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eBook details
- Title: Echoes of Sophocles's Antigone in Auster's Invisible (Paul Auster) (Critical Essay)
- Author : CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
- Release Date : January 01, 2011
- Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines,Books,Professional & Technical,Education,
- Pages : * pages
- Size : 87 KB
Description
In Gilles Deleuze's preface to Difference and Repetition, he connects his forthcoming views on ontology to that of the "the contemporary novelist's art which revolves around difference and repetition, not only in its most abstract reflections but also in its effective techniques" (xix). Some novelists question the definition of being through the language of their fictional characters and create layers, thus forcing us to find meaning in the space between. Paul Auster is a novelist who does this repeatedly using frame narrations, accidental intersections, virtual or dream worlds, and allusions. His latest novel, Invisible, repeats aspects of Sophocles's Antigone. It makes a case for embracing Deleuze's idea of becoming in a virtual world versus merely living in the actual, physical world. Sexual and immortal desires in the protagonist's virtual world show a near achieved nothingness, or "a space which is unlimited" and filled with the being's energy, and a being who is becoming, a "univocal being" as a "free spirit" of energy (Deleuze 36, 41). However, because these desires are only realized through a repression, Auster asks us not to go as far as Deleuze and Felix Guatarri's "Anti-Oedipus" argument that negates a being dependent on experience: instead of merely dealing with the Actual world to reach a state of "nomadic ... distribution" of the energy particles that create a "univocal . Being" (Deleuze and Guattari 36-37), we should become only as participating members of families and relationships in which love is truly realized in both the virtual and actual. If so, one would conclude that Auster's ontological view is also psychoanalytical in nature. Auster's theoretical paradox lies in both grounding us in a relatable, although tabooed, experience and un-grounding us through his use of historicity that is repeated in shifting between the actual and virtual, the spaces of Paris and New York, and the present and past that opens up the text to consider allegorical connections. With incest as a focal point, Auster asks us to consider theoretical writing by those brave enough to tackle the subject, including Deleuze, Jacques Lacan, and Michel Foucault. Joan Copjec makes use of their theories and the incest taboo in discussing Antigone in "The Tomb of Perseverance: On Antigone." Through her assessment of Antigone's current implications, we can see how Invisible is also in essence a repeated narration of the Greek tragedy, of Antogone's Ate within society's bifurcated reality is central to each text's exploration of ontology. Copjec questions: "How can we account for the temporal nomadism of figures from the past? And, in this context, how is it possible that the drama of Antigone still concerns us?" (234). She suggests that it does and explains that in Lacan's reading of the text, "structure gives meaning to [Kreon and Antigone's] acts" and that those acts are inherently performed by "sexual beings" (Copjec 236). Auster is able to use the concept in the "consideration of contemporary urban issues," which Copjec sets up as a possibility (234). Even after the rise of the modern (and postmodern) era, family connections and one's own endurance are remain important. Perhaps because the workplace, national agendas, and materialism may push aside questions surrounding the Ate and immortality, it is even more poignant to explore these issues. Antigone acts in order to "honor . her family's singularity or Ate: that which belongs to them and no one else" (Copjec 260). When Ismene asks if she "dare, despite Kreon" respectfully bury her brother, Antigone replies that "He cannot keep me from my own" (Sophocles, line 54-5). "Singularity" is a term Deleuze uses to "ground [the] principle and the infinite as its element" (43). It is both the impulse to act and the object toward which one drives, for this uniqueness may exist and also be spread.