paper).

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self/portraits, subjects perform identity formation through repetition and difference. There can be no representation of a “true” subject or an identity in photography, because all visible images are the different masks of one’s image-repertoire. “The mask is the true subject of repetition,” Deleuze wrote, “[b]ecause repetition differs in kind from representation, the repeated cannot be represented: rather, it must always be signified, masked by what signifies it, itself masking what is signified” (Difference 20). There is “no prior identity, no eternal resemblance,” as Deleuze concluded (Difference 372-373), only repeated simulacra of a self marked by difference or, in Barthes’s words, the “subject [...] as into itself eternity transforms it” (R.B. 102-103). In what follows, I will discuss three auto/biographical self/portraits by Breitz, Calle, and Foer that oscillate between the self and the “other,” and between sameness and difference, in order to perform (authorial) self-invention. “[Y]ou constitute yourself, in fantasy, as a ‘writer,’” Barthes wrote, “or worse still: you constitute yourself” (R.B. 82). How the authorial self, or rather, ever new versions of this self, are actively “constituted” in the subject’s mind through performative self/portraits, will be the main objective of my analyses. “Factum” Candice Breitz’s video work “Factum” (2010) consists of seven interviews with identical twins and one interview with identical triplets, from which Breitz later edited seven dual-channel and one tri-channel video installation.98 Each twin was interviewed individually and “[e]ach pair of interviews was later woven together in the editing studio to create a somewhat stereoscopic dual-channel portrait” (Breitz, Same 19).99 Viewers see a split screen showing twin A at the left and twin B at the

98 “Factum” was commissioned by The Power Plant in Toronto and centerpiece of the survey exhibition Candice Breitz: Same Same (2009) at the same location. Selective parts of three of the eight installations are available to watch on Breitz’s website: “Factum Kang” (original 69 min 10 sec), “Factum Misericordia” (original 51 min 1 sec), and “Factum Bradley” (original 78 min 8 sec): http://www.candicebreitz.net/. The longer versions (each with a duration of approximately an hour) of all interviews are available on Vimeo: http://vimeo.com/album/259786. Breitz chose five female sets of twins/triplets and three male pairs. 99 Cf. catalog: “Breitz chose to work with monozygotic twins who spent their formative lives together and who thus draw on shared memories and experience. Each pair of twins was filmed over the course of one long day in a domestic environment designated by the twins [...]. In each case, Breitz interviewed Twin A for approximately five to seven hours in the absence of his/her sibling and then directed the same set of questions separately to Twin

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right, both dressed in the same outfit and seated in the same location. Both twins speak straight into the camera. Because of their visual and positional sameness, the first impression of the video is one of a single person being shown twice, being doubled. The realization that the work is actually a double portrait of identical twins hits later. Gilles Deleuze called such uncanny sensation “the paradox of doubles or twins,” who are “absolutely identical in respect of their concept, and participating in the same singularity in existence” (Difference 14). The staging of Breitz’s twins strives to show sameness, while at the same time, her arrangement paradoxically accentuates difference down to the smallest detail. “The thing about twins,” Breitz explained in an interview “is that their experience of subjectivity is a magnified version of what we all experience. [...] We all want to be distinct and autonomous, [...], but we also all want to exist in community. Twins have a heightened sense of that dilemma between sameness and difference” (in: Milroy, “Double” s.p.). In “Factum,” Breitz demonstrated and visualized the inherent antagonism of identity, which continuously moves back and forth between sameness and difference. “For the past ten years or so,” Anne M. Wagner explained, “Breitz’s work has pushed against the limits of portraiture as a genre so as to offer a set of answers to this question – answers that, taken together, may well be the closest we have yet come to an artistic depiction of contemporary identity” (“Double” 12). This is particularly the case in “Factum,” a work in which Breitz looked at “whether it’s possible to both respect genres like portraiture and biography, but to mess them up a little bit, to undermine some of the assumptions that are built into those genres, like the idea that a story is simply a story that is told factually” (“Mirror” s.p.), as she explained. Rather than telling a coherent master narrative “factually,” Breitz looked for a form to express the two (or many) sides of a story. She found this form in oral history, a tradition very familiar to the South African artist, as she outlined: I’ve been wanting for a long time to use oral history…which I think is very African, histories that are not written down on paper, histories that are not told in a formal, authoritative way. But histories that become histories by being retold – the kinds of stories that a grandmother tells to her grandchildren, the grandchildren repeat them to their children, and that again is an imperfect loop. As the stories are retold, we remember the things that are significant to us in the retelling, we might throw in a little bit of flavor to embroider the story in the direction that interests us in particular, leave out details which never seemed particularly interesting to us in

B. [...] Each pair of twins was asked to style themselves as identically as possible for the camera” (Same 19).

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the first place. So as that story gets repeated [...] that loop keeps on going around but every time it’s a little different. (“Mirror” s.p.)

Breitz’s work calls to mind not only the long tradition of oral storytelling in South Africa, but also, even more forcefully, the public hearings of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) that took place between 1996 and 1998.100 The TRC interviews, which were open to the public, were conducted in public spaces in both large city centers and in more remote areas. More importantly, the public hearings were broadcasted via radio and national television, allowing the public to listen to the “[o]ver 22.000 victims of human rights violations [who] made statements to the TRC, and more than 7.000 perpetrators [who] applied for amnesty.”101 The public hearings and the TCR’s final report of 1998 have “been acknowledged as one of the twentieth century’s most historically significant documents” 102 for South Africa and the world at large. Beyond that, they distinctly disclose the concepts of truth and memory in all their complexity. In “Factum,” Breitz consciously ridiculed the Latin title, meaning truth,103 by displaying and accentuating diverse, yet equally credible, subjective experiences side by side. The twin narratives might conflate at times into a shared interpretation of a mutual memory, but their stories might also diverge without truth claim104 on either side. The imperfect loops of the twins’s individual versions of their story illustrate the emergence or unfolding of a narrative through activating memory and imagination, thereby constantly calling into question the facts in “Factum.” Moreover, each set of interviews is at once a self-portrait of the individual twin and a portrait of each other. Breitz’s “double portraits,” in their multiplicity, thus qualify as revealing examples of self/portraits. Breitz named her work after Robert

100 For more information and the 1998 final report of the TRC cf. http://www.justice.gov. za/trc/index.html. 101 Cf. “Traces of Truth” at Historical Papers, William Cullen Library, University of the Witwatersrand: http://truth.wwl.wits.ac.za/about.php. Also cf. The South Africa History Archive (SAHA): http://www.saha.org.za/. 102

Cf. http://truth.wwl.wits.ac.za/about.php.

103

Further meanings include deed, act, achievement, or work.

104

The term “truth claim” plays a significant role in the discussion about photography, further intensified with the emergence of digital photography and processing programs. Cf. Tom Gunning, “What’s the Point of an Index? or, Faking Photography,” 2004.

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Rauschenberg’s twin paintings “Factum I”105 and “Factum II,”106 which were created simultaneously in 1957.107 Each of Rauschenberg’s “combines” is “a mediation on repetition,” as the Museum of Modern Art’s report noted, “[w]ith doubled heads of Dwight D. Eisenhower, paired trees, and two successive news photos” (“Acquisition” 31). Rauschenberg’s twin “mediation on repetition” or difference, are look-a-likes or doubles at first sight. However, upon closer inspection, small divergences become apparent: different drops of paint and color gradients, slightly different applications of newspaper clippings, and individual brushstrokes. Gradually, these minor details of difference emerge, shifting our perception from sameness to difference or to difference in repetition. Surprisingly, the focus on the differences becomes so relevant that the previous assumption of sameness is eclipsed. The viewer asks herself how she could have ever thought of these paintings as being “identical” in the first place. The same happens to viewers in watching Breitz’s interviews with the twins. Her pairs of twins, formerly conceived of as “identical” to each other, become different and distinguishable from one another. While watching and listening to their stories, the differences in voice, facial expression, body language, and individual narratives, become increasingly distinguishable. By watching and listening closely, we discover the differences, or as Gordon C.F. Bearn described it in his essay on Deleuzian difference in three beautiful pictures: “Taking the walk to our spot, again. Driving past the cows, again. Listening to the slow movement, again. These are ways of discovering the differences in the so-called repetitions. Revealing that the same is not the same, it is different” (“Differentiating” 459). In Breitz’s work, viewers get the chance to clearly see, hear, and feel the differences between the apparent sameness of the twins. Or, as Deleuze described, we are able to experience that “[r]eflections, echoes, doubles and souls do not belong to the domain of resemblance or equivalence; and it is no more possible to exchange one’s soul than it is to substitute real twins for one another” (Difference 1). By the end of each clip, we are, without a doubt, able to distinguish twin A from twin B, in

105

Rauschenberg, “Factum I,” 1957. Combine, 61 ½ x 35 ¾ in. (156.2 x 90.8 cm). The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. The Panza Collection.

106

Rauschenberg, “Factum II,” 1957. Oil, ink, pencil, crayon, paper, fabric, newspaper, printed reproductions, and painted paper on canvas, 61 3/8 x 35 ½ in. (155.9 x 90.2cm). The Museum of Modern Art, New York.

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Breitz explained: “I have been fascinated by these works since I was in art school, [...] They seem to anticipate everything about the Pop moment that was still to come, [...] that shift away from the notion of the work of art as the unique, gestural expression of an inner state toward something new, a fascination with seriality and replication” (in: Milroy, “Double” s.p.).

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the same way we are able to tell the difference between Rauschenberg’s “Factum I” and “Factum II.” Beyond the title, another connection between Rauschenberg’s paintings and Breitz’s work emerges in Breitz’s explicit reference to portrait painting.108 Against a black background, each dual channel installation shows two flat screens (“canvases”) in upright portrait format that are side by side and divided by a slim black line. This recalls the format of a classical diptych (Greek for twofold), which has been used for family representations throughout the history of art.109 In terms of format, Breitz’s installation thus clearly refers to the tradition of diptychs (or triptychs in the case of the interview with the identical triplets Jade, Joelle, and Mariah Tang). With regard to genre, Breitz drew on classical techniques of portrait painting to depict her subjects – full-length and full-face – situated in their surroundings. Both twins tell their story parallel to each other, with and against each other. Both narratives are, as a result, constantly interrupted. The stories are not screened in their original chronological order, but rather are shown fragmented and in a non-linear fashion. Two similar yet unique narratives thus compete with each other. Through Breitz’s cutting technique, the twins complement, contradict, or “comment on” each other’s stories with their own narrative and body language. At times, Breitz interrupted one twin’s narrative by muting his or her voice, freezing the image, or blackening one side of the screen. One twin is mostly “listening” to the story of the other and only rarely do they both speak at the same time. Breitz looped the “natural” moments of silence that accrue in any lengthy conversation when someone reflects on his or her thoughts. Thus the sensation of a “real” conversation between the twins is created, despite the fact that they are virtually positioned next to each other and make eye contact only with Breitz, the interviewer who is sitting close to the camera. Often, Breitz played back the twins’s statements to accentuate certain aspects of the story. A meaningful example of Breitz’s elaborate technique of repetition is her interview with the sisters, Pauline Misericordia-Stewart (the older) and Mary Misericordia-Dooher (the younger),110 an elderly Italian-Canadian pair of identical

108

I owe this observation to Tim-Lorenz Wurr.

109 Take, for example, Dürer’s diptych Dürer’s Parents with Rosaries (1490, Germanisches Nationalmuseum, Nuremberg) or the numerous religious representations of Jesus Christ and the Virgin Mary in the diptych format. 110 Who is the older and who is the younger twin seems to always matter in Breitz’s interviews, even and especially if the interviewees downplay any significance to this fact. Pauline, as the first born, describes herself as the leader, the stronger personality, while Mary, being born as the second twin, sees herself as the shy follower, which is mutually confirmed by the other twin.

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Fig. 4: Candice Breitz, Factum Misericordia

Factum Misericordia, 2009. From the series Factum, 2010. Dual-Channel Installation: 2 Hard Drives. Duration of loop: 51 minutes, 1 second. Commissioned by The Power Plant, Toronto; Commissioning Partner - Partners in Art.

twins born in 1933. Their double portrait, “Factum Misericordia,”111 focuses on their different attitudes towards life in general and towards their looks in particular.112 While Mary is very self-critical and unhappy with her (that is, their) appearance, Pauline seems more self-assured and at ease with her looks. “Don’t dwell on those negative things,” Pauline repeats over and over again, as Breitz looped her statement to make it the ultimate gist of the double self/portrait. Mary, for her part, keeps on

111 Breitz, “Factum Misericordia,” 2009. Dual-channel video installation, duration: 51:05, http://vimeo.com/album/259786/video/13374356. All quotes are taken from here. 112 The name Misericordia is very telling of the differing attitudes of the two sisters that seem to be expressed in their contradictory family name: miseria means misery in Italian, while cordia is a flowering plant of the family of starflowers. Misericordia is also the denotation of a visual tradition in the depiction of the Virgin Mary as the Virgin of Mercy (Madonna della Misericordia in Italian), which shows a group of people sheltered under the cloak of the Virgin Mary (Sheltering-cloak Madonna). The Misericordia twins were raised in an Italian-Catholic household.

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lamenting about her features and consoles herself by stating that Pauline “has enough confidence for both of us.” Because of advanced age and shared life experience, both of their positions have existed for a long time in their relationship. Both seem to be aware that Mary has “outsourced” parts of her self-confidence (mental state) to Pauline, and that Pauline, by contrast, has assigned Mary to be responsible for their appearance (physical state). This partial allocation of emotional tasks between the twins is touching and amiable, yet it also leaves a disturbing feeling in the viewers, as it reveals the unbreakable connection between these two individuals. Their condition as a “spilt personality”113 is, once again, reiterated and thus reinforced in their narratives. It is further amplified and visualized by Breitz’s loops and splitscreen technique. Pauline and Mary tell the story of their plastic surgeries, to change their “Italian” noses when they were in their early thirties, and to lift their eyes when they were in their early fifties.114 Mary felt their noses were too “big,” too “Italian-looking” and with a “hook.” When Mary criticizes her own nose, she thereby criticizes the nose of Pauline, who never thought that they had “an ugly nose.” In her interview, Pauline adds that “to this day” she still does not think she had an ugly nose. Nevertheless, the nose issue became “a sensitive thing” for Mary, and so shortly after one New Year’s Eve, Pauline called her sister and said that she was going to “have [her] nose fixed.” Both twins thus ended up with a “nose job,” which was still rare in the 1960s. Despite being content with her own nose, Pauline underwent surgery to please her unhappy twin sister. Cosmetic surgery, as an active form of self-invention through physical alteration and modulation, offers individuals the possibility to alter their appearances with minor changes or profound transformation. Aesthetic operations promise, yet might not keep, a new birth of the self as a self-made self, were one tries to match physical features to an emotional (self-)perception. This is very compelling with regard to twins, especially when one twin is content with her appearance while the other one is not. Apparently, in the case of the Misericordia sisters, it was out of the question that only one of the twins could have gone through this procedure by herself. The surgical intervention of the noses was seen as such a fundamental alteration of “their” face that only both twins together could make that decision. “I don’t think that one can do it without the other,” Pauline says, and gesturing towards an imagined Mary, adds humorously: “If you have [another] plastic surgery without me, I will

113

I do not refer to the metal conditions of dissociative identity disorder or schizophrenia here, but to the idea that certain character traits can be shared or divided up between twins or long-term couples.

114 As it turns out, the Misericordia family has a long tradition of cosmetic surgery. After the twins’ father had died, their mother had a facelift, later followed by an eye-lift and a nose job. Also their aunts and Mary’s daughters had plastic surgeries.

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never walk with you again.” In order for Mary to have the desired nose surgery, it was thus necessary for Pauline to be proactive. She not only permitted her twin sister to alter her face, but also had to initiate the whole intervention both of them to retain sameness. Mary, in this regard, calls their proceeding “collaborative” and speaks about the surgery as a common “adventure.” Yet it was Mary who unexpectedly decided to have her nose altered in a slightly different way than Pauline’s, thus distinguishing herself from her twin sister. When the cosmetic surgeon rhetorically asked “I suppose you want the same noses,” Mary answered “no, not necessarily,” the result was two identical twins with two different noses. Apparently, the twins had not discussed this before surgery, and both of them were astonished by Mary’s bold move. Even today, Pauline says she cannot understand why Mary did that. Pauline never had the urge to look different from Mary. “I was always happy looking like her,” Pauline says, and adds that she never consciously wanted to distinguish herself from her sister. Mary, however, while continuing to complain about her turned-up “new” nose, about which she is still “no happy camper,” comes to the conclusion that she always wanted to “stand on [her] own two feet” and be a separate individual. By changing her looks, her clothing, and hairstyle, she had always tried to distinguish herself from her sister. About her desire for a different nose, Mary says, “I have done that consciously,” a statement that Breitz used to end the shorter version of their interview, highlighting Mary and Pauline as “two separate beings.” The longer version of the double portrait shows that the elderly twins had trodden different paths, as Pauline moved decades ago to the Canadian West Coast with her husband, while Mary remained in the East. In the course of the interview, more of their differences in lifestyle and attitude become apparent, especially regarding their feelings about religion and their own economic circumstances. Yet at the same time, in the eyes of beholders, the twins will always belong to each other. 115 It is unimaginable to think about one twin without the other. Each twin is only seen in the light of the other. What we easily accept with non-twins, the singularity of the individual, seems harder to accept for twins, whom we assume “complete” one another. Mary and Pauline were and always will be “the twins” to each other and to others. They confirm this view when Pauline explains that while they live totally different lives, they are still one, and when Mary describes her sister as her “alter

115 This effect is comparable to the Rauschenberg paintings, which are also physically separated today: “Though the two no doubt belong together,” Jonathan Neil wrote, “there may be something appropriate about their geographical separation. [...] “Factum I” and “Factum II” are like biological twins: imperfect repetitions of one another that now, in their new found distance, would seem to fold West Coast onto East (or vice versa)” (“Factum” 76). Neil’s formulation also reminds of the original meaning of the diptych as twofold.

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ego.” This paradox of sameness and difference helps explain the fascination with identical twins. In “Factum,” we therefore experience a pair of individuals who are uncannily “same same, but different,” as Breitz explained the exhibition’s title at Toronto’s Power Plant, where her installation had been presented for the first time: The title of my exhibition at the Power Plant is Same Same and I hope that resonates for some people with the phrase ‘same, same but different.’ Things seems [sic] to repeat themselves, they seem to come back, but each time they repeat themselves they come back at a different point in time, and arguably have a different resonance. (“Mirror” s.p.)

Same Same thereby implies the disturbing ambivalence yet absolut interdependence of sameness and difference in the process of identity formation. Breitz explained: “For me, as someone who’s making loops, and working in the business of repetition—colleague of mine calls it the ‘loop business’—what I noticed very early on is that repetition never generates sameness, it always generates difference, at the level of reception” (“Mirror” s.p.). The viewers see Breitz’s twins as simultaneously identical and different, which is a truly paradoxical experience. Deleuze used the example of doubles or twins to define his concept of “discrete extension” as “a pullulation of individuals absolutely identical in respect of their concept, and participating in the same singularity in existence (the paradox of doubles or twins).” Twins, for Deleuze, manifest figures of “discrete extension” and thus constitute a “true repetition in existence rather than an order of resemblance in thought” (Difference 14). Through Breitz’s perceptive interviews with various sets of twins, we are able to grasp the significance of Deleuze’s idea of difference in repetition. In Breitz’s installation we can thus glimpse the complex workings of sameness and difference inherent in identity formation. Yet what is usually an unconscious process within each individual, is doubled and reciprocal with Breitz’s twins, whose identity formation always involves a simultaneous differentiating from and moving towards each other. “Factum reflects on the relationship between the individual and the pair, with the understanding that each twin forms one half of a duality and as such has an individual identity, but is also part of an interdependent identity,” as Gregory Burke explained (Breitz, Same 9). Intriguing moments of this doubling experience of an interdependent identity are found in Breitz’s self/portraits, especially in “Factum Kang,”116 the artist’s double interview with the young Korean-Canadian twin sisters, Hanna Kang (the older) and Hanjoo Laurie Kang (the younger), born in 1985. Both women are visual artists

116 Breitz, “Factum Kang,” 2009. Dual-channel video installation, duration 1:09:10, http://vimeo.com/album/259786/video/13514467. All quotes are taken from here.

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Fig. 5: Candice Breitz, Factum Kang

Factum Kang, 2009. From the series Factum, 2010. Dual-Channel Installation: 2 Hard Drives. Duration of loop: 69 minutes, 10 seconds. Commissioned by The Power Plant, Toronto; Commissioning Partner - Partners in Art.

themselves.117 The relationship between Laurie and Hanna constantly circles around their mutual need to be the same yet different. As both tell it, they each had always been expected to look alike. But at the same time, people constantly focused on the smallest physical differences between them: for example, “Hanna’s rounder face,” or “Laurie’s longer neck.” Others “hyper-magnified” their physical differences, as Hanna explains, which, in turn, stimulated for the sisters an ongoing physical competition. Public pressure led the twins to develop an eating disorder, which reinforced their competition and was hazardous to their health. Both remember that during the escalating rivalry, they each had paradoxical feelings of longing to be thinner than the other, and at the same time, wishing to look like the other. Experiencing a “joined identity,” or as Laurie describes, a “conglomerated identity,” led to the fatalistic declaration, “I can’t get better, if you can’t get better,” which Hanna flung at her sister in times of anger and despair. While both twins eventually

117 In 2011 Hanna, who uses the pseudonym Hanna Hur, lived and worked in Berlin as Breitz’s mentee. Cf. The twins’s artist websites: Hanna Hur: http://www.hannahur.com/ and Laurie Kang: http://www.lauriekang.com/.

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overcame their eating disorder, they still describe their ongoing rivalry as very painful. They feel that they need to establish their individual identities by trying to be separate, a process that they experience as both hard and liberating. Laurie, who as a child “was always trying to be Hanna,” is now the more resolute twin in this process of separation and performs, as she explains, “distinct efforts to be different,” and “becoming me.” Hanna, on the other side, is rather afraid to lose their “bond of extreme dependency” and to give up the “fucked-up quality” of their relationship, informed by what she calls “insane neediness.” Both artists found different visual expressions for their binding “twinship.” In one co-authored work, they photographed themselves as a bridal pair in identical white dresses walking down an aisle they constructed. The now untraceable double portrait, called “Twins Getting Married,” is described by the artists as both humorous and sad, as lovely and imprisoning. While Laurie has her twin sister’s face tattooed on her left forearm, Hanna has a tattoo of a stereoscope camera on her left upper arm. Simulating human binocular vision, the stereoscope camera, with its two lenses, takes two half-images simultaneously and from slightly different positions, as Hanna explains. Once you look at an image through a stereoscope, the double images are visually joined to form one 3D image. The stereoscope camera is thus symbolic of the twins’ relationship, which Hanna describes as being “almost like one person” with “one perspective.” The contradictory condition of “same same but different” seems hardly bearable for Hanna and Laurie, whereas the double constellation appears more liberating and comforting for the Tremblay twins. “Factum Tremblay” 118 portrays the FrenchCanadian sisters, Natalyn Helen Tremblay (the younger) and Jocelyn Lucy Tremblay (the older), who were born on a farm in South West Ontario in 1980. As young adults they had their mutual coming-out and were therein reassured by each other. Working as visual artists in Toronto, these twins create mixed media and performative works together as well as independently.119 Commonly referred to as Jocenat, Nat and Joce, as they call themselves, are constantly trying to escape the “binary power structure” of twinship that people create to identify the “smarter,” the “prettier,” the “more popular” twin. This “oppression of binary opposition” is imposed upon them by their environment to “tear them apart,” as Joce explains. But their distinct code of rules for their attire, body decoration, and choice of partner, helps them to differentiate from each other and to “reclaim one name” for each other in order to escape being “photocopies,” as they were sometimes referred to in their adolescence. Today, with their “shape shifter personality” and “gender fluid” attitudes, they use the

118 Breitz, “Factum Tremblay,” 2009. Dual-channel video installation, duration 1:18:08, http://vimeo.com/album/259786/video/13513226. All quotes are taken from here. 119 The Tremblay twins also played in Breitz’s live performance New York, New York (2009).

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Fig. 6: Candice Breitz, Factum Tremblay

Factum Tremblay, 2009. From the series Factum, 2010. Dual-Channel Installation: 2 Hard Drives. Duration of loop: 78 minutes, 8 seconds. Commissioned by The Power Plant, Toronto; Commissioning Partner - Partners in Art.

performative potential of twinship to confuse people about their identity (including their gender). As rural, “genderqueer” twins of French-Canadian background, Nat and Joce experience themselves as true “hybrid persons” admidst Toronto’s culturally diverse population. Throughout their struggles, the twins have nevertheless internally preserved their strong bond of sameness. This found its visual expression, again, in a common tattoo on their right hands that shows a circular variation of the yin-yang symbol in two colors, “cool red” for Nat and “warm blue” for Joce. They resolved their “intellectual battle” over the violating external binaries by developing this visual symbol for their difference in repetition. “We came into being as an existence at the same moment,” and are “in a sense almost the same person,” Nat explains. This statement echoes in Deleuze’s formulation of twins being “a true repetition in existence” as “individuals absolutely identical in respect of their concept, and participating in the same singularity in existence” (Difference 14). Yet this existential paradox seems difficult to endure, especially for the outside world. The twins are appropriated as living “spot the difference” picture puzzles. A binary structure is constantly imposed upon them, as people are intrigued by the differences within the sameness.

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As several sections of the interviews disclose, this incessant comparison between difference and sameness can cause twins unhealthy competition and alienation, which can be harmful both to their individual and interdependent identities. Each of Breitz’s sets of twins and triplets describe being the center of attention when they are amongst others. At other times, they feel like outsiders, for nearly all of them are cultural hybrids. In their relationships, the twins’s bodies play a significant site to express sameness and difference simultaneously. All twins consciously alter and accentuate their bodies with and through attire, tattoos, cosmetic surgery, piercings, or eating disorders. The mirror-image twins, Amy and Kristy Hawke, to use another example, are exact reflections of each other: one is left-, the other right-sided. When they look at each other, it is as if they are looking in a mirror and given to their low self-esteem, they don’t like what they see. The mirror experience of the twins corresponds well with Deleuze’s concept of what he called the “Other-structure,” which is absolutely necessary for the individual to develop, to perceive the world, and to be perceived by it: Notions necessary for the description of the world – […] – would remain empty and inapplicable if the Other were not there to give expression to those possible worlds in which that which is (for us) in the background is pre-perceived or sub-perceived as a possible form; […] all this is made possible only by the Other-structure and its expressive power in perception. In short, it is the Other-structure that ensures individuation within the perceptual world. It is not the I, nor the self: on the contrary, these need this structure in order to be perceived as individualities. (Difference 352)

It is intriguing that Breitz chose to interview mostly pairs of twins who, like her, work in creative fields. With the exception of the Bradley and the Misericordia twins, her choice are visual artists (Kang, Tremblay), editors (Hawke), photographer and designer (Jacob), models and actors (Tang), or sport producers (McNamara). And all of them, with the exception of the Bradley and Hawke twins, are cultural hybrids, children and grandchildren of immigrants to Canada from multiple cultural and linguistic backgrounds, with roots ranging from Spanish, Irish, Ukrainian, Chinese. As participants in the creative industries and as hybrid citizens of Toronto’s culturally diverse population, the chosen twins mirror the self-image of Breitz: an urban artist in between languages and cultures of Johannesburg, New York, and Berlin – the cities in which she has lived to date. Breitz’s interest in self-image through reflection in the “Other” has been decisive in her preference for female over male subjects; five of the eight sets of twins are female. On the whole, Breitz is far more present as an author in her portraits than it first appears. Though her body is never seen, and her voice is never heard, Breitz’s distinct cutting technique of interruption and repetition in the interviews displays her ample

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control and authorial footprint throughout. Respectfully yet assertively, she insisted on her own interpretation of the twins’ stories to ultimately channel them into a multifaceted narrative of self/portraiture in all its layers. In “Factum,” the genres of portrait and self-portraiture are inseparably connected on multiple levels and thus contribute to Breitz’s “exploration of the myriad factors, both genetic and received, which bounce off each other to determine the performance of identity,” as Burke recapitulated (Breitz, Same 9). “The thing about twins,” Breitz explained, “is that their experience of subjectivity is a magnified version of what we all experience. Two is the smallest possible community” (in: Milroy, “Double” s.p.). As Breitz impressively demonstrated in her self/portraits, all identities are perpetually negotiated and performed within binaries of nature and nurture, individual and collective, and sameness and difference. In the following discussion of Sophie Calle’s True Stories, I will show how authors perform within these dichotomies to ultimately become conscious creators and active agents of their works. True Stories I Sophie Calle’s True Stories (2013) 120 are best described as fragmented auto/biographical self/portraits in miniature format that present an image next to a short text to form a diptych. 121 The ongoing series of the true stories is arranged mostly chronologically and spans from Calle’s childhood until today. Many of the stories start with the words “I was x years old…” to give her readers a biographical context. Geographical locations are given as well. The true stories are thus located in time and place. Between 1988 and 2013, Calle wrote more than forty short stories. They were initially exhibited individually or in small groups and were at first subsumed and published under the title The Autobiographies/Les Autobiographies. In 1994, for the first time, Calle published many of the picture stories together and named the collection True Stories. In the latest English publication of the True Stories, forty-six short stories are assembled, forming an auto/biographical mosaic of much of Calle’s previous oeuvre. Each story is accompanied by an image, or each image by a story.122

120

The first “complete” English edition of the True Stories was published in 2013 with Actes Sud. Most quotes are taken from here. Other quotes are taken from: Calle, True Stories. Göteborg/Göttingen: Hasselblad Foundation/Steidl, 2010, identified as True 2010.

121 Alma-Elisa Kittner called Calle’s true stories “visual autobiographies” in her 2009 book Visuelle Autobiographien: Sammeln als Selbstentwurf bei Hannah Höch, Sophie Calle und Annette Messager, 58. 122 Calle, Autobiographies (1988-2003). Series of elements each consisting of one framed photograph and one framed text. In: M’as tu vue 434-435.

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The images, mostly black-and-white photographs, symbolically illustrate the texts. Because of Calle’s multi-faceted work, it is widely discussed whether to position her as a performance artist or as a photographer. However, this debate is irrelevant to my project, especially because Calle herself explained her very pragmatic take on photography: “If the work to be done was more in the performance domain, and entailed relationships with other people, I would take the photos myself. […] And if, as in the case of certain autobiographies, I was using myself as the model, I would ask Jean-Baptiste Mondino to take the pictures” (True 2010 14). This quote reveals Calle’s complex yet practical relationship with photography as an important expression, but only one of many artistic forms she has embraced. Many of Calle’s true stories cross-reference her other major artworks, such as “The Detective” or “The Chromatic Diet,” and thus function as a foundation for her larger oeuvre. Much discussed in publications and exhibitions, the story collection comprises the quintessence of Calle’s authorial expression. In these stories, diverse authorial strategies of self-invention become manifest. As I will show in this chapter, Calle has disclosed a whole spectrum of authorial moves to perform identity formation, becoming an author in the creative process. One of her earliest stories is called “The Plastic Surgery,” which thematically relates to the Candice Breitz’s interviews with twins. Calle’s story reads as follows: When I was fourteen my grandparents suggested that I needed plastic surgery. They made an appointment with a famous cosmetic surgeon, and it was decided that my nose should be straightened, that a scar on my left leg should be covered up with a piece of skin taken from my ass and that my ears should be pulled back. I had doubts, but they reassured me, I could change my mind up until the very last moment. In the end, though, it was Doctor F. himself who put an end to my dilemma. Two days before the operation, he committed suicide. (True 10-11)

Printed next to the story is a black-and-white portrait of Calle in profile, which strongly emphasizes her nose. Looking confident with her large, hooked nose (taking up about one fourth of the image) her presentation seems to “ridicule” her grandparents’ attempt to “straighten” the beak. With Breitz’s Misericordia twins, internal pressure from one sibling led to the plastic surgery of their noses, yet in the end the decision was a conscious adult choice. In Calle’s story, it is the external pressure from the family that compelled the teenage girl to alter her features according to normative notions of what adolescent girls should look like (straighten her nose, flatten her ears, removing her scars). Calle did not seem to have much

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Fig. 7: Sophie Calle, The Plastic Surgery

“The plastic surgery” 2000. One framed text, one framed b/w photograph, 50 x 50 cm (text), 170 x 100 cm (photograph) / 50 x 50 cm (text), 170 x 100 cm (photograph). © Sophie Calle / ADAGP, Paris & VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2015. Courtesy Galerie Perrotin.

agency in this predicament, and thus no participation in any form of active selfinvention, self-making, or self-(re)making, at least not at first. “I had doubts,” is all that Calle was able to articulate, which expresses a “dilemma” that could only be solved by another exterior event: the suicide of her plastic surgeon Dr. F. The anonymized name Dr. F., in combination with the plastic surgery is reminiscent of Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus (1818) and its protagonist Dr. Victor Frankenstein. Dr. Frankenstein is the creator of the monster (later confusingly referred to as Frankenstein), who formed his creature out of dead tissue. Shelley’s Frankenstein draws on the much older Golem theme

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that entails the creation of a manlike being out of inanimate material.123 The Golem is a figure from Jewish mysticism and folklore made out of stone and clay by rabbis.124 Both creators, the doctor and the rabbi, are scholarly men of science and theology, respectively, with enough hubris to dare the act of creating life. This power, originally reserved for mother nature or God, and much envied by mankind, can be read as a metaphor for the creative process itself.125 Authors create characters and animate them, at least in an imaginary world. Likewise, authors create and animate their own authorial figures in the process of writing. Like Dr. Frankenstein and Rabbi Loew, who combined their respective knowledge and spirituality with dead matter to create living creatures, authors fuse the inanimate materials of paper and ink with the imaginary substance of thoughts to create literary creatures and mental images of themselves. In her story “The Plastic Surgery,” Calle played with various well-known tropes of literature, Jewish mythicism, and anti-Semitic stereotypes, when she proudly presented her “Jewish” nose126 as being untouched by the Frankensteins of the world. Instead of being modeled by any doctor or rabbi, representatives of worldly and religious scholarship, Calle insisted on her autonomy and agency as a self-made author. After all, she is the creator, not the creature. Balancing this fragile game of self-determination and other-directedness is a complicated matter for every

123

Similar stories exist in multiple versions worldwide, which describe the animation of dead objects, for example Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s poem The Sorcerer’s Apprentice (1797). Also Goethe drew on older versions of the narrative, for example Lucian of Samosata’s Philopseudes (c. 150 AD).

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The tale of the Golem of Prague and Rabbi Judah Loew ben Bezalel from the 16th century is among the most well-known Golem narratives. The story goes that Rabbi Loew created the Golem to protect Prague’s Jewish community against pogroms, but later had to destroy it. Supposedly, its remnants are still in the attic of the Old New Synagogue of Prague.

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Ernst Kris and Otto Kurz outlined the close connection between God the Creator and the artist in their work Legend, Myth, and Magic in the Image of the Artist (1934): “We can distinguish two groups of ideas: God as the builder of the world, and God as the modeler of man. […] The most widespread image, however, is that of God who, like a sculptor, forms mankind out of clay. […] As Panofsky has shown, two conceptualizations had their origin here. In one, God is compared with the artist – the means by which ‘the Middle Ages were accustomed […] to render God’s work of Creation comprehensible’; in the other, prevalent since the Renaissance, the artist is compared with God – a comparison that subserves the aim of ‘heroizing artistic creativity’” (Legend 53-54).

126

Calle’s mother, Monique, was Jewish. She and her family hid in France throughout the war and Nazi persecution.

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individual and a special theme of many of Calle’s stories. In “The Plastic Surgery,” Calle demonstrated her will to emancipate herself from the status of a mere “object” to one of an active subject. As the author of her story, she re-appropriated her history to eventually make it her own. Paradoxically, photography, specifically photographic self/portraits, are significant for Calle’s quest for authorial self-discovery and selffashioning. Along the lines of Roland Barthes, who expressed that “the Photograph is the advent of myself as other: a cunning dissociation of consciousness from identity” (Camera 12), Calle strove to obtain “photographic evidence of [her] existence” (Double 122-123) in self/portraits. Even if “[p]hotography transformed subject into object,” as Barthes characterized the emergence of the first photographic portraits around 1840, for Calle, “to become an object” or even “a museum object” (Camera 13), constitutes a desirable and productive performance. After all, Calle has repeatedly re-appropriated her images and stories to make them her own. Another of her stories, “The Razor Blade,” exemplifies well her move away from objectification to (more) self-determination, thus claiming authorship of her own work: I posed nude every day for a drawing class, from 9:00 a.m. to 12 noon. And each day, a man who was always seated in the first row, on my far left, drew me for three hours. At noon he would take a razor blade out of his pocket and compulsively slash the drawing he had made. I would watch. Then he would leave the room. The drawing would remain on the table as evidence. This was repeated every day for twelve days. On the thirteenth day, I didn’t go to work. (True 20-21)

Published with the story is a pencil sketch of a full-size nude woman leaning on her left leg, her arms and hands positioned behind her back. The drawn model shows enough resemblance to photographs of Calle to qualify as a self/portrait of the artist. Serious, the model looks straight into the beholders’ eyes, turning her head and body slightly to the right, towards the viewers. The position of the model in the sketch indicates that Calle’s recollection of the man sitting on her “far left” might be false. Either he actually sat on her far right, or the drawing is not by a stranger, but by Calle herself, which makes it a “true” self-portrait. With her detailed yet questionable recollections of the model and drawer, Calle hinted at the sketch’s “true” origins. In any case, the drawing is slashed about a dozen times with thin parallel cuts, mostly from the upper left to the lower right side of the paper. On several spots, the cuts have been repaired with glue strips to superficially close them. These cuts, which suggest destructive and aggressive acts, are disturbing to viewers. The slashed drawing reminds us of the connection between paper and human skin in their strength and vulnerability, stability and fragility. Both can be punctured or embellished, as we saw in the tattoos of Breitz’s twins. Paper and skin are both protective surfaces; skin

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Fig. 8: Sophie Calle, Razor Blade

“Razor blade” 1988. One framed text, one framed b/w photograph, 50 x 50 cm (text), 170 x 100 cm (photograph) / 50 x 50 cm (text), 170 x 100 cm (photograph). © Sophie Calle / ADAGP, Paris & VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2015. Courtesy Galerie Perrotin.

holds the body together, while paper holds a book together, for example. Papercutting thus calls to mind skin-cutting, a widespread mental disorder that manifests in physical mutilations. Troubled people cut their skin with knifes or razor blades in order to dissociate themselves from their problems and sorrows. In Calle’s self/portrait, paper and skin are both cut; the paper is cut literally, while the skin is cut (or violated) figuratively. If Calle is the author of her self-portrait, then the cuts embody a form of auto-aggression and depersonalization. If it was made by a stranger, then the portrait is an expression of the maker’s aggression towards his model, which can be compared to the ultimate destruction that Frankenstein and Golem experienced at the hands of their creators. Whether self-portrait or portrait, Calle quit her modelling work either to escape further “mutilation” from her violent creator, or to distance herself from her own self-inflicted “injuries.” Calle, when she “didn’t go to work” anymore, resisted the century-old tradition of female models as muses of the artistic creation of men. This resistance through refusal holds a double

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Fig. 9: Sophie Calle, Wait for me

“Wait for me” 2010. Une photographie couleur contrecollée sur aluminium encadrée (170 x 100 cm), texte encadré (50 x 50 cm) / Print, aluminium, text, frame (x2), 170 x 100 cm + 50 x 50 cm / 67 x 39 inches + 20 x 20 inches. © Sophie Calle / ADAGP, Paris & VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2015. Courtesy Galerie Perrotin.

meaning, as not working also means not “functioning” the way traditional gender roles call for. Calle simply refused, left her position, and later published the mutilated image(s) of herself as part of her own work. As a powerful authorial performance of self- assertion, she reclaimed her own physical body and embedded it into her body of work. Calle made clear that her path from an insecure young woman to a selfconfident artist had been a very long one. In her story “Wait for Me,” she wrote: I was two. It happened on a beach – Deauville, I think. My mother had entrusted me to a group of children. I was the youngest and they had to get rid of me: that was their game. They huddled together, whispering, then burst out laughing and scattered when I tried to come near. And I ran after them, shouting: ‘Wait for me! Wait for me!’ I can still remember. (True 90-91)

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This short text is printed next to a yellowed black-and-white photograph of a twoyear-old child standing on a pier. She is dressed in a dated white blouse and a bonnet; her legs are naked; her feet are wearing white sandals. The child appears alone on the pier, which is fenced off from the beach and the small houses that are only vaguely perceptible in the background. The dark-haired child looks straight into the camera with a knowing smile and alert eyes. There is a certain self-conscious presentation in the child’s facial expression and body position. The child’s body is slightly turned to the right, hiding most of her right arm and hand. The left arm hangs loosely on the side, while the fingers are slightly spread out, grabbing the fabric of the blouse, as if seeking to hold onto something.127 The self-confident look of the child, by contrast, speaks to her trust of the photographer (possibly the mother, as the text implies) and to her awareness that her picture is being taken. The child in the picture stands firm and strong; she is young but has a developed personality. Viewers familiar with Calle’s self/portraits will know that the child in the picture is little Sophie around the age of two. There is a recognizable resemblance between the young child and the grown-up artist, who is known from innumerable photographs. In all likelihood, the picture of little Sophie is a photograph taken from the photo album of Calle’s family. This early portrait of Calle aligns well with the autobiographical project of her true stories. As with many of these picture stories, the accompanying text is extremely concise. Despite their apparent simplicity, Calle has stressed repeatedly in interviews that she spent a lot of time writing the texts of the true stories. She formulated and reformulated the texts to bring them into a plain and concise form, as she explained in an interview: “The autobiographies are texts with five lines, but I need two months to write them, and I read them two to three hundred times until I have found the right word” (my translation).128 In addition, “Wait For Me” is also a very short story. Its five lines start with the pronoun I, and end with the words “I can still remember,” read abridged “I ... remember.” The first person pronouns I, my, and me – which are used eleven times in these five lines, immediately indicate to readers that what follows should be read in the autobiographical register. This anecdote is told as a

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The gesture of the hand, fiddling with the fabric of the dress or the hair, is a well-known motif in art history, especially in the Renaissance. Take, as examples, Michelangelo’s sculptures Pietà (1498-99) or Moses (1513-15), which illustrate well the playfulness and virtuosity of such artistic expression and execution. Such depictions display the haptic and artistic differentiation of materials and structures that artists were able to produce.

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The original reads: “Die Autobiographien sind Texte mit fünf Linien, aber ich brauche zwei Monate, um sie zu schreiben, und ich lese sie zwei-, dreihundert Mal, bis ich das richtige Wort gefunden habe” (Stech, “Sophie Calle” 222).

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personal memory from the perspective of the remembering I, that is, the author figure Calle. The first person singular thereby stands in stark contrast to the plural they, referring to the other children, which suggests a dichotomy between the individual and the group. On the one hand, there is the little girl whose face is seen in the photograph and is thus recognized as an individual by viewers. She is the outsider of the “game,”129 excluded due to her age: “I was the youngest.” On the other hand, there are the other children, who remain anonymous yet seem overpowering in their majority: “that was their game” (my emphasis). Interestingly in R.B., Roland Barthes offered a similar childhood anecdote entitled “A memory of childhood.” Here Barthes’s interpreted a comparable incident differently, when he remembered playing with other children in his hometown of Bayonne, in huge building holes that had been dug in the loamy soil for the foundations of the houses, and one day when we had been playing in one of these, all the children climbed out except me – I couldn’t make it. From the brink above, they teased me: lost! alone! spied on! excluded! (to be excluded is not to be outside, it is to be alone in the hole, imprisoned under the open sky, precluded); then I saw my mother running up; she pulled me out of there and took me far away from the children – against them. (R.B. 121-122)

Indeed, Barthes’s experience was not that of an outsider of the group, but rather that of someone trapped inside a group that excluded him: He was thus an excluded insider. Calle’s exclusion, on the other hand, indicated that she was more of an included outsider, left behind by the group with which her mother entrusted her. In the former recollection, the mother recovers the son from the solitary hole, only to snatch him away from the group for good. In the latter story, the mother hands the daughter to the group, with which she experiences solitude through exclusion. Both texts, in offering readings of the authors as excluded insider or included outsider, ultimately, tell the story of becoming an outsider.130 To Paul John Eakin, “Roland Barthes’s ‘R.B.’ is an inveterate outsider” who desires for a private language while, at the same time, fearing “exclusion from ‘the popularity of language’” (Touching 9, 10). Barthes even confirmed this view: “The Doxa speaks, I hear it, but I am not

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Ironically, the cruel “game” is only possible because there is an outsider to the group. The outsider position, as we will see, can be more powerful than one might initially expect.

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Cf. Barthes: “[H]e has always belonged to some minority, to some margin – of society, of language, of desire, of profession, and even of religion [...]: like an intermittent outsider, I can enter into or emerge from the burdensome sociality” (R.B. 131).

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within its space. A man of paradox, like any writer, I am indeed behind the door” (R.B. 123). Eakin explained that Doxa is “Barthes’s term for received public opinion” (Touching 8). The outsider position is thus both a given and self-chosen position in society, which comes with loneliness and freedom from conformity. In their stories, Barthes and Calle each claimed that at very young ages they were singled out because they did not fit into a particular group of children.131 The outsider or outcast position, however, is not exclusive to them, as it has been well-known to writers and artists for centuries. Authors have been perceived as mediators between individual autonomy and collective cooperation, as Barthes’s picture of “hearing the Doxa,” yet “behind the door” well illustrates. As Beatrice von Bismarck in Auftritt als Künstler – Funktionen eines Mythos (2010) reminded us: With the 19th century, the inborn godlike skills of the artist emerged more and more in conjunction with a social marginalization. The myth of the artist began to closely interlink with that of the bohemian, the counter image of regulation, standardization, and moderation of middle-class society. (My translation)132

The nineteenth century myth of the artist focuses on the notion of the bohemian, which involves the artist’s separation from the common people. Artists separate and are separated from society, because they are perceived as different or special, features that are often detected in their childhood. Yet their specialty also leads to their outsider status. The perception of the modern artist has been that of the alienated genius, created and perpetuated by society and by the artist. In their marvelous and precise publication, Legend, Myth, and Magic in the Image of the Artist: A Historical Experiment (1934),133 Ernst Kris and Otto Kurz discussed the bohemian artist as part

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Ernst Kris and Otto Kurz wrote about the artist’s youth: “The universal interest in everything reported about the childhood and youth of exceptional persons has deep roots in the human mind. [...] One point of view states that childhood events have a decisive impact on the future development of man; […] The other interprets the earliest available information about the lives of the heroes not as precursors in terms of causality, but as premonitory signs; it sees in the experiences of the child an indication of his future accomplishments and regards them as evidence of the early completion of uniqueness” (Legend 13).

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The original reads: “Die angeborenen, gottähnlichen Fähigkeiten des Künstlers, [...], traten mit dem 19. Jahrhundert immer stärker im Zusammenhang mit gesellschaftlichem Außenseitertum auf. Der Mythos vom Künstler begann sich aufs Engste mit demjenigen des Bohemians zu verzahnen, dem Gegenbild zu Regulierung, Normierung und Maßhaltung in der bürgerlichen Gesellschaft” (Auftritt 19).

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The German title is Die Legende vom Künstler: Ein geschichtlicher Versuch.

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of a long tradition of artist legends, from the Greek artists Zeuxis and Apelles to the divino artista of the Renaissance to the artists of “Montmartre, or Greenwich Village – a vanishing world which, where it still survives, belongs to yesteryear” (Legend 7). “In each phase of this historical development,” Kris and Kurz wrote, “new social types [of artists] appear alongside the old, without ever entirely displacing them” to form, what they coined, the “great community of geniuses” (Legend 6, 7). In their study, Kris and Kurz paid special attention to the artist anecdote as “the ‘primitive cell’ of biography,” which “taps the realms of myth and saga, from which it carries a wealth of imaginative material into recorded history” (Legend 11, 12). They further elaborated: We regard the hero of these typical anecdotes as depicting the typical artist – as the image of the artist which the historian had in mind. The question whether statements contained in an anecdote in this or that particular case are true then becomes irrelevant. The only significant factor is that an anecdote recurs, that it is recounted so frequently as to warrant the conclusion that it represents a typical image of the artist. (Legend 11)

Even though Kris and Kurz concentrated their study on “biographical formulas” of the artist and on “how the artist was judged by contemporaries and posterity” (Legend 36, 2), their findings on the “legend about the artist” (Legend 12) are applicable to my discussion of self-perception and self-representation of authors in auto/biographies and self/portraits.134 Barthes and Calle used their early childhood anecdotes to position themselves as outsiders and to draw portraits of their distinctiveness. They established their authorial selves outside the social space of what Barthes called Doxa, which, for him, is ultimately language itself. In his anecdote, Barthes is trapped behind the doors or in a pit. In Calle’s story, her words are not heard, or worse, ignored by the others. Both described themselves as being socially marginalized by the group. Such painful marginalization is given a purpose in their work. In retrospect, they portrayed their separation from society as artistic distinctiveness. Both Barthes and Calle positioned their stories within a certain genealogy of cultural production. By naming Deauville as the locale of her childhood story, Calle situated herself within a tradition of artists who had lived and worked there. Deauville is a famous seaside resort in the center of the Normandy, well known for its wide sandy beach and its 643 meter-long, wooden

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Kris and Kurz hinted at this reading: “Biographical formulas and life appear to be linked in two ways. Biographies record typical events, on the one hand, and thereby shape the typical fate of a particular professional class, on the other hand. […] The area of psychology to which we point may be circumscribed by the label of ‘enacted biography’” (Legend 132).

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promenade, built in 1923. Calle’s portrait as a two-year old was possibly taken on that promenade. With its casino, its luxurious hotels and villas, and its direct railway connection to Paris, Deauville was, and still is, a popular place for artists such as Gustave Flaubert, Coco Chanel, and Josephine Baker. Furthermore, Deauville was a favorite spot of many of the Realists and Impressionists, among them Gustave Courbet, Eugène Boudin, Claude Monet, and Paul Cézanne. Boudin even established in 1850 a colony of artists in nearby Honfleur (on La Ferme Saint-Siméon) to encourage each other in outdoor painting. La Ferme Saint-Siméon is thought to be one of the birthplaces of Impressionism. For Calle, the location of Deauville had both geographical and intellectual dimension. Calle did not situate her story arbitrarily, but rather in a significant location for art history, as is the case for her other stories. The chronological and geographical clues in her stories thus function as allusions to certain artists or traditions that firmly position the author Sophie Calle within the greater history of art.135 Intriguingly, Calle invoked many effective auto/biographical formulas of the artist in her true stories. They affirm Kris’s and Kurz’s conclusion that “the early manifestations of talent among great artists do indeed constitute a biographical formula” (Legend 30). The first story of Calle’s collection, “The Dutch Portrait,” proceeds as follows: I was nine years old. While rummaging through my mother’s letters I found one, addressed to her, which started like this: ‘Darling, I trust you are seriously thinking about a boarding school for our Sophie.’ The letter was signed by a friend of my mother. I assumed from this that he was my real father. Whenever he came to visit us, I would sit on his knee and, with my eyes deep in his, I would wait for a confession. But his total lack of response caused me at times to have doubts. Then I would re-read the stolen letter. I had hidden it behind the picture in the dining room, a fifteenth century Flemish painting entitled Luce de Montfort, which portrayed a young woman in a pink bodice, her face slightly turned to show her left profile while her eyes looked straight at you, her features framed by a white, starched linen coif. (True 6-7)

This true story involves the portrait Luce de Montford136 that has a complex history. Before I will show how Calle, in her story, playfully weaved her auto/biographical legends to portray herself as an artist from early age, let me first talk about the origin

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What Deauville and Impressionism are for Calle’s anecdote, Bayonne and the great French literati are for Barthes’s story: “Bayonne, Bayonne, the perfect city: riverain, aerated with sonorous suburbs (Mouserolles, Marrac, Lachepaillet, Beyris), yet immured, fictive: Proust, Balzac, Plassans. Primordial image-hoard of childhood: the province-as-spectacle, History-as-odor, the bourgeoisie-as-discourse” (R.B. 6).

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Luce de Montfort, Flemish School, 15th century. Oil on panel, 15.35 x 11.30 in.

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of the painting because its provenance is fascinating. Reference can be found in the database of the Munich Central Collecting Point of the Deutsches Historisches Museum with the object number 10183: Fig. 10: Sophie Calle, Dutch Portrait

“Dutch portrait” 1988. One framed text, one framed b/w photograph 50 x 50 cm (text), 170 x 100 cm (photograph) / 50 x 50 cm (text), 170 x 100 cm (photograph). © Sophie Calle / ADAGP, Paris & VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2015. Courtesy Galerie Perrotin. The ‘Central Art Collecting Point’ was the name given [to] the center for art that the American Forces’ Monuments, Fine Arts and Archives Service set up in the former National Socialist Party buildings in Munich after the end of World War II. The task was to bring artworks that had been looted, confiscated, or sold on the art market in the German Reich or in the areas

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under its occupation between 1933 and 1945 from the repositories to the MCCP for inventorying and subsequent restitution. 137

The painting, Luce de Montfort, was brought to the collection center on October 18, 1945 and the presumed owner listed was Baron Cassel (France). Probably, this was Baron Cassel van Dorn, a Belgian banker and art collector with Jewish roots, whose collection in the South of France was looted by German forces and the Vichy administration in 1943. Between 1943 and 1945 the painting was in the possession of Adolf Hitler, as the DHM index card indicates. The painting left the collecting center for Paris on June 10, 1947 without further notice. Exactly how the Luce de Montfort portrait came into the possession of Calle’s family, is unknown. However, she wrote about the painting in the context of her exhibition “Art Now: Sophie Calle” at the Tate Modern (1998), where she exhibited the painting as part of her work “The Birthday Ceremony” (1980-93): I had always seen it hanging in my mother’s house. My father said they bought the painting together for my first birthday and so it was mine. My mother denied this. Self-interest made me more inclined to believe my father’s version. But my mother had been fighting this war of attrition for 10 years: not before she was dead would it come into my possession. Now she suddenly decided that it was a good date to give up the battle. Luce is mine, for my first and my fortieth birthdays. (In: Rose Shepard, “Outtakes” s.p.)

The Luce de Montfort has a complex history, both for Calle’s family and the public in general. In “The Dutch Portrait,” Calle playfully weaved fact and fiction into her auto/biographical anecdote to portray herself as an artist from early age. When she wrote that she always thought of herself as being the child of another father, she drew on a well-established “motif of mythology” concerning the special origin of the hero, which is set parallel to the birth of the artist. “This theme is dominated,” Kris and Kurz wrote, “by the tendency to deny the real father of the man who is elevated to a hero, and to substitute a more exalted, royal parent; […] Just like the hero who was set out as a child, the child artist is recognized by a special mark”138 (Legend 35). Conclusively, Calle portrayed herself in her eclectic true stories as a special outsider who quit working as a creature to eventually become a creator and an artist, deeply rooted in art history’s genealogy within the field of cultural production.

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Cf. DHM website: http://www.dhm.de/datenbank/ccp/dhm_ccp.php?seite=10.

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Kris and Kurz added: “The core of these fantasies is simply the child’s notion that he is not the child of his parents with whom he has come to live by this or that fluke of fate, but is in fact of higher birth, an unrecognized hero who still may hope to be discovered” (Legend 37).

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In the following chapter, I will show how writer Jonathan Safran Foer has used storytelling to draw his self/portrait in literature. His “factual” stories, which focus on different diets and eating habits, ultimately construct an author persona – Foer’s authorial self amidst his family and peers. Eating Animals After his two highly praised novels, Everything Is Illuminated (2002) and Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (2005), Jonathan Safran Foer wrote Eating Animals (2009), which is commonly described as a nonfiction book about factory farming and vegetarianism. Yet the blurb on the book’s back cover describes Eating Animals as a hybrid text, “synthesizing philosophy, literature, science, and memoir” (Eating book jacket). I am particularly interested in the memoir aspect of Foer’s book, carving out his auto/biographical approach to eating habits and dietary traditions. His introductory and closing chapters, both called “Storytelling,” which frame the “nonfiction” center of the book, constitute the focus of my reading of Foer’s text as a self/portrait. Foer framed his argument for vegetarianism, which is based on solid data and facts about the American meat industry, with personal stories of himself and his whole family. Therefore, I will analyze Foer’s text as a personal essay in the tradition of the French Renaissance writer and originator of the literary genre of the essay, Michel de Montaigne (1533-1592). As translator Michal A. Screech noted in his introduction to Montaigne’s The Complete Essays, the essays were to become for Montaigne “‘tentative attempts’ to ‘assay’ the value of himself, his nature, his habits and of his own opinions and those of others – a hunt for truth, personality and a knowledge of humanity through an exploration of his own reactions to his reading, his travels, his public and his private experience” (Essays xv).139 And so Montaigne, in his note to the reader, claimed: “I have set myself no other end but a private family one. […] I have dedicated this book to the private benefit of my friends and kinsmen” (Essays lxiii). Such a claim appears in Eating Animals, as Foer stated: “This story didn’t begin as a book,” he further explained: “I simply wanted to know – for myself and my

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Screech also assessed the novelty of Montaigne’s essays: “He soon decided to write about himself, the only subject he might know better than anyone else. This was a revolutionary decision, […]. No one in Classical Antiquity had done anything like it. In the history of the known world only a handful of authors had ever broken the taboo against writing primarily about oneself, as an ordinary man. St. Augustine had written about himself, but as a penitent in the Confessions, […] But those works bear no resemblance to what the Essays were to become for Montaigne” (Essays xiv-xv).

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family – what meat is” (Eating 12). His family included his maternal grandmother, his brother Frank, his former wife Nicole Krauss,140 and his new-born son, who was the initial catalyst for the publication: “As my son began life and I began this book, it seemed that everything he did revolved around eating” (Eating 11). Many of the stories that Foer shared in the two framing chapters focus on his Jewish grandmother, who only barely survived persecution in Europe during the Second World War and was always on the brink of starvation. Referring to the oral tradition of storytelling under the heading “Listen to me,” in the last section of the first chapter, Foer recounted how he listened to his grandmother’s hunger story “[o]ver pumpernickel ends and Coke” many Saturday afternoons (Eating 14-15). Shortly before nearly dying of starvation, she had been offered a piece of pork by a Russian farmer, but remarkably, she denied it because it was not kosher. To her disbelieving grandson, she then explained that “[i]f nothing matters, there’s nothing to save” (Eating 17). This moral insight became the concluding sentence of Foer’s text, as it goes to the heart of their joined stories (Cf. Eating 267). Grandmother Safran’s141 survival story and its moral commitment are the climax of Foer’s publication. Although many more stories could have been told about his grandmother,142 Foer told one of the “family’s primal stories,”143 because it was her “culinary prowess” that earned her the family title “the Greatest Chef” (Eating 4, 5). Foer’s grandmother, as the head (cook) of the

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Krauss is a bestselling author herself, who has published three novels so far: Man Walks Into a Room (2002), The History of Love (2005), and Great House (2010). As Foer, Krauss is also a third generation Holocaust survivor and wrote about family ties and remembrance. The preface of The History of Love shows photographs of all of her grandparents “who taught [her] the opposite of disappearing,” as the dedication reads.

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Grandfather Louis Safran’s survival will be discussed in my chapters “Stage Names” and “Everything is Illuminated.” Also compare Foer’s novel Everything Is Illuminated, where Jonathan tells Alex about his grandmother weighing him by lifting him up every time he visited her house (158), to the corresponding section in Eating Animals: “On the way in, Friday night, she would lift me from the ground in one of her fire-smothering hugs. And on the way out, Sunday afternoon, I was again taken into the air. It wasn’t until years later that I realized she was weighing me” (Eating 3).

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Cf. Foer: “More stories could be told about my grandmother than about anyone else I’ve met – her otherworldly childhood, her hairline margin of survival, the totality of her loss, her immigration and further loss, the triumph and tragedy of her assimilation – and though I will one day try to tell them to my children, we almost never told them to one another” (Eating 5).

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Cf. Foer: “Her culinary prowess was one of our family’s primal stories, like the cunning of the grandfather I never met, or the single fight of my parents’ marriage. We clung to those stories and depended on them to define us” (Eating 4-5).

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family, and his own son, as the “Benjamin of the family,” who made “everything […] possible again” (Eating 10), are the “immediate impetus for the journey that would become this book,” as Foer stated at the outset (Eating 5-6). Despite stating that his text “is as objective as any work of journalism can be,” using only the “most conservative statistics available” and hiring “two outside fact-checkers to corroborate them,” Foer continued to “think of it as a story” (Eating 14). Yet this “story” is actually a complex narrative, a personal account that ultimately depicts his authorial self via the subject matter of family meals and eating habits. Even with Foer’s confirmation of the validity of his data on the food industry, which is well-researched, in the end, he drew a picture of the authorial person he wished to portray. Foer’s introductory comments remind us of Montaigne’s preludes to his essays: “For it is my own self that I am painting. […] I myself am the subject of my book” (Essays xiii). Thus, the painting of the self, or the self-portrait, is at the core of Montaigne’s intentions. Like Montaigne who “decided to write about himself,” as Screech explained, because he is “the only subject he might know better than anyone else” (Essays xiv), Foer approached the subject of eating animals personally. Earnestly tackling the big issues of animal welfare, health protection, and environmentalism, Foer ultimately presented a personal image of the author’s ethical and moral conduct with regard to food culture and its larger implications. Due to space limitations and the vast size and scope of Montaigne’s essays, I will concentrate on one of his essays, and in comparing it to Eating Animals, I will demonstrate the textual tradition it established. Montaigne’s “On habit: and on never easily changing a traditional law,” which exemplifies various customs and traditions of eating, will provide a foundation on which to argue for Foer’s Eating Animals as a self/portrait in the form of a personal “tentative attempt.” Foer concluded his book by stating that “[f]ood is culture, habit, and identity” (Eating 263). Thus, food is literarily incorporated in our bodies and anchored in our minds by social and cultural forces. “The Power of Habit,” as one entry in Foer’s alphabetically ordered chapter “Words/Meaning” (Eating 62) is entitled, is described as an enormous force that channels our thoughts and acts especially in regard to eating traditions inherited by family and community. Foer described how his father’s “mad-scientist cooking” encouraged him to experiment with unusual food combinations, which “formed” his “tastes – not only [his] ideas about foods, but [his] preconscious cravings” (Eating 62, 63). Montaigne confirmed the pervasive impact of habit in his own essay and linked it to various eating traditions as well: For, in truth, Habit [sic] is a violent and treacherous schoolteacher. Gradually and stealthily she slides her authoritative foot into us; then, having by this gentle and humble beginning

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planted it firmly within us, helped by time she later discloses an angry tyrannous countenance, against which we are no longer allowed to even lift up our eyes. (Essays 122)

Montaigne offered various examples of differing eating habits, from breastfeeding to vegetarianism to anthropophagy (Essays 128, 129). 144 To prove his points, he referenced “findings” of Francisco López de Gómara in his sixteenth century publication Historia general de las Indias y conquista de México (1552), which describes the conquest of the New World from a secondhand perspective. Montaigne stated: “[I]n the new world of the Indies great nations were discovered in widely different climates who lived on spiders; […] Other peoples were found for whom our meats and viands were deadly poisonous” (Essays 123). The association of food and habit, of eating and tradition, is strong and reciprocal, at once personal and communal. “[T]he impression I have is that there is nothing custom may not do and cannot do,” Montaigne summed up, because “habit stuns our senses” (Essays 129, 123). This is not only meant metaphorically, as our senses are aligned with our habits, and our habits are shaped through our sensory perception. It is thus with good reason that Montaigne’s personal examples are taken from the sensory fields of taste, smell, and sound. His “scented waistcoat” loses its smell to him after a few days of wearing, while his ears eventually get accustomed to “the great bell [which] tolls out the Ave Maria every day” (Essays 123). Habit, or custom, is both an individual and a collective force that significantly shapes our everyday lives and choices. Whether people “wipe their fingers when eating on their thighs, on their balls or on the soles of their feet,” or whether “they eat fish and flesh raw,” is less about right or wrong, but rather a matter of frequent practice based on tradition (Essays 126, 127). 145 Customs are “sucked in with ones mother’s milk,” as Montaigne phrased it (Essays 130). Likewise, Foer formulated that the foods his son will be able to eat by the time he has finished the book will be “digested together with the stories” that the boy is told (Eating 11). Foer’s “personal quest” (Eating 12) of coming to terms with meat eating, is thus closely intertwined with his notion of storytelling. “Within my family’s

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Montaigne wrote an essay on the topic of anthropophagy, called “On the Cannibals.” Also see William Arens’s The Man-Eating Myth: Anthropology and Anthropophagy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979), which challenges the history of cannibalism. For an overview and critique on cannibalism in contemporary culture, see C. Richard King. “The (Mis)uses of Cannibalism in Contemporary Cultural Critique.” In: Diacritics, Vol. 30 No. 1 (Spring 2000), pp. 106-123.

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“The laws of conscious which we say are born of Nature,“ Montaigne wrote, “are born of custom; since man inwardly venerates the opinions and the manners approved and received about him, he cannot without remorse free himself from them nor apply himself to them without self-approbation” (Essays 130).

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Jewish tradition,” he wrote, “I came to learn that food serves two parallel purposes: it nourishes and it helps to remember. Eating and storytelling are inseparable – […] stories establish narratives, and stories establish rules” about eating (Eating 11-12). Nourishment and narration feed our body and mind, hence expressions such as “digesting the truth,” “being hungry for news,” or consuming “newsfeed.” Yet stories may change, Foer argued, and customs can change accordingly. “But then we decided to have a child,” Foer explained, “and that was a different story that would necessitate a different story,” which later came to be known as Eating Animals (Eating 10). Undeniably, changing one’s eating habits is a highly difficult undertaking, but “[a] man who wished similarly to assay himself and to loose himself from the violent foregone conclusions of custom will find many things accepted as being indubitably settled which have nothing to support them but the hoary whiskers and wrinkles of attendant usage” as Montaigne assessed (Essays 132). Montaigne linked changing one’s habits to assaying oneself, implying that self-portraiture and change of habit are closely related and interact with one another: “Everywhere and in everything my own eyes suffice to keep me to my duty; no eyes watch me more closely: there are none I regard more highly” (Essays 124). So through the process of thinking and writing about oneself, change of habit is possible, as Foer saw in his own experience as an on-and-off vegetarian: But when, at the end of my sophomore year, I became a philosophy major and started doing my first seriously pretentious thinking, I became a vegetarian again. The kind of willful forgetting that I was sure meat eating required felt too paradoxical to the intellectual life I was trying to shape. (Eating 8)

Thinking, writing, and acting are morally interlinked in Foer’s narration. These deeds are displayed as conscious performances of shaping the authorial self. With regard to Montaigne, “[h]e was not seeking for verbal subtleties,” Screech argued, “but to portray himself in all truth, to find solid facts about what Man really is, and practical counsel about how he should live and die,” thereby never losing sight of his belief that “opinion is not knowledge” (Essays xviii, xxxiv). Thus, Montaigne modeled and sketched a mental portrait of his authorial self in his corpus of essays in order to pursue that self-image in his (corpo)real acts.146 Likewise, Foer attempted to rewrite

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Screech explained Montaigne’s understanding of the connection of body and soul: “His ‘self,’ he found, was more than his soul. His ‘being,’ like that of any person, consisted in a soul (‘form’) linked to a body (‘matter’). […] Once he had grasped how ‘wonderously (sic) corporeal’ human beings are he saw that wisdom lies in keeping body and soul together in loving harmony, not in segregating the soul from the body to keep it pure and purely intellectual” (Essays xlvi).

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his family’s story with regard to meat eating, because “[t]o accept the factory farm – […] – would make me less myself, less my grandmother’s grandson, less my son’s father,” as he concluded his book (Eating 267). “We are not only the tellers of our stories, we are the stories themselves,” Foer stated (Eating 15). In this way, writing Eating Animals was becoming that “different story.” Telling and retelling stories is akin to performing the antagonistic workings of the dichotomy of difference and repetition. Through continuous storytelling, whether in oral or written form, or as personal or collective narratives, we perform identity formation. Through the difference in repetition of our stories, we are thus becoming, in the Deleuzian sense. And according to Screech, “Montaigne knew, […] that in the world of creation nothing ever is; it is only becoming. […] No creature is: a creature is always shifting, changing, becoming” (Essays xxxix). To assay oneself in the form of a self/portrait is a powerful encounter with one’s own self-image, which is perpetually (re)invented in the process. Roland Barthes’s maxim that “you constitute yourself, in fantasy, as a ‘writer,’ or worse still: you constitute yourself,” (R.B. 82) articulates well the fundamental workings of auto/biography and self/portrait as performative acts of becoming. In his self/portrait, Eating Animals, Foer’s performative acts involve, simultaneously becoming a vegetarian, becoming a father, and becoming an author.

Staging

In my chapter “Staging,” I will offer an analysis of how authors have staged themselves and their works in the cultural arena as a means of self-invention. One of these staging strategies involves performing self-naming by appropriating a stage name. Another meaningful approach, I will argue, is staging oneself as a character in one’s own work. Finally, I show how the creation of an individual mythology further renders possible identity formation as it relates to becoming an author. “You constitute yourself, in fantasy, as a ‘writer,’” Roland Barthes wrote (R.B. 82). Following my idea of performative authorship, I will use the term staging, rather than constituting. Barthes himself spoke of staging in relation to his “image system” or “image repertoire:” “The vital effort of this book,” he wrote, “is to stage an imagesystem. ‘To stage’ means: to arrange the flats one in front of the other, to distribute the roles, to establish levels, and, at the limit: to make the footlights a kind of uncertain barrier” (R.B. 105). Barthes’s vague description of the performative force and importance of staging asks for theoretical explanation and concrete examples, which I will provide in this chapter. Having established in my introduction, representation as a performative act by means of Wolfgang Iser’s work, I would now like to bring Iser’s concept of staging as an anthropological category to my discussion of performative authorship. Iser explained the notion of staging in his publications Prospecting (1989) and The Fictive and the Imaginary (1993). I will use Iser’s findings to support my analyses of different authorial forms of staging. In The Fictive, Iser argued that human beings are in a “decentered position” in which they “are but do not ‘have’ themselves,” so that they “cannot become present to themselves.” Literature, and as I will show cultural texts, explore this “distance between ‘being’ and ‘having,’” as Iser explained. Cultural texts offer a “space” that does not do away with these “unavailabilities” of human beings “by hard-and-fast definitions,” but rather “launches into multifarious patternings” of representation. As Iser argued, representation as a means of staging “gives appearance to something that by nature is intangible” (Fictive 296). Staging takes shape and form in and through play. “Such play,” Iser explained, “is endowed with endlessness, because staging allows the otherwise impossible state that one can experience one’s own inability to have oneself” (Fictive 297). Human beings thus want to incessantly stage themselves

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in play to experience the inconceivable. According to Iser, cultural representations as performative acts are imaginary approximations of the unobtainable: Staging in literature makes conceivable the extraordinary plasticity of human beings, who, precisely because they do not seem to have a determinable nature, can expand into an almost unlimited range of culture-bound patternings. The impossibility of being present to ourselves becomes our possibility to play ourselves out to a fullness that knows no bounds. (Fictive 297)

Iser then described literature as a “panorama of what is possible” and staging as a form of “self-fashioning,” even as an “institution of human self-exegesis” (Fictive 297, 302). In other words, cultural play offers the space to fathom the possibilities of life through staging life’s impossibilities. Through the performative act of staging the imaginary, the distance between “being” and “having” oneself offers the potential for self-invention. Staging oneself as an author, I argue, is therefore a means to perform one’s own authorial becoming. Before exploring Iser’s concept of staging in its different forms of expression, I will illustrate his notion by returning to Candice Breitz’s work “Becoming” (2003), which I discussed earlier. Breitz reenacted the roles of seven leading actresses, including Cameron Diaz, Drew Barrymore, and Julia Roberts, in scenes from different romantic Hollywood movies. The black-and-white “copies” are presented back-to-back with their colored “originals,” while both versions share the soundtrack of the Hollywood original. To recapitulate, Breitz staged the process of identity formation by performing different acts of becoming. In her appropriation of a scene from Pretty Woman (1990), she tried to become Julia (Roberts), who tried to become the character Vivian Ward, who tried to become a socially respectable person. In this way, as Beatrice von Bismarck argued in her essay “Performing the Role and Always Becoming,” 1 each “performance becomes the visible adopting of a role – an adopting of a role that is marked by the fact that the attempted approximation reveals the difference all the more” (“Performing” 52). Staging is disclosed in Breitz’s work as a powerful performative technique and the predominant artistic practice of self-invention. However, “Becoming” also demonstrates the very ambivalence of the concept of staging. While the work is empowering for Breitz, it also reveals the confinements of this kind of staged expression. Von Bismarck emphasized that Breitz’s performances within the framework of “art, mass media star cult, and commerce” reveal the constructedness and limitations of the formulaic character of Hollywood’s consumerism so hegemonic for contemporary life (“Performing” 52). This is particularly true of the public images of women in contemporary society, which

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In: The Scripted Life: Candice Breitz – February 6 to April 11, 2010. Bregenz: Kunsthaus Bregenz, 2010, 51-57.

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appear especially limited and limiting, as Breitz’s selection shows. “I wanted to study a series of romantic comedies or ‘chick flicks’,” Breitz explained in an interview, “to get a sense of what expectations are held of a romantic lead. What are the current conventions that describe femininity and desirability, and how do they get produced or reproduced in mainstream cinema?” (in: Burke, “Breitz” 12). The narrowness of female roles represented in contemporary mass media is certainly disturbing. In “Becoming,” staging is thus explicated as an ambivalent practice and a double-edged sword. Consequently, Breitz asked to “what extent are we molded by the images that are fed to us by the entertainment industry,” and “to what extent does the entertainment industry create images that mirror the very desires and needs that it perceives in the audience via complex market research?” In response, Breitz said her work is an “attempt to engage [in] what ends up being a chicken-and-egg question without necessarily answering it” (in: Burke, “Breitz” 12). Breitz’s appropriation of established gestures and facial expressions of women in relationships reveals concepts of self and other, of sameness and difference simultaneously. On the one hand, ready-made body language and behavior patterns from mass media are accentuated and made painfully visible. On the other hand, Breitz’s individual expressions also emerge. For von Bismarck, Breitz’s “Becoming” thus “proves to be a form of artistic appropriation that demonstrates the authority of pop-cultural image media while opening up a new space for the artist’s own practice” (“Performing” 57). Cultural texts are able to explore this “new space,” as Iser formulated. In her attempt to “void” herself of her own unique “gestures, expressions, and idiosyncrasies” (in: Burke, “Breitz” 12) to become Julia, Breitz’s differences from Julia are also reveled. In staging sameness, difference becomes possible; in staging the other, possible selves may shine through. As Iser wrote: “Never being finally present to ourselves is the mechanism that allows us to keep changing in the mirror of our possibilities,” which “may even be the root from which aesthetic pleasure springs. Staging is the indefatigable attempt to confront ourselves with ourselves, which can be done only by playing ourselves” (Fictive 302, 303). In other words, while experiencing aesthetic pleasure in staging ourselves in play, we simultaneously perform identity formation by exploring and picturing the imaginary. We find a similar view in Barthes, who argued that “[y]ou have to ‘figure yourself,’ to see yourself as a figure: I project an image of myself playing a role, and the strength of that role will help me to do what I want. […] I act the part of the writer, in the fully sacred sense of the role, as a way of enabling myself to become one” (Preparation 225). How authors stage themselves and “act the part of the writer,” in order to become authors, is the focus of this chapter.

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S TAGE N AMES When Jonathan Safran Foer became an author, he began using the surname Safran as part of his author identity. In a 2012 CNN online interview, Foer explained why he renamed himself by adding the name Safran to his birth name: “It’s a name I’m proud of. It’s my grandfather’s last name. There’s something to having a slightly different, almost like a stage name, for writing” (in: Landau, “Foer” s.p.). I will argue that by taking on the stage name Safran, Foer created and staged himself as an author. The act of giving oneself a stage name is a performative act that consciously brings into being another persona that is a double of oneself. The assumed name Safran thus became a fundamental part of Foer’s identity as an author. Wolfgang Iser described staging as a basic form of doubling. 2 In his essay “Representation: A Performative Act,” printed in Prospecting, Iser outlined how representation in literature is to be conceived not in terms of mimesis but in terms of performance. He thereby excavated a doubling structure of fictionality in representation, because each text makes “inroads,” into extratextual and intertextual fields of reference. The doubling process becomes even more complex, Iser explained, for the texts alluded to and the segments quoted begin to unfold unforeseeable shifting relationships that create “semantic instability,” resulting in a “dynamic oscillation” (Prospecting 237). Old meanings become potential sources for new ones. The text itself, Iser wrote, becomes a kind of junction, where other texts, norms, and values meet and work upon each other. What had long seemed closed is now opened to what Iser called the aesthetic dimension of the text (Prospecting 238). Literary fiction, therefore, is to Iser “an enabling structure generating an aesthetic potential” (Prospecting 241). Iser further argued that readers take up this aesthetic potential and engage in active role playing while reading: “Representation can only unfold itself in the recipient’s mind, and it is through his active imaginings alone that the intangible can become an image” (Prospecting 243). A reader, or “recipient,” finds herself in a similar situation to an actor “who in order to perform his role must use his thoughts, his feelings, and even his body as an analogous for representing something he is not” (Prospecting 244). Iser argued that for the duration of the performance, we are both ourselves and someone else and concluded that “staging oneself as someone else is a source of aesthetic pleasure; it is also the means whereby representation is transferred from text to reader” (Prospecting 244). In this chapter, I will extend Iser’s theory of representation as a performative act from the reader’s role playing to the author’s role playing. Role play, I will argue, has been embraced by authors as much as by readers. Authors have staged themselves

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Cf. Iser, Prospecting 246 and “Staging is thus the absolute form of doubling” (Fictive 301).

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as authors in acts of self-invention. Authors have thus performed representation beyond their texts, or, in other words, they have extended their texts to incorporate their author double as a kind of paratext.3 Part of this authorial self-invention can be the act of renaming oneself. The performative act of naming will thus be at the center of discussion. I will argue that the moment Jonathan Foer added the stage name Safran to his proper name is the moment in which he invented the author Jonathan Safran Foer in a performative act of role play. What are the performative aspects of renaming oneself? To rename oneself is clearly an act of speech, as it was outlined by John L. Austin and systematized by John Searle. Austin, in his 1955 seminal work How to Do Things with Words (originally a twelve-part lecture series at Harvard), described such naming as utterances with illocutionary force and coined the term “performative sentences” or short “performatives” for such utterances. To give oneself a stage name, that is to assume a name or rename oneself, can be described as a performative utterance with illocutionary force that is defined by Austin as a “performance of an act in saying something as opposed to performance of an act of saying something” (How 99-100). Naming someone or something falls into Austin’s general category of “explicit” performatives, by which he defined a class of humdrum verbs used in the first person singular present indicative active form. These are utterances “that A. […] do not ‘describe’ or ‘report’ or constate anything at all, are not ‘true or false’; and B. the uttering of the sentence is, or is a part of, the doing of an action, which again would not normally be described as, or as ‘just’, saying something” (How 5). Austin explained why he especially analyzed the so-called present-indicative-active verbs: We said that the idea of a performative utterance was that it was to be (or to be included as a part of) the performance of an action. Actions can only be performed by persons, and obviously in our cases the utterer must be the performer. […] The ‘I’ who is doing the action does thus come essentially into the picture. (How 60-61)

The act of giving oneself a stage name constitutes a performative utterance by which the performer, in this case Foer, comes to the fore as an active subject. Austin gave several examples of utterances for which the two conditions of A, utterance does not describe, and B, utterance is doing the action, hold true. One of the examples is especially revealing for the case of naming someone or something, because it illustrates well the performance of naming: “‘I name this ship the Queen Elizabeth’ – as uttered when smashing the bottle against the stem” (How 5). Austin explained: “In these examples it seems clear that to utter the sentence (in, of course, the

3

Cf. Gérard Genette. “Introduction to the Paratext” (1987). In: New Literary History, Vol. 22, No. 2, “Probings: Art, Criticism, Genre” (Spring 1991), pp. 261-272.

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appropriate circumstances) is not to describe my doing of what I should be said in so uttering to be doing or to state that I am doing it: it is to do it” (How 6). Thus, to christen a ship is to give it its proper, legal name and release it to sea. Naming, renaming, or, in Foer’s case, assuming and continuing a name works comparably: the act of announcing the stage name in the appropriate circumstance, which is the publication of a text under the stage name, is to perform the name change. Austin further explained the category of the explicit performatives and classified five different groups to which the class of the “exercitives” is of special importance here, because it includes naming. 4 Austin defined exercitives as verbs that “are the exercising of powers, rights, or influence” (How 151). He then elaborated: “Exercitives commit us to the consequences of an act, for example of naming” and can best be described as “an assertion of influence or exercising of power” (How 159, 163). To rename oneself is apparently an act of assertion. Foer asserted his influence on his author’s name and exercised the power to rename himself by assuming his maternal grandfather’s last name. From then on, he was no longer (only) Jonathan Foer, but Jonathan Safran Foer, thereby adding a name that belongs to his family, but not to him. Austin repeatedly insisted on the appropriate circumstances in which any explicit performative must be uttered to be effective: “Thus, for naming the ship, it is essential that I should be the person appointed to name her” (How 8). So it is not only the utterance itself that does the act (of naming), but the whole situation, or, as Austin called it, the speech act that needs to be looked at. He stated: “We must consider the total situation in which the utterance is issued – the total speech-act” (How 52). Returning to the case of Foer, we should identify the “appropriate” circumstance necessary for Foer to rename himself or assume another name as an author that is, for giving himself a stage name for his passion and profession. For the renaming to be “felicitous,” the “appropriate” circumstance is of great importance as the stage name must be recognized by the author’s environment. Certainly, the act of renaming oneself is different from the act of christening a ship. Surnames are inherited from previous generations. First names are given to us by our parents or guardians. People cannot name themselves when they are born; they start their lives with given names not names that they themselves chose. Most people accept that fact; they are either content with their given names, or they eventually get used to their names. Others change their names. People marry and take on the surnames of their spouses to strengthen a family name. People change their names or use middle names or nicknames to attenuate unloved given names. Some of these acts of renaming involve the adherence to bureaucratic rules and requirements in order to make the change “felicitous.” Other acts of renaming, to be considered happy performative utterances,

4

Cf. Austin, How 142.

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require acceptance by family and peer groups. This is not as simple as it sounds, because people get used to other people’s names quickly, which makes it very difficult for them to forget given names and use the assumed names. Some people, like Foer, choose to take on another name for professional reasons. This is especially common among artists who use pseudonyms or initials from their given names. Take, for example, Lady Gaga, whose birth name is Stefani Joanne Angelina Germanotta, or T.C. Boyle, who was Thomas John Boyle before he renamed himself Tom Coraghessan Boyle at age seventeen. As an author, he then used his initials only. Interestingly, Coraghessan was the name of an Irish ancestor on his mother’s side of the family, which is another case of personal filiation comparable to Foer’s. What kind of “appropriate” circumstance, to return to Austin’s theory, is necessary to ensure the felicity of renaming oneself in an act of authorial selfinvention? In the case of artists, it is not enough for them to rename themselves without recognition and acceptance from the larger field of cultural production. Stage names only fulfill their functions when they are used in public, as on a stage. Thus, if the renaming is to be happily performed, there has to be an audience or public to witness the act, or at least to be made aware of it. Usually, agents, such as a producers or publishers, are necessary to introduce the stage name to the world, in essence to bring it into being. When a producer or publisher prints the self-given stage name on the cover of a CD or book, the “appropriate” circumstance of a “felicitous” renaming is given. Renaming diverges slightly in this way from Austin’s example of ship christening, because the person who renames or assumes a name differs from the person who pronounces and or promotes that name. It is Foer himself who assumed his ancestor’s name, and who made it official by printing his stage name on the cover of his books. After a writer’s stage name is established by an official agent, it can be used publicly. The author is thus born in a very self-conscious act of authorial selfinvention. Foer marked the specific starting point of his becoming an author by adding Safran to his name, at an exact time. From then on, he was able to reiterate his own myth of origin as an author. Through the illocutionary act of renaming himself, Foer created a new persona, his author double, in a basic form of doubling, to return to Iser’s terminology. In his book The Act of Reading (1978), Iser extended Austin’s illocutionary speech acts to the pragmatic nature of literary texts. 5 Thereby, Iser correctly disproved Austin’s vague attempt to distinguish between speech acts and literature. Austin had described language in poetry or on stage as “used not seriously, but in ways parasitic upon its normal use” (How 22). Iser effectually showed that this

5

To see how Iser applied Austin’s speech act theory to literature also compare “The Reality of Fiction: A Functionalist Approach to Literature,” in: New Literary History, Vol. 7, No. 1 (Autumn 1975), pp. 7-38.

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differentiation is bound to fail. Even though literal performances on stage or figurative ones on paper might be different from what Austin had in mind when he defined speech acts, they are not simply hollow, void or even parasitic. Rather, Iser argued, “the fictional context of the speech may well be transcended, and the spectator may find himself contemplating the real world, or experiencing real emotions and real insights” (Act 59). Speech acts in literature may well have illocutionary force through the imagination or contemplation of readers. And Iser concluded that “fictional language has the basic properties of the illocutionary act. […] it takes on an illocutionary force, and the potential effectiveness of this not only arouses attention but also guides the reader’s approach to the text and elicits responses to it” (Act 61-62). Such is the case with Foer’s assumed name Safran. It “arouses attention” and guides the reader’s approach to the text. The author name thus becomes part of the work, as a kind of paratext. It offers an authorial strategy to help to guide readers to an understanding of the selective processes underlying the text. 6 In such a performative act of self-invention, the author name expands the aesthetic dimension and the aesthetic potential of the text. The author name becomes a code that governs the reading and the meaning of the entire work. To rename oneself is certainly not a new phenomenon in the world of art and literature. But in Foer’s case, it is more complex and more compelling. Foer did not simply invent a pseudonym or use the initials of his given name. Rather, he assumed a name – his maternal grandfather’s last name – that is part of his family history. What are Foer’s motives for having taken on the family name Safran in the process of becoming an author? First, there are the personal motives. Foer’s grandfather’s name connects Foer historically to previous generations of his mother’s family. His renaming is thus an act of personal filiation, which brought him in line with his ancestors, as is the case with T.C. Boyle. His surname Foer connects him to his father’s lineage. By taking on the name of his maternal grandfather, he made a strategic decision that has complex implications. For one, Louis Safran is the name of a deceased relative, whom Foer never met, because after he fled the Nazis, he died shortly after his arrival in New York City. Grandfather Safran thus represents a void in Foer’s personal history. Paradoxically, his grandfather’s absence was nevertheless always present.7 Louis Safran was not really talked about in the Foer home, but would make sporadic appearances in conversations. This created discomfort for family

6

Cf. Iser, Act 61.

7

In Eating Animals, the presence in absence of Foer’s grandfather becomes strikingly apparent: “More stories could be told about my grandmother than about anyone else I’ve ever met – her otherworldly childhood, the hairline margin of her survival, the totality of her loss, her immigration and further loss, the triumph and tragedy of her assimilation.” Grandfather Safran is the “further loss” that Foer touched upon in this passage (Eating 5).

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members, as Foer’s brother Franklin revealed in the CNN report cited earlier. To take on Safran as a name is thus a conscious way for Foer to continue the legacy of his grandfather’s life – a life that was ubruptly and tragically cut short. Foer’s nametaking is clearly an act to transform the grandfather’s presence in absence into an absence in presence. To take on his grandfather’s name, is to make the absent present and to give the void a name. Gransfather Safran’s legacy is embraced, his story somewhat continued. As for the professional motives of Foer’s act of renaming, it is important to consider the different meanings of the name Safran. Safran is a very special name with mysterious and even “foreign” associations. Safran means saffron in German. The English word saffron stems from the Latin safranum and the French safran and has Arabic and Persian origins. The word safran, or saffron, has many connotations. The color saffron (orange-red) is associated with the goddess of dawn, Eos in Greek mythology and Aurora in Roman mythology. She is found in Homer’s Illiad, which has a short description of the goddess: “Now when Dawn in robe of saffron was hastening from the streams of Oceanus, to bring light to mortals and immortals, Thetis reached the ships with the armor that the god had given her” (Iliad xix). Aurora, goddess of dawn, renews herself every morning and flies across the sky, announcing the arrival of the sun. Another literary reference to saffron was of even greater importance to Foer. He came across the color saffron in Bruno Schulz’s short story collection The Street of Crocodiles (1933), for which he wrote the foreword for the 2008 edition and from which he later made a die-cut book by erasure called Tree of Codes (2010). Schulz, a Jewish writer and artist from Poland was murdered by a Gestapo officer in 1942. The Street of Crocodiles is often Foer’s “answer to the impossible-to-answer question: What is your favorite book?,” as he wrote in 2010 (Tree 138). In Schulz’s story “August,” the saffron appears in the following passage: “Touya’s mother, Maria, hired herself to housewives to scrub floors. She was a small saffron-yellow woman, and it was with saffron that she wiped the floors, the deal tables, the benches, and the banisters which she had scrubbed in the homes of the poor” (Street 7). Here, the color saffron evokes the hard physical labor and poverty of the Jewish shtetls of pre-World War II Eastern Europe that Schulz drew for many of his stories. David A. Goldfarb described Schulz’s evocative work as follows: “[W]e see in Schulz […] the writer sifting through trash […] to find and reassemble mutilated fragments of castoff mythologies or systems of meaning” (Street xxiii). In the same lines, the color saffron, in combination with the name Maria, refers to Christian mythology. In such tradition, dawn, or Aurora, is associated with the Mother of God, Mary, who leads the way for her son Jesus, who is the personation of the sun. Therefore, another possible association is offered in Schulz’s story that was so influential for Foer. In 1933, the year of the first publication of The Street of

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Crocodiles, a young girl with the name of Marietta Beco was reported to be a witness to Marian apparitions in Banneux, a small town in Belgium. Between January and March 1933, the girl reported eight epiphanies; during the third apparition, Maria introduced herself as the Virgin of the Poor to Marietta. Schulz, who was Jewish, was quite possibly aware of this extraordinary religious event that made headlines in Catholic Poland, a center for the adoration of the Virgin Mary. Schulz’s saffronyellow Maria, who wipes the floors of the poor with saffron, can certainly be connected to the Virgin of the Poor of Belgian Banneux. Generally, saffron is known as a special, valuable spice, believed to be one of the oldest spices on earth. It is mentioned in the Old Testament in the “Song of Songs,” where it links the beauty of a garden to the beauty of a lover: “Your plants are an orchard of pomegranates with choice fruits, with henna and nard, nard and saffron, calamus and cinnamon, with every kind of incense tree, with myrrh and aloes and all the finest spices” (“Song of Songs” 4:13-14). More specifically, saffron references figure into another famous text, The Arabian Nights. Scheherazade, the narrator of The Arabian Nights, is the mother of storytelling. For 1001 nights, she tells a story to her husband, King Shahryar, to whom she is married against her will. Every night she stops at dawn with a cliffhanger, forcing the King to keep her alive for another day so that she can complete the tale the next night. Saffron is mentioned several times in her stories, including in the happy ending of 1001 nights of Scheherazade: Then Shahryar made an end of his sitting in all weal, whereupon the folk dispersed to their dwelling places and the news was bruited abroad that the King purposed to marry the Wazir’s daughter, Scheherazade. Then he proceeded to make ready the wedding gear, and presently he sent after his brother, King Shah Zaman, who came, and King Shahryar went forth to meet him with the troops. Furthermore, they decorated the city after the goodliest fashion, and diffused scents from censers and burnt aloes wood and other perfumes in all the markets and thoroughfares, and rubbed themselves with saffron, what while the drums beat and the flutes and pipes sounded and mimes and mountebanks played and plied their arts and the King lavished on them gifts and largess. And in very deed it was a notable day. (My emphasis, Arabian, s.p.)8

It is again in Foer’s foreword to Schulz’s story collection, The Street of Crocodiles, where we find the missing link to Scheherazade. Foer reported on the tragic story of the Jewish writer and artist Schulz, who was forced to paint murals for the Gestapo officer Felix Landau in the early 1940s in the Ukrainian town Drohobych, which was

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Translation by Sir Richard Burton, 1850, http://classiclit.about.com/library/bletexts/ arabian/bl-arabian-conclusion.htm.

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Polish at the time. When Landau killed a Jew favored by another Gestapo officer named Karl Günther, Günter took revenge and shot Schulz in broad daylight in November 1942. He was later reported to have screamed at Landau: “You killed my Jew, I killed yours” (Street vii). This horrifying story led Foer to ask in his foreword: “Why was Schulz in the street that afternoon, instead of working on the murals? Perhaps he was putting off the completion of the murals, knowing, like Scheherazade, that it was only his creations that kept him alive” (Street vii). So it is the creative act of telling stories and painting pictures, that kept the literary figure Scheherazade and the real person Schulz alive, at least for a little while. In his essay “What Is an Author?,” Michel Foucault contextualized The Arabian Nights in a similar way: Arabic stories, and The Arabian Nights in particular, had as their motivation, their theme and pretext, this strategy for defeating death. Storytellers continued their narratives late into the night to forestall death and to delay the inevitable moment when everyone must fall silent. Scheherazade’s story is a desperate inversion of murder; it is the effort, throughout all those nights, to exclude death from the circle of existence. (“What” 117)

The importance of telling stories, whether written, told, or drawn, could not be more explicit. We need stories to survive, to stay alive, and thus to create our own “immortality,”9 as Foucault wrote. Significantly, Paul Auster also quoted at length from The Arabian Nights in his first, autobiographical prose text The Invention of Solitude (cf. 160-165): “The story begins with the end. Speak or die. And for as long as you go on speaking, you will not die” 10 (Invention 160). Auster attentively summarized Scheherazade’s finesse: “She begins her story, and what she tells is a story about story-telling, a story within which are several stories, each one, in itself, about story-telling – by means of which a man is saved from death” (Invention 161). Foer’s assumed name, Safran, in all its associations, alludes to the color and spice saffron. This, in turn, connects Foer’s work to a history of storytelling from Greek and Roman literature, to Christian biblical texts, to the Middle Eastern writings of Scheherazade, and to the Eastern European Jewish tradition of storytelling represented by Schulz. By adding Safran to his author name, Foer triggered the

9

Foucault further argued that “this conception of a spoken or written narrative as a protection against death has been transformed by our culture” turning the work from a means of immortality into the “murderer of its author” (“What” 117). Foer’s reference to Scheherazade thus does not only link him to older storytelling traditions, but marks himself as an author unwilling to be erased by his own work.

10 This unquestionably only holds true in literature not in real life, where Bruno Schulz was killed despite his unfinished murals.

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multitude of allusions that the word evokes. Iser explained such linguistic phenomena with the act of selection (extratextual) and the act of combination (intratextual): Every word becomes dialogic, and every semantic field is doubled by another. Through this double-voiced discourse every utterance carries something else in its wake, so that the act of combination gives rise to a duplication of what is present by that which is absent – a process that often results in the balance being reversed and the present serving only to spotlight the absent. (Prospecting 238)

Through allusion and association, Foer staged himself as an author in certain traditions of storytelling. To assume the family name Safran is not only a form of personal filiation to his maternal grandfather Louis and the attempt to keep him alive linguistically. It is also a clever performative strategy to establish himself within a certain genealogy of storytelling to ensure his own immortality as a storyteller. By taking on the name Safran, Foer thus actively advanced his authorial self-invention to become the author Jonathan Safran Foer. The conscious use of one’s own author name also plays a significant role in the work of Sophie Calle and Paul Auster. It was Philippe Lejeune who argued in his “The Autobiographical Pact:” The name received and assumed first – the father’s name – and especially the Christian name that distinguishes you from it, are no doubt essential basic principles in the story of me. Witness the fact that the name is never indifferent, whether we adore it or we detest it, whether we accept that we owe it to others or we prefer to receive it only from the self. […] those few letters in which each of us thinks instinctively that the essence of his being is registered. (“Pact” 21)

Both, Auster and Calle, have played with their names and, in an ironic way, have taken the figure of speech “nomen est omen” literally. “Needless to say,” Auster wrote to his pen pal J.M. Coetzee in 2009, I have spent my whole life exploring and mediating on my own name, and my great hope is to be reborn as an American Indian. Paul: Latin for small, little. Auster: Latin for South Wind.

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South Wind: an old American euphemism for a rectal toot. I therefore shall return to this world bearing the proud and altogether appropriate name of Little Fart. (Here 83-84)11

Auster signifies another set of associations and meanings. It means oyster in German, which is a type of mussel that breeds a pearl in its locked shell. Auster has been aware of this pun with his family name, as expressend in a quote from his screenplay for the movie Smoke (1995). At one point, Auster’s character Rashid philosophized: “The world is my oyster. (Pause) Whatever that means” (3 Films 61). The metaphor of the oyster works well with the allegory of the “locked room” 12 that Auster invented. The “locked room” is a symbol of the work environment of writers, who, not only retreat physically during the creative process, but also withdraw mentally from the world, from which they later return with a “pearl” at best. Auster has periodically played with the pun of his name, enjoying its many semantic levels. The same applies to Calle who, as the mobile and well-travelled artist, has read her own name “calle” in the Spanish translation as “street” and “hence [as] wandering.”13 Her early works in particular have their origins on the street, created when Calle followed total strangers on the streets of Paris, tailed a man through the alleys of Venice, or asked residents to lead her to their favorite sites in the Bronx. Calle’s name is an echo of her artistic work on the streets of different cities. Many times, she called attention to the Spanish meaning of her name, thus alluding to its associations with the street. Again and again, she reminded her audience that her own surname means “street,” which she linked to her former vagabond life as a world traveler, who for seven years took on all kinds of odd jobs. In her essay “The Author Issue,” Christine Macel argued that for Calle “the proper name, and a fortiori the name of the author, is in itself the subject of the work” (“Author” 23). Because her name is meaningful to her and is part of her author identity, Calle reacted rather vehemently when the French local newspaper Le Courrier de Céret by mistake addressed a letter to “Sophie Caille.” She responded with ironic wordplay: “With time I have become used to my last name, which, in Spanish, means ‘street,’ hence wandering… my first name means ‘wisdom’ in Greek, so this gives ‘smart street’ rather than ‘wise quail’”14 (M’as tu vue 24). The street is a symbol of Calle’s work;

11 Letter Aug 29, 2009. Also cf. Auster’s Report from the Interior: “[T]he old south wind cracks and rages,” which he explained in a footnote: “Almost certainly a reference to your last name, which means south wind in Latin” (Report 198). 12 The allegory of the “locked room” is a frequently recurring theme of Auster’s and the title of one of his best-known short stories “The Locked Room,” which is the third part of the The New York Trilogy. 13 Calle, M’as tu vue 24. 14 Caille means in English quail.

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it is on streets that many of her projects take shape. As Macel wrote, Calle’s letter to the French newspaper “illustrates the fact that the author is therefore not exactly a proper name like any other, […]. The name Sophie Calle actually defines a style, a notion essential to the definition of the author” (“Author” 24). Nomen est omen. Names may be read as meaningful. Indeed, a whole new theory, called nominative determinism, has evolved around that ancient idea. Nominative determinism is a comparatively recent term for the theory that a person’s name can have a significant role in determining key aspects of her job, profession, or even her character. In literature, this concept is known by the term aptronym, which describes a name that fits some aspects of a character. An earlier and widely cited example of the theory that names may significantly influence choice or behavior is contained in C.G. Jung’s 1952 paper called “Synchronicity:” We find ourselves in something of a quandary when it comes to making up our minds about the phenomenon which Stekel calls the ‘compulsion of the name.’ What he means by this is the sometimes quite grotesque coincidence between a man’s name and his peculiarities or profession. For instance Herr Gross (Mr. Grand) suffers from delusions of grandeur, Herr Kleiner (Mr. Small) has an inferiority complex. Herr Feist (Mr. Stout) is the Food Minister, Herr Rosstäuscher (Mr. Horsetrader) is a lawyer, Herr Kalberer (Mr. Calver) is an obstetrician, Herr Freud (joy) champions the pleasure-principle, Herr Adler (eagle) the will-power, Herr Jung (young) the idea of rebirth, and so on. Are these the whimsicalities of chance, or the suggestive effects of the name, as Stekel seems to suggest, or are they ‘meaningful coincidences’? (“Synchronicity” 11, fn. 12)

Whether we describe the significance of names as “whimsicalities of chance” or as “meaningful coincidences,” Foer, Calle, and Auster have each bestowed meaning on their proper names by assuming new evocative names or by playing with the associations of their given names. By attaching certain meanings and allusions to their surnames, these authors have actively engaged in the act of authorial selfinvention. Calle staged herself as a fearless voyager, her name reminding viewers of the many streets on which she has travelled. Foer referenced diverse storytelling traditions by assuming the family name Safran. And with the metaphor of the oyster, Auster drew on well-established images of the solitary writer in the scriptorium.15 To give oneself a stage name is thus a meaningful way to perform one’s authorship. Yet another way to perform authorship involves staging oneself as a character in one’s own work, a phenomenon discussed on the following pages.

15 Compare the title of Auster’s book Travels in the Scriptorium (2006).

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S TAGING O NESELF Staging oneself as someone else is a source of aesthetic pleasure; it is also the means whereby representation is transferred from text to reader. (Iser, Prospecting 244)

While Wolfgang Iser described the process of staging from the reader’s perspective to define representation as a performative act, I will now apply his model to show how authors have staged themselves as author figures in conscious acts of performative authorship. By broaching the issue of authorial becoming, I am convinced, authors in my study have actively performed authorial identity formation. Furthermore, I will argue that this kind of self-referentiality has been a source of aesthetic pleasure. This is certainly the case in the examples of Jonathan Safran Foer, Paul Auster, and Sophie Calle, who have each engaged in staging themselves in meaningful ways in order to define their author identities as well as to render aesthetic experiences for authors and readers alike. Everything Is Illuminated Jonathan Safran Foer’s first novel Everything Is Illuminated illustrates well the authorial performance of staging oneself as a character in order to become an author. The book was published in 2002 and brought Foer immediate worldwide recognition. Even though the text is clearly labelled “a novel,” this status is not as clear as it initially seems.16 Philippe Lejeune asked in his “The Autobiographical Pact:”17 Can the hero of a novel declared as such have the same name as the author? Nothing would prevent such a thing from existing, and it is perhaps an internal contradiction from which some interesting effects could be drawn. But, in practice, no example of such a study comes to mind. And if the case does present itself, the reader is under the impression that a mistake has been made. (“Pact” 18)

16 Cf. Gérard Genette: “[N]ovel does not mean ‘this book is a novel,’ an assertive definition which is not in the control of any single person, but rather: ‘Please consider this book a novel’” (“Paratext” 268). 17 Cf. Lejeune: “Parallel to the autobiographical pact, we could place the fictional pact, which would itself have two aspects: obvious practice of nonidentity (the author and the protagonist do not have the same name), affirmation of fictitiousness (in general it is the subtitle novel which today performs this function on the cover; whereas narrative (récit) is, itself, indeterminate and compatible with the autobiographical pact)” (“Pact” 14-15).

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Everything Is Illuminated is a case in which the hero and the author bear the same name, and readers do not necessarily feel that “a mistake has been made.” The story is told by two narrators in a complex doubling structure that weaves one plot, set in the late 1990s, into another plot, set in the period from the late eighteenth century to 1942. This shared narration18 skillfully brings a book within a book into existence. Both stories are situated in what is today Ukraine, mostly in the area around a former Jewish shtetl, with the slightly altered name of Trachimbrod,19 about 150 kilometers to the northeast of L’viv. In 1941, after the invasion of Ukraine by the army of the German National Socialist regime, Trachimbrod became a Jewish ghetto and, in 1942, the site of one of the numerous massacres executed by German soldiers on the Jewish communities of Ukraine and elsewhere. In August and September of 1942, almost all residents of Trachimbrod were murdered by the Nazis and the shtetl was deliberately destroyed by fire. 20 The two narrators of the story are the young Ukrainian Alexander Perchov, or short Alex, who introduces himself as the first person narrator of the “contemporary” plot,21 and Jonathan Safran Foer, the young American Jew, who is introduced indirectly by Alex and turns out to be the omniscient narrator of the “historical” plot.22 Names, name changes, and name adaptations play a significant role throughout the novel, revealing the linguistic power of naming in the process of identity formation. In Everything Is Illuminated, Alex is the third male to be named

18 “We are [...] working on the same story,” Alex writes to Jonathan (Everything 214). 19 Trachimbrod is a fictive spelling of a real village with the name of Trochenbrod. The village is also known under the name of Sofiyofka. Different spellings are due to Russian, Ukrainian, or Polish diction. Foer mostly used the Russian spelling for places, for example, Lvov for L'viv, or he used slightly varied fictive diction to mark imaginary spaces. 20 See Ivan Katchanovski’s critical article on Foer’s novel: “Its population consisted of 1,5002,000 Jews before the start of World War II, but it almost doubled when Nazis brought in Jews from nearby villages and small towns and established a ghetto after they occupied Ukraine. The Nazis liquidated the Trochimbrod ghetto in August and September 1942, with a German killing squad executing several thousand Jews. The local police force, which at that time consisted primarily of Ukrainians, helped round up Jews. Fewer than 200 survivors managed to escape the massacres in the ghetto and in another nearby Jewish village. […] Only about 40 Jews from Trochimbrod survived until the end of the war” (“Not Everything Is Illuminated” s.p.). 21 “My legal name is Alexander Perchov. But all of my friends dub me Alex, because that is a more flaccid-to-utter version of my legal name” (Everything 1). 22 “But then I met Jonathan Safran Foer, and I will tell you, he is not having shit between his brains. He is an ingenious Jew” (Everything 2-3).

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Alexander23 in his family, but he is referred to by many other names throughout the story by the different people with whom he is engaged. His father Alex calls him Shapka,24 in a derogative way; his younger brother Little Igor lovingly names him Alli; and his grandfather Alex, who had once changed his own name from Eli to Alexander to disguise his identity and hide his guilt,25 refers to his grandson as Sasha, an affectionate form of the name Alexander.26 Jonathan Safran Foer, on the other hand, is called “Jon-fen,” a funny mispronunciation by Alex, or more often, ‘the hero’ meant to be teasing and appreciative. Jonathan, as a descendant and representative of his family, is the hero of the contemporary story and the narrator of the historical plot. Thus, right from the start, we are confronted with three “Jonathan Safran Foers:” Foer, the author of Everything Is Illuminated; Jonathan, the narrator of the “historical” part of Everything is Illuminated; and “the hero,” the character of Alex’s part of Everything is Illuminated. Yet we never “meet” the character Jonathan “in person,” because he never “speaks” to us directly, like Alex does, but rather remains in the opaque background. Ulla Haselstein wrote about the character Jonathan: “Despite the autobiographic dimension and genealogical localization, marked through the name identity, Foer, however, avoids the first person perspective: everything readers learn about ‘Jonathan’ is mediated through Alex’s perspective and consistently fictionalized” (my translation). 27 “Jonathan” is marked as fiction and yet, paradoxically, he bears the name of his creator and shares important parts of his personal history. This play with different autobiographical means and modes is

23 “Grandfather’s name is also Alexander. Supplementary is Father’s. […] I will dub my first child Alexander” (Everything 5). 24 A ‘shapka’ is a round, slightly tapered, brimless fur hat worn especially in Russia. 25 It turns out that grandfather Alex was formerly called Eli. He had lived with his wife Anna and their son Alex in Kolki, a shtetl close to Trachimbrod. When the Nazis came to murder the Jews of Kolki in 1942, it was the goy Eli who betrayed his best friend Herschel, the Jewish poet, to the Nazis to save his own family. Eli is a common Jewish name, deriving from Hebrew. 26 Alex’s mother, whose name is never revealed, calls him ‘Alexi-stop-spleening-me!’ Women do not play important roles in the “contemporary” plot, despite the fact that its main objective is the search for a woman, namely Augustine. The identity search that is about to unfold is certainly a male search for ancestors: “In the water I saw my father’s face, and that face saw the face of its father, and so on” (Everything 41). 27 The original reads: “Trotz der durch die Namensidentität markierten autobiographischen Dimension und genealogischen Verortung vermeidet Foer jedoch die Ich-Perspektive: Alles was die Leser über ‘Jonathan’ erfahren, ist durch die Perspektive Alex’s vermittelt und konsequent fiktionalisiert” (“Rücksicht” 201).

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significant, for it enables a complex paradoxical situation of uncertainty and friction that hovers between fact and fiction but cannot be sorted out. The boundaries between character, narrator, and author are purposefully and constantly blurred in order to question the authority and the origin of a story that is shared by many parties. Jonathan is introduced by Alex as a young Jew from the United States, who is about to travel to Ukraine to do research and write a book about his grandfather’s rescue from the Nazis by a woman named Augustine. Alex’s family runs a travel agency with the name of “Heritage Touring” that offers trips for “Jewish people, like the hero, who have cravings to leave the ennobled country America and visit humble towns in Poland and Ukraine” (Everything 3). On this trip, Alex is the amiable and witty translator, and his grouchy grandfather is the driver, despite his claim to being blind.28 Jonathan’s grandfather, named Safran, was rescued by Augustine’s family from the Nazis while his wife and baby were killed. He later remarried in a DP29 camp and “died only five weeks after coming to the States, just half a year after my mother was born,” Jonathan recounts (Everything 98). On his search, Jonathan, who obviously has never met his grandfather, is equipped with only spare information from his grandmother, a picture of Augustine and his grandfather, as well as several old maps of the area they will search. So Alex, Jonathan, and Alex’s grandfather Alex set off to Trachimbrod on a road trip to find Augustine. They are accompanied by the so-called “Seeing Eye bitch,”30 Sammy Davis, Junior, Junior, who is to aid the selfproclaimed blind grandfather.31

28 The “blind” grandfather will later be forced to “see” his own imbroglio in the story. The supposed blindness is symbol to his denial and oblivion of his own past. 29 DP stands for “displaced person” which is a person who has been forced to leave his or her native place, a phenomenon also known as forced migration. The term was coined during World War II by Eugene M. Kulischer, a Russian American sociologist, to describe the more than 10 million European refugees after the war. 30 Alex introduces the family dog as follows: “If you’re wondering what my bitch’s name is, it is Sammy Davis, Junior, Junior. She has this name because Sammy Davis, Junior was Grandfather’s beloved singer, and the bitch is his, not mine, because I am not the one who thinks he is blind” (Everything 1). 31 Samuel George “Sammy” Davis Junior, who lived from 1925 to 1990, was an American entertainer, singer, dancer, TV and film star. He lost his left eye in a car accident in 1954 and converted to Judaism shortly after. Once he was asked: “What’s your golf handicap, Sammy?” And the famous convert Davis answered: “I’m a colored, one-eyed Jew — do I need anything else?” (in: Rebecca Dube, “Menorah Illuminates Davis Junior's Judaism,” s.p.). With wit, Foer called the “seeing-eye” dog after a half-blind African American who

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The story unfolds in three different plot lines: in Alex’s story of the trip; in Alex’s letters to Jonathan after the trip; and in Jonathan’s “historic” tale about Trachimbrod and its citizens. What is missing are Jonathan’s reply letters; their existence is, once again, only indirectly acknowledged by Alex’s references to them. We can only infer that Alex was encouraged by Jonathan to write down his version of the search and his personal entanglement in the story so as to assist Jonathan’s story. In doing so, he also comes to terms with his own family history. Alex regularly sends his evolving text to Jonathan, who thus becomes his “editor,” while, at the same time, Alex comments in his letters on Jonathan’s evolving narrative, thus becoming his “editor”32 in return. “With our writing, we are reminding each other of things. We are making one story, yes?,” Alex suggests (Everything 144). This mutual exchange is structurally marked by the chapter titles of Alex’s and Jonathan’s stories that eventually align with each other. When Jonathan calls several chapters “Falling in Love,” Alex gives his chapters the titles “Falling in Love” (146) and “What We Saw When We Saw Trachimbrod, or Falling in Love” (181). These connected titles further conflate the plots of their stories, forcing readers to stay focused in order to constantly follow the complex interplay of who is speaking about what and to whom. It seems critical that Foer used different typography for the different story lines. Alex’s letters are in italics, always starting with the address “Dear Jonathan” and the date and his story line has regular captions. Jonathan’s chapters, by contrast, have a slightly curved title, often accompanied by the time period. The beginning of Jonathan’s historic tale with the caption “The Beginning of the World Often Comes” is, moreover, illustrated with a mimicry of a woodcut, displaying a man, his horse, and wagon falling into a body of water. The water is the river Brod, the man is Trachim, who fell and died in the river in 1791. A baby girl survived the wagon accident and was given to Yankel, who named her Brod, alluding to the river from which she was “reborn.”33 Brod is introduced by the narrator (supposedly Jonathan) as Jonathan’s “great-great-...grandmother.” The tale about Trachim, Yankel, and Brod is the “founding myth” of the unnamed shtetl, which is called Trachimbrod later that same year by Yankel. Yankel, the adoptive father of Brod, who is Safran’s and

converted to Judaism. During the car trip, Jonathan informs Alex and his grandfather that Davis was a Jew. 32 “Did I tell you that he [Little Igor] is reading your novel as I read it? I translate it for him, and I am also your editor” Alex writes to Jonathan (Everything 178). 33 “Perhaps the wagon flipped, the bodies plunged under its weight, and perhaps, sometime between her mother's last breath and her father's final attempt to free himself, the baby was born. Perhaps. But not even Harry could explain the absence of an umbilical cord” (Everything 16).

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Jonathan’s ancestor, used to be named Safran himself, before he lost both his wife and his usurer’s license, the latter due to unfit practice: He had even lost a name: he was Safran before he fled the shtetl, Safran from birth to his first death. […] He lost his good name, which is, as they say, the only thing worse than losing your good health. […] After three years he returned to the sthetl – […] He changed his name to Yankel, the name of the bureaucrat who ran away with his wife, and asked that no one ever call him Safran again. (Everything 46-47)

The story begins with a person called Safran (who renames himself Yankel) and ends with a person called Safran (Jonathan’s grandfather). The tale therefore moves full circle, connecting past and present, and conflating time and memory, fact and fiction. Yet what Alex and Jonathan write down means more to them than just stories of the past or notes in their diaries. They write to become the persons they want to be: Jonathan becomes an author, the author of a book about Trachimbrod and his grandfather Safran, which enables him to finally tell the story of his ancestors. Alex ultimately becomes a free man, who can stand up for those he loves. When Alex reads parts of Jonathan’s diary, he discovers a fictive anecdote about himself that encourages him to later confront his abusive father. Jonathan writes down in his diary what Alex will later do: “He told his father he could care for Mother and Little Igor. It took his saying it to make it true. […] You are not my father” (Everything 160). Alex does exactly this in the end, as grandfather Alex reports it to Jonathan in his last letter that closes the entire book (cf. Everything 274). It is one of the many forms of literary anticipation that Foer created in his novel, which powerfully intermingles times and motives in an aesthetic Gordian knot. This, in turn, remind readers of the multiple dimensions involved in writing: imagining, remembering, anticipating, and much more. At the same time, questions of who is writing about whom and who is inventing whom are raised. When the character “Jonathan” anticipates in his diary what the narrator Alex will perform later on, does that not make Alex a creation of Jonathan rather than the other way around?34 Alex recounts the story of their trip to Trachimbrod, yet Jonathan’s diary entry indicates that Alex is his creation. The figures Alex and Jonathan are opposite sides of the same coin35 and are therefore, in the end, both alter egos of the author, Foer. Their mutual journey is a trip down

34 Haselstein explained that “the character Alex fades in the end and becomes recognizable as a rhetorical figure of the text” (my translation). The original reads: “Wenn am Ende die Erzählfigur Alex verblasst und als rhetorische Figur im Text erkennbar wird…” (“Rücksicht” 201). 35 Haselstein called Jonathan and Alex mirror characters – “Spiegelungsfiguren” (“Rücksicht” 208).

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memory lane as well as a voyage into the world of simultaneous writing. Writing is thus not only experienced as a vehicle for remembering, but also as a way to render the impossible possible. Writing is experienced as therapeutic, as a source of selfempowerment. Jonathan writes to remember, to understand and fill in the gaps in his family history. “The origin of a story is always an absence,” Jonathan lets his grandfather Safran state in the historical plot (Everything 230). Above all, Jonathan writes to become an author.36 Alex, on the other hand, writes to excavate the truth of his family history, to empower himself and free his loved ones: “I think that this is why I relish writing for you so much. It makes it possible for me to be not like I am, but as I desire for Little Igor to see me. […] I can repair my mistakes when I perform mistakes […]. With writing, we have second chances” (Everything 144). Both protagonists benefit greatly from writing’s “second chances.”37 The imaginary act is described as an act of self-discovery, self-assertion, and ultimately self-invention. Yet neither writer considers himself an author at the outset. Alex feels honored to “write for a writer” and Jonathan is described by Alex as an apprentice writer in the process of becoming a “real writer” (Everything 24, 100). Alex even lets Jonathan know that “it is true, I am certain, that you will write very many more books than I will, but it is me, not you, who was born to be a writer” (Everything 145). The romantic idea of the writer “who was born to be a writer” is dismissed at this point in Foer’s novel, only possible for the fictive “co-author” Alex. The idea that one is born a writer is no longer a valid concept for contemporary authors, neither for Jonathan, nor for his real counterpart Foer. Jonathan is not “born to be a writer,” but must make himself one, just as Foer made himself an author by writing Everything Is Illuminated. In the end, Alex suggests that Jonathan may pretend that it is only his book that they are writing: “I will not require that my name is on the cover” (Everything 104) which is, finally, what readers are faced with: Jonathan Safran Foer is the author of Everything Is Illuminated and the name of his

36 Jonathan tells Alex: “I want to express myself. […] I’m looking for my voice. […] I want to do something I’m not ashamed of” (Everything 70). 37 Haselstein wrote: “Alex’s letters and Jonathan’s chapters alternate and fabricate a dense texture of allusions, cross references, mirror characters, anticipation and flash backs in which the performativity of writing and of being written fashions the protagonists’ existential question of their personal identity and history” (my translation). The original reads: “Alex’s Briefe und Jonathan’s Romankapitel wechseln sich ab und erzeugen ein immer dichteres Gewebe von Anspielungen, Querverweisen, Spiegelungsfiguren, Vorund Rückblenden, in denen die Performativität des Schreibens und Geschriebenwerdens die existentielle Frage beider Protagonisten nach ihrer persönlichen Identität und Geschichte modelliert” (“Rücksicht” 202).

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fictive co-author Alex will not appear on the cover. Foer once again played with the boundaries between fact and fiction. By cleverly bridging the worlds of fiction and non-fiction, he artfully questioned his single authority over the text, generating debate about its genesis. Who is the author after all? This matter is further complicated when readers learn that Everything Is Illuminated is the result of a real trip to Ukraine that Foer took in 1997 in order to do research on his grandfather’s history.38 Grandfather Safran’s story is, after all, the blueprint for the novel. He survived the Nazi occupation of his country, lost his wife and baby to the aggressors, met Foer’s grandmother at a DP camp, and died shortly after arriving in the United States.39 On his trip, Foer did not find any information or witnesses to tell him more about his grandfather’s past, but what he found was his own voice as an author, resulting in Everything Is Illuminated. “It was the kind of experience that inspires a book, precisely because it was so flat,” Foer said. “All of the burden was on my imagination” (in: Landau, “Foer” s.p.). This “failed” journey motivated him to imagine a more felicitous trip, thus making the real tour a success. Indeed, Everything Is Illuminated became a global success. In his novel, Foer conflated reality and fiction, using his disappointing actual experience in Ukraine to create a story that in itself became the fruitful result of the whole journey. As Alex notes: “I saw that he kept filling his diary. The less we saw, the more he wrote” (Everything 115). Even when there was nothing left to see, because everything was destroyed or had vanished, readers learn that it is still possible to imagine. The imaginary act resembles an echo in a void,40 disturbing the silence of that which is lost. The fictive mode allowed Foer to imagine all that should have been, could have been, or ought to have been. Many of the actual things he was searching for on his real trip may be in the novel, but the narrative remains close to his personal experience of finding little information. This observation is based mainly on the plot structure. Foer’s interweaving of fact and fiction allowed him to imagine himself more consciously as an author. In fact, it is important to know that Everything Is

38 See Landau: “Foer wanted to know more. At age 20, he went to Ukraine to find out, armed with an old photograph of his grandfather with three other people. Foer came back without learning anything about his grandfather, but his curiosity didn't stop there. He reinvented the journey, and his grandfather's life story, in ‘Everything is Illuminated’” (“Foer” s.p.). 39 In the story, Alex sums up the unbelievable story of rescue, life, and death: “It is amazing, yes, how your grandfather survived so much only to die when he came to America? It is as if after surviving so much, there was no longer a reason to survive” (Everything 143). 40 I am thinking about the term “void” in the sense of Daniel Libeskind’s understanding of his five voids built within the Jewish Museum Berlin. The Museum’s Voids refer to “that which can never be exhibited when it comes to Jewish Berlin history: Humanity reduced to ashes” (Libeskind, “The Voids” s.p.).

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Illuminated is Foer’s first truly ambitious project as a writer. What the character Jonathan says about his early stories is thus probably true for Foer as well: “I don’t even like them. […] They’re apprentice pieces. […] They’re not real stories. I was just learning how to write” (Everything 69). Jonathan’s trip to imaginary Trachimbrod is not only a search for Augustine and his grandfather’s past, but also a trip to find his voice as a writer and to create his author identity. Alex asks: “Why do you want to write?” and Jonathan answers: “I don’t know. I used to think it was what I was born to do. No, I never really thought that. It’s just something people say. […] I want to express myself. […] I’m looking for my voice” (Everything 69-70). The same holds true for Foer who used his characters Jonathan and Alex, as alter egos to imagine his own becoming an author. Jonathan writes about Alex’s rebellion against his father: “It took his saying it to make it true” (Everything 160). Likewise, it took Foer’s writing “to make it true,” that is when writing about Jonathan and Alex becoming authors, Foer became an author himself, in a performative act of selfinvention. It was therefore inevitable that he would name his protagonist Jonathan Safran Foer and even stage himself as a character in his book. Like Jonathan, Alex, in his letters to Jonathan and in his narration of the contemporary plot, earnestly reflects upon the process of writing and issues of authorship. As an extremely naive narrator, Alex slowly develops into a critical and self-reflexive author who is seeking the truth, despite the pain it may cause.41 Almost until the end, Alex tries to pursuade Jonathan not to tell the truth about Alex’s grandfather, who had betrayed his best friend Herschel to the Nazis: “You may understand this as a gift from me to you Jonathan. And just as I am saving you, so could you save Grandfather. We are merely two paragraphs away. Please, try to find some other option” (Everything 224). The narration is merely “two paragraphs away” from the devastating exposure of grandfather Alex’s guilt. Even though it is the grandson Alex who is writing the contemporary plot and begs Jonathan not to reveal the truth, he does not alter the narration in the end, but meets his responsibilities as the descendant of a betrayer and a trustworthy author. So despite it’s painful dimension, “truthful” writing is shown to be a way of assuming one’s responsibility as a human being and as an author. Accepting the truth, bearing witness to the past and paying tribute to one’s ancestors, are displayed as empowering techniques to create one’s personal as well as authorial identity. Foer’s novel reveals itself as highly self-reflexive book that offers multiple metalevels of reading. The story is not solely about Jonathan’s and Alex’s road trip to excavate and remember the intertwined histories of their two families: It is also a tale about the emergence of two interwoven stories – the historical and the contemporary

41 Alex constantly comments on the difficulties and chances of writing and his own authorial responsibilities.

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plot – as well as the coming-of-age of Alex and Jonathan as authors. Furthermore, the novel is the story of Foer imagining himself becoming an author. In a complex act of performative self-invention, Foer successfully invented himself as an author, as blatantly signified by the name Jonathan Safran Foer, which appears, all by itself, on the cover of Everything Is Illuminated. This kind of authorial self-invention by staging oneself as an author-character is further discussed in the following chapter about Paul Auster’s “City of Glass.” “City of Glass” Since its first publication in 1987, much has been written about The New York Trilogy, Paul Auster’s inaugural novel in three parts. The three stories, “City of Glass” (1985), “Ghosts” (1986), and “The Locked Room” (1987), are, as Alison Russell put it in her essay “Deconstructing The New York Trilogy” (1990): 42 “essentially retellings of the same story.” It is the story of writers becoming detectives and of detectives becoming writers in search “for ‘presence’: an ultimate referent or foundation outside the play of language itself.” Russell continued her Derridean reading of the trilogy: “This quest for correspondence between signifier and signified is inextricably related to each protagonist’s quest for origin and identity, for the self only exists insofar as language grants existence to it” (“Deconstructing” 97-98). Madeleine Sorapure, in Dennis Barone’s anthology, Beyond the Red Notebook (1995), was among the first scholars to concentrate on the significant juxtaposition of the figures of detective and author in Auster’s work. Her close reading of “City of Glass” as a “meta-anti-detective-novel” (in: Beyond 23), in regard to authorship and authority, offers a useful entry into the text, as “Auster stages a complex play with his name, simultaneously associating and dissociating himself and his mode of authorship with an author-character” (“Detective” 85). Also helpful in approaching Auster’s puzzle of author-detectives is William Lavender’s essay, “The Novel of Critical Engagement: Paul Auster’s City of Glass” (1993) and especially John Zilcosky’s text, “The Revenge of the Author: Paul Auster’s Challenge to Theory” (1998), both found in Harold Bloom’s collection, Paul Auster (2004). And last but not least, one must mention Norma Rowen’s “The Detective in Search of the Lost Tongue of Adam: Paul Auster’s City of Glass” (1991) as well as William G. Little’s “Nothing to Go On: Paul Auster’s ‘City of Glass’” (1997). What this small selection of writings already indicates is that the 1990s were a time of great scholarly debate about Auster’s second urtext.43 Yet what particularly concerns this chapter is

42 Russell’s text was republished in 2004 in Harold Bloom’s anthology Paul Auster. 43 Paul Bruckner called The Invention of Solitude “the ars poetica and the seminal work of Paul Auster” (“Paul Auster” 27).

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the performative act in “City of Glass,” and how Auster used it to invent the author persona Auster, which eventually “led to the birth of another ‘author’ – Paul Auster himself,” as Zilcosky wrote in his epilogue (“Revenge” 73). By imagining himself as an author or rather as many different authors, and by including his real name in the first story of The New York Trilogy, I will argue that Auster at once performed authorial identity formation and illuminated his own becoming an author. Auster’s “City of Glass” is a smart and complex linguistic game of names and doppelgänger, around which narrative ambiguities of chance and fragmentation circle. Nothing ever seems certain in Auster’s story. By mistake, the protagonist Daniel Quinn, a writer of detective novels who published under the pseudonym of William Wilson,44 lets himself be hired as the alleged private detective Paul Auster (in italics) by a man who calls himself Peter Stillman (Peter from now on): “My name is Peter Stillman. That is not my real name” (Trilogy 16). Peter and his wife Virginia seek protection from Peter’s father who, being released from psychiatry the next day, is supposedly a threat to them. As a cruel experiment to “discover man’s true ‘natural language’” (Trilogy 33), Peter’s father had imprisoned the two-year-old child after his mother’s death, and kept him in solitude in a dark room for nine years without any social contact. Peter’s father is also called Peter Stillman (Stillman from now on): “His name is Peter Stillman too. Strange, is it not? That two people can have the same name?” Peter explains to Quinn (Trilogy 18).45 Quinn takes on the strange case under the false name of Auster and starts to follow Stillman through New York City. However, right from the start, Quinn encounters two identical men who both look like Stillman. Quinn must choose between the doubles and follows the shabby, instead of the elegant, doppelgänger. After a twoweek chase and three direct exchanges with Stillman, Quinn loses track of him, but cannot let go of the case, even when he learns that Peter and Virginia can no longer be reached. In his desperation, Quinn contacts the “real” detective Paul Auster, who turns out to be a writer, instead, and who is unable to help him. Quinn increasingly withdraws from his former life, first camps out in front of Peter’s and Virginia’s apartment, and then eventually settles inside the abandoned place. At the end of the narrative, Quinn has vanished altogether to an unknown place, while his story, documented in a red notebook, is found at Peter’s former apartment by Paul Auster and his unnamed friend, who is supposedly the narrator of “City of Glass.” Almost every character in “City of Glass” is a writer and/or a detective, or else a seeker of words and objects: Quinn is a writer becoming a detective, who wrote

44 The name is a reference to Edgar Allan Poe’s “autobiographical” short story “William Wilson” (1839), which themes around doubles or doppelgänger. The initials of William Wilson also refer to Walt Whitman. 45 Also Quinn’s son, who had died several years ago, was called Peter.

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detective novels under the pseudonym of Wilson. Peter is a prospective author: “I am mostly now a poet. Every day I sit in my room and write another poem. I make up all the words myself, just like when I lived in the dark” (Trilogy 19). Stillman is the writer of a dissertation on the author Henry Dark, as well as a seeker of broken things to “give them names” (Trilogy 78). And finally, there is Auster, an author mistaken for a detective, who is writing an essay on the authorship of Don Quixote. Throughout the story, Auster directly and indirectly referenced other authors and text: Marco Polo and Michel de Montaigne; Edgar Allan Poe and Walt Whitman; Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe; Herman Melville’s “Bartleby, the Scrivener” and Moby Dick; Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass; and Carlo Collodi’s Pinocchio. It is Miguel de Cervantes’ Don Quixote, however, that most prominently and constantly shines through Auster’s text, as Rowen argued: Quinn is roused from this invisible existence when a midnight phone call gives him a chance, like Don Quixote whose initials he shares, to inhabit and make real one of his own fictions. Don Quixote manages to turn himself into a medieval knight; Daniel Quinn is given the opportunity to play the detective. (“Detective” 226-227)

Quinn starts “to play the detective” even before the actual story begins, right after the death of his wife and son: “A part of him had died, he told his friends, and he did not want it coming back to haunt him. It was then that he had taken on the name of William Wilson” (Trilogy 4). Quinn first invents his pseudonym Wilson, and then begins to play the role of Wilson’s private eye narrator, Max Work:46 Over the years, Work had become very close to Quinn. Whereas William Wilson remained an abstract figure for him, Work had increasingly come to life. In the triad of the selves that Quinn had become, Wilson served as a kind of ventriloquist. Quinn himself was the dummy, and Work was the animated voice that gave purpose to the enterprise. (Trilogy 6)

Quinn impersonates Wilson and plays to become Work, thereby fragmenting his self into at least three identities. Wilson, as a writer of detective stories, functions as an intermediary between the author (Quinn) and the detective (Work). “That such refuge in games and avoidance exacts its price, however, is soon demonstrated,” Rowen wrote and continued: “As a self, Quinn has lost control of his words. They originate with and issue from someone else. He has become a puppet through which they pass, and hence they no longer seem to belong to him” (“Detective” 226). This, of course,

46 His name refers both to the verb and noun (to) work. The character is marked as a work of art or a work of words, thus ficticious, while Quinn puts maximum effort in his creation.

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reminds us of another famous puppet: Collodi’s Pinocchio. Pinocchio’s highest aim is to become a real boy, a primal quest echoed in Peter’s subsequent monologue: “I know that I am still the puppet boy. […] But sometimes I think I will at last grow up and become real” (Trilogy 22). 47 Quinn, in reverse, wants to become fictitious, a puppet, or a body without a soul, for which Auster found an analogy in Quinn’s long walks through New York: “Lost, not only in the city, but within himself as well. Each time he took a walk, he felt as though he were leaving himself behind, and by giving himself up to the movements of the streets, by reducing himself to a seeing-eye, he was able to escape the obligation to think” (Trilogy 4). The premise of Quinn’s postmodern Quixotic quest is thus to reverse Pinocchio’s condition from real boy to fictitious puppet: Quinn “had, of course, long ago stopped thinking of himself as real. If he lived now in the world at all, it was only at one remove, through the imaginary person of Max Work” (Trilogy 9). “City of Glass” therefore raises the fundamental question whether it is possible to become another person by playing the role of that person. The problem is a matter of nomenclature and performance. As I discussed in my chapter “Stage Names,” to rename oneself falls under the category of “performatives,” according to John L. Austin’s speech act theory. To give oneself another name is a performative utterance with “illocutionary force,” which is defined by Austin as a “performance of an act in saying something as opposed to performance of an act of saying something” (How 99-100). To give oneself another name is to become someone else, at least for a time. Quinn begins his identity change by renaming himself William Wilson; then he pretends to be Max Work in his mind; and finally, he becomes the “detective” Paul Auster by appropriating his name and profession. Yet the detachment from his Quinnself started earlier when he began to write mystery novels under his pseudonym: “Because he did not consider himself to be the author of what he wrote, he did not feel responsible for it” (Trilogy 4). Instead, Quinn takes on Auster’s responsibilities and performs his surveillance job. “I have not been hired to understand,” Quinn notes in his first entry in the red notebook, “merely to act” (Trilogy 40). But instead of using Auster’s name to sign the first page of the red notebook, Quinn signs it with his own initials, D.Q. This assumption of authorship reveals Auster’s complex game of confusion in which authorship is constantly contested and questioned. Quinn writes: And then, most important of all: to remember who I am. To remember who I am supposed to be. I do not think this is a game. On the other hand, nothing is clear. For example: who are you?

47 See Auster’s description of Peter entering the room: “It was like watching a marionette trying to walk without strings” (Trilogy 15).

168 | P ERFORMING A UTHORSHIP And if you think you know, why do you keep lying about it? I have no answer. All I can say is this: listen to me. My name is Paul Auster. That is not my real name. (Trilogy 40)

In the end, despite his alienation from himself Quinn uses his real initials to claim authorship of the red notebook. Who is the author? How many authors are there? And who imagines whom? The different authors/characters in “City of Glass” are tightly interlaced and are thus impossible to unravel. Lavender makes the attempt to disentangle the “authorship” of “City of Glass,” revealing its “circular and seamless” construction, from the “real” Auster, to the implied Auster, to Quinn, Wilson, and Work, back to the character Auster, and the mysterious I of the story’s narrator (cf. “Novel” 81). Lavender’s diagram, confusing as it must remain, indicates the entangled authorship construction of Auster’s story. One author emerges from the other author, analogous to the principle of the Chinese box or the Russian Matryoshka doll. Auster is the author of “City of Glass,” narrated by I, which refers to the red notebook authored by Quinn, alias Auster. Quinn, an alter ego of Auster, is the author of Wilson, who is the author of Work. Authors and characters become deeply interrelated. Traditional concepts of origination and single authorship are thereby blurred and critically challenged. No one author alone can claim exclusive authorship of the story. In this strange world, Lavender argued, “it is then possible […] for a character in a novel to be its author” (“Novel” 81). The character becomes the author; the author becomes the character. Quinn imagines being a detective and becomes the author/detective Auster; Auster imagines being an author/detective to become an author. Taking a Foucaultian perspective, Lavender described “City of Glass, with its confused abundance of authors, writers, narrators, pseudonyms, and impersonations, [as] the künstlerroman of these ‘complex operations’” that Michel Foucault had constituted in “What Is an Author?” Lavender thus assessed “City of Glass” as “Auster’s portrait of the author as a developing function, a search through the labyrinth of theory and tradition for a new authorial identity, one that can survive in an age when authority is not necessarily bound to text by ‘spontaneous attribution’” (“Novel” 94). Auster developed his “author function” in “City of Glass,” Lavender argued. I claim that in “City of Glass,” Auster, for the first time, became the author he aspired to be. This authorial becoming is especially enabled through Auster’s staging of himself as a detective, as a private eye. In many respects, the role of the detective is analogous to the role of the author: like detectives, authors observe their surroundings while trying to make sense of the world, as the narrator of “City of Glass” explains: “The detective is the one who looks, who listens, who moves through the morass of objects and events in search of the thought, the idea that will pull all these things together and make sense of them. In effect, the writer and the detective are interchangeable” (Trilogy 8). Both the private eye and the author keep track of and extract the nature

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of the people and events in the world around them. The homophone eye and I have especially interested Auster as signs of identity. His narrator, in fact, explains the significance of the pun: Private eye. The term held a triple meaning for Quinn. Not only was it the letter ‘i,’ standing for ‘investigator,’ it was ‘I’ in the upper case, the tiny life-bud buried in the body of the breathing self. At the same time, it was also the physical eye of the writer, the eye of the man who looks out from himself into the world and demands that the world reveal itself to him. For five years now, Quinn had been living in the grip of this pun. (Trilogy 8-9)

The eye functions as a passage between interior and exterior, through which information about the world is collected. In the processes of reading and writing, physical and mental visions are vital.48 Eyes have been described in the Bible as the windows of the soul,49 and thus our “innermost” character can be seen in our eye. The homophone I, by extension, embodies the essence of our individual selves. The homophone eye/I, therefore, represents the core identity of a person. At least, Quinn works under this assumption: “He remembered having read somewhere that the eyes were the one feature of the face that never changed. From childhood to old age they remained the same” (Trilogy 54). Even if this is true, the I does not remain the same from childhood to old age, and can experience multiple identity crises. Quinn himself must learn this painfully as his identity gradually disintegrates. “I must keep my eyes open,” he thinks at the beginning of the case. Yet it is his “open I,” that ultimately leads to his loss of identity. While the self, therefore, constantly seeks to center itself in the linguistic sign I, the eye is taken to be the symbol of the physical gateway to the self. With this in mind, the private eye is a tautological construction, and contrasts with the idea of a private and a public I, which everyone possesses. The I is thus both private and public, capable of eyeing and being eyed. The private eye, who remains incognito, tries to shed light on private affairs to bring them into the public eye. Comparably, the author writes about personal matters, offering insight into inner struggles. Yet there is a complex twist to Auster’s play with the pun private eye and its analogy to the author position. After Quinn follows Stillman for thirteen days without discovering his raison d’être, he is deeply disillusioned: He had always imagined that the key to good detective work was a close observation of details. The more accurate the scrutiny, the more successful the results. The implication was that human behavior could be understood, that beneath the infinite façade of gestures, tics, and silences,

48 Certainly, reading and writing is possible without eyes, for example in braille. 49 “The light of the body is the eye: if therefore thine eye be single, thy whole body shall be full of light,” in: King James Bible, Matthew 6:22.

170 | P ERFORMING A UTHORSHIP there was finally a coherence, an order, a source of motivation. […] He had lived Stillman’s life, walked at his pace, seen what he had seen, and the only thing the felt now was the man’s impenetrability. Instead of narrowing the distance that lay between him and Stillman, he had seen the old man slip away from him, even as the remained before his eyes. (Trilogy 67)

Stillman slips away before Quinn’s eyes. To survey someone, therefore, does not necessarly offer an image of that person as an integrated self, but rather displays the fragmentary nature of human behavior. Likewise, authors remain impenetrable to their readers, despite certain “confidential information” they give us in their texts. Like Quinn, who struggles “to take in all these surface effects” of Stillman’s performances, Auster’s readers are faced with his authorial performances. Our vision through the windows of the soul always remains blurred. Still, like Quinn who “continued to disbelieve the arbitrariness of Stillman’s actions,” readers continue to look for signs, as they want “there to be a sense” to the actions of their author (Trilogy 69). As the quintessential performative author himself, Auster offered many such signs. In The Red Notebook: True Stories (1992), Auster wrote about the initial spark for “City of Glass:” My first novel was inspired by a wrong number. I was alone in my apartment in Brooklyn one afternoon, sitting at my desk and trying to work when the telephone rang. […] I picked up the receiver, and the man on the other end asked if he was talking to the Pinkerton Agency.50 I told him no, he had dialed the wrong number, and hung up. […] The next afternoon, the telephone rang again. It turned out to be the same person asking the same question I had been asked the day before […]. Again I said no, and again I hung up. This time, however, I started thinking about what would have happened if I had said yes. What if I had pretended to be a detective from the Pinkerton Agency? (Notebook 55)

Auster imagined what it would be like to be a detective, while his character Quinn, at the third phone call,51 becomes a detective by taking on the name Paul Auster. Like a Chinese box structure, Auster positioned his story within a story ad infinitum. Fiction and “fact” are skillfully interlaced to blur the boundaries between them, the alpha and omega of the story are thus never exposed.

50 The Pinkerton National Detective Agency was founded by Allan Pinkerton in 1850 and is still in business. Pinkerton became famous when he claimed to have frustrated a plot to assassinate Abraham Lincoln, who later hired Pinkerton agents for his personal security during the Civil War. 51 “City of Glass” begins as follows: “It was a wrong number that started it, the telephone ringing three times in the dead of night, and the voice on the other end asking for someone he was not” (Trilogy 3).

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Becoming Auster is not an easy operation, but rather a complex performance of appropriation and staging. Quinn rejects the assignment on the first call: “‘Is this Paul Auster?’ asked the voice. ‘I would like to speak to Mr Paul Auster.’ ‘There is no one here by that name.’ ‘Paul Auster. Of the Auster Detective Agency.’ ‘I’m sorry,’ said Quinn. ‘You must have the wrong number’” (Trilogy 7). When he misses the second call, Quinn prepares for the third call the following night, finally ready to take on the case: “‘And who do you want to speak to?’ ‘Always the same man. Auster. The one who calls himself Paul Auster.’ […] ‘Speaking,’ he said. ‘This is Auster speaking’ (Trilogy 11). At first there is no one there by the name of Auster, then Auster is finally speaking, and slowly Quinn becomes Auster by staging himself as the detective: The effect of being Paul Auster, he had begun to learn, was not altogether unpleasant. Although he still had the same body, the same mind, the same thoughts, he felt as though he had somehow been taken out of himself, […]. He wandered through the station, then, as if inside the body of Paul Auster. […] ‘Look at it through Auster’s eyes,’ he said to himself, ‘and don’t think of anything else. (Trilogy 50-51)

By playing the role of Paul Auster like an actor, Quinn gradually performs an identity change. Staging himself as Auster eventually leads Quinn to become Auster: “He was Paul Auster now, and with each step he took he tried to fit more comfortably into the strictures of that transformation” (Trilogy 61). Later we are told by the narrator: “Once he had taken the leap into that name, he had stopped thinking about Auster himself” (Trilogy 91). But then, after having lost Stillman, Quinn remembers the “real” Auster. Quinn seeks out Auster, the only one in Manhattan, to pay him a face to face visit. What follows is a description of a man who resembles the “real” Paul Auster: “He was a tall dark fellow in his mid-thirties, with rumpled clothes and a two-day beard. In his right hand, fixed between his thumb and first two fingers, he held an uncapped fountain pen, still poised in a writing position” (Trilogy 92-92). Auster made a cameo appearance in his own narrative as a writer caught in the middle of the act of writing. He staged himself as a character in his own story. Shortly after, his young son Daniel and wife Siri enter the stage, and Auster introduces them to Quinn: “‘I see you’ve already met, Daniel,’ he said to the boy, ‘this is Daniel.’ And then to Quinn, with that same ironic smile, ‘Daniel, this is Daniel.’ The boy burst out laughing and said, ‘Everybody’s Daniel.’ ‘That’s right,’ said Quinn. ‘I’m you, and you’re me’” (Trilogy 102). Paul Auster’s son from his first marriage with Lydia Davis is called Daniel. Referring to the three doppelgänger by name, Auster further interlaced fact and fiction. His character Quinn is called Daniel, which is also the name of the son of Auster’s alter ego, Auster. Auster thereby marked Quinn as his fictive offspring, which makes it possible to read the Stillmans as Quinn’s fictive offspring, because Quinn’s son had been called Peter as well. This

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would render the Stillmans fictional. After all, as the narrator reminds us, Quinn could have “imagined the whole thing” (Trilogy 71). We are faced not only with several namesakes of Auster and his family members, but also with several related careers, namely that of writer and detective.52 With Quinn, Stillman senior and junior, and Auster, Auster thus created four different author types in order to stage his own authorial becoming. Young Peter is the fragile, nameless poet in the dark room; old Stillman is the keen theoretician with knowledge of literature and philosophy. Both Stillmans vanish throughout the story, or rather, Auster got rid of these “exhausted” authorial identities. Quinn, another version of Auster’s earlier author self, is fragmented and constantly in crisis regarding his own authorial identity and has to vanish: “As for me,” the narrator closes the story, “my thoughts remain with Quinn. He will be with me always. And wherever he may have disappeared to, I wish him luck” (Trilogy 132). Quinn will always remain, yet only in memory. He looses himself in his own narrative and dissolves at the end of the story in order to give room for Auster’s future authorial self: Auster. Auster, the intelligent writer of literary analyses, with his smart son and his beautiful wife,53 is the prototypical blueprint for the author that Auster has desired to become. Furthermore, Auster also bid farewell to his supposedly ethical and dutiful I-narrator who announces: “As for Auster, I am convinced that he behaved badly throughout. If our friendship has ended, he has only himself to blame” (Trilogy 132). The I-narrator, who refers to himself as the author by the end of the story, establishes himself as trustworthy and the story as authentic: “Since this story is based entirely on facts, the author feels it his duty not to overstep the bounds of the verifiable, to resist at all costs the perils of invention” (Trilogy 113). By closing the I-narrator’s friendship with Auster, the last “credible” authorial identity vanishes into a nonentity, leaving behind the unreliable author, Auster, that is, the performative author identity of Paul Auster himself. Like Auster, Sophie Calle has equally been fascinated with the figure of the detective and made use of the private eye to further develop her authorial persona. This will be further discussed in the next chapter.

52 See Auster: “In the past, Quinn had been more ambitious. As a young man he had published several books of poetry, had written plays, critical essays, and had worked on a number of long translations” as well as “Quinn did all his writing with a pen, using a typewriter only for final drafts, and he was always on the lookout for good spiral notebooks” (Trilogy 4, 38). All this is true of Auster’s own biography and working method. 53 See Auster: “This Auster was the first intelligent person he had spoken to in a long time. He had read Quinn’s old work, he had admired him, he had been looking forward to more” as well as “She was a tall, thin blond, radiantly beautiful, with an energy and happiness that seemed to make everything around her invisible” a description of the character Siri that resembles the real Siri Hustvedt (Trilogy 96, 101).

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“The Detective” In 1981, Sophie Calle asked her mother to hire a private detective to shadow her for one day, documenting her whereabouts in notes and photographs. This resulted in a later work called “The Detective” (1981). As usual, Calle detailed her intentions beforehand in the form of a short test arrangement: “In April 1981, at my request, my mother went to a detective agency. She hired them to follow me, to report my daily activities,” as she sought “to provide photographic evidence of my existence” (Double 122-123). “By laying down the ‘rules of the game’ before carrying out such a project,” Dörte Zbikowski observed, “it is possible for the artist to distance herself from the often very private theme of her works” (in: Levin, Ctrl 414). Such a process of distancing, I argue, is not necessary, for Calle’s work exposes very little if any private information about the artist and her personal life. Instead, in “The Detective” Fig. 11: Sophie Calle, The Detective

“The shadow” (detail), 1981. Set of one text, one colour photograph, 29 b/w photographs partly assembled in groups, 11 texts. 71,5 x 245 cm (one text), 32 x 24 cm (one colour photograph), 17,5 x 25,8 cm (each b/w photographs), 30 x 21,5 cm (each text). © Sophie Calle / ADAGP, Paris & VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2015. Courtesy Galerie Perrotin.

Calle sent her author persona into a game of chase to further shape her authorial identity. “The Detective”54 can thus be regarded as a continuation and development

54 Calle, “The Detective.” Set of one text 71.5 x 245 cm, one color photograph, 32 x 24 cm. 29 b/w photographs, 17.5 x 25.8 cm (each), party assembled in groups, 11 texts, 30 x 21.5 cm (each). In: M’as tu vue 433ff.

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Fig. 12: Sophie Calle, The Detective

“The shadow” (detail), 1981. Set of one text, one colour photograph, 29 b/w photographs partly assembled in groups, 11 texts. 71,5 x 245 cm (one text), 32 x 24 cm (one colour photograph), 17,5 x 25,8 cm (each b/w photographs), 30 x 21,5 cm (each text). © Sophie Calle / ADAGP, Paris & VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2015. Courtesy Galerie Perrotin.

of her earlier project, “Suite vénitienne” (1979/80), only with the roles of protagonist and author seemingly switched. Rather than following a stranger to Venice, and shadowing him for several days in order to stage herself as an author detective, Calle allowed herself to be shadowed by a private detective, as she sought from him a ‘proof of existence’ of her author persona. “The Detective” is composed of Calle’s two-page report about the plan of pursuit; a full-body studio portrait of her in profile; the detective’s two-page report; his blackand-white snapshots (enlargements and contact prints) taken during the observation; and a short report with black-and-white snapshots of a third party, whose role will be discussed shortly. “The Detective” has been presented by Calle in exhibitions and

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publications in consistent ways. 55 The reports and photographs are presented successively, so that they complement one another and raise specific expectations from the audience. As is often the case in Calle’s work, text and image “verify” each other. The photographs illustrate the text and apparently “prove” its “truthfulness.” The text illuminates the images and thereby controls the focus of analysis. The impression of an objective report is further intensified through the use of factual, descriptive language. The viewer’s gaze is thus directed according to Calle’s staging. Calle illustrated her report with contact prints of the detective’s black-and-white photographs. On six film strips with six shots each, viewers can supposedly follow her daily routine. De facto, it is this “photographic evidence” that she aimed for from the beginning, according to her own instructions. These “objective” photographs should prove the existence of the author persona Calle. As a matter of fact, almost half of the photographs show Calle or, at least, the subject seems to be Calle. She prefixed a full-body self-portrait in color and meticulously described her outfit of the day: “I am wearing gray suede breeches, black tights, black shoes, and a gray raincoat. Over my shoulder a bright yellow bag, a camera” (Double 124). Prior to “The detective,” Calle had experimented with turning herself into an object of desire in order to contemplate her own corporeal existence. In “The Striptease,” (1979)56 for example, she purposefully and unsparingly exposed herself to the gaze of others, more precisely to the gaze of men, when she stripped on the stage of the bar “Eros” in the Parisian red-light district Pigalle. Calle supposedly hired a photographer to document her nightly table-dance in black-and-white photographs to, again, provide photographic evidence of her bodily existence. “The Striptease” thus stands as another, exposed attempt for her to become aware of her own body through the gaze of the “other.” Calle’s body on stage is observed and examined. In becoming a staged object, she thereby experienced a heightened awareness of herself as another, thereby becoming the author persona Calle.57 It is noteworthy that other female artists have dealt with their corporeal existence in similar ways, turning their own bodies into the sites and themes of their art. This is particularly true of performance artists and photographers such as Marina Abramović, Valie Export, and Cindy Sherman. These artists have either used their

55 In exhibitions, “The Detective” is presented as a linear narrative on the walls, so that visitors walk along the story as it progresses. 56 Calle, “The Striptease” (1979). Selection of b/w photographs. In: Calle, Double, 44ff. 57 I am not arguing that strippers or table-dancers have this experience at work, but in Calle’s case nothing can be certain, not even whether her striptease actually took place in public, or was privately staged for her project.

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Fig. 13: Sophie Calle, The Striptease

The Striptease, 1979. Set of b/w photographs. Published in: Double Game 1999. © Sophie Calle / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2015.

bodies directly during their performances or have staged their bodies as photographic motifs.58 Calle has done both. In “The Striptease,” she performed a direct bodily play on stage and artistically staged her body for the camera. Nevertheless, I do not assign “The Striptease” to the realm of performance art. Calle did not really interact with her audience, which was not much of an audience at all, since the photographs show only a few other dancers behind the stage, the announcer on the stage and two male guests below the stage. She also did not videotape the event, which would have documented a temporally and thematically defined performance, making it accessible to her audience. Whether or not, Calle actually strip-danced at a Parisian bar and whether or not the photographs are actually authentic is thus impossible to know. Moreover, Calle “disguised” herself with a blond wig during her “performance.” This is the same or similar wig she would wear later for her work “Suite vénitienne,” and which Paul Auster used in his novel Leviathan.59 According to Calle, the blond wig was meant to protect her from discovery, she wrote, “in case my grandparents, who lived in the neighborhood, should happen to pass by” (Double 44-45). Through the

58 See for example: Abramović, “Lips of Thomas” (1975) and Export, “Aktionshose Genitalpanik” (1969). 59 See my chapter “Double Game.”

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Fig. 14: Sophie Calle, The Striptease

The Striptease, 1979. Set of b/w photographs. Published in: Double Game 1999. © Sophie Calle / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2015.

disguise, the uncovering of her (corporeal) existence is, however, negated. Why masquerade oneself, when one wants to discover one’s self? This early Calle work displays that she was already concerned with something else, namely the creation and molding of her authorial self. She staged herself as a blond object of desire and thereby exposed her body to the gaze of others. Like an actress on stage, Calle played the ritualized role of a private dancer. Because this is a highly traditional ritual, as a gentle variation on “the oldest profession of the world,” Calle did not disclose anything of her “identity" despite her stripping. In his Mythologies (1957) Roland Barthes devoted a short text to the Parisian striptease in which he unmasked the professional striptease as a ritualized staging and masquerade: [T]he dance, consisting of ritual gestures which have been seen a thousand times, acts on movements as a cosmetic, it hides nudity, and smothers the spectacle under a glaze of superfluous yet essential gestures, for the act of becoming bare is here relegated to the rank of parasitical operations carried out in an improbable background. (Mythologies 85-86)

Professional strippers, according to Barthes, withdraw into the safety of their technique, which clothes them like a garment and covers their nudity. Using the

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Fig. 15: Marina Abramović, Lips of Thomas

Lips of Thomas, 1975–97. Framed color photograph, 128,27 x 128,27 cm. © Marina Abramović / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2015.

accessories of vaudeville – Barthes noted feathers, furs, and gloves, among others – the stripper becomes a luxury object, while “the nakedness which follows remains itself unreal, smooth and enclosed like a beautiful slippery object” (Mythologies 85). Barthes contrasted the professional striptease with the amateur striptease, which is Fig. 16: Valie Export, Aktionshose: Genitalpanik

Aktionshose: Genitalpanik, 1969. Photo: Peter Hassmann. © VALIE EXPORT / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2015.

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usually practiced as a kind of contest. 60 Amateur strippers, in his view, lack the technique and accessories behind which they can hide, as they are constantly threatened by immobility, and above all by a ‘technical’ awkwardness (the resistance of briefs, dress or bra) which gives to the gestures of unveiling an unexpected importance, denying the woman the alibi of art and the refuge of being an object, imprisoning her in a condition of weakness and timorousness. (Mythologies 86)

Even though Calle is not a professional stripper, she does not look scared or timid in the photographs, because in contrast to many amateur table dancers, Calle certainly had the alibi of art for her dance, but one that is different from that of professional strippers. Calle’s professionalism has more to do with the framework she chose for her work. The setting was marked not as a site for an amateur contest, but as a real striptease bar. Calle did not undress to win any prize, but rather to consciously expose her body to the gaze of others. Thus, her body was disguised, as Barthes formulated: “There will therefore be in striptease a whole series of coverings placed upon the body of the woman in proportion as she pretends to strip it bare. […] all aim at establishing the woman right from the start as an object in disguise” (Mythologies 84). Calle’s costume – black silk dress, fur stole, high heels, veiled hat, and previously-mentioned blond wig – contributes to the kind of professionalism to which Barthes referred. Even when Calle finally stood naked on stage, she still wore parts of her masquerade, namely her high heels and the wig that camouflaged her identity. Using these professional attributes, Calle turned her author persona into a luxury object. In “The Striptease,” Calle created a situation with the alibi of art to give her a view of herself from the outside. She thereby played on the gaze of the “other” to make visible her own authorial becoming. In a similar vein, “The Detective” is about the gaze of a man focused on Calle, this time not primarily as an object of eroticism and luxury, but as one of surveillance. However, here the boundaries are blurred, for Calle took extra care to look good during that day, not only as the person being shadowed, but also as a woman and thus as an object of desire. She wrote: “It is for ‘him’ I am getting my hair done. To please him” (Double 124). She thereby accentuated the erotic component of the pursuit game. Penny Cousineau argued that in “The Striptease” and “The Detective,” Calle at once offers herself up to, and attempts to control or ‘own,’ the male gaze. […] she simultaneously places herself in the position of female object of desire and male observer. […] she attempts to procure for herself […] the entitlement and prerogative of masculine desire. Even as she poses for these photographs, trying to incite male longing and thereby assure her

60 Often done in form of wet-T-shirt contests in bars or discotheques.

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By staging her author persona in deliberate ways, Calle thus controled the gaze of the “other” and manipulated this image according to her authorial will. “The Detective” at first bore the title “La Filature.”61 Zbikowski remarked that the original French title literally means shadowing and, at the same time, alludes to networks. The title “is usually translated as ‘The Shadow,’ a term with multilayered readings” (my translation).62 Only later, in her publication Double Game, did Calle decide upon the title “The Detective.” She thereby increasingly focused the attention on the role of the detective and his significance in the act of staging. He became the other who ought to provide evidence of her existence. His gaze enabled her to see the becoming of her authorial self. The audience is likewise invited to assume the view of the detective, following his gaze on Calle. The new title introduces the detective as an active and decisive subject, while simultaneously distracting viewers from the strangely-eclipsed Calle. Yet this scenario is undermined by Calle as she stepped out of the shadow to reveal herself as the master puppeteer behind the whole staging. Calle made sure that her audience would always recognize her author persona. Her authorial self became the object of the shadow, yet unexpectedly did not remain passive. Rather, Calle heavily manipulated the image that the detective drew of her to obtain the highest possible sovereignty and authority over her author persona. For that matter, Calle painstakingly worked out the day with “her” detective leaving nothing to chance, as Zbikowski explained in detail: That this was not a usual day for Calle becomes apparent in her own peculiarly emotional recording which accompanies the detective’s report. She knows that she is being followed and does not only address this in her self-observation and in the observation of others, but additionally tries to direct the perception of the detective. […] The observer is being observed while observing and does not realize this, just as little as the fact that the subject of his

61 “The Shadow” (1981). French version: diptych, texts and color and b/w photographs, each element framed, 162 x 110 cm. Artist’s collection. English version: set of one text 71.5 x 245 cm, one color photograph, 32 x 24 cm, 29 b/w photographs, 17.5 x 25.8 cm (each), partly assembled in groups, 11 texts, 30 x 21.5 cm (each). In: M’as tu vue 101ff. 62 The original reads: “[E]r wird gewöhnlich mit dem vielschichtig lesbaren Begriff ‘Der Schatten’ übersetzt” (“Sophie Calle” 83).

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observation is actually his client. […] By playing a role, Sophie Calle prevents the detective from exposing her true identity. (My translation)63

Fig. 17: Titian, Man with a Glove

Man with a Glove, around 1520. Oil on canvas. 89 x 100 cm, Musée du Louvre, Paris.

Once again, Calle’s “true” identity was kept hidden. She was in control of what the detective and thus her audience saw and came to know of her author persona and her daily routine. Even though viewers could have shadowed Calle through the eyes of the detective, it is nevertheless she who always took the lead: “I want to show ‘him’ [and thus her audience] the streets, the places I love. I want ‘him’ to be with me as I go through the Luxembourg, where I played as a child and where I received my first kiss in the spring of 1968. I keep my eyes lowered. I am afraid to see ‘him’” (Double 63 The original reads: “Dass es aber kein ganz normaler Tag für Calle war, wird durch ihre eigenen, auffällig gefühlsbestimmten Aufzeichnungen deutlich, die sie dem Bericht ihres Beschatters zur Seite stellt. Sie weiß, dass sie beschattet wird und macht dies nicht nur zum Gegenstand ihrer Selbst- und Fremdbeobachtung, sondern versucht auch, die Wahrnehmung des Detektivs zu lenken. [...] Der Beobachter wird beim Beobachten beobachtet und realisiert dies ebenso wenig wie die Tatsache, dass das Subjekt seiner Beobachtung seine eigentliche Auftraggeberin ist. [...] Indem sie eine Rolle spielt, verhindert Sophie Calle, dass der Detektiv ihre wahre Identität aufdeckt” (“Sophie Calle” 81).

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126). Calle staged herself as an artist in a trench coat with a camera – conventional attributes of detectives – and acted out her own script. Her audience only “saw” what she wanted them to see and “met” only the people she wanted them to meet, such as a publisher, her father – “I want ‘him’ to see my father” (Double 126) – or Bernard F., the man of whom she long thought of as her real father, an intertextual reference to one of her many self-mythologies that she often casually interspersed throughout her work.64 Fig. 18: Sophie Calle, The Detective

“The shadow” (detail), 1981. © Sophie Calle / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2015.

Calle “directed” the detective through the city and meticulously described her whereabouts and activities during that day under surveillance. At one point, Calle entered the Louvre and paused for a long time in front of Titian’s “Man with a Glove” (1520).65 She recounted: “At 2:20 p.m., after walking quickly through the museum, I find myself in front of Titian’s ‘Man with a Glove.’ I have always liked this painting. The sad vacant eyes. The pouting mouth. The face as if beheaded resting on a lace collar. But above all, this hint of a mustache” (Double 126). Sure enough, 64 See my chapter “Self/Portrait” and my reading of Calle’s work “The Dutch Portrait.” 65 Tiziano Vecellio (Titian), “Man with a Glove,” around 1520. Oil on canvas, 89 x 100 cm, Musée du Louvre, Paris.

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a photograph that shows Calle in front of this Titian painting is among the photographs that the private detective took. Titian, significantly, was one of the most sought-after European portraitists of his time. Using Titian’s masterpiece as the backdrop of her picture, Calle offered an art historical allusion to the genre self/portrait. With an ironic and knowing wink, Calle thus positioned her own work within the history of art, about which she holds greater knowledge than she has acknowledged in her interviews.66 With this photograph, Calle gave her audience an interpretive clue about the actual theme of “The Detective.” On one level, her work is about the emergence of a self-portrait through the eyes of an outside observer. On another level, Calle’s work is about the staging of herself as an artist in order to become the artist Sophie Calle. “The Detective,” is, after all, about Calle’s narration and image of herself, which she expressed via the “other.” Because Calle’s report preludes the detective’s report, the latter of which is verified by the audience and based on the artist’s “original” descriptions, Calle purposefully directed the expectations of the readers. In “The Detective,” Calle created a self-portrait through the eyes of another person. Through the detective’s gaze, readers witness yet another self-invention of the author persona Calle. Calle composed an allegedly objective image through the accurate description and the photographic evidence of a third party. Yet she manipulated that image so drastically that it remains as subjective as her very own report. Calle demonstrated that it is impossible to grasp the essential being of another person through close observation. She showed complex performances of the self in perpetual becomings, which present themselves in shallow acts and facts of daily routines. Thus, instead of uncovering the “true identity” of Calle, readers are left with the orchestrated banalities of the author. In the end, what do we learn about the observed person? As in “The Striptease,” where Calle only showed her surface, her outer skin, under which viewers could not see, in “The Detective,” Calle merely offered superficialities about her daily whereabouts. In both, observations and conclusions remain on the surface, as Calle’s self, or any self for that matter, can neither be grasped through the viewer’s gaze nor through official surveillance. Summing up these conceptual meanings in Calle’s work, Zbikowski wrote: With The Shadow (Detective), as with other works, Sophie Calle addresses the theme of the failure of the “myth of information” (Barbara Heinrich) […] Only the spectator who sees Sophie Calle’s notes as part of a work of art gets some impression of the artist’s efforts to shape

66 Furthermore, Calle turned her back towards the viewers in front of Titian’s painting. Her face is thus invisible to us. Calle’s self/portrait via the gaze of the detective is therefore rather a non-portrait. This non-portrait critically remarks on the general failure of representation in the genre of self/portrait. See my chapter “Self/Portrait.”

184 | P ERFORMING A UTHORSHIP the course of her day so as to produce a representative image, and thereby acquires insight into her (artistic) individuality. Ultimately it is here that the art-theoretical dimension of Sophie Calle’s work becomes clear: her investigative pursuits, be they real or invented, certainly bear witness to the artist’s personal obsession, but more than anything else they bear witness to the failure of art to penetrate a stranger’s life, to understand and grasp it through observation. (In: Levin, Ctrl 415).

At the same time, “The Detective” is equally a demonstration of Calle’s authorial power. For the first time, Calle explicitly stated and claimed her authority. As the indirectly-informed client, she held the power and control over the detective on their shared day. The detective, who was not adept to the game, followed her. He had to follow her in his dependency, and was thus controlled by her decisions. But who really followed whom? Who had the other one in his or her grip? Calle herself clearly articulated: “I’ve become a part of the life of X, private detective. I structured his day, Thursday, April 16, in much the same way that he has influenced mine” (Double 126). It is this reciprocal power constellation that Calle decided right from the start. Only at the very end of “The Detective,” did Calle reveal that it had always been her who was in control at all times, thereby offering another twist to the narration. She wrote: “I wanted to have a souvenir of the person who would be following me. I didn’t know which day of the week the tailing would take place, so I asked François M to be outside the Palais de la Découverte every day at 5P.M. and to photograph anyone who seemed to be tailing me” (Double 138). The private detective, who was commissioned by her in the first place, was observed by her friend François M., whose photographs and short report were presented at the very end of Calle’s work. M.’s notations leave no doubt that Calle left nothing to chance, but remained the stage director of her play in all situations. The observer literally becomes the observed and vice versa. Yet in contrast to Calle, the detective did not know that he was being photographed and that every one of his steps was being followed and documented. Sure enough, Calle presented six black-and-white photographs of a slender, young man with dark hair, carrying a bag over his shoulder and a camera in his hand. This “photographic evidence” corresponds well with Calle’s own report in which she described the detective at one point: “My eyes meet, on the other side of the boulevard Saint-Germain, those of a man about twenty-two years old, five feet six inches tall, short straight light brown hair, who jumps suddenly and attempts a hasty and awkward retreat behind a car. It’s ‘him’” (Double 126). The unsuspecting detective was being followed while he was pursuing and observing, photographing and taking notes – operations of both the detective and the author. In these tasks, the core practices of detectives and authors coincide significantly: to watch closely and to keep record. Yet Calle kept the detective an anonymous phantom, his face remained hidden, as François M. only took photographs from his

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Fig. 19: Sophie Calle, The Detective

“The shadow” (detail), 1981. © Sophie Calle / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2015.

rear view, or rather, Calle only chose the rear-view photographs for publication. His identity as the detective is thus questioned. Did he ever exist at all? Is the whole observation a fictitious staging? Did the pursuit really take place? To answer these intriguing questions may distract us from the essence of Calle’s art, which is ultimately about her narration, in all its ficticious and factual dimensions. Regarding this aspect of her work, Michael Glasmeier’s observations, as expressed in Private Eye: Crimes & Cases (1999), are useful for understanding Calle: “Reality becomes adventure. It lays tracks that refer to acts which are possible or happened. With these, the narration begins” (my translation). 67 The narration itself is always central to Calle’s production. In “The Detective,” it reports the story of her authorial becoming through the gaze of the “other,” which is documented with photographic “proof,” and and, as I would add, the textual evidence of the detective’s account. As I have shown, Foer, Auster, and Calle have staged themselves as the authors they endeavored to be: Foer acted the part of the aspiring, empathetic fledgling,

67 The original reads: “Die Realität wird damit zum Abenteuer. Sie legt Spuren, die auf Taten verweisen, die möglich oder geschehen sind. Damit beginnt die Erzählung” (Private Eye 10).

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Auster staged himself as an erudite, established author, and Calle performed the role of the curious, adventurous femme mystique. In the following chapter I will explore how Calle and Auster created their individual mythologies as superstructural networks that encompass their author personae and professional oeuvres.

I NDIVIDUAL M YTHOLOGIES Using stage names and staging oneself are two strategies that authors have used in the process of becoming authors. Another method used in performing authorship, which I introduce in this chapter, is the creation of individual mythologies. These are personal myths or stories into which writers and artists imbed their author personae and their texts, creating metanarratives, that is, mythological superstructures around the author figures. I analyze Paul Auster’s and Sophie Calle’s “true stories”68 as individual mythologies, thereby offering new perspectives on their “autobiographical” short stories.69 The concept of myth allows me to disregard questions of “fact or fiction” in Calle’s and Auster’s stories. On this use of myth, Ihab Hassan wrote: “[I]f autobiography is the central impulse of literature, adventure and quest both revert to myth, which prefigures literature and still breathes life into allots shapes” (“Quest” 125). At first glance, Auster’s and Calle’s stories could be seen as naïve and trivial anecdotes or accounts of incidents that supposedly happened to each of them. On a deeper level, though, their texts are actually retrospective inscriptions that establish metanarratives around and beyond their author personae. Within these metanarratives, authorial identity is positioned and staged. Calle and Auster, as I argue, self-consciously created their individual mythologies to increase their agency in the formation of their distinct if not fragile authorial identities. Myths and mythologies, and the origins of these narrative constructs, have always interested artists, writers, and theorists. Roland Barthes dedicated his third publication Mythologies to the phenomenon and delineated a semiotic reading of everyday, contemporary mythologies. Barthes defined myth as a “type of speech,” as a “system of communication” or “message” and thus not as “an object, a concept, or an idea,” but rather as “a form” (Mythologies 109). He argued that everything can be a myth provided that it involves discourse: “Every object in the world can pass from

68 See: Paul Auster The Red Notebook: True Stories (1992) and Sophie Calle True Stories (2013) first published as a story collection in 1994. 69 My reading of Calle’s (and Auster’s) true stories as individual mythologies was inspired by Christine Macel’s seminal essay “The Author Issue in the Work of Sophie Calle. Unfinshed” published in the 2003 catalog M’as tu vue 17-28.

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a closed, silent existence to an oral state, open to appropriation by society, for there is no law, whether natural or not, which forbids talking about things”70 (Mythologies 109). Barthes then described myth as a “metalanguage” or a “second language, in which one speaks about the first,” reading myth not as a “language-object” or a “linguistic schema,” but as a “total term,” or a “global sign” (Mythologies 115) When dealing with myth, Barthes argued, we are operating in “a second-order semiological system” in which “a sign (namely the associative total of a concept and an image) in the first system, becomes a mere signifier in the second” (Mythologies 114). The signifier in myth “already postulates a reading, I grasp it through my eyes, it has a sensory reality” Barthes argued, so that the “meaning is already complete, it postulates a kind of knowledge, a past, a memory, a comparative order of facts, ideas, divisions” (Mythologies 117). So in contrast to the linguistic system of semiology, which results in a sign as a connector to meaning (signifier) and a concept (signified), in myth we arrive at a signification (the myth itself) as a connector to a concept (signified) and a complex reciprocation between meaning and form (signifier). Myth thus has a double function: it plays a “constant game of hide-and-seek between the meaning and the form” and, paradoxically, it “hides nothing and flaunts nothing: it distorts; myth is neither a lie nor a confession: it is an inflexion” (Mythologies 118, 129). This duality is apparent in the word’s etymology: mythology is a compound term that combines both Greek words for speech: the fictional narration (mythos) with the rational argument (logos). Barthes, therefore, described myth as “a value, truth is no guarantee for it.” Without a guarantee for truth, wrote Barthes, the reader of myths “lives the myth as a story at once true and unreal” to “reveal their essential function” (Mythologies 123, 128, 129). What makes myth so effective, after all, is its vigorous immediacy, as “the reading of a myth is exhausted at one stroke,” stated Barthes (Mythologies 130). To summarize Barthes’s argument in a nutshell: Myth is a discursive metalanguage, which may appropriate any discourse and transform any meaning into a mythic form that can be deciphered by a reader. If nothing is safe from myth, not even the most trivial, everyday matter, and if every discourse can be appropriated, then myth is indeed a powerful performative expression. What is more, individuals can create “artificial myths,” which led Barthes to ask: “Since myth robs language of something, why not rob myth?” (Mythologies 135).

70 Barthes further wrote: “[N]ot only written discourse, but also photography, cinema, reporting, sport, shows, publicity, all these can serve as a support to mythical speech. Myth can be defined neither by its object nor by its material, for any material can arbitrarily be endowed with meaning” (Mythologies 110).

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Barthes’s idea of a “self-made” artificial myth is later echoed in Harald Szeemann’s notion of individual mythologies. The neologism “individual mythology” became known through this Swiss curator, who introduced the term to the art world in 1963.71 Yet it was not until 1972, when Szeemann curated documenta 5 that the concept was introduced to a larger audience.72 He intended his concept as a scheme for “individualists who do not fit into any scheme,” who “as individuals visualize exemplary performances and thus render visible anticipation of identity” (my translation).73 The artists Szeemann had in mind produced personal myths to illustrate universal processes of identity performance. He conceived of the umbrella term individual mythologies for those artists who did not easily fit into a predefined scheme and who were strongly affected by individual experiences. With Barthes’s definition of myth/ologies and Szeemann’s concept of individual mythologies, I will introduce two ideas to my discussion of performative authorship in order to explain authorial agency in the process of identity formation. The notion of produced individual mythologies is a useful tool to investigate supposedly autobiographical texts, like Auster’s and Calle’s “true stories,” and to avoid the trap of “truth claims.” The concept of artificial personal myths, which subsumes these fragmentary personal expressions under a coherent framework, enables me to analyze their works beyond their autobiographical dimensions. In his documenta 5 exhibition, “Individuelle Mythologien I and II,”74 Szeemann included a great number of artists, among them Christian Boltanski, Paul Thek, Joseph Cornell,75 and Jörg Immendorf. Szeemann presented artistic positions that generated new interpretations of the world via personal mythologies. By encouraging the mental processes of association and analogy, he offered his audiences intuitive access to these individual mythologies, which originated in the personal yet resonated in the universal realm. The neologism76 individual mythologies spawned lively and

71 Szeemann used the term “individual mythology” for the first time in his “Etienne-Martin” exhibition at the Kunsthalle Bern (1963). 72 In 1981, Szeemann published Museum der Obsessionen, and in 1985, Individuelle Mythologien, two volumes in which he demonstrated his own associations, emotions, and thoughts on individual mythologies in a very personal and experimental way. 73 The original reads: Das Schema für “die Individualisten, die in kein Schema passen”, die “als Individuum ein exemplarisch vorgelebtes Verhalten sichtbar [...] machen und dadurch Antizipation von Identität sichtbar [...] machen” (Museum 88). 74 See exhibition catalog documenta 5 – 1972, 16.7-86 and 16.167-220. 75 Cf. my chapter “A Convergence of Birds” and Jonathan Safran Foer’s work on Cornell. 76 Barthes defined the use of neologisms as “a constituting element of myth: if I want to decipher myths, I must somehow be able to name concepts. The dictionary supplies me

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heated discussions among art historians and critics who attended documenta 5. Contemporary author and journalist Dieter Bachmann described the open denotation suggested by Szeemann’s neologism as a “mental room where the individual makes those marks and sets those signals that mean the world to him” (my translation).77 For her part, art historian and author Elke von Radziewsky explained Szeemann’s approach retrospectively as follows: Looking through C.-G.-Jung’s glasses, he asked the artists of the exhibition section ‘Individuelle Mythologien’ to put themselves on the couch, he drew their secrets from them, helped to explain them, encouraged them to diligently keep on searching in religion and intoxication, in antiquity and everyday life and to create even more of those individual symbols, to make art out of it, space filling. (My translation)78

Szeemann’s biographer, Hans-Joachim Müller, later defined the concept of individual mythologies. He wrote: “The formula contains two things, the possible impossible of the myth and the individual as the final true signifier of art” (my translation).79 However, the idea of Szeemann’s individual mythologies has also been criticized, mainly because it lacks clear definition. Art historian, critic, and journalist Barbara Cartoir scrutinized the term as early as 1974: A ‘mythology’ cannot be ‘individual’ by definition for it is commonly understood as the ‘collectivity of mythic records of a people’ or even the ‘academic research and presentation of

with a few: […] Now what I need most often is ephemeral concepts, in connection with limited contingencies: neologism is then inevitable” (Mythologies 120-121). 77 The original reads: “[G]eistige Raum, in dem ein Einzelner jene Zeichen und Signale setzt, die ihm seine Welt bedeuten” (in: Szeemann, Museum 91). 78 The original reads: “Mit C.-G.-Jung-Brille auf der Nase bat er damals die Künstler der Ausstellungssektion ‘Individuelle Mythologien’ auf die Couch, entlockte ihnen ihre Geheimnisse, half sie zu erklären, ermunterte sie, fleißig weiterzusuchen in Religion und Rausch, in Antike und Alltag und noch mehr von diesen individuellen Symbolen zu erfinden, Kunst daraus zu machen, raumfüllend” (“Der ewige Demonstrant” s.p.). 79 The original reads: “In der Formel war beides enthalten, das möglich Unmögliche des Mythos und das Individuum als letztwahre Referenzfigur der Kunst” (Harald Szeemann 47).

190 | P ERFORMING A UTHORSHIP the myths.’ Generally, one can only speak about an individual appropriation of myths, associated, in many cases, with a self-mythologization of one’s person. (My translation)80

This is a valid point. However, it does not acknowledge the paradox that Szeemann intended his neologism to raise: the contradiction between individual creative expressions and their artistic manifestations in the form of universal myths. The personal story is a clue pointing to the commonly understood narrative. The tension between the individual and the universal in Szeemann’s concept of individual mythologies questions purely autobiographical interpretations of the artworks in his installation. Catoir summed up the problem: What complicates the access to works and actions of such artists, what certainly makes them so appealing on the other hand, is the fact that we are dealing here with ‘individual assimilation processes,’ with eclectic montages whose parts and pieces are derived from many different cultures, religions, philosophies, and hermetism. (My translation)81

In an interview shortly after documenta 5, Szeemann commented on the criticism of his exhibition, explaining once again the meaning of individual mythologies: I like the expression, because it is so open and can be applied to everything created intensely. […] Many critics wrote that half of the presented names had been unknown to them, the artworks strange and therefore not yet classifiable. But this only meant: the ‘individual mythologies’ were irrational innovations not yet brought in line with the aesthetic beliefs (of the critics). […] They were important to me as utterances and as a return to the fragile character of the expression of the individual. (My translation)82

80 The original reads: “Per Definitionem kann eine ‚Mythologie’, worunter man gemeinhin die ‚Gesamtheit der mythischen Überlieferungen eines Volkes’ oder aber die ‚wissenschaftliche Erforschung und Darstellung der Mythen’ versteht, nicht ‚individuell’ sein. Generell lässt sich nur von einer individuellen Mythenverwendung sprechen, womit vielfach auch eine Mythisierung der eigenen Person verbunden ist” (“Individuelle” 3). 81 The original reads: “Was den Zugang zu Arbeiten und Aktionen derartiger Künstler erschwert, andererseits freilich auch ihren Reiz ausmacht, ist die Tatsache, daß wir es hierbei mit ‚individuellen’ Assimilierungsprozessen zu tun haben, mit eklektischen Montagen, deren Versatzstücke sich aus den verschiedensten Kulturen, Religionen, Philosophien und Geheimwissenschaften herleiten lassen” (“Individuelle” 3). 82 The original reads: “Der Ausdruck gefällt mir, weil er so offen ist und auf alles intensiv Gestaltete angewendet werden kann. [...] Viele Kritiker schrieben, daß ihnen die Hälfte der

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For Szeemann, the expression of the individual applied “for example to [Paul] Thek – here, the symbolic value is merely culturally charged – and, beyond the question of ‘art, or not art’, reveals the dimension which the individual mythologies intended to visualize: self-realization” (my translation).83 Cleverly, Szeemann defended his frequently criticized idea: “Historians call the concept ‘individual mythologies’ an absurdity, maybe because it equally extends to the collective as is does to the individual. Exactly, but what more do you want?” (my translation).84 It was precisely the subjective view of these myths that made the whole presentation valid for Szeemann.85 Many contemporary artists supported his conception, for instance Thek himself, who paraphrased Szeemann’s idea: “I believe that we mask our individuality and our own inspiration, when they are in fact group imaginations” (my translation).86 At documenta 5, Szeemann presented the imaginary biographies of many, quite different artists and thus staged the concept of individual mythologies for the first time to a larger audience. Before I read Auster’s and Calle’s “true stories” as individual mythologies, I will introduce a number of quintessential works by the French artist Christian Boltanski (whom Calle knows) that were exhibited in Szeemann’s group show at documenta 5. Boltanski’s works are of special relevance to my analysis, because they explicitly parallel Auster’s and Calle’s projects and will thus be helpful in understanding how the latter have made use of the concept of the individual mythologies. Boltanski has scrutinized the nature of his identity by measuring the limitations of his memory.87

dort vorgestellten Namen unbekannt gewesen seien, die Werke fremd und deshalb noch nicht einzuordnen. Das aber hieß doch nur: Die ‚Individuellen Mythologien’ waren noch nicht mit ästhetischen Vorstellungen (der Kritiker) in Einklang zu bringende irrationale Innovationen. [...] Für mich waren sie wichtig als Äußerungen und als Rückbesinnung auf den fragilen Charakter einer Äußerung eines einzelnen” (in: Kipphoff, “Blick zurück” s.p). 83 The original reads: “[…] zum Beispiel für [Paul] Thek — der Symbolgehalt hier ist lediglich kulturbeladener — und läßt jenseits der Frage ‘Kunst oder nicht Kunst’ die Dimension sichtbar werden, die zu visualisieren die individuellen Mythologien intendierten: Selbstverwirklichung” (in: Kipphoff, “Blick zurück” s.p.). 84 The original reads: “Die Historiker nennen den Ausdruck ‘individuelle Mythologien’ Unsinn, vielleicht, weil er sich ebenso auf das Kollektive wie auf das Individuelle erstreckt. Eben, aber was will man mehr?” (Individuelle 235, 237). 85 See Szeemann, Individuelle, 123, 162. 86 The original reads: “Ich glaube, daß wir unsere Individualität und unsere eigenen Eingebungen verbergen, wo sie doch in Wirklichkeit Gruppenphantasien sind” (in: Szeemann, Individuelle 163). 87 Cf. exhibition catalog documenta 5 – 1972, 16.9-10.

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Szeemann called this artistic approach “egocentric archeology that has taken form” (my translation).88 Initially, Boltanski tried to examine his identity with the help of supposedly personal belongings from his childhood, such as with an old storybook, a piece of cloth from a pullover, and a ringlet. When these “original” objects failed to bring about his intended effect, he tried to preserve days of his life in cans. This experiment failed as well, as Boltanski realized that the moments of our lives are formed by too many elements to be contained in a can, or to be contained in any physical construct. With this realization, Boltanski attempted to rebuild the missing parts from memory. I had my pictures taken and in front of the camera I reenacted the moments and gestures which, back then, had impressed and marked me and which had neither been recorded nor saved: Again I threw the pillow as I had done on October 15, 1949; again I slid down the stair railing as on July 6, 1951. (My translation)89

Ultimately, Boltanski admitted that he “failed” in visualizing the reality of his own past, because even the items from his childhood, so carefully reconstructed in plasticine, did not do the trick. Boltanski’s second attempt was also ill-fated from the outset. Here the artist aimed to visualize the life his friend’s family90 – a family the artist himself barely knew. Although he used photographs that “would remain as evidence of their existence after their death” (my translation), 91 in the end he acknowledged that “these photographs were no evidence of the real life of the D. family – to the contrary, they once again pointed to my own memories” (my translation).92 The same result was felt by Boltanski’s audience, as his “personal” objects and photographs (the “evidence” of his existence), speak little about the child, the person, or the artist Christian Boltanski. Rather, these “original” objects, the reconstructed items, and the reenacted photographs speak a universal language that

88 The original reads: “Formgewordene, ‘egozentrische’ Archäologie” (“Individuelle” s.p.). 89 The original reads: “[D]ie fehlenden Teile aus der Erinnerung wiederherstellen. Ich habe mich fotografieren lassen und vor dem Apparat die Augenblicke und Gesten durchgespielt, die mich damals beeindruckt und markiert haben und weder festgehalten noch aufbewahrt wurden: erneut schleuderte ich das Kopfkissen, wie ich es am 15. Oktober 1949 getan hatte; erneut rutschte ich das Treppengeländer hinunter wie am 6. Juli 1951” (documenta 5 16.9.). 90 The work is on Michael D.’s family. 91 The original reads: “[N]ach ihrem Tode als das Beweisstück ihrer Existenz bleiben würden” (documenta 5 16.9.). 92 The original reads: “Diese Fotografien gaben mir keinen Hinweis über das, was in Wirklichkeit das Leben der Familie D. gewesen war – im Gegenteil, sie verwiesen mich nur erneut auf meine eigenen Erinnerungen” (documenta 5 16.9.).

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Fig. 20: Christian Boltanski, Photo Album of the Family D.

Photo Album of the Family D., 1971. 6 of 150 b/w photographs (1939-1964). © Christian Boltanski / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2015.

evokes in the spectators their own childhood myths of pillow fights, stair railing slides, and bedtime stories. Boltanski’s personal myths, therefore, have a mirror effect, reflecting the audience’s individual childhood memories. What we “see,” is not Boltanski’s past, but rather a reverberation of recollections of our own pasts. To paraphrase Boltanski, his keepsakes only point to ourselves. Spectators emphatically connect with Boltanski’s memories through intuitive association and recognize themselves in his individual mythologies. As Barthes formulated, myth is a “system of communication” or “a message” (Mythologies 109), which offers a two-way passage from individual expression to universal expression and vice versa. Boltanski’s personal narratives are thus deeply rooted in common human experiences from which viewers can draw their own individual analogies. This individual-universal dichotomy also appears in Calle’s and Auster’s “true stories.” Their – often trivial – narratives are similar to our own life experiences and mirror our common memories. Yet at the same time, their stories offer what is not typically found in our fragile and fragmentary memories: the coherence and compositional structure of literature. These features are feasible in narrative, yet unlikely in everyday life. Calle’s and Auster’s individual mythologies, therefore, offer a red thread that allows them to stage random events as meaningfully

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connected. Furthermore, by establishing an individual mythology that defines a unique repertoire of themes, motifs, and images, unconnected artworks become imbedded in an overall narrative construct that centers around the author personae of Calle and Auster. Their work functions as a metanarrative, or as Barthes called it, a metalanguage, “a second language, in which one speaks about the first” (Mythologies 115). As a metanarrative, Calle’s and Auster’s individual mythologies create the appearance of discreet and coherent authorial worlds, promising their audiences intimate knowledge about the processes and relations that govern these worlds. Similar to the tensions of Szeemann’s neologism, the seemingly oppositional terms “true” and “story” – in the sense of something real versus something invented – must be acknowledged. Auster’s and Calle’s “true stories” are fictive and truthful at the same time, for, as Barthes explained “myth is neither a lie nor a confession,” but “a value; truth is no guarantee for it” (Mythologies 129, 123). While truth in their work is not guaranteed, their art does not signify falsehood. The “true stories,” therefore, will always remain ambiguous. Despite the simple appearance of the “true stories,” they nonetheless operate on complex levels, as my formal and contextual analysis of Calle’s and Auster’s individual mythologies will reveal. Discussing their metanarratives in the context of each authors’ larger oeuvre, enables me to scrutinize the construction of authorial becoming through personal myth-making. Such an approach allows me to argue that both authors compose their “true stories” as myths of origin from which later artworks are supposedly derived. Let me begin with Calle’s true stories. True Stories II In 1994, Sophie Calle published Des Histoires Vraies, her True Stories,93 for the first time as a story collection. The ongoing series of the true stories is mostly arranged chronologically and spans from Calle’s childhood until today. Between 1988 and 2013 Calle wrote more than forty short stories that were initially exhibited individually or in small groups and were collectively published under the suggestive title The Autobiographies/Les Autobiographies. Each story is accompanied by an image, or rather, each image comes with a story.94 As I argue in this chapter, the loose story collection forms the basis of Calle’s individual mythology. Recurring themes, motifs, and images from Calle’s oeuvre are presented in a concise, almost distilled

93 There are different sets of the “true stories” published in Double Game (1999), M’as tu vue (2003), True Stories (Göteborg/Göttingen: Hasselblad Foundation/Steidl, 2010), and True Stories (Arles: Actes Sud, 2013). The texts also slightly differ depending on the edition. 94 Calle, Autobiographies (1988-2003). Series of elements each consisting of one framed photograph and one framed text, M’as tu vue 434-435.

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format. Each story is like an elaborately crafted tile within a larger mosaic that pictures the author persona Calle – a persona upon which Calle has drawn significantly. To read Calle’s true stories as individual myths necessitates grappling simultaneously with questions of history, remembrance, and myth. The expressive strength of her stories lies in their autobiographical truth claims. Their promise of authenticity suggests a veracity that appeals to her audience. In an interview, Calle ingeniously addressed the questions of fact or fiction that surround her work: “I called my book ‘True Stories’ to escape the question ‘Is it true what you are telling there?’ Now I am asked ‘Is it really true?’” (my translation).95 Are the “true stories” really really true, we could ask ad infinitum? Because the issue of truth “is the ‘complicated problem’ raised by all story-tellers, the problem of whether telling stories is telling lies” wrote Andrew Addy,96 who continued, “to begin to tell a story, to narrate, is at once to blur the ontological boundaries between the real world and the world of the story, between fact and fiction, and so to raise the question of truth” (“Narrating” 157). To call Calle’s story collection true stories underscores this dilemma of ambiguity, which is key to any reading of Calle’s stories and to the pleasure they bring to her readers. It is impossible if not futile to differentiate between the person Calle, the author Calle, the narrator Calle, or the performer Calle. Ideed, her work is about the mixing and merging of these personae and their constructed character. Readers cannot make a clear distinction between Calle’s different authorial figures because her true stories illustrate the performance of perpetual identity formation of the author. Christine Macel described Calle’s approach as such: “Calle uses acting=doing, not to feign it, but to execute it in order to give birth to a story. […] art comes before fiction, it is necessary in itself, and gives rise to it” (“Author” 22-23). It is through these performances-turned-stories that the author Sophie Calle is created. Such stories thus encourage an examination of how Calle brought these individual myths into being and how they have operated. Her story “Striptease” (1988), which is illustrated with a photograph from her earlier project “The Striptease” (1979, see fig. 13, 14), is a case in point. The story reads as follows: I was six. I lived on a street named Rosa-Bonheur with my grandparents. A daily ritual obliged me every evening to undress completely in the elevator on my way up to the sixth floor, where I would arrive without a stitch on. Then I would dash down the corridor at lightning speed, and

95 The original reads: “Ich nannte mein Buch ‘Wahre Geschichten’ um der Frage zu entgehen: ‘Ist das wahr, was du da erzählt hast?’ Jetzt werde ich gefragt: ‘Ist das wirklich wahr?’” (in: Stech, “Sophie Calle” 224). 96 Addy wrote on Auster’s Moon Palace (1989), but his argument is also valid for Calle’s true stories.

196 | P ERFORMING A UTHORSHIP as soon as I reached the apartment, jumped into bed. Twenty years later, in 1979, I found myself repeating this ritual every night in public, on the stage of one of the strip joints that line the boulevard in Pigalle, wearing a blond wig in case my grandparents, who lived in the neighborhood, should happen to pass by. (Double 44-45)

This story sounds rather fantastic. To disentangle the fictional and non-fictional aspects of Calle’s work, readers could find out whether she had in fact lived on Rue Rosa-Bonheur with her grandparents as a child. Yet as Macel wrote, “it is not up to us to come down on one side or the other, for this would mean flushing out the moments when the Sophie Calle character becomes detached from author and narrator alike. This is no big thing, actually” (“Author” 21). Ultimately, whether Calle’s story is a fictional tale, a childhood daydream, or a “real” experience is not that important. More important is the fact that in the story Calle retrospectively established a link to her later project “The Striptease.”97 By bringing these stories into chronological order and linking them narratively, Calle constructed a seamless connection between the childhood fantasies of her story and the later artistic staging of her performance as a stripper. This seemingly organic link brings her two texts onto the same narrative level and thus establishes them both as true accounts. The childhood story provides “autobiographical” credibility to the later artistic project and vice versa. At the same time, Calle, once again, established herself as a special child, a whimsical wunderkind, staging the quintessential actions an egocentric “exhibitionist,” who would subsequently become an artist. This reading corresponds well with the analysis laid out by Ernst Kris and Otto Kurz in their publication Legend, Myth, and Magic in the Image of the Artist (1934), in which they discussed the universal interest in the youth of the artist: This interest is usually accounted for in two ways. One point of view states that the childhood events have a decisive impact on the future development of man; hence the attempts to demonstrate the early influence of fate in the lives of the great men of history. The other interprets the earliest available information about the lives of the heroes not as precursors in terms of causality, but as premonitory signs; it sees in the experiences of the child an indication of his future accomplishments and regards them as evidence of the early completion of uniqueness. (Legend 13)

The first point of view, as mentioned by Kris and Kurz, is useful in analyzing the work of Christian Boltanski, who tried to reenact childhood memories to examine his identity. The second point of view is instrumental in exploring Calle’s quest to establish her individual mythology, which is firmly based on the notion of her

97 Cf. my chapter “The Detective.”

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Fig. 21: Sophie Calle, The Red Shoes

The Red Shoes, 1994. © Sophie Calle / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2015.

uniqueness as a child. As a “typical leitmotif […] in numerous biographies with little or no variation” (Legend 8), the theme of the artist’s uniqueness in childhood is a widely known “individual” myth that Calle appropriated successfully. Lastly, by explicitly referring to the street name Rosa-Bonheur in her story “The Striptease,” Calle connected directly to the French painter Marie-Rosalie Bonheur, called Rosa, a famous female artist who lived from 1822 to 1899. It is no coincidence that Calle “mentioned” the street name, because names are used meaningfully in her work, as demonstrated in my previous chapter “Stage Names.” By naming the street name so prominently in her story, which otherwise seems a marginal detail, Calle cleverly established a genealogical connection between herself and Bonheur, one of the most important painters of her time. “Such a process of linking, which leads directly to the formation of sagas and legends,” as Kris and Kurz explained using the examples of Cimabue and Giotto, “springs from the urge to provide a genealogy for the achievement of the great man who received Italian art” (Legend 24). Calle’s process of linking herself to Rosa Bonheur, renders her a follower of another independent, emancipated, feminist French artist, who reacted against the artistic and gender conventions of her day. These genealogical quotations or appropriations within art history are quite common in Calle’s body of work. Macel explained that Calle thereby “extended the author notion by highlighting an interrelation between

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artists within a history of art” (“Author” 27). At the same time, Calle’s audience is constantly invited to engage in a fascinating, multi-faceted process: searching for revealing clues in the artist’s work and disentangling her web of autobiographical and art historical references. As it turns out, these clues are made of myths and legends that mirror our own experiences. Readers can see their “own” personal stories reflected in Calle’s individual mythologies, which are, ultimately, not “owned” by any one individual alone. Such is also the case in “The Red Shoes,” another of Calle’s true stories: Amelie and I were eleven years old. We had a habit of stealing from department stores on Thursday afternoons. We did this for one year. When her mother began to suspect, in order to frighten us, she said that a policeman had spotted us and reported our activities to her. But because of our age, he was giving us a second chance. He would now follow us, and if we stop stealing, he would forget about the past. In the following weeks, we spent most of our time wondering who the policeman hidden among all the people around us was. In our attempts to lose him, we were now too busy to steal. Our last robbery had been a pair of red shoes too big for us to wear. Amelie kept the right shoe, and I kept the left. (True 8-9)

Like many children have done over time, Calle and her friend Amelie played the tempting game of hide-and-seek. Involving the thrill of staying in disguise and avoiding discovery, hide-and-seek is likely familiar to Calle’s audiences, who as children may have played the game with their parents, friends, or even imaginary police officers. Unlike the traditional children’s game of hide-and-seek, however, Calle’s game is a systematized, adult version. Calle’s hide-and-seek becomes an artistic method for the artist to scrutinize questions of memory and identity formation. Fifteen years after the story with the imaginary police officer, Calle started to randomly follow total strangers on the streets of Paris. She trailed a man for two weeks on his trip to Venice, and, shortly after, she asked her mother to hire a private detective to spy on her for a whole day, as I discussed in my chapter “The Detective.” These tracking projects strongly resemble the story of the eleven-year-old Calle and her friend Amelie. Or rather, as I argue, Calle’s true story establishes a credible link between a childhood experience and an artistic project, which gives the latter a “reliable” myth of origin. Calle’s truth claim in this anecdote turns out to be neither authentic nor unique because “The Red Shoes” involves universal childhood memories common to us all. Most remarkable is her use of the prominent trope of (red) shoes in EuroAmerican mythology, as even a small selection of well-known folktales illustrates. Symbolism abounds in the glass slippers of the protagonist in Cinderella (Brothers Grimm, 1812); the shoes of the twelve princesses in The Worn-Out Dancing Shoes (Brothers Grimm, 1812); the red shoes of the poor sinner girl in The Red Shoes (Hans

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Christian Anderson, around 1900); and the magical silver shoes of Dorothy in The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (L. Frank Baum, 1900). Calle’s appropriation of the universal, literary trope of red shoes as a personal, “individual” symbol might appear incongruous at first glance, yet it is exactly this difference in repetition that creates strong mythologies. As Barthes explained: “This repetition of the concept through different forms is precious to the mythologist, it allows him to decipher the myth: it is the insistence of a kind of behavior which reveals its intention” (Mythologies 120). Calle has clearly understood the mechanisms of myths. In her narrative “The Red Shoes,” our own childhood memories are reflected in the reminiscences of wellknown fairytales. In Calle’s true stories readers can identify aspects of their own childhoods and by extension their own identity formations, as her individual myths present themselves as universal tales common to us all. However, we must remember that Calle’s true stories are neither true nor untrue: they are metanarratives. As such, they belong to a “second language,” as Barthes explained, which “speaks about the first” and for which “truth is no guarantee” as we remember (Mythologies 115, 123). In summary, despite the ostensibly plain form and style of Calle’s true stories, as mythological metanarratives, they are quite complex. The artist’s myths pocess at least three main aspects: first, the appropriation of universal literary symbols and myths as inspiration for the individual mythologies; second, the creation of a genealogical intra- and intertextual network of references; and third, the catalyst effect that stimulates subsequent projects. Readers familiar with Calle’s oeuvre will recognize that her stories repeat, yet also change, from project to project. Calle dated her earliest stories to 1988, while many of her projects that draw on these true stories had already been completed by the late 1970s or early 1980s. Calle’s true stories supposedly give credibility to her projects by establishing an “autobiographical” link to and a stable point of origin for the “real” person Calle. Yet to accept them at face value is to deny their complexity as elaborate constructions. Are the true stories therefore a clever résumé that Calle has composed? Are they a form of historiography? The true stories formally tie together otherwise minimally connected projects by Calle to form an intrareferential body of work. Subsequently, and more obviously, she repeated this kind of historiography in her book Double Game (2007), a collaborative publication with Paul Auster, in which she published a range of projects that she further interlaced with one another. 98 Due to the peculiar yet seamless link she established between her stories and her projects, her work takes the shape of a yarned net. “Yarn” is the operative word here, for according to an English dictionaries, the noun yarn is not only a “thread used for knitting or making cloth,” but also a “story that someone tells, often a true story with invented details which

98 See my chapter “Double Game.”

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makes it more interesting.”99 One speaks of spinning a yarn and of a thread that runs through a story or even a whole body of work. One’s own life may dangle on a string, which is, according to Greek mythology, yarned by others. Two of the three Greek moirai or goddesses of fate, Clotho (the spinner) and Lachesis (the allotter), yarn and measure our threads of life, while the third goddess, Atropos (the inevitable), cuts the same threads and thus ends our lives. For her part, Calle yarned her own authorial thread, weaving stories that have continually confounded readers, art historians, and critics. By means of repetitive, yet differing individual myths, she created a tight net of (self-)referential texts and images that, over the course of time, have become leitmotifs and icons in the Calledian mythology. While Boltanski tried to reenact identity formation and preserve his memories in objects, Calle staged situations that echo primal childhood experiences, such as hide-and-seek, interlacing autobiography throughout her oeuvre. Thus, Calle’s true stories are not about the “person” Calle. Rather, her myths are about universal experiences that, in turn, evoke particular memories in her audience. It is precisely this paradoxical ambiguity of the personal and the universal in her individual mythologies that connects to our own experiences and memories. It is this complexity that makes Calle’s myths so intriguing and challenging to readers. Such is the case with Auster’s true stories, which my following chapter illustrates. The Red Notebook: True Stories In 1992, Paul Auster published his short story collection The Red Notebook, with the subtitle True Stories. The book combines about two dozen stories and short anecdotes, all of which Auster has declared are true: “This really happened. Like everything else I have set down in this red notebook, it is a true story” (Notebook 58). His story collection forms the core of Auster’s individual mythology. As with Calle’s true stories, themes, motifs, and images that have appeared throughout Auster’s oeuvre are presented in this slim volume. Again, each story is an elaborately crafted tile of a larger mosaic that pictures the author persona Auster – an image that also Auster has drawn on substantially. One of Auster’s true stories recounts the moment of his supposed authorial initiation. It tells of the time when his parents took him, as an eight-year-old boy, to a baseball game between the New York Giants and the Milwaukee Braves. By chance, after the game, they ran into Auster’s then-idol Willie Mays: “I managed to keep my legs moving in his direction and then, mustering every ounce of my courage, I forced some words out of my mouth. ‘Mr. Mays,’ I said,’ Could I please have your autograph?’” (Notebook 77). However, neither Mays nor Auster or his parents had something to write with, and so the golden opportunity was

99 See, for example, Collins Cobuild, English Dictionary for Advanced Learners.

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missed. What remained from this chance encounter was a devastated boy who vowed to from that moment on to always carry a pencil with him. Auster ended his story with the words: “If nothing else, the years have taught me this: if there’s a pencil in your pocket, there’s a good chance that one day you’ll feel tempted to start using it. As I like to tell my children, that’s how I became a writer” (Notebook 78). In this story, Auster performed what Andrew Addy called personal myth-making or mythologizing.100 The missed opportunity of the young Auster becomes the “birth” of the author Auster. “As with all story-telling,” Addy explained, “this is achieved through the metaphorical rendering of the detail in order that some greater meaning might be suggested” (“Narrating” 153). The detail of the initially absent but later present pencil gains metaphoric meaning for Auster’s authorial becoming. This reduction of complex cause and effect events into a single moment of revelation and decision signifies the power of myth-making. This is also the case for the other two facts turned into metaphors in Auster’s story: chance and baseball. The latter is a meaningful, recurring subject in Auster’s oeuvre, which becomes an integral part of his individual mythology.101 The former is a constant question of principle for Auster. The English word chance means opportunity as well as coincidence. In Auster’s work, chance holds the opportunity for both coincidence and change. There is no story without chance. Accidental events can give an author the chance to change his point of departure, and thus to begin a new story. Indeed, Auster registered everyday puzzles, noted them down in his red notebook, and drew on them to tell his stories. Take, for example, the anecdote Auster told about the origin of his story “City of Glass,” which was supposedly the result of a wrong number, as I demonstrated in my chapter “City of Glass.” Auster offered a very appealing myth of origin for the story that made him well-known. His true story promises a mystery that extends beyond the work to the “real” world, crossing back and forth between fact and fiction. Auster’s fiction not only has a mysterious effect, but his true life also appears enigmatic. “For Auster,” Addy wrote, “the construction of a narrative is not just a parallel act to the construction of identity, they are one and the same thing” (“Narrating” 157). Narrating thus goes hand in hand with the process of becoming an author. By entering his own fiction as a character within it, Auster envisioned and illustrated this process, making it necessary for him to remain “faithful” to “what had really happened,” as he argued:

100

Addy also used the term mythopoeia, fictional myth-making, which is the integration of mythical themes and archetypes into fiction. Mythopoeia introduces the idea of ancient myths appropriated for new fictional texts. However, I believe that Auster’s and Calle’s approach is better described with personal myth-making or individual mythologies in correspondence to Roland Barthes’s idea of the myths of the daily life (Mythologies 11).

101

Cf. my chapter “Playing Authorial Games” for the significance of baseball for Auster.

202 | P ERFORMING A UTHORSHIP When I sat down to write City of Glass a year later, the wrong number had been transformed into the crucial event of the book, the mistake that sets the whole story in motion. […] Most of all, I wanted to remain faithful to my original impulse. Unless I stuck to the spirit of what had really happened, I felt there wouldn't have been any purpose to writing the book. That meant implicating myself in the action of the story (or at least someone who resembled me, who bore my name). (Notebook 56)

Such chance encounters are obviously not unique to Auster. But unlike many people, Auster has recognized these small disruptions of the daily routine as more than trifles. In his stories, he investigated their character and effects on his own existence. Bruce Bawer explained that “Auster understands coincidences – […] in other words, he has taken note of and reflected seriously upon the sense of harmony, of magic, and even of transcendence that a striking coincidence can inspire, and has brought these reflections to bear upon his story [Moon Palace]” (“Doubles” 188). Paradox coincidences have a great influence on people’s lives. Auster’s appreciation of chance occurances is central to his work. He has used chance events, such as wrong numbers, as forces to inspire change and new beginnings. The serendipities and contretemps of human life provided fruitful fodder for the author to create a mysterious interpretation of a world that is, on the one hand, uniquely Austerian, and on the other, universally human and thus recognizable to his readers. Auster closed this true story with another absurd if not illogical twist. Ten years after he had finished “City of Glass,” Auster received a phone call from a man with a Spanish accent. At that time, Auster had already been living in another apartment with another telephone line. The man on the line asked to speak to a certain Mr. Quinn. Auster stated: “For a moment I thought it might be one of my friends trying to pull my leg. ‘Mr. Quinn?’ I said. ‘Is this some kind of joke or what?’ […] But no such luck. […] I suddenly grew scared, and for a moment or two I couldn’t get any words out of my mouth” (Notebook 57). Auster’s fiction, closing in on his life, once again becomes narration. “I learned,” the amazed and slightly scared Auster summed up, “that books are never finished, that it is possible for stories to go on writing themselves without an author” (Notebook 57). Yet despite his claim of authorless narration, it is nevertheless the author Auster who staged the whole myth that, after all, centers around his authorial persona. As mysterious as the whole true story might sound, it is still credible. Readers aspire to believe that what Auster has written, with all its uncanny and tantalizing effects, is really true. We all have experienced curious coincidences in our lives and – to a certain extent – we can relate to Auster’s account. His seemingly individual myth connects to universal experiences, enabling readers to make analogies to their own lives. The author’s world is thus a reflection of the reader’s world – a circumstance which greatly appeals to many readers. The true stories are complex and multi-faceted. On the one hand, they are catalysts of Auster’s

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future projects, reaching beyond themselves. On the other hand, they are selfreferential for Auster, who informed readers about himself as if he was a character in one of his fictional works. This intellectual play with autobiographical fiction is a very characteristic feature of Auster’s individual mythologies. Another true story illustrates well how Auster turned trifles into mysterious anecdotes of his authorial self. This story involves a lost dime that his ex-wife Lydia Davis threw to him from the window of her third floor apartment. Having bounced off a tree, the coin was lost and Auster was not able to locate it. Later that same day, he claimed, while lighting a cigarette at a baseball game, he found a dime in the stadium. “Ridiculous as it might sound, I felt certain that it was the same dime I had lost in Brooklyn that morning” Auster wrote (Notebook 24). As this is a banal experience that could have happened to anyone, why did Auster bother to write it down? Read on its own, the story doesn’t make much sense nor does it have much aesthetic or intellectual appeal. But read in connection with Auster’s other work, it introduces recurring topics and images in his oeuvre as a whole. Examined in the light of Auster’s larger body of work, the dime story provides another example of prominent themes in his stories: the effects of chance encounters and the workings of memory. Regarding memory, Auster reflected upon his ex-wife’s initial tossing of the dime: “Why she did that is also forgotten. […] All that remains is the open window and the image of a dime flying through the air. I see it with such a clarity, it’s almost as if I have studied photographs of that instant” (Notebook 23-24). By describing what he remembered, Auster conveyed how memory connects to images more than it does to words. The anecdote leaves us with a certain image of the author himself, indicating how the author Auster wanted to be perceived by his readers: as the freshly divorced, caring father of a three-year-old son, who lives in Brooklyn, enjoys baseball, and likes to smoke cigarettes. By (re)introducing key topics from his fictional work into his true stories and by connecting the latter to the image that he has presented of himself, Auster intertwined his work and life in fascinating ways. The true stories from Auster’s Red Notebook tie his life stories to his work to form a total artwork (Gesamtkunstwerk). A true story refers to “fiction” and vice versa. His life is thereby transferred into fiction and interpreted as myth. “For Auster,” Addy wrote, “this personal mythologizing is a way of centering the self in the face of a decentred culture” (“Narrating” 161). Like Calle’s anecdotes, Auster’s true stories are likewise not simply “innocent” autobiographical stories. Rather, as parts of the individual mythology of Auster’s author persona, they are narratives of authorial identity formation. Whether these stories are perceived as “true” is therefore beside the point. Both, Calle and Auster have played fascinating games in their true stories, inviting their audiences to explore the complex problem of truth in narrative and to take aesthetic pleasure in the mythologies they have constructed around their author personae. “As with all

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instincts,” Peter Hutchinson argued in Games Authors Play (1983) “to play is far stronger in some authors than in others” (Games 15). In the work of performative authors like Auster and Calle, this instinct is not only strong, it is central, as I show in my following chapter.

Playing

According to Gilles Deleuze in Difference and Repetition (1968), the work of art approximates the divine game, which is the opposite of the human game. The human game, such as the Platonic lottery or the Leipnizian game of chess, is characterized by “preexisting categorical rules.” In contrast, “[t]he divine game is quite different – […] that which Mallarmé evokes with such religious fear and repentance, […] – for us it is the most difficult game to understand,” because it has no preexisting rules, “since the game includes its own rules,” Deleuze wrote (Difference 353). He then famously cited from Arthur Rimbaud’s poem “H.” in order to illuminate his concept of a pure Idea of play: “A game which would be nothing else but play instead of being fragmented, limited and intercut with the work of men (What is the human game closest to this solitary divine game? As Rimbaud said: look for H,1 the work of art.)” (Difference 354). In his recent publication Life Drawing (2013), in which he developed a Deleuzean aesthetics of existence, Gordon C.F. Bearn explained that “Deleuze does not say that humans can experience the world Aionically. What he says is that we can come close to this in the work of art.” Bearn continued: “The middle time of beauty is the time of purposeless play, and this is also the time of innocence, the innocence of the artist who can accept the fortunate accident” (Life 56, 60). If art comes close to what Deleuze delineated as the divine game, and if that game involves purposeless play and an acceptance of chance,2 it does not mean that the art game has no rules. Quite

1

The H stands for Hortense, a female name deriving from the Latin hortus meaning garden and, accordingly, hortensius meaning gardening. Rimbaud’s poem H reads: “Everything monstrous violates Hortense’s atrocious gestures. Her solitude is the erotic machinery; her lassitude, the amorous dynamic. Under surveillance by infancy, she has been, at many epochs, the ardent hygiene of races. Her door is open to poverty. There, the morality of living beings is disembodied in her passion or action. – Oh, terrible shudder of unskilled loves on the blood-stained floor and amongst transparent hydrogen find Hortense!” (Illuminations XXXV).

2

“Every artist welcomes accidents, affirms chance, but it is the rare artist who affirms chance completely,” Bearn stated (Life 60).

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to the contrary, because the rules of art are intrinsic to the art game, it is essential to know them. Since the rules of art are fluid and variable, depending on the changing customs of those who practice the game, the rules continuously define and redefine the character of the art game. The work of art, as the closest human game to the divine game, is thus subject to the rules of the art game, without which it would be unrecognizable and non-existent as a work of art. The game of art is, therefore, difficult to understand because “every time, the whole of chance is affirmed in a necessarily winning throw. Nothing is exempt from the game,” as Deleuze explained (Difference 353-354), not even a change of rules as an interplay of chance and fluctuating moves within the art field. Rather than seeking a full understanding of the ever-changing laws and details of the art game – an impossible task – gaining a sense of the art game’s mechanisms, or as Susan Sontag called it a new sensibility,3 seems critical for becoming a visible player in the field of cultural production. Sontag argued in her essay “One Culture and the New Sensibility” (1965) that art today is an instrument “for modifying consciousness and organizing new modes of sensibility. And the means for practicing art have been radically extended.” This “new function” of art, along with changes to the art game have called for new authorial responses since, as Sontag stated, “artists have had to become selfconscious aestheticians: continually challenging their means, their materials, and methods” (Against 296). This new openness to different sensorial experiences is apparent in the diverse authorial endeavors of the four authors discussed. Paul Auster has written poetry, prose, and plays, designed a card game, authored several screenplays and directed two movies.4 His lifelong interest in baseball, James M. Hutchisson speculated in Conversations with Paul Auster (2013), “is why Auster has never been averse to, is indeed quite interested in, writing for the screen – as well as all other aspects of filmmaking – a ‘team sport’ if there ever was one”

3

See Sontag’s essay collection Against Interpretation (1964), in which she requested a new sensibility “to see more, to hear more, to feel more” when thinking or speaking or writing about art (Against 14).

4

Auster’s first preserved prose text, Squeeze Play (1978), was published under the pseudonym Paul Benjamin, in: Auster, Hand 233-436. His three plays are called: Laurel and Hardy Go to Heaven (1976/77), Blackouts (1976), and Hide and Seek (1976), in: Auster, Hand 129-208. His “Action Baseball is a card game for 1 or 2 players” (Hand 211). Auster wrote the screenplays for Wayne Wang’s films Smoke (1995), Blue in the Face (1995), and, together with Siri Hustvedt, The Center of the World (2001). He also wrote and directed the movies Lulu on the Bridge (1998) and The Inner Life of Martin Frost (2007) and had a small appearance in Philip Haas’s movie version of his The Music of Chance (1993), for which he had written the screenplay.

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(Conversations xv). Sophie Calle’s artistic repertoire encompasses photography, performance, conceptual art, installations, writing, and teaching.5 Candice Breitz has worked with photography, text and sound collages, interviews, performances, and installations. As a professor of fine arts at the Braunschweig University of Art since 2007, she has taught seminars on spatial concepts. Jonathan Safran Foer has written fiction, non-fiction, and poetry.6 His books are meticulously designed, often with uncommon typography as well as with drawings, scribblings, and photographs. Foer’s Tree of Codes (2010) is actually a “die-cut book by erasure” (Tree 138), as the following chapter shows. Additionally, Foer has curated two exhibitions,7 and currently teaches creative writing at New York University, while engaging in collage work with his painter-friend Sam Messer, a friend of Auster’s as well. All four authors have significantly engaged in the production of diverse cultural, and frequently collaborative, texts and projects that reach beyond their typical terrain, playfully experimenting with different “means, materials, and methods.” They have extended the modernist tradition of pushing the boundaries of their chosen media and probing new genres to further their work and their authorial selves. Indeed, Sontag traced this “new” sensibility among artists, at least back to the French symbolism of Mallarmé and Rimbaud: “And the most interesting works of contemporary art (one can begin at least as far back as French symbolism poetry) are adventures in sensation, new ‘sensory mixes’” (Against 300). This literary tendency towards creating new and unfamiliar forms of cultural texts, I argue, has increased tremendously since the traditional distinction between “high” and “low” culture have

5

Calle has taught at the European Graduate School in Saas-Fee, Switzerland, e.g. a seminar on “History of Film, Media and Art – Aesthetics and Visual Media” together with YveAlain Bois in 2004. Calle also taught in the Department of Visual Arts at the University of California San Diego in 2009.

6

In collaboration with photographer Hiroshi Sugimoto and designer Takaaki Matsumoto, Foer wrote a prose poem for the photo book Joe (2006). Sugimoto focused his series on Richard Serra’s large rolled-steel elliptical sculpture Joe (2000), an homage to the late Joseph Pulitzer, Jr. (1913-1993). Joe is truly a book after Foer’s fancy for it came into being through a succession of inspirations: benefactor to sculptor to photographer to writer to designer.

7

“Retrospective of S.” was a survey of a fictional painter, in fact featuring ten female artists at the Fredericks Freiser gallery in New York in 2012 (Rozalia Jovanovic, “Jonathan Safran Foer” s.p.). “Hanging Correspondence” was on view at Georgia Southern University in Statesboro in 2014, featuring collaborative texts and portraits from Foer and Sam Messer (Geha, “A Brief” s.p.).

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been broken down.8 Today, the “seriousness” of authors like Auster or Foer would not be questioned because one has written screenplays and the other appeared briefly in the film adaption of his novel Everything Is Illuminated. Rather, these interdisciplinary and intermedial activities have become central to the practice of contemporary authors who seek to perform authorship and make “the most interesting and creative art of our time” (Sontag, Against 295). What counts as particularly “interesting and creative art” in a time dominated by celebrity culture,9 it seems, is the artist’s conscious, self-reflexive incorporation of the authorial self into his or her work, as a form of (meta-)text. In S/Z (1970), Roland Barthes laid out a possible path for the author in this new performative universe: “The Author himself […] can or could some day become a text like any other […] he has only to see himself as a being on paper and his life as a bio-graphy” (S/Z 211). In this regard, contemporary authors can play with their public authorial images on radio, television, and social media, as well as at readings, performances, interviews, social and political events. The images produced through such media contributes to the creation of the performative authors whom the public desires if not expects to see. Today, more than ever, the performative author fervently accepts the challenges of the art game, offering insight into the mechanisms of our own game of life, “a game whose purpose is to discover the rules, which rules are always changing and always undiscoverable,” as Gregory Bateson summarized in his text “Metalogue: About Games and Being Serious” (Steps 20). Contemporary authors, I argue, are challenged to a greater extent than authors of previous generations to perpetually perform their authorial selves in literary acts of selfreflexiveness. 10 Furthermore, today’s authors are expected to constantly negotiate their own positions as players within the field of cultural production. They must

8

This has clearly changed since the 1960s when Sontag described these cultural struggles: “All kinds of conventionally accepted boundaries have thereby been challenged: not just the one between ‘scientific’ and the ‘literary-artistic’ cultures, or the one between ‘art’ and ‘non-art’; but also many established distinctions within the world of culture itself – that between form and content, the frivolous and the serious, and (a favorite of literary intellectuals) ‘high’ and ‘low’ culture” (Against 297).

9

The interest in what is called celebrity culture has increased tremendously within the last decades as only a small selection of academic conferences and publications will illustrate: “Celebrity Culture: An International Conference,” University of Paisley, 12-14 Sept 2005; Framing Celebrity: New Directions in Celebrity Culture, ed. by Su Holmes and Sean Redmond, London: Routledge, 2006; The Celebrity Culture Reader, ed. by P. David Marshall, New York: Routledge, 2006; Stardom and Celebrity: A Reader, ed. by Sean Redmond and Su Holmes, London: Sage, 2007.

10 Cf. Mark McGurl’s argument of reflexive modernism/postmodernism (my introduction).

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posses specialized knowledge and strong artistic affiliations (real and imaginary) in order to prevail in the art game with a winning strategy. Authors appropriate, collaborate, affiliate, and even form imaginary teams with other authors of various backgrounds, from earlier times, and far-away places. “The most interesting and creative art of our time,” we remember Sontag argued, “demands special effort.” It “demand[s] an education of sensibility whose difficulties and length of apprenticeship are at least comparable to the difficulties of mastering physics or engineering” (Against 295). To successfully play the divine game of art today, therefore, requires one to “affirm chance completely” (Bearn, Life 60), while simultaneously be conscious of the mechanisms of the cultural field and one’s own position within it. The contemporary art game increasingly demands of the author to develop a new sensibility to join in real or imaginary collaborations and to display the authorial self as a (meta-)text in a self-reflexive act of performative selfinvention. This requires a delicate balance of sense and sensibility. To gain a deeper understanding of effective performances of authorial becoming, I link Deleuze’s notion of the divine game with Wolfgang Iser’s concept of the play of the text. Iser asserted that readers play the game of the text and are, likewise, played by the text. He further argued that the text is therefore a performance, or a staged play. By simultaneously playing and being played by the text, readers, and I argue authors as well, engage in a performance or a staging, which Iser concluded is “a means of crossing boundaries” to “extend ourselves” (Prospecting 260-261) and, I would add, to reach out towards others. The art game is a team sport and thus takes place on what Pierre Bourdieu called the (play-)field of cultural production. The play of the text, or the game of art, is thus an effective and ideally pleasurable means by which to cross conventional boundaries of the self. At this point, I move my analytical focus from the artist’s positioning and staging of their authorial selves to the collective playing and performing their authorial selves, in real or imaginary teams. First, I analyze two examples of broader authorial collaboration in Foer’s A Convergence of Birds and Breitz’s “King” and “Queen.” Then I examine direct forms of cooperation in Auster’s and Messer’s The Story of My Typewriter and in Calle’s and Auster’s Double Game. Finally, I explore a case of imaginary team play in Foer’s and Bruno Schulz’s Tree of Codes.

P LAYING A UTHORIAL G AMES This word [playful] brings out two important qualities which are contained in the instinct to play: a sense of humor – however slight – and a feeling of spontaneity. […] a literary game may be seen as any playful, self-conscious and extended means by which an author stimulates his reader to deduce or to speculate, by which he encourages him to see a relationship between

210 | P ERFORMING A UTHORSHIP different parts of the text, or between the text and something extraneous to it. (Hutchinson, Games 14-15)

The playful games of authors can reveal “a sense of humor,” produce “a feeling of spontaneity,” or “stimulate” readers in various ways. Certain authors, however, not only play with their readers but also engage in play with each other, which is the focus of this chapter. The reader of such authors are of course invited “to deduce or to speculate” or “to see a relationship” yet my concern is on the activities of the performative authors. My examples of collaborative projects show forms of inspiration, appropriation, and remix that challenge notions of the “original” and the “copy” in meaningful ways. My readings follow the trajectory of Gilles Deleuze’s definition of the simulacrum, which he initially spelled out in Difference and Repetition: “Everything has become simulacrum, for by simulacrum we should not understand a simple imitation but rather the act by which the very idea of a model or privileged position is challenged and overturned” (Difference 82). To this effect, Jonathan Safran Foer and Candice Breitz have created “true simulacra,” which effectively display the aesthetic potential of inspiration, appropriation, and team play. A Convergence of Birds In the late 1990s, Jonathan Safran Foer started to develop an interest in and a love for the work of the self-taught American artist Joseph Cornell (1903-1972), who is best known for his surrealistic collages and boxed assemblages. 11 After being introduced to Cornell’s work by an artist friend, the undergraduate Foer engaged in extensive research on Cornell’s creative output, which finally led him to edit the volume of A Convergence of Birds: Original Fiction and Poetry Inspired by the Work

11 The Art Institute of Chicago holds “the world’s largest and most comprehensive public collection of works by Joseph Cornell” (Seaman, “Joseph Cornell’s” s.p.). The Kawamura Museum in Sakura City (Japan), which has four of his boxes in their collection, wrote about Cornell: “In 1931 he became inspired by the Surrealist art of Ernst, Dali and others and soon began creating collage works of his own, before switching to the box compositions that he would continue creating for the rest of his life. In these works he made boxes of about the size that could be held easily in both arms and filled them with a variety of objects that he fancied. For Cornell these were both ‘treasure boxes’ and showcases in which he could display his own unique worldview […] The things Cornell put in his boxes are not only collector’s items like bug specimens and rare musical scores but also everyday items like cork balls and cordial glasses of the kind sold at the local variety store” (http://kawamura-museum.dic.co.jp/en/collection/joseph_cornell.html).

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of Joseph Cornell (2001) and to assemble novel texts inspired by Cornell’s bird boxes.12 Foer began his project by sending letters to his favorite authors, asking them for their contributions to his volume. As would be expected, the then unknown author Foer received responses ranging from total indifference to furious outrage at his boldness. In the introduction to his book, Foer anonymously quoted from the nastiest of those letters: Since I don’t know what this means, since you mention no fee (is there one or not?), since the whole issue seems to be a question of getting contributions, for nothing, from various wellknown people to suit your own ends (vague as they are), and since for some reason you seem to think I’d be ‘as excited about this project as [you] are,’ how can I say yes, even with the very best wills? (Convergence xiii)

At first this diminished Foer’s faith in the whole project and in himself, as the experience underscored his naivety as an “unpublished college student, self-educated in art history, uneducated in book publishing” (Convergence xiv). Were it not for the seven positive letters that arrived after the negative ones, the project would have died before it even began. Ultimately, more than twenty authors responded to Foer’s call, including illustrious names such as Joyce Carol Oates, 13 Rick Moody, and Siri Hustvedt,14 whose texts are each published next to a color reproduction of a Cornell bird box, which Foer carefully selected. Foer’s anecdote about the convergence of these 23 authors, which include Cornell and Foer himself, speaks to authorship claims and authorial collaboration within the literary game, as it is played on the field of cultural production. “[W]ho the hell was I,” Foer humbly questioned in his foreword, “to ask for things from people I didn’t know, with nothing to offer in exchange?” (Convergence xiv).

12 Cornell’s boxes were also an inspiration for Foer’s Everything Is Illuminated. When Jonathan enters Lista’s house “[t]here were many boxes, which were overflowing with items. These had writing on their sides. […] I noticed that there was a box on the top one of these skyscrapers of boxes that was marked ‘DUST’” (Everything 147). Lista gives a box labeled “IN CASE” to Jonathan, which is later stolen by a guard on the train and lost forever (Everything 192, 23, 52). In the movie version of Everything Is Illuminated (2005), starring Elijah Wood as Jonathan, Jonathan is not portrayed as a writer, but as a collector of ordinary items, highlighting Cornell’s influence on Foer’s character, as a passionate collector of everyday objects. 13 Foer was Oates’s student in her creative writing classes at Princeton University. 14 Not only Hustvedt, but also Lydia Davis, Paul Auster’s first wife, contributed to Foer’s volume. This circumstance might have been the start of Foer’s and Auster’s friendship.

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Pierre Bourdieu described such authorial position-taking as a struggle between ‘young’ and ‘old’ writers, in which the younger ones tend to “refuse everything their ‘elders’ […] are and do” (something Foer never did, quite the contrary) whereas “the ‘old’ writers will regard the social non-existence (in terms of success and consecration) and also the ‘obscurity’ of their young rivals as evidence of the voluntaristic, forced character of some endeavors to overtake them” (“Field” 59). The author of the first malicious letter may have seen Foer in these terms, as the unknown player who dared to invite the more experienced players into the literary game “to suit [his] own ends (vague as they are)” (Convergence xiii). A lack of both literary legitimacy and understanding the ‘character of [Foer’s] endeavor’ are clearly expressed in the responses to Foer’s invitation. The letters spanned the gamut in their reactions: some of the famous authors tried to clip Foer’s flying feathers as a young author, while others were taking the newcomer under their wings in order to launch the apiring author. In A Convergence of Birds, Foer made the strategic decision to adorn himself with borrowed plumes, to use an apt idiom. After all, his publication beautifully displays fresh literary responses to Cornell’s oeuvre from acclaimed authors.15 Putting on the book’s cover his own author name as editor and contributor certainly helped Foer to enter the literary game. Bringing together his “love for Cornell” with his poetic inclinations and the words of his favorite authors enabled him to position himself on the cultural field and to present his own name on the literary stage. Foer thus followed the golden rule of entrance into the literary game, which is best described by Bourdieu: “There is no other criterion of membership of a field than the objective fact of producing effects within it” (“Field” 42). Foer’s letters, and thereafter his book, certainly produced an effect within the literary field. Yet Foer’s authorial strategy to make himself known in the literary world by forming affiliations and teams, real or imaginary,16 is not new. What is unusual, however, is Foer’s decision to go public with some of the harsh rejections he received, which are

15 Leah Hager Cohen wrote about Cornell’s remarkable reception in the cultural field: “Perhaps a desire to understand this enigmatic man in terms that would count him as one of us explains the seemingly endless flow of literary responses to his work […] John Ashbery, Octavio Paz, Stanley Kunitz and Robert Pinsky all wrote poems for him. He’s been immortalized in music and plays. And many of the books about him — from Dore Ashton’s ‘Joseph Cornell Album’ to Charles Simic’s improbably beautiful ‘Dime-Store Alchemy’ to Jonathan Safran Foer’s anthology ‘A Convergence of Birds’ — could themselves be described in Cornellian terms: collage-like, experimental, quixotic” (“Boxing Day” s.p.). 16 By “real” team, I mean all authors who contributed to Foer’s volume; by “imaginary” team, I mean the established link between Cornell and these authors.

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Fig. 22: Jonathan Safran Foer, A Convergence of Birds

A Convergence of Birds, 2001. Joseph Cornell, Isabelle (Dien Bien Puh), 1954. Box construction with glass, painted wood, collage, and mirror. 18 x 12 x 6 in. Text: Joyce Carol Oates, “The Box Artist.”

part of the story of his own authorial becoming. Thus, he not only positioned himself among his own selection of distinguished authors, but successfully developed a narrative around the naive yet bold fledgling who dared to play with the established authors by releasing his volume to the world. Foer’s bold actions constitute the young author’s attempt to use the established rules of the literary game for his own purposes. He brought to the fore the pressures of the literary profession, which are so well described by Bourdieu: “The literary or artistic field is a field of forces, but it is also a field of struggles tending to transform or conserve this field of forces” (“Field” 30). Such performative moves in the cultural field underscore Foer’s unique approach to authorial self-invention, involving both genealogical positioning and performative staging. Foer’s newcomer status enabled him, in Bourdieu’s words, “to impose new modes of thought and expression.”17

17 The whole quote reads: “[I]n a universe in which to exist is to differ, i.e. to occupy a distinct, distinctive position, they must assert their difference, get it known and recognized, get themselves known and recognized (‘make a name for themselves’), by endeavoring to impose new modes of thought and expression, out of key with the prevailing modes of thought and with the doxa, and therefore bound to disconcert the orthodox by their ‘obscurity’ and ‘pointlessness’” (“Field” 58).

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While Foer somewhat fouled his own nest by exposing the problematic nature of the literary field, he nonetheless established himself as an authentic author who is unafraid to confess his own shortcomings and those of others. By giving his personal story of authorial becoming yet another meta-dimension within the authorship game, Foer smartly asserted his distinct authorial authority, while at the same time, announced his desire to collaborate. He saw through the game at the outset, recognizing the vital significance of asserting individual difference and engaging in teamwork, real or imaginary. Instead of “refusing everything his elders are and do” and displacing “the whole series of earlier authors, schools, and works” (Bourdieu, “Field” 59, 60), Foer very consciously looked for an entrance into the literary game through engaging in team play and by inviting esteemed authors to join him in celebrating an acclaimed artist. Foer’s authorial performance raises issues that Bourdieu addressed such as the author’s “degree of conscious strategy, cynical calculation, in the objective strategies” (“Field” 72). According to Bourdieu, to be too self-conscious about the workings of the field “would make the literary or artistic undertaking itself a cynical mystification, a conscious trick” (“Field” 72). For “to utter ‘in public’ the true nature of the field, and of its mechanisms,” Bourdieu wrote, “is sacrilege par excellence, the unforgivable sin which all the censorships constituting the field seek to repress” (“Field” 73). Quoting Stéphane Mallarmé’s text “Music and Letters” (1895) on this point, he stated: We know, captives of an absolute formula that, indeed, there is only that which is. Forthwith to dismiss the cheat, however, on a pretext, would indict our inconsequence, denying the pleasure we want to take: for that beyond is its agent, and the engine I might say were I not loath to perform, in public, the impious dismantling of the fiction and consequently of the literary mechanism, display the principle part or nothing. But I venerate how, by a trick, we project to a height forfended – and with thunder! – the conscious lack in us of what shines up there. What is it for? A game. (Mallarmé in: Bourdieu, “Field” 72)18

Bourdieu argued that Mallarmé was only able to “utter the truth about a field” without “excluding himself from the field” and affirming “that he recognizes its censorship” by means of “euphemism and Verneinung” that is saying things “in such a way that they are not said.” Ultimately, Mallarmé used “a language which is designed to be recognized within the field” (“Field” 73). Bourdieu interpreted Mallarmé’s quote as a meta-discourse, as a kind of ‘art for art’s sake’ written for other authors and players

18 Also see Mallarmé “Music and Letters” (1895) in: Mallarmé in Prose, ed. by Mary Ann Caws, New York: New Directions, 2001, 36.

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in the cultural field.19 Mallarmé’s criticism of the ‘true nature’ of the literary scene thus remains within the inner logic of the game itself, ultimately incapable of committing an effective ‘sacrilege.’ By playing by the literary rules with regard to form and content, Mallarmé’s double-cross on his own profession led him to the dismantling of the fiction and consequently of the literary mechanism for a limited ‘public’ that is a select circle within the cultural field. ‘We all know’ that “only” a (literary) game is played following a certain set of rules, yet ‘we’ all agree to play along with those rules, those performative tricks of ‘thunder’ to ‘take the pleasure’ in this play of art. Wolfgang Iser, in “The Play of the Text,” a chapter in his book Prospecting (1989), explained this “dilemma” for the reader as being “caught up in ineluctable doubleness by being involved in an illusion and aware that it is an illusion.” According to Iser, this deliberate illusion is represented by different modes of semantics, experience, and pleasure “according to which the play of the text can be acted out” (Prospecting 259). Similarly, Bourdieu argued in his conclusion that ‘we’ as readers, “by another willing suspension of disbelief,” ‘choose’ to play along the slight of hand honoring its authorless origin.20 Self-consciousness awareness about the rules and mechanisms of the cultural field, on the part of both authors and readers, is thus an important part of the art game. Authorial games, which are not authorless at all, can be pleasurable without ‘excluding members from the field.’ Knowing some of the rules of the culture game does not reduce the author’s pleasure of collaboratively engaging with art. Quite the contrary, to be aware of the game plan of an artwork further enhances the enjoyment of that work, calling for an even stronger intellectual engagement in the game of cultural production, for authors and readers alike. “Hence in disclosing itself,” Iser argued, “fictionality signalizes that everything is only to be taken as if it were what it seems to be, to be taken – in other words – as play” (Prospecting 251). Mallarmé asked of art: “What is it for?” Nothing more and nothing less than a “game,” he summed up succinctly. One must play by the rules in order to participate; and the better one knows the rules, the better one can take pleasure in playing the game of art.

19 Bourdieu generally distinguished between three “competing principles of legitimacy” in the field of cultural production. First, “the recognition granted by the set of producers who produce for other producers, their competitors, i.e., by the autonomous self-sufficient world of ‘art for art’s sake’, meaning art for artists.” Bourdieu described the second and third kinds of legitimacy as ‘bourgeois’ and ‘popular’ legitimacy (“Field” 50-51). 20 Bourdieu called this process “to ‘venerate’ the authorless trickery” (“Field” 73).

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Foer, whose preamble to A Convergence of Birds was published more than 100 years after Mallarmé’s convoluted text, further developed21 the game by including its backstory, its behind-the-scenes process, thus effectively producing effects in the literary field and beyond. Foer offered his readers knowledge of and access to the structure of the literary game, this “insider information” further increased the pleasure of the text. Roland Barthes, in The Pleasure of the Text (1973), called this expanded scope of information created by the author “a site of bliss” and assured his readers that with this bliss “the bets are not placed, there can still be a game” (Pleasure 4). When authors consciously initiate readers into the mechanisms of the literary game, they are essentially inviting readers to play on (more) equal footing with authors and their texts, thereby further “privileging the performative aspect of the author-text-reader relationship,” as Iser asserted (Prospecting 249). “Authors play games with readers,” Iser famously wrote (Prospecting 250). Likewise, authors play games with other authors and with other texts. Using this fluid triangle of reader, text, and author, Iser defined representation not as mimesis but as something “different, conflicting” and developed his concept of representation as a performative act. “[I]f author, text, and reader are thought of as interconnected in a relationship that is the ongoing process of producing something that did not previously exist,” Iser suggested, then play should be raised “above representation as an umbrella concept to cover all the ongoing operations of the textual process”22 (Prospecting 249, 250). Iser argued for ‘the play of the text’ as a performance, as an act that challenged the ‘traditional notion of representation.’ Extending Iser’s concept of ‘representation as a performative act’ from the reader to the author perspective, as demonstrated in my chapter “Authorial Representation as a Performative Act,” I now intend to critically engage with Iser’s use of the idea of play as “an umbrella concept,” in order to analyze these textual performances. Iser used play as the key concept to develop his literary anthropology, arguing in The Fictive and the Imaginary (1993) that “[o]nly play allows for metacommunication of what happens in linguistic action, because this is primarily a performance which ends the achievement of its aims. Consequently, the performance has to be staged, if language is to be used to talk about language” (Fictive 249). In my analysis, I focus on the performative act of production, using Iser’s key concept of the performative act of reception to develop

21 I do not mean “develop” in a teleological sense, but as change or transformation. There is no greater raison d’être in the game of art, only difference and repetition. 22 Iser further wrote about play: “It has two heuristic advantages: (1) play does not have to concern itself with what it might stand for, and (2) play does not have to picture anything outside itself. It allows author-text-reader to be conceived as a dynamic interrelationship that moves toward a final result” (Prospecting 250).

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my own ideas of authorial playing. In order to illustrate how Iser’s concept of the text as “a playground between author and reader” comes into play when emphasizing the “authorial” side, I examine Candice Breitz’s works “King” and “Queen.” “King” and “Queen” The titles of Candice Breitz’s videos “King (A Portrait of Michael Jackson)”23 and “Queen (A Portrait of Madonna),” 24 both from 2005, are reminiscent of a (card) game.25 Yet Breitz intended her titles to refer not to the kings and queens on playing cards but to Jackson’s and Madonna’s nicknames, as the King and Queen of Pop. For her work, Breitz invited 16 devoted fans of Jackson and 30 devoted fans of Madonna to recording studios in Berlin and Milan. There the fans sang and recorded a cappella versions of the albums Thriller (1982) and The Immaculate Collection (1990), respectively. “I wanted to replicate the experience that you have at home when you listen to an album that you love and sing your way through it, albeit under professional recording conditions,” Breitz told an interviewer and added: Other than this, I made no attempt to direct the fans – they chose what they wanted to wear, if they wanted to bring props, and how they wanted to interpret the album. Some sang and danced like there was no tomorrow. Others shyly fought their way through the experience. (In: “Crazy” 68)

In the exhibition installation, each fan was given one screen – a grid-wall display of a total of 16 screens arranged in two rows of eight screens in “King,” and a total of 30 screens arranged in five rows of six screens in “Queen.” “The grid-like structure both acknowledges and disavows the differences claimed and inhabited by the participating performers,” according to the 2010 catalog The Scripted Life: Candice Breitz (153). Individuals were thus given a separate space to perform their difference,

23 “King.” Shot at UFO Sound Studios, Berlin, Germany, July 2005. 16-Channel Installation: 16 Hard Drives. Duration: 42 minutes, 20 seconds. Installation View: Temporäre Kunsthalle Berlin: http://vimeo.com/74959758. 24 “Queen.” Shot at Jungle Sound Studio, Milan, Italy, July 2005. 30-Channel Installation: 30 Hard Drives. Duration: 73 minutes, 30 seconds. Installation View: White Cube, London: http://vimeo.com/30395719. 25 “King” and “Queen” are the second and third portrait of a quartet: the first is “Legend (A Portrait of Bob Marley),” 2005, http://vimeo.com/30383536; the fourth is “Working Class Hero (A Portrait of John Lennon),” 2006, http://vimeo.com/74454291.

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Fig. 23: Candice Breitz, King

Still from King (A Portrait of Michael Jackson), 2005. Shot at UFO Sound Studios, Berlin, Germany, July 2005. 16-Channel Installation: 16 Hard Drives. Duration: 42 minutes, 20 seconds.

while the sameness of the screen-frame visually connected the soloists to form a collaborative chorus. 26 The Greek chorus as “both a collective and a character simultaneously,” as Breitz explained (Inner 60), has interested her for some time. In the exhibition catalog Inner + Outer Space (2008), Breitz described her fascination with the dialectic between stars and fans in respect to the role of the chorus as one body of different voices: “This dialectic is explored […] in works like King, Queen, and Working Class Hero, which draw more literally on the form of the chorus to explore the relationship between iconic figures and their communities of fans” (Inner 60). Much has been written about Breitz’s engagement with pop culture and with the roles of stars and fans within it.27 Yet the dialectic of celebrity culture28 is not my focus here. Instead, I explore questions of collaborative authorship and team play. My interest is Breitz’s concern with “the figure of the fan […] at the center of our culture of consumption” (Inner 61), as it relates to the question of performative

26 According to The Scripted Life, it is “the grid of sameness imposed by Breitz” (Scripted 165). Jessica Morgan saw the grid-structure in “the tradition of other typological studies (from August Sander to Rineke Dijkstra), it is ultimately the differences that become apparent, rather than the social group’s cohesion” (in: Breitz, Multiple 37). 27 Cf., for example, Okwui Enwezor’s and Beatrice von Bismarck’s contributions to The Scripted Life. 28 Cf., for example, Ingo Berensmeyer et al. for a concise overview of celebrity culture in the 19th and 20th Centuries: “By the turn of the century, the emerging visual culture and the creation of a mass readership had led to the rise of a celebrity culture, in which authors were no longer solely known for their work, but also for their personality, their home, and their likeness” (“Authorship” 20).

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Fig. 24: Candice Breitz, Queen

Queen (A Portrait of Madonna), 2005. Shot at Jungle Sound Studio, Milan, Italy, July 2005. 30-Channel Installation: 30 Hard Drives. Duration: 73 minutes, 30 seconds. Installation View: White Cube, London. Photograph: Stephen White.

interplay between author, audience, and artwork. As Breitz wondered “to what extent it might be possible to transform the moment of passive consumption into one of active production” (Inner 61), I analyze the possibilities of authorial becoming in Breitz’s double game of appropriation. By double game of appropriation, I refer to the performances of devoted Jackson and Madonna fans, who appropriated the stars’ authorial texts to create their own versions. I refer as well to Breitz’s editorial creation, as she appropriated the interpretations of the fans to create her own work of art. Jessica Morgan explained the multilayered process of appropriation that already exists in Madonna’s and Jackson’s interpretations of the songs: The lyrics that they [the fans] sing are not their own (indeed, in many cases they were not even written by the pop star), such that the notion of an authentic, centered individual is fractured and further exaggerated by the presence of multiple competing voices uttering the same words. (In: Breitz, Multiple 39)

The stars interpreted songs written by songwriters; the fans interpreted songs performed by those stars. Breitz’s work, in turn, reveals this process of perpetual appropriation. What happens, then, when traditional boundaries between “producer” and “consumer” are blurred? How does authorship work in these interwoven layers

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of appropriation? What are the rules of the art game when played in (imaginary) teams? Susan Sontag argued that [w]hen painters such as Joseph Albers, Ellsworth Kelly, and Andy Warhol assign portions of the work […] to a friend or the local gardener; […] they are changing the ground rules which most of us employ to recognize a work of art. They are saying what art need not be. At least, not necessarily. (Against 297-298)

Art in the realm of appropriation and collaboration need not be an original object ‘belonging’ to an individual genius. Instead, as Gilles Deleuze declared, “Pop Art pushed the copy, copy of the copy, etc., to that extreme point at which it reverses and becomes a simulacrum (such as Warhol’s remarkable ‘serial’ series, in which all the repetitions of habit, memory and death are conjugated)” (Difference 366). Breitz has long been engaged in appropriation art, and as an art historian herself, she is well aware of its role in modernist and postmodernist production. Between 1998 and 2002, Breitz was a doctoral candidate in art history at New York’s Columbia University, writing her thesis entitled Ultimate Warhol: 1968-1987 (unfinished). 29 In an interview, Breitz explained her consistent authorial strategy to appropriate and sample, and thus to play in real or imaginary teams: To appropriate and sample existing material is to draw on a long avant-garde tradition. Perhaps in the past it was possible to imagine this way of working as a deliberately chosen artistic strategy, one aesthetic option among others. The fundamental difference now is that using found or readymade material in one’s work no longer seems like just an option – rather, at this point, it is an inescapable condition, which comes with the realization that the creative process is not about originating and animating, but rather about recycling, translating, interpreting, in short, a process of reanimating materials and languages that pre-exist one’s own practice. One has no choice. (In: Neri, “Candice” s.p.)

As Breitz’s fans teamed up with their superstars to understand and experience their idols and take pleasure30 in the appropriation of their “shared” texts, the texts became playgrounds for the performative interplay between authors and readers. Morgan

29 In 1999, Breitz published an essay entitled “The Warhol Portrait: From Art to Business and Back Again.” In: Andy Warhol Photography. Exhibition catalog. The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh, and Hamburger Kunsthalle, 1999. 30 Cf. Wolfgang Iser: “A third mode of play is that of pleasure. Then we give precedence to the enjoyment derived from an unusual exercise of our faculties which enables us to become present to ourselves” (Prospecting 259).

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even declared Breitz’s work to be “an extreme example of what Roland Barthes has called a ‘writerly’31 text: a reading or portrait of the celebrity that consists entirely of the interpretations of the reader (as performed by Breitz’s communities of fans)” (in: Breitz, Multiple 37). In this way, the fans who appropriated and interpreted the songs of Jackson and Madonna (who are themselves not the “authors” of the songs) became the prominent actors in the solo/choral performances. Breitz’s authorial achievement, as the draftswoman and editor of this game, is having created the playgrounds on which the individual performances are staged. Breitz’s audience, on the other hand, experiences a triple sensation, as three layers of authorship interact with each other: Jackson/Madonna, the engaged fans, and Breitz.32 Boundaries between authors and readers (or performers and audiences) are thus visibly challenged and blurred throughout the game. What remains for authors and readers is the playground of the text, or the play of the text. The text, at the center of the triangular relationship between author-text-reader, is by no means a static object of sameness, but rather is, what Wolfgang Iser called, a vibrant “enabling structure.”33 This enabling structure is comparable to Deleuze’s idea of the divine game and ultimately different from the profane human game. As Iser insisted: “The play of the text is therefore a performance for an assumed audience, and as such it is not just a game as played in ordinary life, but it is actually a staged play enacted for the reader, who is given a role enabling him or her to act out the scenario presented” (Prospecting 258). Meaning, in its engagement with the text is created as a supplement, as “something that did not previously exist” (Prospecting 249). Each time authors and readers perform on the playground of the text, new meanings are created. Despite the aesthetic potential of the enabling structure (text) as a site of meaning-making, like all texts, it has linguistic limitations. As Iser explained:

31 In S/Z, Barthes further developed his differentiation between writerly and readerly texts. The latter are representational forms of writing, whereas the former display a potential opening for readers to enter into a productive endeavor with the texts. 32 Cf. Morgan: “The celebrity is literally embodied by the fans, and their understanding of the persona of the star is the transformative act that enables the star to exist. Perhaps this is the most authentic portrayal of a celebrity possible: an amalgamation of our various forms of identification with the virtually non-existent reality of the star” (in: Breitz, Multiple 37). 33 Cf. Iser on fiction in literary discourse: “It is not subject to any rules of practical application, as it is not designed for any specific use but is basically an enabling structure generating an aesthetic potential” (Prospecting 241).

222 | P ERFORMING A UTHORSHIP For the intentional character of language works against the endlessness of play. But even if such a movement is made the object of language games […] the endlessness of play cannot be maintained, since the text itself is limited. This does not mean, however, that play itself is ended. Instead, the endlessness of play has to be conveyed by playing through specific possibilities, and this is done by the means of games. (Fictive 257)

Iser responded to this linguistic dilemma by insisting that all structural features “mark off both the limits and the free areas of play, and so represent the precondition for ‘supplements’ – in the form of meaning – as well as for the playful undoing of these ‘supplements’” (Prospecting 257). The play of the text might be endless, yet it is not boundless34 but rather restricted by linguistic rules and regulations in game structures as “play turns into games when rules are introduced,” as Iser wrote (Fictive 266).35 As enabling structures that allow for self-invention, texts, including pop music texts, must be understood as double-edged swords. Breitz cautioned against this in an interview, in which she said: Pop music seems to offer a potential for self-invention – this is what makes it so seductive. The problem with Pop, of course, is that the kinds of inventions that it suggests to the self are passive and predetermined, that they are not really moments of self-invention, after all, but rather designated to fit one’s own identity into preformed stereotypes. (My translation)36

For all their potential for self-invention, pop music texts also carry the danger of promoting the uniformity and standardization of consumerism. Nonetheless, cultural texts still remain the best sites for self-invention and meaning-making, due to their ability to disrupt the status quo and their accessibility as enabling structures of power. Cultural texts are the playgrounds on which authors performatively invent, challenge, or reject new versions of themselves. “The more

34 Cf. Morgan: “The fans who perform in Breitz’s portraits may similarly have found some means of communication through their affiliation with Michael Jackson, but this hardly constitutes an effective emancipation. Their scripted lines are a clear indicator of the limitations that are set for self-invention in the realm of fandom” (in: Breitz, Multiple 39). 35 Cf. catalog: “The highly dictated performances in Breitz’s portraits allude to this condition: to the impossibility of inventing language anew, and to the consequent necessity of communicating within certain conventions” (Breitz, Multiple 205). 36 The original reads: “Popmusik scheint uns ein Potential der Selbsterfindung zu liefern, und das macht sie so verführerisch. Das Problem ist natürlich, dass die Selbsterfindungen, die sie nahelegt, passiv und vorbestimmt sind, dass sie weniger einen echten Moment der Selbsterfindung markieren, als ein Einpassen der eigenen Identität in eine vorgeformte Schublade” (in: Stange, Zurück 71).

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our daily life appears standardized, stereotyped and subject to an accelerated reproduction of objects of consumption,” Deleuze wrote, the more art must be injected into it in order to extract from it that little difference which plays simultaneously between other levels of repetition, and even in order to make the two extremes resonate – namely, the habitual series of consumption and the instinctual series of destruction and death. (Difference 365)

What is theoretical in Deleuze’s and Iser’s analyses, is palpably visualized in Breitz’s installations “King” and “Queen.” She created a divine enabling game generating an aesthetic potential by providing a playground on which traditional roles are switched when “consumers” become “producers.” In her work, texts are appropriated and reinterpreted to create ever new meanings out of difference: Jackson is invoked and multiplied across the sixteen vertical plasma displays constituting the support of the installation – the performances of his fans range from impersonations that attempt to approximate the star’s every move and tic, to embodiments that are more impressionistic, capturing the odd move or indeed just a quirky vocal sound.37 (In: Scripted 159)

In contrast to Deleuze, whose idea of difference is widely encompassing, Iser’s approach is concrete and systematic. He spelled out his concept of difference in cultural texts and “all types of discourse, textual or otherwise, since no rendering can be that which it renders” (Prospecting 251). According to Iser, difference is continuously acted out in the play of the text and occurs on three levels simultaneously: (1) extratextually (between the author and the world; between the text and the extratextual world; between the text and other texts); (2) intratextually (between the items within extratextual systems; between semantic enclosures); and (3) between the text and the reader (between readers’ intrinsic and assumed attitudes; between the denotation of the world in the text and its analogous adumbration) (cf. Prospecting 251). These distinct differences set the play of the text into motion and arrange for a confrontation between varied positions, a “to-and-fro movement” between those positions and a transition from one to the next (cf. Prospecting 251).

37 And further: “Jackson is appropriated as a flexible screen for subjective projection – his androgyny and racial ambiguity offer a permeable template for identification,” as well as: “Madonna features less as a template here, than as a license for invention; the album accordingly serves as a blueprint for the re-articulation of gender and sexuality […]. The performances captured by Breitz ultimately have less to do with Madonna as such, than with the Madonna function” (in: Breitz, Scripted 159, 165).

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Iser wrote: “Every one of theses differences opens up space for play, and hence for transformation” (Prospecting 252). The play of the text can therefore be performed endlessly by Breitz’s readers-turned-authors who never lose the pleasure of difference and repetition. Iser emphasized this duality of the play of the text by carving out its principle elements of “removing and maintaining difference,” as the text “both repeats and encapsulates extratextual worlds” (Prospecting 253). He concluded his notion of the play of the text with the following words: Since play strives for something but also undoes what it achieves, it continually acts out difference. Difference, in turn, can be manifested only through play, because only play can make conceivable the absent otherness that lies on the reverse side of all positions. Thus the play of the text is neither winning nor losing, but is a process of transforming positions, thereby given dynamic presence to the absence and otherness of difference. (Prospecting 257-258)

Like Deleuze, Iser thus saw the interplay of difference and repetition as the driving forces of the (literary) game. Like Pierre Bourdieu, he posited its players as positiontakers on the field of cultural production. Contemporary authors have no choice but to welcome authorial appropriation and readerly remix. Or, in the words of Deleuze, today the rules of the art game have (once again) changed so that “[t]he game of the problematic and the imperative has replaced that of the hypothetical and the categorical; the game of difference and repetition has replaced that of the Same and representation” (Difference 354). Iser intensified the matter by asking what play is and why we play at all (thereby differently repeating Stéphane Mallarmé’s question of principle). Dividing the function of play into its phylogenetic and its ontogenetic origins, 38 considering it from the perspective of an animal and a child, respectively, Iser defined staging as the common feature shared by these parallel histories of humanity. In the case of the animal kingdom, staging “serves as preparation for future actions; in child’s play, it permits real limitations to be overstepped” (Prospecting 260). In both cases, staging is a means of “crossing boundaries,” which “holds for the play of the text as well, which stages transformation and at the same time reveals how the staging is done” (Prospecting 260). Iser then described his conception of play, or staged transformation, as having a dual nature. Play, Iser argued, “allows us to have things both ways, by making what is inaccessible both present and absent” (Prospecting

38 Iser defined play phylogenetically as an activity for its own sake, as a way of exploring the bounds of the possible, and as a would-be action or trial run, whereas he designated play’s ontogenetical terms as “an action in which a defamiliarized meaning is acted out in a real situation” (Prospecting 260).

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260). Iser thereby gave a possible answer to Mallarmé’s question of principle, stating that “[b]y allowing us to have absence as presence, play turns out to be a means whereby we may extend ourselves” (Prospecting 261). Play is also a means by which we empathetically connect to each other, a form of human interaction and communication. Even when we play alone, Siri Hustvedt wrote in her latest novel The Blazing World (2014), we play with an imaginary other.39 Mostly though, we play with one another, that is, authors play with other authors (and their texts) as well as with their readers. Asking in the aforementioned interview about the presence of collaboration in her art, Breitz answered: It would be impossible for me to work in isolation. The working process is always collaborative for me, literally and otherwise: first, because I rely on other people’s assistance in my work, and second, because my works themselves often arise from conversation. […] Warhol would say, ‘I was never embarrassed to ask someone else “What should I paint?” because Pop comes from the outside, and where is the difference between asking someone for an idea or looking for one in a magazine?’ […] The moment of reception is more interesting than the moment of creation, in the same way that talking to someone else is usually more interesting than talking to oneself. (My translation)40

To produce effects within the field – in performing their authorial becoming – requires contemporary authors to joyfully juggle difference and repetition, as the two sides of the same coin. To successfully play on today’s field of cultural production involves observing the rules of the game: to position oneself in difference and to collaborate with others in repetition. To surround oneself with the literati of the field of cultural production is not a new game strategy for artists. In fact, authorial collaboration (real or imaginary), as well as appropriating and remixing, have become indispensable practices in a profession where “the creative process is not about originating and animating, but rather about recycling, translating, interpreting, in short, a process of

39 “No one can play alone, I said. Even when there is no one else in the room, there must be an imaginary other” (Blazing 230). 40 The original reads: “Für mich wäre es unmöglich, isoliert zu arbeiten. Der Arbeitsprozess ist für mich immer kollaborativ, buchstäblich und auch sonst: einmal, weil ich mich in meiner Arbeit auf die Mithilfe anderer verlasse, und zum andern, weil die Arbeiten selbst oft aus Gesprächen hervorgehen. […] Warhol würde sagen: ‘Es war mir nie peinlich, jemand anderen zu fragen, was ich malen soll, weil Pop von außerhalb kommt, und wo liegt der Unterschied, ob ich jemanden nach einer Idee frage oder in einer Zeitschrift nach ihr suche?’ […] Der Moment der Rezeption ist interessanter als der Schaffensmoment, genauso, wie es meist interessanter ist, mit jemand anderem zu sprechen als mit sich selbst” (in: Stange, Zurück 76).

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reanimating materials and languages that pre-exist one’s own practice,” as Breitz so astutely noted (in: Neri, “Candice” s.p.).

A UTHORS

IN

C OLLABORATION

“Who owns the words? Who owns the music and the rest of our culture? We do – all of us,” David Shields wrote in his manifesto Reality Hunger (2010). By using hundreds of unsourced quotes, Shields was “trying to regain a freedom that writers from Montaigne to Burroughs took for granted and that we have lost” (Reality 209). Paradoxically, Shields’s boldness was restricted due to legal constraints, as “Random House lawyers determined that it was necessary for me to provide a complete list of citations” after all (Reality 209). Throughout history, writers always circumvented such restrictions with direct or indirect authorial collaborations, real or imaginary. Even though team play has long existed, today it functions almost like a rule if not a necessity in the contemporary art game, as Christine Macel has argued of Sophie Calle’s work: Sophie Calle has been forever inventing double games and appropriates, which extends the author notion to the twosome, or even to the collective and anonymity. It would even seem that this process of artful acquisition is essential to her identity as author, which is thus constructed in the relationship to the other – the character tailed, the character spied upon, the ideal lover as husband, the admired author, the anonymous person, and even the artist, represented by (her) name and no longer by (her) work. (“Author” 25)

While the label ‘appropriation art’ seems to have given Candice Breitz and Calle the freedom to quote and sample from “high” and “low” culture, the lable has brought problems for Paul Auster and Jonathan Safran Foer, the latter of whom was heavily attacked for his appropriative methods. Journalist and editor Harry Siegel even called Foer a fraud and a hack: “Foer is indeed a sampler, throwing in Sebald […], Borges […], Calvino […], Auster […], and damn near every author, technique, reference and symbol he can lay his hands on, as though referencing were the same as meaning” (“Extremely” s.p.). It is notable that Siegel named Auster in his list of Foer’s “original” sources, since the older writer is himself a sampler, known for his extensive quoting and referencing of other authors. The boundaries of intellectual property in literature seem more rigid than in the visual arts, where appropriation is a common and appreciated practice. As Breitz explained: “Perhaps in the past it was possible to imagine this way of working as a deliberately chosen artistic strategy, one aesthetic option among others,” to add that today “one has no choice” (in: Neri, “Eternal Returns” s.p.). In literature, as opposed to the visual arts, legal issues around

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copyright are far more limiting in real and imaginary collaborations, as the examples of Shields and Foer show. While I previously examined imaginary authorial games played by authors, who in forming their own author-selves, have appropriated material from other authors and position themselves within a genealogy, I now scrutinize real collaborations between authors as aesthetic games of exchange and reciprocal inspiration. This kind of contemporary authorial team play is a central focus of the next chapter, in which I examine diverse intermedial and collaborative projects, such as Auster’s and Sam Messer’s The Story of My Typewriter, Calle’s and Auster’s to-and-fro Double Game, as well as Foer’s Tree of Codes, which is indebted to Bruno Schulz’s The Street of Crocodiles. The Story of My Typewriter In my chapter “You: Winter Journal,” I discussed Paul Auster’s and Sam Messer’s The Story of My Typewriter (2002) with regard to authorial corporeality and imaginary spaces. Now I return to their artists’ book to examine the collaborative dimension of their mutual project. Since 1996, Messer has painted and drawn dozens of portraits of Auster and still lifes of Auster’s Olympia typewriter; often Auster and his typewriter appear in the same painting. Auster tellingly described Messer’s artistic practice and their mode of collaboration in the following way: Messer seldom goes anywhere without a sketchbook. He draws constantly, stabbing at the page with furious, rapid strokes, looking up from his pad every other second to squint at the person or object before him, and whenever you sit down to a meal with him, you do so with the understanding that you are also posing for your portrait. We have been through this routine so many times in the last seven or eight years that I no longer think about it. (Typewriter 28)

A large number of Messer’s pictures of Auster and his Olympia, along with Auster’s auto/biographical short story about his typewriter, are published in their illustrated book, entitled The Story of My Typewriter. One of Messer’s portraits of Auster is the 2001 “The Wizard of Brooklyn” (see fig. 3).41 Auster is painted en face, looking into the beholder’s eyes with his head rested on one right hand. His head, body, and hands are painted with thick yet plain brushstrokes. His body has more gravitas here than in the other, more emphemeral portraits of him. Auster is painted with seven hands that are engaged in various activities connected to his authorial work: resting his head, stubbing out a small cigar, typing on his typewriter, grabbing a glass of whiskey, holding a pencil, and dialing a number on a telephone. Staged like theater

41 Messer, “The Wizard of Brooklyn.” Oil on canvas, 78 x 109 in, 2001.

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props, several objects are scattered on the desk in front of Auster. These are objects that have appeared in many other Messer’s portraits: an old black telephone, a full ashtray, a red notebook, and, most prominently in the foreground, the white Olympia typewriter that features a piece of paper with the typed words: “The Story of My Typewriter. Paul Auster.” As a text within a text, these typed words can be read as a mise en abyme,42 a self-referential note about Auster’s and Messer’s joint publication The Story of My Typewriter. Furthermore, their co-authorship is recorded prominently, as their names are “engraved” on the painting itself: Auster’s name is written on the paper wound-up in the typewriter; Messer’s name appears on a small white paper (or a cigarette pack?) underneath the ashtray. “The Wizard of Brooklyn” thus directly refers to the artists’ book which creates the effect of a “temporal” Möbius strip. Viewers are also reminded of the impossible images of Dutch graphic artist M.C. Escher, such as Relativity (1953), Waterfall (1961), and especially his most famous lithograph Drawing Hands (1948), which depicts two hands that paradoxically draw one another. Messer’s 2001 painting “The Wizard of Brooklyn” references the Messer-Auster collaborative artists’ book from 2002; the painting and the book have each influenced each other. Like a Chinese box 43 or a Russian Matryoshka doll, the title of the book reappears several times in the book; for example, in the title of Auster’s short story and in the wound-up paper in the typewriter in Messer’s “The Wizard of Brooklyn.” Thus, the origins of the text and the painting, as well as their solo authorship, are blurred and critically challenged. Instead, art is established as a matryoshka principle of repetition, in accordance with Gilles Deleuze who asserted that “[a]rt does not imitate, above all because it repeats; it repeats all the repetitions, by virtue of an internal power (an imitation is a copy, but art is simulation, it reverses copies into simulacra)” (Difference 365). To approach the repeated simulacra in intertextual references, such as recurring titles or doppelgänger characters, is an important if not mind-boggling aspect of the art game

42 The term mise en abyme comes from heraldry and was used by André Gide to describe self-reflexive embeddings in the arts. 43 Auster has often used the metaphor of the Chinese box: “Everything seems to be repeating itself. Reality was a Chinese box, an infinite series of containers within containers” (Invention 117). Also cf. Nicci Gerard (2002): “We are unmistakably in Paul Auster's world of doubles, parallels, mazes, massed shadows, masks, of deaths within deaths, stories within stories, like a Chinese box of revelations” (“Dead men” s.p.); or Andreas Lienkamp (2002): “Like Kubrick and Lynch, Auster presents himself as a master of the Chinese-box structure, the mise en abyme” (my translation, As Strange as the World 148). The original reads: “Wie Kubrick und Lynch zeigt sich Auster als ein Meister der chinese-box Struktur, der mise en abyme.”

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today. Through repetition, cross-reference, and self-referentiality authorial collaboration is made aesthetically tangible in text and image alike. This is true for Messer’s portrait of Auster, most obviously in the title’s direct reference to The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900), the popular story of Dorothy’s adventures in the Land of Oz, which was initially a collaboration between L. Frank Baum and the caricaturist William Wallace Denslow, whose illustrations contributed heavily to the success of their narrative. Significantly, Baum and Denslow both held the copyright for the first novel. Later, Baum turned the Oz theme into a series, thereby changing the authorial circumstances, as Frank Kelleter argued: As if to mark this changed relationship to his creation, he [Baum] now signed his books as ‘The Royal Historian of Oz,’ a title expressing his new understanding of popular authorship as a kind of commissioned office. (In a similar manner, John R. Neill, who succeeded W.W. Denslow as illustrator after the first book, became ‘The Imperial Illustrator of Oz.’). (“‘Toto’” 24)

Messer’s “The Wizard of Brooklyn” repeatedly references The Wizard of Oz. The painting therefore points to the themes of collaborative authorship and mutual inspiration within the art game in general and in the Baum-Denslow and AusterMesser texts in particular.44 Auster, for his part, echoed the significance of authorial collaboration in his auto/biographical short story – his direct contribution to the Auster-Messer publication. Auster emphasized the significance of the typewriter itself as a catalyst for and a co-partner in the authorial collaboration: It was never my intention to turn my typewriter into a heroic figure. That is the work of Sam Messer, a man who stepped into my house one day and fell in love with a machine. There is no accounting for the passions of artists. The affair has lasted for several years now, and right from the beginning, I suspect that the feelings have been mutual. […] I have never doubted that the typewriter spoke to him. In due course, I believe he even managed to persuade it to bare its soul. (Typewriter 27, 29)

Messer staged Auster’s typewriter iconically and accentuated this symbol of authorship in his paintings. The typewriter, depicted with or without its user, often appears as the actual protagonist of the paintings. Auster confirmed this mystical impression when he wrote: “The typewriter is on the kitchen table, and my hands are

44 However, matters remain ambiguous for the word wizard includes the syllable wiz that is another word for genius. Messer’s title therefore also hints at the more traditional notion of authorship as a stroke of genius rather than as a game of collaboration.

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on the typewriter. Letter by letter, I have watched it write these words” (Typewriter 55-56). In Auster’s description, it is the typewriter (not him) who has typed the text, referring to the former as “it.”45 The author himself becomes an observer, a reader, in the process of textual origination, while his Olympus typewriter, both Auster and Messer seem to claim, becomes a collaborator in the interplay between author, medium, and text. “Sam has taken possession of my typewriter,” Auster insisted, “and little by little he has turned an inanimate object into a being with a personality and a presence in the world. The typewriter has moods and desires now, it expresses dark angers and exuberant joys, and trapped within its gray, metallic body, you would almost swear that you could hear the beating of a heart” (Typewriter 32). The authorship of the work is playfully challenged by a machine; instead of single authorship, authorial team play is humorously stressed. The triangular liaison between author, painter, and typing machine is further emphasized in the epilogue of the artists’ book, which states that “[t]he title pages of this book were set by Paul Auster’s Olympia typewriter” (Typewriter 71). So the tangible outcome of the Messer-Auster collaboration, which is the actual publication The Story of My Typewriter, was literarily signed by the machine itself. All typewriters, in fact, have individual signatures or even their own fingerprints, as their mechanical parts align letters with slight variations from one another, causing them to wear down at different rates. Side by side, the three “authors” – Auster, Messer, and the Olympus typewriter – claim their authority for the textual, visual, and graphical contribution to their mutual work. Playfully, even the machine is granted its share in the collaborative authorship. Another meaningful yet ambivalent image that involves collaborative authorship is Messer’s 2002 portrait “Maestro.”46 The painting challenges the delicate question of authorial authority over one’s own work. In this portrait, Auster is shown in semiprofile, sitting at a lavender-colored desk. The whitish background is minimal and a barely visible skyline is indicated with thin black lines. On the table are some of the familiar props of the Auster-Messer collaboration: a full ashtray, the corner of a red notebook, a glass of red wine, a glass of whiskey, a slip of paper displaying Messer’s signature, and Auster’s white typewriter, in which a white paper, with “Paul A” faintly written on it, is stuck. Apparently the scattered objects in this picture, unlike in the previous painting, play a secondary role, for they occupy only about one fifth of the canvas. The figure of the author, on the other hand, fills the rest of the canvas.

45 Later Auster admitted that “Messer has forced me to look at my old companion in a new way. I am still in the process of adjustment, but whenever I look at one of these paintings now (there are two of them hanging on my living room wall), I have trouble thinking of my typewriter as an it. Slowly but surely, the it has turned into a him” (Typewriter 32-33). 46 Messer, “Maestro.” Oil on canvas, 58 x 48 in, 2002.

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Fig. 25: Sam Messer, Maestro

Maestro, 2002. Oil on canvas, 147 x 122 cm.

Smoking a small cigar and expressing fatigue, Auster’s intense look pulls in the viewer’s gaze. Auster’s hands (only two here) are both lifted up in a gesture of innocence, with palms visible, as if to claim: I have nothing to do with this. This is clearly the magic that is taking place in the painting. Wondrously, the letters and special characters on the typewriter come undone and float towards the space between Auster’s open hands. Left with empty keys, the typewriter is stripped of its letters (its signs), which hover through the air. Meanwhile, the author figure resides in the center of the turmoil, remaining calm and worldly-wise. Are the typewriter characters in Messer’s painting free agents with a will of their own or has the author caused the signs to float? The image of the floating signs corresponds well with the linguistic concept of the floating signifier first introduced by social anthropologist

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Claude Lévi-Strauss in his Introduction to the Work of Marcel Mauss (1950).47 For Lévi-Strauss the floating signifier was “a semantic function, whose role is to enable symbolic thinking to operate despite the contradiction inherent in it.” Lévi-Strauss explained further that the floating signifier “is the disability of all finite thought (but also the surety of all art, all poetry, every mythic and aesthetic invention), even though scientific knowledge is capable, if not staunching it, at least of controlling it partially” (Introduction 63). In its openness and ambiguity, the floating signifier carries aesthetic potential, and can therefore be described as an enabling structure – to connect Lévi-Strauss’s social anthropology with Wolfgang Iser’s literary anthropology (cf. Prospecting 262-284). The image of actual floating signifiers (seen in Messer’s portrait of Auster) is a witty visualization of both the ambiguity of meaning and the aesthetic potential of every textual or visual expression. “[A]ll images are polysemous;” Roland Barthes wrote, “they imply, underlying their signifiers, a ‘floating chain’ of signifieds, the reader able to choose some and ignore others”48 (Image 38-39). Messer’s floating letters are a clever illustration of sign’s flexibility, showing, on the one hand, creative authorial alignment, and on the other hand, the unconditional openness of all aesthetic objects to interpretations by readers or viewers. However, one could also interpret Auster as the Maestro (master or teacher) in this painting, orchestrating the jumble of letters like a conductor. Without moving his hands, Auster is shown juggling “his” characters,49 at his own will, capturing them from flying away. In this reading, Auster holds the magical power, creating the letters out of his fingertips, leading them back to the typewriter, and grouping them into words according to his authorial will. This line of argument reinforces the traditional notion of the author as the “master” of language, who “enchants” his readers like a magician or an artiste. At first glance, Messer’s depiction of Auster does in fact resemble a god-like figure, a singular genius whose identity lies in well-known tropes of the solitary, hard drinking, and chain smoking author. This would seem at first to be a valid reading of the portrait, if not for the intra- and intertextuality of its title and its co-authorship, so prominently expressed in the multiple names on the painting: Messer’s signature on the paper beneath the ashtray, Auster’s name on the paper in the typewriter, and the machine’s brand name on its body and individual signature of

47 For an examination of the floating signifier in the work of Lévi-Strauss and Jacques Lacan, see Jeffrey Mehlman, “‘The Floating Signifier:’ From Lévi-Strauss to Lacan,” in: Yale French Studies, No. 48, French Freud Structural Studies in Psychoanalysis (1972), 10-37. 48 Cf. Barthes: “Hence in every society various techniques are developed intended to fix the floating chain of signifieds in such a way as to counter the terror of uncertain signs” (Image 39). 49 Characters can be understood here as letters and as literary figures.

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the typeface. So despite Auster’s figure as the grandmaster of the text who juggles his own characters, Messer’s portrait of Auster accentuates their collaborative authorship. In the painting, the Auster image has everything and nothing to do with the floating signs: he is the solitary maestro who can only succeed in the game of art, in the interplay between authors, texts, and readers. This kind of interplay is operative in the networks of collaboration between the authors in my examination. Messer has also collaborated with Jonathan Safran Foer, whom he possibly met through Auster and Siri Hustvedt, the latter of whom collaborated with Foer on his Joseph Cornell anthology A Convergence of Birds (2001). Supposedly, on Messer’s second unannounced visit to the couple’s home, it was Hustvedt who led Messer into Auster’s study and to the Olympus typewriter. Of this encounter, Auster said: “I remember pointing out the typewriter to him the first time he visited, but I can’t remember what he said. A day or two after that, he came back to the house. I wasn’t around that afternoon, but he asked my wife if he could have another look at the typewriter” (Typewriter 28). Also, around the year 2000, it may have been Hustvedt who first introduced Messer to Foer, which was “before he had published anything” as Messer recalled in a 2014 interview (in: Geha, “A Brief” s.p.). Messer subsequently became close friends with Foer, regularly portraying him in drawings and paintings, even collaborating with him on two exhibitions, the most recent one entitled “Hanging Correspondence” at Georgia Southern University in 2014. This exhibition “explores the on-going artistic collaboration between renowned visual artist, Sam Messer, and the award-winning author, Jonathan Safran Foer,” according to the announcement on the university’s website, which also states “[o]ften focusing on aspects of communication and the human experience, Messer and Foer create compelling portraits that address subconscious desires and daily life.”50 Their collaboration has not yet led to a joint publication, but it is likely that another artist book will result from their exchange, as Messer stated in the aforementioned interview. In contrast to the Auster-Messer collaboration, in which each author stayed with his own medium, some of Messer’s portraits of Foer include Foer’s own text scribbled directly onto Messer’s drawings or paintings; others reveal Messer’s painting over Foer’s writings. Messer further explained their working process: “The work is really done when he is writing, and I’ll be drawing him, and then he works on the drawings” (in: Geha, “A Brief” s.p.). The exhibition title “Hanging Correspondence” refers to the intermedial communication and exchange between the two authors. Typically, an author’s personal correspondence is not made public much less shown in a gallery or museum. If a (literary) correspondence

50 See “Art meets literature in ‘Hanging Correspondence’ exhibition” (Jan 7, 2014), http://class.georgiasouthern.edu/blog/2014/01/07/art-meets-literature-in-hangingcorrespondence-exhibiton/.

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becomes public, it is commonly printed in a book or featured in display cases in an exhibition. Paintings, on the other hand, are most often hung on museum walls, as sacred objects to be viewed but not touched. The title of Messer’s and Foer’s exhibition, “Hanging Correspondence,” further stresses the intermediality of their collaboration. Their visual correspondence turns out to be a cooperative exchange between image and text, or paper and canvas, as well as between different practices of publication and exhibition. In said interview, Messer described their work as “a conversational space. […] Both are languages; drawing is just as much a language as text” (in: Geha, “A Brief” s.p.). Both The Story of My Typewriter and “Hanging Correspondences” are examples of reciprocal inspiration and direct exchange between authors that has lead to richly layered collaborations. These collaborations, in turn, raise issues of ownership and authorship of words and images that exist within the phenomenon of team play. Such issues manifest themselves in fascinating ways in the authorial collaboration between Sophie Calle and Paul Auster in Double Game. Double Game At the end of the 1980s, the British filmmaker Michael Radford asked Paul Auster to write a screenplay for a documentary film about the life of Sophie Calle. Auster accepted the offer and started to conduct research. Due to financial constraints, the film was never shot,51 but Auster used his findings on Calle in his novel Leviathan (1992). Calle’s author persona, thereby, provided a basis for Auster’s eccentric character Maria Turner, whom he described as “the reigning spirit of chance, as goddess of the unpredictable” (Leviathan 102). Even though she is only a minor character in the novel, she is responsible for the peripetia of the story. Calle, in return, described Auster’s literary version of herself in an interview: “His person Maria is younger than I am, blond, American, and practices rituals that I have practiced, such as keeping her birthday presents wrapped and following people and so on. Ten pages Maria is me. After that she abandons me to live on her life as a person of Paul Auster” (my translation).52 To give his figure biographical depth, Auster drew on aspects of Calle’s life as well as on about a dozen of her projects, including “The Striptease”

51 Cf. Calle, M’as tu vue 82. 52 The oginal reads: “Seine Person Maria ist jünger als ich, blond, Amerikanerin und praktiziert Riten, wie ich sie praktiziert habe, wie z.B. ihre Geburtstagsgeschenke unausgepackt aufzubewahren und Leuten zu folgen, etc. Zehn Seiten lang ist Maria Ich. Danach verlässt sie mich, um ihr Leben als Person von Paul Auster weiter zu leben” (in: Stech, “Sophie Calle” 216).

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(1979), “The Address Book” (1983), and “Suite vénitienne” (1980), her best known work at that time. Conflating reality and fiction, Auster used Calle’s authorial life as a stencil (on several consecutive pages) for the fictive life of the character Maria.53 Later in the text, he embedded Maria again in the fictional events of his novel and “abandoned” Calle, as the latter expressed, “to live out her own story” (Double Preface). In their collaborative artists’ book Double Game (1999), Calle “edited” Auster’s literary appropriations by reproducing a facsimile of the corresponding pages of Leviathan on which Maria’s life echoes her own life and “corrected” the diverging passages with a red marker. Auster’s fictive catalog raisonné of Maria’s work therefore gave Calle the great opportunity to present her hitherto disconnected oeuvre together for the first time. Yet she did not curate “which works of hers should be anthologized in Double Game; she followed Auster’s inclination (an excellent choice, one should add),” as Yve-Alain Bois argued (“Character Study” 130). Calle described her motivation for the publication of Double Game as an inspiration triggered by her fictive doppelgänger Maria: “Intrigued by this double, I decided to turn Paul Auster’s novel into a game and to make my own particular mixture of reality and fiction” (Double Preface). With Double Game, Calle entered into an authorial ping-pong 54 collaboration with Auster that interweaves several of their projects into a complex intertextual composite work that meanders between fact and fiction. To analyze this complexity, let me start at the beginning of Auster and Calle’s collaborative game: Leviathan.

53 See Leviathan 60-67. 54 In Games Authors Play (1983), Peter Hutchinson gave the example of Eugen Gomringer’s concrete poem “ping pong” (1953) that echoes the “sounds of a game of table tennis [to] provide the means for a game with words.” Attributing playfulness to such games with words, Hutchinson stressed the authors’ awareness that “[t]o ‘play’ with language is thus not merely restricted to test its resources or amuse, but also to illustrate its restrictive, conditioning nature” (Games 19, 20). This is equally valid for Double Game, a work that playfully discloses the workings and limitations of language and representation. Already the title functions as an invitation to play and to read the work as such. Hutchinson concluded that “[b]y highlighting this aspect of the text in their titles the authors suggest their ‘games’ are of central importance to an understanding of the plot” (Games 36). Double Game also has the connotation of “playing both sides of the street” and therefore already points to the fact that Maria becomes the double of Calle and vice versa.

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Auster’s novel tells the story of the friendship between the two New Yorker authors Benjamin Sachs and Peter Aaron,55 from Peter’s perspective. The narrative is named after the sea monster of Judeo-Christian mythology, 56 which calls on a multifold of homonymous publications ranging from Thomas Hobbes’s benchmark work (1651) to the novels and narratives of Julien Green (1929), Joseph Roth (1940), and Arno Schmidt (1949). Auster’s protagonist Benjamin also names his last unfinished book Leviathan, the content of which remains unknown to readers throughout Auster’s novel. An inter- and intratextual overlap occurs, as Auster made his protagonist Peter name his own book, which is the story of Peter’s and Benjamin’s friendship, also Leviathan: “[T]o mark what will never exist, I have given my book the same title that Sachs was planning to use for his: Leviathan” (Leviathan 142). There are now three books that carry the same title: Auster’s novel, Peter’s “true story,” which readers are supposedly reading at that moment, and Benjamin’s incomplete and missing manuscript.57 At the same time, we are confronted with three authors simultaneously who offer different versions of the author persona Auster. The three texts and authors are thus cleverly interrelated to create a complex interand intratextual play of texts that attempt to obscure reality and fiction. Arthur Saltzman described Auster’s associational artifice as follows: Our three novelists, Auster, Aaron, and Sachs seemingly bent upon triangulation so as to converge upon the truth, instead play out as concentric perspectives. We find ourselves addressed by an oddly corporate author in Leviathan who pitches intent at the frayed edge of belief. (“Leviathan” 170)

55 Auster himself served as a source for his characters, as Illana Shiloh pointed out (cf. Paul Auster 155). Both protagonists carry his name or initials (Auster’s middle name is Benjamin). Peter Aaron refers to Saint Peter; his surname to Moses’s older brother Aaron. Both were not only Jesus’s enunciators, but also disowned him, as Peter will do with Benjamin (Matthew 27, 69; 2. Book of Moses 32). Peter’s biography shows analogies to Auster’s: his narrator was also born in 1947 and he has two children from two marriages: David and Sonia (Auster’s children are called Daniel and Sophia. Their mothers are the authors Lydia Davis and Siri Hustvedt, respectively). 56 See Hiob chapter 40, 25-32 and chapter 41, 1-26. 57 Peter Hutchinson reminded us that “[t]his concept of ‘interior duplication’ derives from André Gide, who himself proved a major exponent of it in his novel The Counterfeiters (where a character is himself writing a novel entitled The Counterfeiters)” (Games 28). The main theme of The Counterfeiters (1925) is that of original and copy. Gide’s novel might have been an influence for Auster’s Leviathan. His character Benjamin only attacks replicas of the Statue of Liberty: the counterfeits of this symbol of freedom.

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This “oddly corporate author” that Auster created in Leviathan offers valuable clues to performative strategies of authorial self-invention. The protagonists Peter and Benjamin, both varied alter egos of Auster, are in their early thirties when they meet and become friends in the 1970s at a mutual reading in New York City. By the time Peter begins his narrative, on July 4, 1990, the 214th anniversary of America’s Independence Day, his friend Benjamin is already dead. He accidentally blew himself up with a bomb that was intended for a replica of the Statue of Liberty. Benjamin, alias “The Phantom of Liberty,” wants to explode this symbol of freedom to urge America “to start practicing what you preach” (Leviathan 216). Peter narrates the story of his friend Benjamin, who evolves from being an author to becoming an anarchistic bomber. Benjamin gradually loses his wife and friends. He also starts to lose his identity because of his guilt-driven misbelief that one could perform the life and work of another person – a path that will ultimately lead to his own violent death. After a chance encounter, Benjamin takes on the identity of his victim Reed N. Dimaggio, a former Ph.D candidate and political activist, to fight for Reed’s supposed cause. A game of hide-and-seek begins during which Benjamin takes on strange names, changes his appearances, and rents apartments in different cities (Leviathan 234). Peter explains: “He was never the same person twice, his powers of invention were constantly put to the test” (Leviathan 231). With determination, Benjamin uses his authorial power of imagination to put his plan into practice. Early on, this aptitude for self-invention becomes apparent in his self-perception and self-portrayal, as Peter describes: “[H]e was able to read the world as though it were a work of the imagination, turning documented events into literary symbols, tropes that pointed to some dark, complex pattern embedded in the real” (Leviathan 24). For Saltzman, “Sachs unabashedly mingles fact and fiction, polemic and farce, in his first novel, then mythologizes his childhood (specifically, a traumatic experience at the Statue of Liberty) to suit the requirements of his eccentric politics” (“Leviathan” 167). While for Aliki Varvogli “Benjamin Sachs is portrayed by his friend as a self-mythologiser. Born on 6 August 1945, Sachs refers to himself as America’s first Hiroshima baby, the ‘original bomb child’” (World 122). These myths that Benjamin yarns about himself from early on provide a precariously secure basis for his identity, which is analogized to pitons used in mountain climbing. His eventual fall – calling into question his whole existence – displays the uncertainty of his identity, which is based on highly fragile selfmythologies. And, as with almost every peripetia in Leviathan, it is again Maria Turner, alias Sophie Calle, who plays the decisive role. Maria and Benjamin meet for the second time at a party, again on Independence Day in 1986, the hundredth anniversary of the Statue of Liberty. Yet Benjamin, who had met Maria only once at a dinner seven years earlier, does not recognize the tall, blond woman who is now standing in front

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of him because “in his mind, Maria Turner was a short woman with long brown hair, and whenever I had mentioned her to him, that was the image he saw,” as Peter explains (Leviathan 112). At this point, Auster artfully mingled fact with fiction and played with the recurring theme of mistaken or confused identity. The artist Calle is a petite brunette; and thus Auster’s character Benjamin actually remembers the real Calle when he thinks of Maria, while the blond Maria, whom he encounters at the party, recalls the author persona that Calle created for her projects “The Striptease” and “Suite vénitienne,” during which she wore a blond wig. Auster’s extratextual references to the real artist Calle, as well as to the author persona, are pleasurable moments, according to Gérard Genette for the happy few58 readers or fans who are able to recognize and decode these clues. Those cross references to other texts, authors, and persons, greatly contribute to the playfulness of such authorial games. Benjamin is fascinated by the mysterious blond woman who, in a teasingly flirtatious game, does not disclose her identity. During their flirtation, Benjamin accidentally falls off the fire escape. Only a clothesline slows his fall and thus saves his life.59 In shock, he awakes in the hospital and is unable to speak for ten days. Later he recalls: Even as I fell, I was already past the moment of hitting the ground, past the moment of impact, past the moment of shattering into pieces. I had turned into a corpse, and by the time I hit the clothesline and landed in those towels and blankets, I wasn’t there anymore. I had left my body, and for a split second I actually saw myself disappear. (Leviathan 117)

Benjamin interprets his fall as a grotesque form of punishment for his desire for Maria, and as a sign of his reluctance to continue his old, inactive life: “I don’t want to spend the rest of my life rolling pieces of blank paper into a typewriter. I want to stand up from my desk and do something. The days of being a shadow are over,” Benjamin declares to his friend (Leviathan 122). In a bitter, ironic twist, however, he becomes a shadow, or a phantom, as a consequence of this decision. In order to leave behind his old life and reinvent a new one, Benjamin is forced to alter one fundamental aspect of his identity, namely that of being an author. The authorial existence that has defined him for so long must give way, because it puts him in an “anergic” state in front of his typewriter. Peter describes the “autistic” condition authors often experience: “There is a point at which a book begins to take over your

58 Cf. Genette, “Implizierter Autor, implizierter Leser?” (1983). 59 This story also appears in Auster’s The Red Notebook: “My father was working on the roof of a building in New Jersey City. Somehow or other (I wasn’t there to witness it), he slipped off the edge and started falling to the ground. Once again he was headed for certain disaster, and once again he was saved. A clothesline broke his fall, and he walked away from the accident with only a few bumps and bruises” (Notebook 51-52).

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life, when the world you have imagined becomes more important to you than the real world” (Leviathan 218). When authors live in their created imaginary worlds, at expense of their real worlds, it is akin to readers becoming so mentally absorbed in texts that their outer worlds disappear. In order to change, Benjamin abandons his imaginary world to focus on reality (within the novel), by disregarding his (former) identity as an author. By giving up his author role, Benjamin’s identity disintegrates, which in turn leads to the explosion of his corporeal body. Prior to that, it is, once again, Maria who plays the decisive role in his attempt to start over. Feeling guilty for his fall, Maria starts visiting Benjamin in the hospital and, after a while, a mutual project evolves: a photograph series called “Thursdays with Ben.” Peter describes Maria’s conceptual working method: Unlike Maria’s other projects, this one had no organizing principle or clearly defined purpose, and rather than start with a fixed idea as she always had in the past (to follow a stranger, for example, or to look up names in an address book), ‘Thursdays with Ben’ was essentially formless: a series of improvisations, a picture album of the days they spent in each other’s company. (Leviathan 128)

These Thursdays with Maria are of great significance for Ben, who has not been the same person since his fall. He has lost all connections to himself and has grown insecure with his own identity. Through Maria’s photographic project, he slowly begins to gain an image of his own persona, as Peter explains: He was no longer able to see himself. I mean that in a phenomenological sense, in the same way that one talks about self-awareness or the way one forms an image of oneself. […] Every time Sachs posed for a picture, he was forced to impersonate himself, to play the game of pretending to be who he was. […] They say that a camera can rob a person of his soul. In this case, I believe it was just the opposite. With this camera, I believe that Sachs’s soul was gradually given back to him. (Leviathan 129-130)

At this point, Auster appropriated Calle’s project “The Detective” (1981).60 While Calle was followed by a private detective through the streets of Paris in her artwork, Benjamin is followed and photographed by Maria through New York City. “Maria had obliged him by resurrecting one of her old pieces: only this time it was done in reverse. Sachs took on the role she had played, and she turned herself into the private detective” Peter says (Leviathan 129). 61 As in the case for Calle in her project,

60 Cf. my chapter “The Detective.” 61 Maria’s “old piece” echoes Calle’s project “Suite vénitienne” (1980), in which she followed a man through Venice for several days.

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Benjamin also knows that he is being followed and photographed. And, like Calle, who asked a friend to shadow the detective during his observation, a final twist in Auster’s text also conflates the roles of hunter and hunted and the veracity of perception at large. By chance, Peter spots Benjamin during one of these Thursdays without becoming aware of Maria behind the camera. Peter starts to follow Benjamin and becomes increasingly concerned by his strange behavior: For the next couple hours, I followed Sachs around the streets, shadowing my friend through the canyons of New York. […] Sachs wandered around the streets like a lost soul, roaming haphazardly between Times Square and Greenwich Village at the same slow and contemplative pace, never rushing, never seeming to care where he was. (Leviathan 125)

Like a detective, Peter painstakingly notes the whereabouts and activities of his friend, even though nothing unusual happens.62 Yet it is especially the banality of everyday occurrences that leaves Peter with misgivings. Later, when Peter learns from Maria about the “Thursdays with Ben” project, he has to drastically adjust his premature conclusions about this depressing afternoon: Knowing what I know now, I can see how little I really understood. I was drawing conclusions from what amounted to partial evidence, basing my response on a cluster of random, observable facts that told only a small piece of the story. […] What I had taken as a conclusive evidence of my friend’s misery was in fact no more than a charade, a little bit of play-acting, a silly reenactment of Spy versus Spy. (Leviathan 126, 129)63

Despite his close observation, Peter is unable to grasp Benjamin’s incitement, much less his feelings and motives. Like Calle’s project “The Detective,” “Thursdays with Ben” calls into question the truthfulness of perception and discloses the impossibility of fathoming a person through vision alone. Without knowledge of the narrative background, Benjamin’s performances remain hollow and meaningless to Peter. Eventually, not even Maria’s photographic project, as evidence of his existence, helps Benjamin to reassemble the broken pieces of his identity. Instead, he increasingly alienates himself from his family and friends, spending long periods alone in a summer cottage in Vermont, where the deadly encounter with Reed N. Dimaggio occurs. After Benjamin kills Reed, it is again Maria, the goddess of chance,

62 Benjamin hands out change to homeless people, lights cigarettes, enters and leaves shops. These random everyday banalities of life in the city are significant for Auster’s and Calle’s follow-up project “Gotham Handbook,” which will be discussed shortly. 63 “Spy vs Spy” is a black-and-white comic strip by the Cuban artist Antonio Prohίas, which debuted in Mad Magazine in 1961.

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who possesses the missing clue to advance the narrative, because she is able to identify Reed as the former husband of her friend Lillian and father of their young daughter Maria. Benjamin becomes obsessed with Reed’s private and professional life. He finally decides not only to carry out the authorial work of his precursor in text, but to attack replicas of the Statue of Liberty, calling attention to society’s grievances. “All of the sudden, my life seemed to make sense to me,” Benjamin tries to explain to Peter. “I had found the unifying principle, and this one idea would bring all the broken pieces of myself together. For the first time in my life, I would be whole” (Leviathan 228). In his quest for identity, leaving his (authorial) self behind, Benjamin radicalizes his cat and mouse game with the FBI, which is ultimately a game he plays with himself. Illana Shiloh wrote: “Sachs’s quest for the wholeness of the self is another manifestation of his quest for meaning. He is looking for the unifying principle – of the self and of phenomenal reality external to the self” (Paul Auster 114). In doing so, Benjamin disregards that his sense of identity is further threatened by constantly alternating pseudonyms, varying self-mythologies, and changing domiciles. Instead of performing identity formation, he practices personality dissolution, hiding himself behind fictional personalities and the mask of the “Phantom of Liberty.” Eventually, he blows himself up in a climatic disaster. “Through one of his favorite devices, the literalization of metaphors, Auster makes the object of the quest literally disintegrate,” Shiloh explained Benjamin’s forceful ending (Paul Auster 9); an image that embodies the diverging components of Benjamin’s broken identity. In Auster’s universe, to solely live out someone else’s life, to act out fictional performances exclusively, and to only exist as a solitary ghost, ultimately leads to the death of the authorial self. Auster seems to have adumbrated that authors should appropriate not assimilate, act collaboratively, and perform in real and imaginary teams in order to constantly refresh their authorial selves in perpetual becomings. While the novel’s collaboration between performance artist Maria and writer Benjamin is ineffective, Auster’s and Calle’s professional teamwork is quite productive. Calle’s real projects, appropriated by Auster’s character Maria, are complemented by two imaginary projects that Auster ascribed to Maria’s oeuvre, thus, inadvertently expanding Calle’s repertoire according to his own agenda. For after the publication of Leviathan, Calle decided, “[i]n order to bring Maria and myself closer together, [...] to go by the book” (Double 10-11). She inserted fiction into reality by appropriating Auster’s works “The Chromatic Diet” (1997) 64 and

64 Calle, “The Chromatic Diet” (1997). Set of six framed color photographs, 30x30cm (each), one framed color photograph, 49x73.5cm, 7 menus in holders, one shelf. In: M’as tu vue 435 and Double Game 12ff.

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“Days Under the Spell of B, C, & W” (1998),65 adding these performances to her own oeuvre. In an interview, Calle reported: I committed myself to the game. Paul Auster had used specific aspects of my life in his novel ‘Leviathan,’ and it was interesting to reverse the game and to acquire the characteristics that he had thought of for me. […] I started to do what Maria in Paul Auster’s book had done, because he had made up rituals for her that weren’t mine, for example the meals according to color. (My translation)66

As a point of origin, Calle took Auster’s description of Maria’s project in Leviathan and reproduced it in Double Game: Some weeks, she would indulge in what she called ‘the chromatic diet,’ restricting herself to foods of a single color on any given day. Monday orange: carrots, cantaloupe, boiled shrimp. Tuesday red: tomatoes, persimmons, steak tartare. Wednesday white: flounder, potatoes, cottage cheese. Thursday green: cucumbers, broccoli, spinach – and so on, all the way through the last meal on Sunday. (Double 12-13)

In “The Rules of the Game,”67 Calle subsequently described her own practice: “The author [Auster] imposes on his creature [Maria] a chromatic regimen which consists

65 Calle, “Days Under the Sign of B, C, & W” (1998). Set of 4 diptychs, including four framed color photographs, four framed texts, 67x67cm (each). In: M’as tu vue 436 and Double Game 22ff. 66 The original reads: “Ich bin auf das Spiel eingegangen, weil es aufregend war. Paul Auster hatte bestimmte Aspekte meines Lebens in seinem Roman ‘Leviathan’ verwendet, und es war interessant, das Spiel umzudrehen und mir die Charakteristika anzueignen, die er für mich erfunden hatte. [...] Ich fing damit an, das zu tun, was Maria im Buch von Paul Auster gemacht hatte, denn er erfand für sie Rituale, die nicht meine waren, zum Beispiel die Mahlzeiten nach der Farbskala” (in: Stech, “Sophie Calle” 216). 67 “The Rules of the Game” is a reference to Luigi Pirandello and his absurd play-within-theplay Six Characters in Search for an Author (1921), in which an acting company prepares to rehearse the play The Rules of the Game (1918) by Pirandello. As the rehearsal is about to begin, the company is unexpectedly interrupted by the arrival of six strange people. The director of the play demands an explanation, whereupon one figure explains that they are unfinished characters in search of an author to finish their story. Calle herself has been searching an author to write her (a) story, and was at first disappointed when Auster refused to “finish her story” properly (“Gotham Handbook” is a compromise between Calle’s wish and Auster’s concession).

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in restricting herself to food of a single color for any given day. I followed his instructions” (Double 9). She continued further: To be like Maria, during the week of December 8 to 14, 1997, I ate Orange on Monday, Red on Tuesday, White on Wednesday, and Green on Thursday. Since Paul Auster had given his character the other days off, I made Friday Yellow and Saturday Pink. As for Sunday, I decided to devote it to the full spectrum of colors, setting out for six guests the six menus tested over the week. (Double 12-13)

Calle, then, presented the single compositions in image and text on the subsequent pages. Each photograph displays a table set in monochrome decoration with tableware, cutlery, and napkins in the color of the day. The text states the respective title, such as “Monday: Orange,” the words “Menu imposed,” and a list of foods. In addition, Calle personally diverged from Auster’s script. Her “corrections” start right away with the first dish, the orange Monday: “Paul Auster forgot to mention drinks, so I allowed myself to complete his menu with: Orange juice” (Double 14). Pragmatically, Calle insisted that no menu is complete without a drink and without Fig. 26: Sophie Calle, The Chromatic Diet

“The Chromatic Diet” (detail), 1997. 7 framed colour photographs, 7 menus on displays, one shelf 30 x 30 (x6 prints) + 49 x 73,5 cm (1 colour print) / 11 3/4 x 11 3/4 inches (x6 prints) + 19 1/4 x 29 inches (1 colour print). © Sophie Calle / ADAGP, Paris & VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2015. Courtesy Galerie Perrotin.

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hesitation changed the rules of the game. Also, because the Tuesday choice appeared tasteless to her, she refined the menu with bell pepper and a glass of red wine. The white Wednesday is criticized and altered by Calle more drastically: “I changed this menu, because I was not satisfied with the yellow color of the potatoes, and added: Rice [and] Milk” (Double 16). What worked in Auster’s literary model, where readers could overlook inconsistencies in the narrative, did not work in Calle’s visual realization. For her, the yellow potato upset the purity of the desired whiteness. Calle thus “retouched” Auster’s description to make her project work visually. Her modus operandi reveals aesthetic differences between their work, as well as the oscillating workings of collaborative appropriation. For the missing days in Maria’s project – Friday, Saturday, and Sunday – Auster nonchalantly formulated “and so on, all the way through the last meal on Sunday” (Leviathan 61). Readers will easily ignore the emptiness of Auster’s “and so on,” or possibly come up with their own matching foods for Maria’s work. Such blank spaces are accepted in literary works or, can even stimulate the readers’ imagination. Yet these voids do not work in a systematic visual project that orders matters according to non-habitual criteria. To perform the task properly involves a color and menu selection for every day of the week. To follow the rules of the game correctly, required Calle to methodically complete the project unlike its fragmentary literary model. “Since no color was prescribed for Friday, I chose yellow” Calle determined (Double 18). She decided on a special dessert with the name “Young Girl’s Dream” for her yellow menu, which consists of a peeled banana between two scoops of mango ice cream. “Young Girl’s Dream” is also one of her picture stories, later published in her True Stories collection, where it appears with an image of the mango treat. The story reads as follows: When I was fifteen I was afraid of men. One day, in a restaurant, I chose a dessert because of its name: ‘Young Girl’s Dream.’ I asked the waiter what it was, and he answered: ‘It’s a surprise.’ A few minutes later he returned with a dish featuring two scoops of vanilla ice cream and a peeled banana. He said one word: ‘Enjoy.’ Then he laughed. I closed my eyes the same way I closed them years later when I saw my first naked man. (True 12-13)

Calle cleverly reintroduced “Young Girl’s Dream” to “The Chromatic Diet” in Double Game, further appropriating Auster’s project for her own purposes. This time, the grown-up woman and distinguished artist even answers back to the salacious waiter with humor and self-deprecation. She takes a stand against the bittersweet male sex: her dessert recommendation for the pink Saturday, which is printed right next to the yellow Friday in Double Game, consists of two scoops of strawberry ice cream that are arranged symmetrically and close together. In visual

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Fig. 27/28: Sophie Calle, The Chromatic Diet

“The Chromatic Diet” (detail), 1997. 7 framed colour photographs, 7 menus on displays, one shelf 30 x 30 (x6 prints) + 49 x 73,5 cm (1 colour print) / 11 3/4 x 11 3/4 inches (x6 prints) + 19 1/4 x 29 inches (1 colour print). © Sophie Calle / ADAGP, Paris & VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2015. Courtesy Galerie Perrotin.

contrast to the banana-phallus of the previous day, these strawberry sweets can only be seen as well-formed breasts – Calle’s late tit-for-tat68 response to the gamy waiter. To complete the colorful week, Calle then prepared all dishes once again and invited six guests to eat at her roundtable, of which viewers only see the deserted, set table. “Lots were drawn for the menus and everybody acquitted themselves

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conscientiously, if without enthusiasm, at their task,” as she described the common meal. She reasoned: “Personally, I preferred not to eat; novels are all very well but not necessarily so very delectable if you live them to the letter” (Double 20-21). Calle took on Auster’s basic concept of the chromatic diet but ultimately refused to become Maria, as she explained: “But she did not become a double for me. Rather, I played with a book. I played to obey. But you do not become someone else by eating eight days green, black, yellow, or gray, or by spending several days by the alphabet. I always remained myself, Sophie, who obeys Paul Auster’s book” (my translation).69 Through her authorial reinterpretation and unique performance of Auster’s script, as well as through her ultimate refusal to become Maria, Calle appropriated “The Chromatic Diet” for her own purposes. Maud Lavin accurately assessed the situation by claiming that: When Calle enacts and lavishly documents Maria’s esthetic exercise, they become hers, and when she republishes the art works originally hers that Auster ascribed to Maria, they become hers again. In Double Game, Calle thus takes back control over her fictional double from Auster but adds a passive twist; she follows the author’s descriptions as if they were instructions, bending the self-administered rules with additions as humor. (“Imitation” 33)

Calle’s skillful entanglement of “Young Girl’s Dream” with “The Chromatic Diet” lightheartedly merges the two works into her oeuvre. What constitutes much of the fascination with and appreciation of Calle’s work are precisely these intermingled (self-)references that contribute significantly to the multi-layered credibility of Calle’s creation. Her intertextual cross-references insinuate a coherent authorial auto/biography that ultimately crystallizes as sophisticated, self-referential games between authors, readers, and texts. Indeed, with “The Chromatic Diet” and “Days Under the Sign of B, C, & W” Auster created two projects that seem to match Calle’s artistic method. Upon closer inspection, however, they turn out to be rather insubstantial. While Auster’s selfexperiments establish rules to be followed and superficially mimic Calle’s conceptual work, one crucial factor inherent in Calle’s original authorial games is missing:

68 The pun “tit-for-tat” is not only an English saying for “equivalent retaliation” but also a highly effective strategy in game theory, first introduced by the mathematical psychologist Anatol Rapoport in Robert Axelrod’s two Prisoner’s Dilemma Tournaments in 1980. 69 The original reads: “Aber sie wurde kein Double für mich. Ich habe vielmehr mit einem Buch gespielt. Ich habe gespielt zu gehorchen. Aber man wird nicht jemand anders, indem man acht Tage grün, schwarz, gelb und grau isst oder einige Tage nach dem Alphabet verbringt. Ich bin immer ich selbst geblieben, Sophie, die dem Buch von Paul Auster gehorcht” (in: Stech, “Sophie Calle” 217).

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curiosity. For what can really be learned by selecting one’s daily meals according to color? What can truly be experienced by spending several days using single letters of the alphabet? Calle’s true inspiration, her curiosity, cannot surface within these overly schematic projects. Despite the thrilling experiment to perform a literary script, the results fall flat. This is not the case, however, for Auster’s and Calle’s first proper collaborative project entitled “Gotham Handbook” (1994). After having developed an appetite in “The Chromatic Diet” for performing the life of an imaginary person, Calle asked Auster to create an independent literary character for her. She wanted to follow his instructions, by manuscript, up to one year: Again it was not the double, but the desire to become someone else to a greater or lesser extent. I was prepared to give up my house, my man, if I had lived with one, my work, everything, to obey the book. The responsibility was too great for Paul Auster, which I can absolutely understand, and he preferred to give me instructions to live in New York. The outcome of this is ‘Gotham Handbook’ – the telephone booth. (My translation)70

Auster, however, refused to take responsibility for Calle and instead sent her a manuscript of six typewritten pages entitled “Gotham Handbook: Personal Instructions for S.C. on How to Improve Life in New York City (Because she asked…).” 71 This personal guide offers four very concrete proposals for improvement of life on the city’s streets, intended for the French artist who is already

70 The original reads: “Wieder war es nicht das Double, sondern die Lust mehr oder weniger jemand anders zu werden. Ich war bereit mein Haus aufzugeben, meinen Mann, wenn ich denn mit einem gelebt hätte, meine Arbeit, alles, um dem Buch zu gehorchen. Paul Auster war die Verantwortung zu groß, was ich durchaus verstehen kann, und er hat es vorgezogen, mir Anweisungen zu geben, um in New York zu leben. Daraus ist das ‘Gotham Handbook’ entstanden – die Telephonkabine” (in: Stech, “Sophie Calle” 217). 71 Washington Irving was the first to call New York City Gotham in his satirical periodical Salmagundi (1807-1808). He wrote about the New Yorkers and their city: “One of the most tickling, dear, mischievous pleasures of this life is to laugh in one’s sleeve – to sit snug in a corner, unnoticed and unknown, and hear the wise men of Gotham, who are profound judges of horse-flesh, pronounce, from the style of our work, who are the authors” (Salmagundi 46). Irving took the name Gotham from the place and legend of the Wise Men of Gotham in Nottinghamshire, England, who acted the fool to prevent the building of a public highway through their village. In 1844, Edgar Allan Poe published his report on New York’s everyday life under the title Doings of Gotham. In 1940, Gotham City featured for the first time in the DC-Universe as the setting of the Batman comic series (Batman, No 4, Winter 1940).

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Fig. 29: Sophie Calle, Gotham Handbook

“Gotham Handbook” (detail), 1994/2000. Set consisting, in the following order, of 2 framed texts, 7 framed pannels containing a text, b/w photographs, documents, one colour photograph under Plexiglas, one framed text. 64 x 68 cm et 34 x 68 cm (framed texts), 143 x 86 (pannel), 180 x 120 cm (photograph under Plexiglas), 14 x 24 cm (framed text) / 64 x 68 cm and 34 x 68 cm (framed texts), 143 x 86 (pannel), 180 x 120 cm (photograph under Plexiglas), 14 x 24 cm (framed text). © Sophie Calle / ADAGP, Paris & VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2015. Courtesy Galerie Perrotin.

familiar with New York.72 “Gotham Handbook” constitutes the central collaboration between Calle and Auster to date. In her exhibitions, Calle featured “Gotham Handbook” by combining texts and photographs in the form of wall panels. In Double Game, “Gotham Handbook” constitutes the third part of the book and is described as “[o]ne of the many ways of mingling fact with fiction, or how to try to become a character out of a novel” (Double 3). 73 The beginning of “Gotham

72 Calle lived and worked in New York. In 1980, she exhibited her work “The Bronx” at Fashion Moda in the South Bronx, which was her first solo exhibition. 73 The first part is: “The Life of Maria and how it influenced the life of Sophie;” the second part is: “The life of Sophie and how it influenced the life of Maria” (Double 2).

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Fig. 30: Sophie Calle, Gotham Handbook

“Gotham Handbook” (detail), 1994/2000. © Sophie Calle / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2015.

Handbook” is once again a facsimile of several pages of Auster’s typed manuscript74 and a color photograph on a double page showing a smiling mouth, possibly Calle’s, anticipating the ‘have-a-nice-day’-smile discussed below. What follows are Calle’s texts, minutes of conversations, and a simulation of the guestbook pages. Large-sized color photographs, partially taken at a photo studio, show details of the project’s location: the telephone booth as well as the sandwiches and cigarettes that she is to distribute in the coming days. Calle presented small-format, black-and-white photographs in enlarged contact prints, which create a documentary aesthetic for the events that will unfold around the telephone booth. These photographs have the effect of snapshots taken from a secure distance. Their amateur style stands in contrast to the professional look of the color photographs, the former taken by Calle herself, the 74 Martina Süßenguth suggested: “The letter is typewritten, but it shows corrections in Paul Auster’s handwriting on the margin and within the text and one small coffee-stain. The conscious decision to include the letter in its raw state might hint at an editorial comment on Auster’s role. Auster leaves a physical trace imprinting his authorial mark on the artwork. Thus, he reaffirms his authority over the project, which is otherwise solely delegated to Sophie Calle” (Poet 215).

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latter by a professional photographer. 75 In her typically understated way, Calle claimed that “my work with Paul Auster is not about the material aspects of art works, but about the idea to follow a novel like one’s own fate” (my translation).76 Significantly, “Gotham Handbook,” as performed by Calle, appears like an implementation of yet another literary model, namely Auster’s novel In the Country of Last Things (1987). On her own, Auster’s protagonist Anna Blume,77 incidentally his only female central character,78 ekes out a living in an imaginary metropolis that strongly resembles New York during the 1980s. The innominate city finds itself in a nightmarish state of decay and decomposition.79 To a certain extent, Anna’s story, which I shortly recapitulate, is performed in “Gotham Handbook” by Calle. Anna

75 Cf. Calle: “If the work to be done was more in the performance domain, and entailed relationships with other people, I would take the photos myself. In such cases their quality wasn’t crucial. If, but this was rarer, no relationship with others was involved and graves or stolen pictures, lifeless objects, were the subject I would take a bad polaroid, decide on the format and the angle and ask a more technically proficient photographer to take the same picture, but better” (True 2010 14). 76 The original reads: “Es geht in meiner Arbeit mit Paul Auster nicht um die materiellen Aspekte von Kunstwerken, sondern um die Idee, einem Roman zu gehorchen wie dem eigenen Schicksal” (in: Heinrich, Geschichten 11). 77 “An Anna Blume” (“To Anna Flower” or “To Eve Blossom”) from 1919 is a dadaist Merz poem by Kurt Schwitters (1887–1948) that made him famous overnight. The poem strongly polarized public opinion and also provoked Berlin Dada around Richard Huelsenbeck et al. Cf. Dada: Zurich, Berlin, Hanover, Cologne, New York, Paris, edited by Leah Dickerman et al., Washington: D.A.P./The National Gallery of Art, 2005. For an examination of Auster’s character Anna Blume and Kurt Schwitter’s artistic methods see Süßenguth, Poet 167-181. 78 Anna Blume is fleetingly mentioned in Auster’s Moon Palace (1989) as the former girlfriend of Zimmer who “had suddenly taken off to join her older brother, William, who worked as a journalist in some foreign country,” which tells her story in a nutshell (Moon 86). Anna Blume also reappears as an aged woman in Auster’s Travels in the Scriptorium (2006), taking care of the author’s alter ego Mr. Blank. 79 Auster drew a fascinating, yet terrifying dystopia of future cities in his novel. But despite the foreboding prospect of poverty, violence, and isolation that Auster envisions, the fact that readers are finally able to read Anna’s report, is an optimistic hint that points to her possible escape from the city towards a better future. As such the text can be read, as Tim Woods argued, “as a novel about making sense of the postmodern urban environment, a process described by Jameson in terms appropriated from Kevin Lynch as ‘cognitive mapping’” (“Looking” 120).

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Blume travels to the Country of Last Things to search for her brother, a journalist who reported about the catastrophic state of things in the nameless city and who has never returned. Upon her arrival, Anna immediately realizes the malfunctions of this contemporary Gomorrah. The processes of destruction and collapse are inexorable, which is equally true of the architecture, the infrastructure, and the social fabric of the city. Life in this city is hard and merciless. Everybody struggles for life in a Social Darwinian sense of survival of the fittest. Objects, people, even words disappear without a trace.80 Anna is forced to quickly learn the rules and codes of behavior in order not to starve to death or to fall victim to an act of violence. Despite her strong assimilation to the local conditions, she thereby nevertheless remains “a constant outsider, looking in on this life in the city, which she always appears to treat as a temporary nightmare until she can find her brother” as Tim Woods wrote (“Looking” 110). After all, it is the role of the outsider that allows Anna to document and report 81 her experiences. In a blue notebook82 she keeps record of her adventures in a hybrid text form that oscillates between a letter to a friend and diary entries. In an essay on the poet Charles Reznikoff, Auster explicated the role of the writing outsider, the subjective chronicler of the city and then spelled out the significance of this figure to himself and his own authorial becoming: In order to see, the poet must make himself invisible. He must disappear, efface himself in anonymity. […] It seems no accident that most Reznikoff poems are rooted in the city. For only in the modern city can the one who sees remain unseen, take his stand in space and yet remain transparent. Even as he becomes a part of the landscape he has entered, he continues to be an outsider. Therefore, objectivist. That is to say – to create a world around oneself by seeing as a stranger would. What counts is the thing itself, and the thing that is seen can come to life only when the one who sees it has disappeared. (“Reznikoff” 375-376)

It is exactly this paradox of impartial observation and energetic action within the social fabric of the metropolis that Auster ascribed to his character Anna and later proposed to Calle in “Gotham Handbook.” In the final analysis, both works negotiate

80 Cf. Auster: “It’s not just that things vanish – but once they vanish, the memory of them vanishes as well” (Country 87). 81 By illuminating the conditions of the city, Anna ultimately assumes the assignment of her lost brother. In contrast to Benjamin Sachs in Leviathan, Anna does not give up writing, but uses writing as a form of identity formation as Süßenguth argued: “Unable to decode the city as a text, Anna writes a new text. Her letter to a friend, the manuscript for the novel, becomes a way of asserting her identity. Again, storytelling becomes a tool for a character’s search for meaning and identity in a disjointed world” (Poet 171). 82 The notebook is a recurring trope in Auster’s work and symbol of authorship in general.

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the antagonism within the inner-city cooperation, where strangers pose a threat to each other, at first, but ultimately constitute the only human means of survival. Consequently, Auster’s first instruction in the handbook is “Smiling.” Calle’s assignment is to “[s]mile when the situation doesn’t call for it. [...] Smile at strangers in the street. [...] See if anyone smiles back at you. Keep track of the number of smiles you are given each day” (Double 239). This first rule of the game corresponds well with a passage of In the Country of Last Things, in which Anna described in detail the different sects and congregations of the city’s population: There is a small minority, for example, that believes that bad weather comes from bad thoughts. […] According to them, when you think a dark or pessimistic thought, it produces a cloud in the sky. If enough people are thinking gloomy thoughts at once, the rain will begin to fall. […] Their solution is to maintain a steadfast cheerfulness, no matter how dismal the conditions around them. No frowns, no deep sighs, no tears. These people are known as the Smilers, and no sect in the city is more innocent or childlike. (Country 26)83

Even though it appears pointless and does not alleviate the misery, Auster coveyed that a smile is still better than outward anger, frustration, or bitterness. In this passage, Auster shared a naive version of the American ‘have-a-nice-day’-smile, which finds itself in stark contrast to Calle’s concept of manners, as we will see shortly. Lavin described their contrasting nature and its resulting friction: Based on these descriptions [in Double Game], readers have formed their own fictionalized impression of Calle – playful, self-involved, distant yet actively invasive in the name of art. She seems flirtatious and seductive, too, interested in tracking in being tracked by men, Auster – at least in his role as writer – included. But not sweet. Not necessarily smiley. So there is a perverse pleasure when we learn that, when Calle asked Auster to design a project for her, he responded by instructing her to smile at strangers on the street. (“Imitation” 35)

Consequently, “Talking to Strangers” is Auster’s second instruction: There will be people who talk to you after you smile at them. You must be prepared with flattering comments. [...] Try to keep these conversations going as long as you can. It doesn’t

83 Anna writes: “I agree with you that these people are ridiculous and misguided. But, in the day-to-day context of the city, there is a certain force to their argument – and it is probably no more absurd than any other. As people, the Smilers tend to be refreshing company, for their gentleness and optimism are a welcome antidote to the angry bitterness you find everywhere else” (Country 27).

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matter what you talk about. [...] If you find yourself running out of things to say, bring up the subject of the weather. (Double 239-240)

Smiling and talking, however, are apparently not enough to improve life in New York City. Under the heading of “Beggars and Homeless People,” Auster explicated the following directions to Calle: Don’t ignore the miserable ones. They are everywhere, and a person can grow so accustomed to seeing them that he begins to forget they are there. Don’t forget. [...] Every time you leave the house, make three or four sandwiches and put them in your pocket. Every time you see a hungry person, give him a sandwich. Stock up on cigarettes as well. (Double 241-242)

And the final assignment for Calle, called “Cultivating a Spot,” reads as follows: Pick one spot in the city and begin to think of it as yours. [...] Take on this place as your responsibility. Keep it clean. Beautify it. [...] Go to your spot every day at the same time. Spend an hour watching everything that happens to it, keeping track of everyone who passes by or stops or does anything there. Take notes, take photographs. (Double 242)

Auster closed his New York City operating manual with the following remarks: “Smile at the people who come there. Whenever possible, talk to them. If you can’t think of anything to say, begin talking about the weather” (Double 243). Auster thus stressed the importance of nonverbal communication in interpersonal relations once again, while on the other hand, introduced the topic of the weather to the game. The weather plays an important role In the Country of Last Things, as Anna explains its copulative function for the inhabitants of the city: What it boils down to mostly, I think, is pure luck. The sky is ruled by chance, by forces so complex and obscure that no one can fully explain it. If you happen to get wet in the rain, you are unlucky, and that’s all there is to it. If you happen to stay dry, then so much the better. But it has nothing to do with your attitudes or your beliefs. The rain makes no distinctions. At one time or another, it falls on everyone, and when it falls, everyone is equal to everyone else – no one better, no one worse, everyone equal and the same. (Country 27)

The weather is the great “equalizer”84 as the last democratic factor in a city where the social and economic differences are so dramatic. Talking about the weather becomes a democratic process in itself and allows people to abandon the forces of their social 84 This is Auster’s own term in “Gotham Handbook” (cf. Double 240).

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roles and communicate on equal footing with each other, at least for a short time. Auster’s weather exercise enabled Calle to converse with people and level the playing field. Auster admitted that his instructions are essentially banal,85 and with regard to Calle, whose public role is otherwise that of the aloof artist, downright ironic, as Lavin described. Yet Lavin added that “the instructions are also disturbing, as if Auster sought to defang his femme fatale [Calle] by giving her a have-a-niceday smile” (“Imitation” 35). This “American smile,” which many Europeans typically perceive as phony or superficial does appear misplaced on the lips of the cool Parisian artist. As Dennis Baron observed, Jean Baudrillard wrote about this distinct American smile as “the equivalent of the prismal scream of the man alone in the world” (Beyond 9). Calle also did not hide her antipathy for certain American manners, which she described as artificial: “When I sleep in a hotel, I even deny myself breakfast in bed, one of my great pleasures, phobic beforehand of the dreadful image of a waiter bending over my bed with his tray, spewing out this obscenity with a smile: ‘Enjo-o-o-oy…’” (Double 246). Thus, even before she entered the streets with Auster’s instructions in her pocket, Calle speculated laconically: I wonder if Paul got his idea for these instructions concerning ways of making life in New York more beautiful by reading the twelve steps of an Alcoholics Anonymous program, or whether he based them on a community service order. Anyway, I have a duty to obey. That was the agreement. If I fulfill this assignment maybe he will offer me the novel that I have been asking for as a reward. (Double 246)

Lavin added to Calle’s sarcastic criticism: “But Calle, of course, returns [Auster’s] irony full force, documenting her complaints about smiling and handing out food” (“Imitation” 35). While nagging, Calle still followed the established rules of the game dutifully, yet from the beginning, she also started to appropriate the project by adjusting the rules and expanding the laws of the game in her own manner. “Paul didn’t ask me to count the smiles I give. Unquestionably an oversight. I add this item to the Handbook” (Double 246). Calle declared a public telephone booth on the corner of Greenwich and Harrison Streets to be the location of the project. It was this booth for which she took private responsibility for the duration of the extended performance. This is an excellent choice for “Gotham Handbook,” which focuses primarily on communication and interaction between strangers. In a public phone booth, private conversations are visible to all and partially even audible to some. Despite the shelter of the space,

85 In a letter to Calle, which is reproduced along with the manuscript for “Gotham Handbook” in Double Game, Auster apologetically wrote on March 6, 1994: “I hope you’re not too disappointed by the ‘lightness’ of what I’ve proposed” (Double 237).

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which protects against monitoring, a phone booth provides little privacy and almost no comfort. Even though Calle obeyed Auster’s rule to turn a public room into a private one, she expanded his requirements by drawing our attention to a semi-private site, which should ideally be protected from passersby. In collaboration with Calle, viewers instead become voyeurs and eavesdroppers, who watch and even listen in on the private conversations of strangers. This intrusion of the public into the private realm and vice versa once again calls to mind Auster’s novel In the Country Last Things, which “constantly confronts one with the intersection of private and public spaces, as [Anna Blume’s] urban experience allows public space to become the stage for private experience, and private spaces to be unfolded onto public spaces,” as Wood explained (“Looking” 108-109). “Gotham Handbook” challenged Calle in unfamiliar ways. She was confronted with total strangers on public ground. In contrast to most of her previous projects, for which she self-determinedly chose mostly single “teammates,” here she exposed herself to crowds of people as a center of public attention. On her first day, she spent an hour listening to two phone calls in her booth and decided to wiretap the line in the next days or, at least, to stop the time of the calls. She spent the evening attempting to involve people in conversations by smiling and distributing foods. After a few failed attempts, an older man approached her, smiled and commented on the bright weather. Calle speculated ironically: “Maybe another disciple of Paul’s Gotham Handbook” (Double 251). At five p.m., Calle packed up her work and said: “I decide to call it a day, however poor the results. Fifteen smiles given, eight or nine received. Two sandwiches accepted. About fifteen minutes of conversation” (Double 251). Later, Calle visited a store for espionage equipment to get information on wiretapping public telephones. The salesclerk recommended a small microphone for listening in on conversations from a distance. Referring to her earlier projects of spying and pursuing – and thus commenting on her passionate curiosity as one of her authorial drives – Calle reasoned against such a device in her hands: “Given my natural inclinations, it would not be a good thing for me to possess such an object. Who knows what use I might put it to on more private occasions. I must not risk it” (Double 252). The bugging device denotes the boundaries of the spying game, which must not be trespassed, not even by Calle who, according to some people, has previously transgressed that line.86 Instead, Calle bought a small cassette recorder,

86 For example in her project “The Address Book” (1983), in which she tried to create a man’s profile, whose address book she had found, by interviewing his friends and acquaintances. “The Address Book” was first published sequentially in 28 articles in the French daily newspaper Libération. When the owner of the address book, a documentary filmmaker called Pierre Baudry, found out about Calle’s project, he threatened to sue her and

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which she installed below the telephone to tape some of the conversations. Well aware of the risks of intercepting telephone calls in a public telephone booth, her curiosity took over, though she hid her fear of detection behind black humor: “Two years of prison for wire tapping a public phone they said. I have a fantasy: I am arrested, I stand before the judge. He proposes an alternative punishment: smile, distribute food, and talk to people. I say: ‘No! I prefer jail!’” (Double 252). Calle’s play instinct has made her gamble with dubious methods, which she tried to justify with her insatiable curiosity: It excites me to know what I must not know, I like to meet people whom I have never seen before, […] and I want to possess this apparently insignificant information about them that only their partners command, such as whether they snore while sleeping, or whether they sleep without a pillow. Thus, nothing sensational, yet such everyday particulars are of interest to me. (My translation)87

Calle went very far in exploring these tendencies, especially considering today’s heightened awareness of government and corporate surveillance of data.88 Her course of action points to the double-edged possibilities of technological communication systems. At the same time, the taped telephone calls illustrate the limits of what we can learn about people from their conversations in a public phone booth, as the following outtake from one such conversation exemplifies: “Call #2: ‘It’s Sonya... Just stay there. I’ll come to you… Don’t move, just stay there. I’ll come to you.’ Twenty-five seconds” (Double 254). The ordinariness and triviality of this recording is blatantly clear. And, even though Calle never directly connected her calls with photographs of the people on the line, her acts leave us uneasy, especially because we are implicated as accomplices in eavesdropping on private telephone calls. In the final analysis, Calle forced her viewers to emphathize with the unsuspecting people whose conversations were recorded without their knowledge.

demanded that a nude photograph of Calle was printed in Libération as retaliation for the intrusion of his privacy. Today The Address Book is published with Siglio (2012). 87 The original reads: “Es reizt mich zu wissen, was ich nicht wissen dürfte, ich treffe gerne Menschen, die ich nie vorher gesehen habe, [...] und ich möchte gerne jene scheinbar unbedeutenden Informationen über sie haben, über die nur ihre Partner verfügen, also ob sie etwas beim Schlafen schnarchen oder ob sie ohne Kopfkissen schlafen. Also nichts Sensationelles, sondern mich interessieren solche alltäglichen Einzelheiten” (in: Romano, “Exotische” 56). 88 This debate has even further intensified since Edward Snowden’s uncovering of the NSA’s spying action, but it has been going on ever since surveillance techniques became available.

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Calle engaged not only with people over the telephone but also in the streets, where she focused on direct interaction with individuals, documenting their reactions towards her. On her daily one hour visits to her telephone booth, she beautified the spot with flowers, cigarettes, drinks, and snacks and on the third day, laid out a Fig. 31: Sophie Calle, Gotham Handbook

“Gotham Handbook” (detail), 1994/2000. © Sophie Calle / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2015.

“comment sheet,” on which “visitors” could leave comments, complaints, and suggestions for improvement. The guestbook is yet another effective instrument of communication in “Gotham Handbook” and was quickly filled. It documents the diverse opinions and irritations that Calle’s installation aroused, most of which are positive: Missing brush, comb, lipstick, and cologne; Leave some quarters; I think it’s cool; Està muy chévere Fedex; It’s great, Love it – Maria M; Fabulous concept; Great scheme; Great, except cigarettes kill – Stone; I think whoever did this is a fucking dick-head and probably has no job; Get a life you stupid bitch. DAVE; Dave is an asshole; Cool man I like this a lot keep it up – Love, Jaz; Who the fuck put this faggot bullshit here?; More cigs; I love it; Who would eat this? (Double 264)

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The written comments are very direct, some even offensive. They were new in Calle’s work since she never before exposed herself to the unfiltered opinions of public viewers. In direct contact with people, offering smiles, sandwiches, and cigarettes, Calle experienced pushback from some visitors. Her frustration showed partially, for example when she interrupted a conversation abruptly,89 received a rude response to her offerings,90 or when she dryly commented on a brief encounter: “Fast and easy. All requirements met” (Double 291). Lavin evaluated her attitude as follows: The reader realizes that Calle’s obsessive inventorying of personal effects seems more comfortably about representation when aimed at a fellow bourgeois; there is less ‘discreet charm’ in recording, again in museum-catalogue style, what type of sandwich is given to a street person. These sandwiches are not merely signs of a lifestyle; they are food. (“Imitation” 35)

Lavin’s critique is noteworthy. Despite all attempts to engage in immediate communication, Calle remained cool and distant from her fellow human beings. Direct contact, especially with socially disadvantaged people, was uncomfortable for her. Calle listened to some intimate, even some wild life stories, but revealed very little about herself. The conversations, therefore, remained mostly one sided and one dimensional. On the other hand, Calle’s distant manner seems appropriate for her author role as the “objective” observer and documentarian of human characteristics and behaviors. Through her combination of distance and openness, her descriptions gain authenticity. It is neither easy nor comfortable to smile at people without reason or to offer snacks to strangers in a city like New York, actions that could be perceived as intrusive as several instances in “Gotham Handbook” make clear. Calle never romanticized her assignment but rather openly and fearlessly showed her antipathy towards this well-intentioned intervention into other people’s lives. She described the costs of her efforts to play out Auster’s assignment, yet never utilized the situation to present herself as a do-gooder. Instead, she struggled to reach a fair observation of the situations she created, stating: “The psychology of interpersonal relations are the

89 Cf. Calle: “I remember Paul’s words: ‘Try to keep these conversations going as long as you can,’ but they have no effect on me. I decide to disobey: I cut him off and leave” (Double 285). 90 Cf. Calle: “Third refusal from a man who at first sight appears to fulfill a number of the conditions: torn pants, dirty hands, sitting on the steps of a building. I ask if he wants a sandwich and he barks, ‘Do I look like I need one?’” (Double 291).

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Fig. 32: Sophie Calle, Gotham Handbook

“Gotham Handbook” (detail), 1994/2000. © Sophie Calle / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2015.

content of all of my works” (my translation).91 This is equally the case in “Gotham Handbook,” in which she observed and documented precisely these interpersonal relationships between strangers on the streets of New York. In the exchange with Auster, Calle succeeded in creating “a social situation that forced others to crack the wall of their indifference,” as Yve-Alain Bois argued (“Character” 131). Calle managed to get people to smile or even talk to her. She snatched them away from their daily routines, creating brief moments of interaction between strangers, people of different social backgrounds, who otherwise would rarely connect in a large city like New York. As Jean-Ernest Joos astutely noted: These projects may not deal directly with community, but they do help us to understand what links the three terms: circulation, relation and heterogeneity. When she distributes smiles, cigarettes and sandwiches in the streets of New York, in chance and often strained encounters,

91 The original reads: “Die Psychologie zwischenmenschlicher Beziehungen ist der Inhalt all meiner Arbeiten” (in: Heinrich, Geschichten 6).

260 | P ERFORMING A UTHORSHIP Calle demonstrates that the contingency of the other, rather than constituting an obstacle to a relation, can actually generate it. (“Community” 51)

Ultimately, Calle’s and Auster’s collaborative double game in “Gotham Handbook” is about how individuals in a city confront their fellow residents, and how the resulting encounters can appear strange, at first. The project generates interpersonal situations through all kinds of communications, from a simple smile to conversations. Calle performed this human interplay in a public telephone booth,92 a brilliant choice of location that enabled her to convey the symbolic significance of “Gotham Handbook,” since the telephone is a symbol par excellence of modern communication and human interaction. Tree of Codes “For years,” Jonathan Safran Foer wrote in his “Author’s Afterword” for Tree of Codes (2010), “I had wanted to create a die-cut book by erasure, whose meaning was exhumed from another book” (Tree 138). For him, die-cutting seemed to be the “perfect interface or perfect intersection of the visual arts and literature,” 93 as he explained in a short video sequence on the publisher’s website. Foer tried the erasure technique of perforation with dictionaries, encyclopedias, phone books, various works of fiction and nonfiction, as well as with his own novels. All these attempts failed because they “would have been an exercise” only, and because he sought something more: “I was in search of a text whose erasure would somehow be a continuation of its creation” (Tree 138). He eventually found this text in Bruno Schulz’s shortstory collection The Street of Crocodiles (1934), which is Foer’s “answer to the impossible-to-answer question: What is your favorite book?” (Tree 138). As discussed in my chapter “Stage Names,” Schulz, a distinguished Jewish writer and artist from the Polish city of Drohobycz (today’s Drohobych, Ukraine), was forced in the 1940s to draw murals on the walls of the child’s playroom of Gestapo officer Felix Landau. Schulz was shot in November 1942 by another Gestapo officer, Karl Günther, in revenge for Landau’s killing of “[his] Jew,” as Günther reportedly shouted (Schulz, Street vii). “All that we have of his fiction,” Foer wrote in his afterword, “are two slim story collections, The Street of Crocodiles and Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass. On the basis of these, Schulz is

92 In times of cell and smart phones and ongoing privatization of public space though, “Gotham Handbook” would certainly be a different story today, an interesting consideration that unfortunately goes far beyond the scope of my project. 93 See Visual Editions’s website: http://www.visual-editions.com/our-books/tree-of-codes. Also see YouTube: http://youtu.be/dsW3Y7EmTlo.

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considered one of the most important artists of the 20th Century” (Tree 137). Foer’s die-cut book could not merely be a telephone book or an encyclopedia, as such an “outrageous” project necessitated an encounter with the artwork/text of an historical author with whom Foer could engage and from whom he could distance himself. Bruno Schulz turned out to be the perfect author for Foer. Foer’s project has many precedents. In the 1920s, the Dadaists in Tristan Tzara’s circle experimented with cut, torn, and folded papers in their works. In English literature, Ezra Pound’s extensive cuts94 influenced T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, as Marjorie Perloff explained in her book Unoriginal Genius: Poetry by Other Means in the New Century (2010). Brion Gysin and William S. Burroughs rediscovered the collage method in the late 1950s for their poetry collection Minutes to Go (1960).95 In his essay “The Cut-Up Method of Brion Gysin” (1960), Burroughs performed the cut-up technique by using an Arthur Rimbaud poem 96 and later demonstrated the method with his own text: “Now here are the preceding two paragraphs cut into four sections and rearranged: ALL WRITING IS IN FACT CUT-UPS OF GAMES AND ECONOMIC BEHAVIOR OVERHEARD? WHAT ELSE?” 97 In this sense, all writing constitutes a game in which all authors and readers plays. Perloff argued that poets of the early twenty first century have turned from the original resistance model of the 1980s to dialogue: “[A] dialogue with earlier texts or texts in other media, with ‘writings through’ or ekphrases that permit the poet to participate in a larger, more public discourse. Inventio is giving way to appropriation, elaborate constraint, visual and sound composition, and reliance on intertextuality” (Unoriginal 11). Collages, cut-ups, and fold-ins offer ways to incorporate chance, novel juxtapositions, and to humbly acknowledge that words and images “are for everyone,” as Burroughs frequently quoted Tzara. Words are not “the poet’s own words,” as Perloff rephrased

94 Perloff, Unoriginal 3. 95 Cf. Conrad Knickerbocker’s interview with Burroughs, “The Art of Fiction,” in: The Paris Review, 35 (Fall 1965) and Oliver Harris, “‘Burroughs Is a Poet Too, Really’: The Poetics of Minutes to Go,” in: The Edinburgh Review, Vol. 114 (2005), 24-36. 96 Cf. Burroughs’s “The Cut-Up Method of Brion Gysin” (1960) and his cut-up version of Rimbaud’s poem: “Visit of memories. Only your dance and your voice house. On the suburban air improbable desertions ... all harmonic pine for strife. The great skies are open. Candor of vapor and tent spitting blood laugh and drunken penance. Promenade of wine perfume opens slow bottle. The great skies are open. Supreme bugle burning flesh children to mist” (“Cut-Up Method” s.p.). 97 Cf. Burroughs’s “Cut-Up Method,” s.p. Also in: The Beat Book: Writings from the Beat Generation, ed. by Anne Waldman, with a foreword by Allen Ginsberg, Boston: Shambhala Publications, 1996, 182-185.

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Edgell Rickword’s 1923 critique of The Waste Land (Unoriginal 3). The close examination of another person’s work, by rearranging and/or selecting parts of it for your own work, is the highest form of homage as well as a way to one up or outdo one’s predecessor. To worship the “master” and to surpass her with her own material, challenges myths of originality and the singular authority of the individual genius. The erasure techniques of collage, cut-up, and die-cut were first introduced by visual artists and appropriated by writers, as Burroughs affirmed: “The cut-up method brings to writers the collage, which has been used by painters for fifty years.”98 Another visual precursor of Foer’s die-cut book is Robert Rauschenberg’s “erased” drawing by Willem de Kooning. In 1953, Rauschenberg asked de Kooning to give him one of his drawings to erase. As Foer did, “Rauschenberg first tried erasing his own drawings but ultimately decides that in order for the experiment to succeed he has to begin with an artwork that was undeniably significant in its own right,”99 as the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA), which owns the drawing, states on its website. For Rauschenberg to create an artwork through erasure, he had to start with a true work of art. While de Kooning hesitated at first, he then carefully selected a valuable drawing that was difficult to erase, as Mark Stevens and Annalyn Swan discussed: ‘No,’ he said at last, ‘I want it to be very hard to erase.’ He brought over a third portfolio. Finally he selected an important, fleshy drawing for sacrifice – a dense mixed-media image that contained, Rauschenberg said, ‘charcoal, lead, everything. It took me two months and even then it wasn’t completely erased. I wore out a lot of erasers.’ (de Kooning 260)

“Erased de Kooning Drawing Robert Rauschenberg 1953” 100 is the outcome of Rauschenberg’s intensive engagement with de Kooning’s legacy; a palimpsest surface from which much “text” was erased and onto which abrasive marks were added. Rauschenberg also added to the drawing a plain gilded frame and the title “Erased de Kooning Drawing Robert Rauschenberg 1953,” a caption coined by Rauschenberg’s friend Jasper Johns, which was permanently applied beneath the drawing.101 As is argued on the museum’s website,

98

Cf. “Cut-Up Method” s.p.

99

Cf SFMOMA’s website: http://www.sfmoma.org/explore/collection/artwork/25846.

100

Rauschenberg, “Erased de Kooning Drawing Robert Rauschenberg 1953.” Traces of drawing media on paper with label and gilded frame, 25 1/4 x 21 3/4 x 1/2 in. (64.14 x 55.25 x 1.27 cm), San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, since 1998.

101

Cf. SFMOMA’s website: “After Rauschenberg completed the laborious erasure, he and fellow artist Jasper Johns (b. 1930) devised a scheme for labeling, matting, and framing

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[t]he simple, gilded frame and understated inscription are integral parts of the finished artwork, offering the sole indication of the psychologically loaded act central to its creation. Without the inscription, we would have no idea what is in the frame; the piece would be indecipherable.102

Adding something to an artwork to call attention to that which has been removed from it, paradoxically, enabled Rauschenberg to create new meaning through erasure. Rauschenberg performed appropriation through erasure. His artwork is an example of direct collaborative authorship between de Kooning, Rauschenberg, and Johns, making visible the different processes of drawing, erasing, and inscribing that are enacted in one single text. These processes link Rauschenberg’s (real) teamwork with de Kooning and Johns to Foer’s (imaginary) collaboration with Schulz. In The Street of Crocodiles, Schulz assembled thirteen short stories told from the perspective of a young boy around the age of ten.103 N. Katherine Hayles discovered in her rewarding essay “Combining Close and Distant Reading: Jonathan Safran Foer’s Tree of Codes and the Aesthetic of Bookishness” (2013), through a “word-byword comparison of Schulz’s text with Foer’s” that “the erasures are extreme. Schulz’s translated text contains 37,483 words, Foer’s 3,815, so about nine out of ten words have been eliminated” (“Combining” 227). 104 What readers hold in their hands, therefore, is an astonishingly lightweight book of about 120 pages that “presents pages with die-cut holes so extensive that the pages resemble lace,” as Hayles accurately described (“Combining” 227). When turning the first page, readers look straight into the bowels of the book’s body, as holes offer views onto words or word-fragments. This kind of text is what Perloff termed “conceptual poetry,” which is “drawn from a variety of source texts, high and low, as well as by the use of visual layout on page or screen, used to defamiliarize poetic material” (Unoriginal 21). The symbol of the white page, signifying the potential of the creative process of writing, is today associated with a dated understanding of the author as the single authority over her text. The “empty page” is no longer white or even empty but rather wildly colored and crowded with preexisting stories. The contemporary writer, not unlike

the work, with Johns inscribing the following words below the now-obliterated de Kooning drawing,” http://www.sfmoma.org/explore/collection/artwork/25846. 102

See SFMOMA’s website: http://www.sfmoma.org/explore/collection/artwork/25846.

103

A perspective that Foer also chose for his novel Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (2005), which is narrated by the nine-year-old Oskar Schell, whose father, Thomas Schell, died in the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center on 9/11, 2001.

104

Hayles’s word-by-word comparison, “achieved by digitizing both texts,” will be very rewarding for future interpretations of Tree of Codes (“Combining” 227). My own interpretation of Schulz’s and Foer’s imaginary collaboration benefits from her accuracy.

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the Renaissance artist Michelangelo, who believed the task of the sculptor was to uncover the figures that already inhabited the stone from which he worked, finds or reveals her stories from the textual universe that already exists in the pantheon of literature. One could describe the author’s occupation as such: she must unwrap the stories that are already there, cutting them out from all the other texts that surround them. This sculptural process is made beautifully visible in Foer’s Tree of Codes, in which the paper of The Street of Crocodiles is literarily chopped and carved, establishing a close material relationship between paper and wood. Like a woodcutter, Foer’s chopped into the “tree trunk” of Schulz’s book. This reverberates in Foer’s three-page foreword to the 2008 Penguin edition of Celina Wieniewska’s translation of Schulz’s The Street of Crocodiles, in which he foreshadowed his later die-cut project. Foer wrote: “‘A book must be an ice-axe to break the seas frozen inside of us,’ Kafka famously wrote. Schulz’s two slim books are the sharpest axes I’ve ever come across. I encourage you to split the chopping block using them” (Street ix-x). Accordingly, Foer literarily chopped Schulz’s book with its own axe to break the frozen seas inside himself. The making of Foer’s soft sculpture from paper is, therefore, a highly collaborative (and also aesthetic) endeavor, as a video on the publisher’s website clearly shows.105 The video displays in three minutes what took Foer three months to do, with meticulous handcraft that involved many people who drafted, cut, taped, hammered, sorted, stapled, weight, and bound the pages that became Tree of Codes. The process of creating the book, with the use of special computer technologies, printing machines and plates, and a die-cutting system, demonstrates the collaborative effort required of book printing and brings to mind its long and complex artistic tradition. The making of a book has always been a matter of teamwork. Curiously, when readers turn the first page of Foer’s paper sculpture Tree of Codes, they find an entirely blank page, without a title or information on what they are looking at. Were it not for Foer’s three-page afterword and a short thank you note on the imprint, 106 uninformed readers would be totally clueless about the formation and meaning of this text-within-a-text, or rather text-out-of-a-text. Schulz’s short story collection, as the “original source” of Foer’s book, is not even mentioned on the book’s back cover, let alone on the frontispiece. The individual

105

See Visual Editions’s website: http://www.visual-editions.com/our-books/tree-of-codes. And YouTube: https://youtu.be/r0GcB0PYKjY.

106

The note reads: “We are grateful to Marek Podstolski, on behalf of the Estate of Bruno Schulz, for giving Visual Editions his blessing to allow the author to work with The Street of Crocodiles for Tree of Codes” (Tree Imprint). Hayles argued that it was a particularly “strong endorsement (not merely permission but a ‘blessing’)” (“Combining” 229).

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Fig. 33: Jonathan Safran Foer, Tree of Codes

Tree of Codes, 2010.

titles of the thirteen short stories are also omitted. What was separated into parts in Schulz’s text becomes one corpus in Foer’s appropriation. Readers are deprived of the organizing principle of titles and subtitles, left with no means to approach the text. They must therefore dig deep into the book to find out how Tree of Codes grew out of The Street of Crocodiles. Readers are challenged to simulate Foer’s process of recreation, which he described on the publisher’s website as trying “to find a story within [Schulz’s] stories.” 107 Readers are urged to find the story in the void that echoes Schulz’s stories. This is akin to the Chinese box structure (previously mentioned in Paul Auster’s aesthetics), in how it contains a story within a story ad infinitum.

107

See Visual Editions’s website: http://www.visual-editions.com/our-books/tree-of-codes.

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Yet what makes Tree of Codes an (imaginary) collaboration between the two authors? First, we must take into account Foer’s intense physical and intellectual engagement with Schulz’s work. In his foreword to The Street of Crocodiles, Foer revealed his passion for and knowledge of Schulz’s life and work. Therein, Foer offered a possible method to grasp Schulz’s work: to read it like an archeologist excavating the physical artifacts beneath layers of earth. Foer retold the story of the 2001 rediscovery of Schulz’s murals in the former house of Gestapo officer Landau, as documented108 by filmmaker Benjamin Geissler: “Geissler rubbed at one of the walls with the butt of his palm,” Foer described, “and colors surfaced. He rubbed more, and forms were released. He rubbed more, like doing the rubbing of a grave, and could make out figures: fairies and nymphs, mushrooms, animals, and royalty” (Streets viii). Foer further argued that our lives happen on the surface of things: on the paint of our walls, on the clothes covering our skins, and on the papers in our wallets, while “[w]e read stories printed on even thinner paper” (Street ix). In Tree of Codes, Foer thus kept one key sentence of the narrator in The Street of Crocodiles, which illustrates his earlier argument well: “Reality is as thin as paper.”109 “In Foer the remark takes on a different double meaning,” Hayles argued, “the pages as material artifacts participate in creating flimsy surfaces that nevertheless achieve remarkable depth through multilayered holes revealing words behind” (“Combining” 231). For Foer, the crucial question as to why we read stories is answered with the uncovering of surfaces: “Stories rub at the facts of our lives. They give us access – if only for a few hours, if only in bed at the end of the day – to what’s beneath” (Street ix). Challenged by the sharpness of Schulz’s writing, Foer had intense physical experiences while reading The Street of Crocodiles: “The fingers of his words rubbed (or scraped or clawed, shoveled, or ripped)” he wrote (Street ix). In return, a similar corporeal act is performed on Schulz’s body of work when Foer physically clawed into the book’s pages and cut out words, phrases, and entire paragraphs. After all,

108

http://www.benjamingeissler.de/Bilder_finden-Teaser-Freilegung/Teaser-BF-DT.html and an Arte documentary film from 2012: http://www.arte.tv/de/ein-maerchenwald-alsdokument-der-shoah/7066546.html. Both films are in German, but first impressions of Schulz’s excavated murals are possible. The murals were later removed from the walls by the staff of Yad Vashem. Foer explained: “Yad Vashem, Israel’s holocaust museum, came to the apartment and, depending on how one sees things, either stole or rescued them. […] in Jerusalem there is a wall, under whose surface is an unfinished fairy tale, painted sixty years before and a continent away by the Jewish writer Bruno Schulz, for the pleasure of his captor’s child” (Schulz, Streets viii).

109

See page 67 in The Street of Crocodiles and page 92 in Tree of Codes.

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“print books have bodies” as Hayles insisted (“Combining” 226). 110 Just as de Kooning’s drawing was “destroyed” to create and subsequently coexist with Rauchenberg’s artwork, Schulz’s book was “mutilated” in order to give birth to Foer’s text. We must bear in mind, though, that the de(con)struction of de Kooning’s and Schulz’s works, recognizes these artworks as deeply meaningful. Each double work shares one altered body, named “Erased de Kooning Drawing” and Tree of Codes, respectively. In Foer’s case, this is evident in his book’s title, for even “tree of codes” is formed out of “Street of Crocodiles” (cf. Hayles, “Combining” 230). This fact highlights the performative act as a means to crack the code of Foer’s text. The two words “tree” and “codes” are likely passwords for decoding the overall meaning of his text. The word tree prefigures the actual tree of which any paper book is made, hinting at a metamorphosis that occurred prior to Foer’s transformation. The tree stands for “Darwin’s evolutionary tree” 111 and, as I argue, for the familial, genealogical tree in which Foer inserted himself through appropriation. By planting his text, his sapling, in the soil of Schulz’s text, Foer permanently inscribed his name in the lineage of Schulz thereby acknowledging his authorial forebear. Instead of following the Deleuzian trajectory of the entwined network of “roots,” of the rhizome, Foer emphasized the more common tree metaphor of a linear, progressional, and hierarchical genealogy. The other significant word of Foer’s title, codes, stands for the second impulse of any authorial homage: the urge to outdo one’s predecessors with one’s own interpretation and aesthetic vision. In order to read a text, readers not only have to decipher codes, but also develop their own individual codes. This circumstance makes any reading experience unique. Tree of Codes reveals Foer’s own personal access code to Schulz’s The Street of Crocodiles. Foer’s thinking process is traceable in parts of the book, evident in his extensive omissions and particular accentuations. As Burroughs explained: “Shakespeare Rimbaud live in their words. Cut the word lines and you will hear their voices. Cut-ups often come through as code messages with special meaning for the cutter.” 112 Tree of Codes embodies Foer’s coded message, the deconstruction of which reveals the special meaning of The Street of Crocodiles. As noted earlier, Foer compared the uncovering of Schulz’s murals to gravestone rubbing – a common practice among genealogists who seek to retrieve

110

Hayles further argued for the need of a “reader-response theory that takes the mind-body fully into account” for “Foer’s text and dozens like it initiate complex coordination between bodily responses evoked by scenes of representation and physical actions required to read the text” (“Combining” 231).

111

Cf. Hayles, “Combining” 230.

112

Cf. “Cut-Up Method” s.p.

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and preserve historical information and among mourners who seek keepsakes from their loved ones. Foer linked the writing of Tree of Codes to the rubbing of a grave, seeking an exhumation of meaning.113 Foer recounted that “[o]ften, while working on this book, I had the strong sensation that The Street of Crocodiles must have, itself, been the product of a similar act of exhumation” (Tree 139). Foer imagined another book, a book behind the book, which he called The Book of Life or simply the Book. The Book of Life, in Christianity as well as in Judaism, is the book in which God recorded the names of every person who is destined for Heaven or the World to Come. Foer noted that “[i]t is from this imagined larger book, this ultimate book, that every word ever written, spoken or thought is exhumed” (Tree 139). To him “The Street of Crocodiles is not that book – not the Book – but it is one level of exhumation closer than any other book I know of” (Tree 139), as Foer concluded his afterword. Foer’s approach parallels Schulz’s own aesthetic epistemology, as evident in his short essay “The Mythologization of Reality,”114 in which he wrote that “[w]hen we employ commonplace words, we forget that they are fragments of ancient and eternal stories, that, like barbarians, we are building our homes out of fragments of sculptures and the statues of the gods” (“Mythologization” s.p.). Foer created Tree of Codes as such a sculpture of fragments. Or, as artist Olafur Eliasson wrote on the book’s back cover, “Jonathan Safran Foer deftly deploys sculptural means to craft a truly compelling story. […] a book that remembers it actually has a body” (Tree back), and as I would add, a book that remembers that it grew out of another body. Tree of Codes is thus a graceful commemoration of Schulz’s legacy and, at the same time, a re-creation of a corporeal, personal heirloom. Furthermore, Foer demonstrated how well authorial games of collaboration are performed in order to make the most interesting and creative art of our time.115

113

Cf. Foer: “At times I felt that I was making a gravestone rubbing of The Street of Crocodiles” and “For years I wanted to create a die-cut book by erasure, a book whose meaning was exhumed from another book” (Tree 138, 139).

114

Schulz’s text, translated by John M. Bates, can be accessed in Polish and English at http://info-poland.buffalo.edu/web/arts_culture/literature/fiction/schulz/reality.html. The text can also be found in: Bruno Schulz and Jerzy Ficowski, Letters and Drawings of Bruno Schulz, translated by Walter Arndt and Victoria Nelson, New York: Harper & Row, 1988, 115-116.

115

Cf. Susan Sontag, Against 295.

Conclusion

As I have shown throughout this book, Candice Breitz, Jonathan Safran Foer, Sophie Calle, and Paul Auster are performative authors who have, individually and collaboratively, produced significant works in their own ways. I chose these four different authors for my analysis because each of them has displayed immense openness to the vast possibilities of performative authorship. They have all been invested in questions of authorial identity formation. Cleverly and playfully, they have all deconstructed their own author personae to reinvent new versions of themselves as authors. While the older Calle and Auster have developed and refined their author personae over decades, through different performative means ranging from auto/biography and self/portrait to diverse collaborations, their successors, Breitz and Foer, have been even more determined from the outset to energetically shape the “no one” whom we call author. I believe that the younger generation of authors possesses a heightened awareness of the importance of their authorial performances in the larger field of cultural production. At young ages, Foer and Breitz internalized the compelling promises of performance in authorship. In their respective strategies, they are even more tactical than Auster and Calle, whose seemingly naive beginnings reveal trial-and-error quests for authorial identity formation. After Auster had written and translated poetry for one and a half decades, in 1982 he published his auto/biography The Invention of Solitude. Yet by 1987, by the time he published The New York Trilogy, Auster was still an unknown, struggling author. Thus, at the time of his first appreciable success, Auster was forty years old and had been an author for more than twenty years. Similarly, while Calle’s first artworks date to 1979, it took the art world more than a decade to recognize her significance and to include her in solo exhibitions and major group shows in such venues as the Fridericianum, Kassel (2000), the Centre Pompidou, Paris (2003), the Martin Gropius Bau, Berlin (2004), and the Venice Biennale (2007). By that time, Calle too was in her forties. Calle and Auster have tentatively approached their author selves over the decades, while their younger counterparts have swiftly and boldly invented and reinvented their author personae from the beginning of their careers. In this regard, Calle’s and Auster’s career paths are clearly different from Breitz’s and Foer’s professional trajectories. Foer was only in his mid-twenties when his first

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novel Everything Is Illuminated (2002) became a major, international success and when it was turned into a movie, directed by Liev Schreiber, in 2005. Breitz was only in her early thirties when her carrer breakthrough came at the beginning of the nineties. During this decade, Breitz made herself a meaningful name in the global art world, as evidenced by solo exhibitions of her work that were mounted at such prestigious institutions as the New Museum, New York (2000), the Museum Folkwang, Essen (2002), and the Kunsthaus Bregenz, Austria (2010). Younger and more purposeful in their approaches than Calle and Auster, Breitz and Foer created works early on that displayed their conscious awareness of authorial strategies of self-invention and their savvy knowledge of the value of performative authorship for both peer recognition and box-office success. I would not go so far as to describe them as cold-hearted or calculating, however, as they are both earnest authors who are committed to their repective vocations. And, we must remember that while they have played well the game of art in the field of cultural production, mastering a few decisive rules, as I showed in my chapter “Playing,” ‘no one’ author is able to manipulate the whole playing field on a grand scale. Authors cannot completely avoid significant established rules or “cheat” their way through the game. Still, it is important to remember that Breitz and Foer are well trained and highly educated, even more than Calle and Auster, possessing a deep understanding and knowledge of the histories of art, literature, and critical theory. Foer, as noted earlier, was educated in the creative writing program at Princeton University, where he took an introductory writing course with Joyce Carol Oates, who encouraged him in his writing. “It was a revelation,” Foer said. “It had never occurred to me that there was such a thing as ‘my writing.’ I thought the thing I was doing was just fulfilling the assignments” (in: Nash, “Learning” s.p.). His undergraduate thesis, written under Oates’s tutelage, was an early version of his first novel,1 which won the freshman, sophomore, junior, and senior creative writing thesis prizes.2 Breitz, for her part, was educated in fine art and art history at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, and at the University of Chicago. She was a doctoral candidate in art history at Columbia University, where she earned her MPhil degree. At the same time, Breitz was a participant in the famous Independent Study Program at the Whitney Museum of American Art, which involved her “in a variety of art practices with an emphasis on installation work, film and video, photography, performance, and various forms of interdisciplinary practice.”3 Both Breitz and Foer, therefore, at

1

Cf. Margo Nash, “Learning to Write from the Masters,” in: The New York Times (Dec 1, 2002).

2

Cf. Robert Birnbaum, “Jonathan Safran Foer,” in: Identity Theory (May 26, 2003).

3

Cf. Whitney Museum website: http://whitney.org/Research/ISP.

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early stages of their careers, were part of highly professional, educational programs that rigorously trained students for careers in the arts.4 Their formative pedagogical experiences differ dramatically from the apprenticeships of Calle and Auster. 5 Calle never took classes at a university. According to one of the mythologies about her life, she claimed to have travelled the world for seven years, which could be described as her vocational training. 6 She is therefore a mostly self-taught artist, who benefitted from exposure to her oncologist father, Robert Calle, a collector of contemporary art and close friend of important artists such as Martial Raysse, Arman, and Christian Boltanski. Early on, Calle connected with well-established artists, engaging in meaningful discourses in the field of cultural production. Auster, on the other hand, received an undergraduate degree in comparative literature from Columbia University, but dropped out of graduate school, after one year, to return to Paris to translate and write for more than three years. Both authors came of age abroad and outside of professional creative writing or studio programs. However, to see Auster’s and Calle’s authorial becomings as “natural” and “organic,” and Foer’s and Breitz’s as “forced” and “simulated,” is too simplistic and does not capture the full complexity of the situation. What my analysis does reveal is that the career paths of many authors today, as compared to those of the previous generation, have been optimized and economized through professionally-oriented creative writing or studio art programs. 7 Even though writers and artists have long approached their vocations as serious professions offering monetary and other rewards,8 in recent times, increasing numbers of external players, such as agents, gallery owners, and consultants, participate in the making of authors. At the same time, according to Ingo Berensmeyer et al., the competitive pressure of the literary and artistic fields has risen “[b]ecause, in modernity, the number of authors is legion, the individual author disappears in a mass of authors. So for whom can one author, not to say the author, still become an event?”

4

Cf. Mark McGurl’s The Program Era (2011).

5

McGurl wrote: “[I]t is the notion that the relation between student and teacher in creative writing is one of apprenticeship rather than of teaching per se – the idea being that a master craftsman communicates her knowledge informally, in daily practice, not by means of systematic presentation tied to a formal syllabus” (Program 35). This concept reminds of the artists’s workshops of the Renaissance, where apprentices oftentimes performed the tasks of their masters.

6

Cf. Barbara Heinrich, Geschichten 6.

7

Creative writing programs have been criticized, see for example: Louis Menand, “Show or Tell. Should creative writing be taught?” in: The New Yorker (June 8, 2009).

8

Ingo Berensmeyer et al. wrote about “a professionalization of [the author] job” at least since the nineteenth century (“Authorship” 19).

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(“Authorship” 17). Those who are drawn to the arts have thus been forced to compete on an increasingly advanced level and to plan their careers more seriously than ever before. Yet as I showed in my three main chapters “Positioning,” “Staging,” and “Playing, strategies of autorial self-invention have existed for a long time and have not decisively changed. Authors have always worked on their author personae through performative means: the most famous examples from the sixteenth century to the present include such figures as Michel de Montaigne, Jean-Jacque Rousseau, Stéphane Mallarmé to Arthur Rimbaud, Gertrude Stein, Ernest Hemingway, Joseph Beuys, Christian Boltanski, Marina Abramović, Tracey Emin, and Lady Gaga among many others. Performative authors have long practiced forms of appropriation and remix, independently and collaboratively. They have created fictitious autobiographies and truthful mythologies, experimenting with new media and novel forms of expression. Some authors, like Thomas Pynchon, have practiced privately and outside of the public limelight, thereby creating mystery around their author personae. Others, like Björk, have fully embraced the celebrity world by inventing powerfully public authorial selves.9 Yet all authors have performed their authorship in the world-beyond-the-text. Authors, as agents of self-invention, have always had agency in inventing their author personae, as I argued throughout this book. Thereby, the process of becoming an author is performed and perceived as a constant state of being. Becoming an author is the basic state of performative authorship: always becoming. In recent decades, we have thus moved from Roland Barthes’s death of the author to the performative author, who is very conscious of the authorial strategies at her disposal and who makes more public use of them than ever before. Furthermore, in recent decades authorial strategies of self-invention have often become the theme of the artworks themselves. This is exemplified by Auster and Foer, who staged themselves as characters in their novels, by Breitz, who demonstrated identity formation in her self/portraits of twins, and by Calle, who yarned a network of mythologies around her author persona. These performative acts of self-invention have been publicized and made visible for readers and viewers. These authors have therefore universalized their individual authorial strategies, making their works potentially meaningful to all of those who engage with them. Performing authorship, in this sense, becomes a metaphor for our daily performances in life,10 as we apire towards some larger goal or career as students, teachers, mothers, or more fundamentally as human beings.

9

Cf. Björk’s show at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, March 8 to June 7, 2015.

10 Cf. Erving Goffman’s, then innovative, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (1959).

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Acknowledgment

I would like to thank Prof. Dr. Winfried Fluck for his extraordinary support during the “becoming” of this book. I would also like to extend my gratitude to Prof. Dr. Heinz Ickstadt, who assisted me in this project at a critical time. My very special thanks go to Prof. Dr. Laura Katzman, who has supported me professionally since we first met at Hamburg University in 2002; as a friend and advisor, she has provided her knowledge and wisdom to make this book what it is today. I am thankful for my fellow graduate students and the staff of the Graduate School of North American Studies at the John-F.-Kennedy-Institute at the Freie Universität Berlin, especially Gabi Bodmeier and David Bosold. I am particularly thankful for my friends Ahu Tanrisever, Rebecca Brückmann, Ruth Steinhof, and Dietmar Meinel. Last but certainly not least, I am deeply grateful for the boundless support of my family: Thank you Niko, Linus, and Leia!