chaos and complaxity in paul auster

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CHAOS AND COMPLEXITY IN PAUL AUSTER ’S

N EW Y ORK T RILOGY

GINGER JONES AND K EVIN ELLS

Many are familiar with Ezra Pound’s remark that artists are the antennae

of the race and with Freud’s comment that writers and philosophers

discovered the unconscious long before he did. British critic Harriet

Hawkins agrees that literary artists do anticipate patterns later explicated

more formally in other fields by suggesting that if we look at chaos from

an artistic angle, “chaos in nature (as in art) likewise may be seen to

serve a higher order as a creative force that may produce beauty,

freedom, and growth as well as catastrophe”.1 Literary critics may

therefore interpret the depiction of events in particular works of literature

as an artistic response, perhaps unconscious or preconscious, to the same

social, political, and technological milieus that chaos theory attempts toexplain in mathematical language.

Few contemporary writers have explored the themes of chaos,

complexity, and randomness with as much depth and breadth as the

American novelist Paul Auster. In novel after novel, Auster depicts how,

moving in time to “the music of chance” – the play of random events –

not just the lives but also the identities of characters may be thrown into

chaos, a complex state that at a certain point emerges, that is to say,

spontaneously organizes itself into a new stable system. This is not chaos

in the everyday sense of the word, but as defined in a technical sense in

chaos theory and complexity theory as random behaviour on the surface

masking an underlying structural order. Roger Lewin writes that

physicist “Murray Gell-Mann has a good phrase for it: Surface

complexity arising out of deep simplicity”.2 Lewin himself calls it

“global properties arising from local interaction”,3 identifying the edge of

1 Harriet Hawkins, Strange Attractors: Literature, Culture, and Chaos Theory, New

York, 1995, 4.2 Roger Lewin, Complexity: Life at the Edge of Chaos, New York, 1993, 14.3 Ibid., 152.



Ginger Jones and Kevin Ells628

chaos as a place of maximum capacity of information computation where

complex systems adapt, honing the efficiency of their rules as they go:4

“A chaotic system could be stable if its particular brand of irregularity

persisted in the face of small disturbances.”5 Who cannot recall a

relationship, or person, described by that definition?

It is difficult to argue, though not necessary to determine, whether this

is a paradigm emerging in multiple disparate fields at a particular

cultural-historical period, or whether, as with many other areas, fiction

created or contributed to the paradigm (the flashbacks, cuts and shifts in

focus of cinema as anticipated in fiction being one example), or whetherAuster was as acutely sensitive to developments in his culture as were

poets such as Walt Whitman or John Ashbery. The fact remains that Paul

Auster’s New York Trilogy, containing the three novels that comprised

the first work Auster published under his own name, demonstrates that

Auster’s vision of the world corresponds closely with the fundamental

tenets of chaos theory and complexity theory (the latter explains in more

detail how an organization or network of elements adapts to an unstable

environment). Despite the extreme unlikelihood that Auster deliberately

set out to dramatize the tenets of chaos and complexity in The New York

Trilogy, the perspective of these theories is explicit throughout this work,

and critics can easily discern throughout it several instances in which acharacter’s identity is altered from one fundamental state (collapse,

stagnation, bifurcation, chaos) to another, or may persist, complexly, to

the edge of chaos, before emerging into something wholly new.

The New York Trilogy consists of three interlocked narratives, City of

Glass, Ghosts, and The Locked Room, each of which reiterates the drama

of a sole unnamed protagonist who survives the disintegration and

achieves the reintegration of his sense of identity. Because the fact that

each novel is a separate iteration of the same story is not made explicit

by Auster until well into the third novel, the trilogy’s structure as a single

story in three long sections would not have been at all obvious to original

readers of the novels (published separately in the two years prior to the

publication ofThe New York Trilogy in a single volume in 1987), but not particularly important to those readers, either, since each part of the

trilogy stands on its own as a self-contained and internally consistent, if

unconventional, narrative. However, early readers would have noticed

that each of this unusual new American novelist’s early novels depicted a

4 Ibid., 54-55.5 James Gleick, Chaos: Making a New Science, New York, 1987, 48.



Chaos and Complexity in The New York Trilogy 629

largely self-appointed detective concerned as much with the solution of

existential puzzles as material ones. Readers would have been less likely

to notice that Auster’s trilogy explicitly dramatizes four fundamental

concepts (the butterfly effect, strange attractors, iteration, and

emergence) of chaos theory, itself first brought to the attention of the

general reader only in 1987 by the science writer James Gleick in his

Chaos: Making a New Science.

The first clear resonance between the tenets of chaos and complexity

and the work of Paul Auster might seem too obvious to bear mention, but

reviewing it will lead quickly into other resemblances Auster’s early

work bears to chaos and complexity concepts. The principle of “sensitive

dependence on initial conditions”, discovered (appropriately enough, by

chance, during an early effort at forecasting the weather through

computerized models) by the meteorologist Edward Lorenz in the early

1960s, and popularized by Lorenz himself as “the butterfly effect”, is the

catalyst of all Auster’s narratives.

The butterfly effect takes its name in part through Lorenz’s own oft-

repeated and frequently cited meteorological analogy of a butterfly in

Brazil flapping its wings so that ultimately a tornado is set off in Texas.

Less well known are Lorenz’s reminders that for every butterfly setting

off a storm, we may imagine another butterfly stopping one, making thelong-term behaviour of any complex system, from the meteorological to

the sociological, impossible to forecast. From a glance at our own

unwritten biographies, many of us can attest what Auster the writer

seems to feel in his bones – namely, that there are a lot of butterflies out

there.

Now, anyone who happens upon a video tape or a screening of The

Music of Chance, a film adapted from Auster’s novel of the same name,

or the film Smoke, co-written by Auster, will surely think the discovery

of the butterfly effect in Auster is about as groundbreaking a subject for

an essay as the discovery of sexual tension in Alfred Hitchcock’s films.

But we find several additional resonances between chaos theory and The

New York Trilogy, including the concepts of strange attractors, iteration,and emergence, which we will discuss in turn.

Briefly, each novel of The New York Trilogy (City of Glass, Ghosts,

and The Locked Room) begins as do many Auster stories with the

irruption of a random event in the life of a protagonist that precipitates a

chain of circumstances leading to the protagonist’s loss of identity. To

lose one’s identity is to accept “the lightness of becoming the other, of




being on the surface with no inner thoughts, while the burden of your

own consciousness gets forgotten”, writes Dragana Nikolic:

Certain conclusions about [the actions of Auster’s characters] cannot be

drawn: they have no centre nor stable identity. The only consolation left

to Auster’s subject is to reinvent himself: Uncle Victor says in Moon

Palace that every person is the author of his own life.6

The narrator of City of Glass begins the chronicle of the private

detective Quinn’s dissolving identity by announcing that “it was a wrongnumber 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”.

The narrator goes on to say that “much later , when [Quinn] was able to

think about the things that had happened to him, he would conclude that

nothing was real except chance”.7 In the first paragraph of Ghosts, we

read how another private detective identified only as Blue “goes to his

office everyday and sits at his desk, waiting for something to happen. For

a long time nothing does, and then a man named White walks through

the door, and that is how it begins.” 8

Finally, in The Locked Room, a freelance writer recalls an influential

childhood friend, Fanshawe, whom he had “let go of”.9 After years of

having no contact with Fanshawe or his family, the writer-narratorsuddenly receives a letter from Fanshawe’s wife, a letter that “caused a

series of little shocks” as though “too many forces were pulling [the

narrator] in different directions” or taking him, and his identity, apart.

The phone ringing, a man walking through an office door, receiving a

letter – all are analogies for how a potentially but not necessarily chaotic

pattern is sensitively dependent upon its initial conditions. “Our lives

carry us along in ways we cannot control”,10

the trilogy’s true narrator

reflects. Unless one controls one’s life, it will be controlled, and so create

a new life. But this letter is not the one that creates chaos in the life of the

writer-narrator. A second letter from Fanshawe himself reminds the

6 Dragana Nikolic, “Paul Auster’s Postmodernist Fiction: Deconstructing Aristotle’s

‘Poetics’”, Queen Mary and Westfield College, University of London, 2000: thesis

online, available from http://www.bluecricket.com/auster/articles/aristotle.html (accessed

12 August 2006).7 Paul Auster, The New York Trilogy, Los Angeles, 1994, 9.8 Ibid., 203.9 Ibid., 299.10 Ibid., 298.




narrator that Fanshawe “is at the place where everything begins” and that

without having had Fanshawe in his life, the narrator would not know

who he is.11

Ed Lorenz grounded his theory mathematically, and showed it to be

not just an aspect of certain events, but of material existence itself. As if

according to Lorenz’s theory, the lives of Auster’s characters are thrown

into disarray when a phone rings, a door opens, a letter arrives. Each

occurrence sets in motion a chain of events the outcome of which neither

narrator nor reader can predict. The psychologists Chamberlain and Bütz

note that “the ‘butterfly effect’ defines … the ease with which the

behavior of interconnected systems can be influenced by the most minute

factors”.12 The mathematician Steven Strogatz, co-author of the

discoveries in graph theory popularly known today as the “six degrees of

separation” effect, adds: “The practical implication is that long-term

prediction becomes impossible in a system … where small uncertainties

are amplified enormously fast.”13

Not only the lives, but also the identity

of each of Auster’s narrators is seen to be sensitively dependent on initial

conditions, but the unnamed writer ultimately revealed as the sole

protagonist of The New York Trilogy turns out to have been using the

process of novel writing to uncover an underlying order that might help

him understand the disintegration of his identity, and allow for theconditions for a new stable identity to emerge.

In the strange attractor lies a second expression of chaos theory in

Auster’s New York Trilogy. Strogatz explains how Lorenz discovered a

wonderful structure emerging when his solution was visualized as a

trajectory in phase space, that is, an imaginary three-dimensional space

which computer graphics programs can represent in two dimensions on a

flat-screen or printout: “When Lorenz’s trajectory was viewed in all three

dimensions … no self-intersections occurred. It settled into an

exquisitely thin set that looked like a pair of butterfly wings.”14

This

became the first known “strange attractor” (as well as the lesser-known

but no less fascinating origin of the term “butterfly effect”), a set of

11 Ibid., 297.12 Linda L. Chamberlain and Michael R. Bütz, “The ‘Lost World’ of

Psychopharmacology: A Return to Psychology’s ‘Jurassic Park’”, in Clinical Chaos: A

Therapist’s Guide to Nonlinear Dynamics and Therapeutic Change, eds Linda L.

Chamberlain and Michael R. Bütz, Ann Arbor: MI, 1998, 128.13 Steven H. Strogatz, Nonlinear Dynamics and Chaos: With Applications to Physics,

Biology, Chemistry and Engineering , Boulder: CO, 2001, 320.14 Ibid., 319.




infinitely diverging complex trajectories, bound within a clearly

delineated region of phase space. In each section of The New York

Trilogy we find one character who, because of a set of ill-defined

experiences, becomes a strange attractor for another. In City of Glass,

Quinn is drawn into the orbit of Peter Stillman; the detective Blue, in

Ghosts, is fatally attracted to the mysterious writer Black; and the

narrator of The Locked Room is pulled into the vortex of the literary

estate and biography of his vanished schoolboy friend, Fanshawe. As the

life of each strange attractor is uncovered, a second character feels the

imperative to change his own life.In City of Glass, Quinn is a private detective and mystery writer who

lives in a steady state according to habit. He earns a living, pays his rent,

and buys his groceries. He reads, watches movies and baseball, and

attends galleries and the opera. When is he hired by Virginia Stillman to

protect her husband, he is destabilized first by assuming the name Paul

Auster, then by Mrs Stillman’s sudden and passionate kiss, by the sight

of a red notebook, and finally by the sight of Professor Stillman. These

circumstances are bound to Quinn and bind him. They intersect his life

and send him into a repetitious pattern that focuses on Peter Stillman.

Auster underscores that Quinn’s behaviour is unpredictable; for example,

he calls himself Paul Auster; he walks various routes through New Yorkthat spell out, when viewed on a map, the letters “Tower of Babel”,

suggesting fragmentation and confusion; then he believes that the pattern

he has just found is a hoax he has perpetrated on himself. Auster makes

sure that the reader realizes also that Quinn’s attraction to Stillman

remains fixed in an infinitely recursive but regressive pattern. After

Professor Stillman disappears, and Quinn’s phone calls to Virginia

Stillman are answered by busy signals that offer “so many possibilities”,

Quinn repeats his behaviour infinitely, though tracing an infinitely

declining scope of movement and action, ultimately becoming

infinitesimal as a protagonist.15

At the end of his story, he sighs, knowing

that:

He had come to the end of himself. He could feel it now, as though a

great truth had finally dawned on him. There was nothing left …. [The

apartment] was gone, he was gone, everything was gone. 16

15 Auster, New York Trilogy, 158.16 Ibid., 188-89.




City of Glass ends leaving readers to reconsider the roles of detective,

writer and reader, figures who search through apparent chaos for clues to

its underlying order. In Quinn’s story, the role of detective merges with

the role of the writer. We understand that both writer and detective make

sense of the chaos of words, and of the world. A detective searches signs

to find the clues that will make sense of everything, while a writer uses

signs or words to do the same. Auster writes:

The detective is the one who looks, 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.17

This implies that “human behavior could be understood, that beneath the

infinite facade of gestures, tics and silences, there was finally a

coherence, an order, a source of motivation”.18

The detective Blue focuses relentlessly on a certain Black in Ghosts.

Ostensibly paid by White, to “keep an eye” on Black for “as long as

necessary”,19 Blue accepts the assignment because he needs the work and

the job pays well. Little does Blue know that the case will continue for

years. This seemingly stable proposition will contribute to Blue’s

destabilization. Like Quinn, Blue will consciously assume a new identity

and will be aware that as he is pulled into a new system he is “no longer

the same”.20 Blue engages in all manner of activities to vary his

relationship to Black, but is instead wrested from his relation with the

future Mrs Blue into Black’s orbit. Eventually, Blue’s behaviour is

unpredictable, and “he realizes he has thrown away his life. He has lost

whatever chance he might have had for happiness, and … it would not be

wrong to say that” he understands he is at “the beginning of the end”.21

But only at the end will Blue understand the meaning of his assignment,

for it is not until we are at the end of something that we know its value.

Blue becomes Black who is White. That is to say, Blue identifies so

absolutely – to the detriment of his own identity – with Black, ultimatelyrevealed to have been playing the part of White, that Blue is no longer

17 Ibid., 17.18 Ibid., 103.19 Ibid., 203.20 Ibid., 219.21 Ibid., 248.




the man he seems, any more than White was. Blue has been pursuing

only himself, losing his identity at the expense of finding himself. He

exists but he does not exist in himself nor for himself – he is a ghost.

Like the other protagonists, the narrator of The Locked Room has a

stable and functional life, especially so after falling in love with and

marrying his childhood friend Sophie, Fanshawe’s widow. When he is

named literary executor of Fanshawe’s unpublished writings and asked

to write Fanshawe’s biography, the narrator is pulled into the absent and

imaginary Fanshawe’s orbit. His behaviour becomes erratic. He sleeps

with Fanshawe’s mother (as if he could control Fanshawe by possessingFanshawe’s origin); he fantasizes about killing Fanshawe (with

Fanshawe dead, he will be alive), about having Fanshawe kill him (if he

is dead, Fanshawe lives), about finding Fanshawe, and about not finding

him. With nothing but the names of some of Fanshawe’s acquaintances

the narrator flies to Paris to find the secretly living Fanshawe, and on his

return, still caught up in the life of Fanshawe, the narrator says that he

has “tasted death”, that he has seen himself dead.22 As with the other

protagonists, the narrator here must break out of the orbit of this strange

attractor.

Ultimately, readers discover that one way the narrator tried to break

free of Fanshawe was by writing the first two novels of Auster’s trilogy.The unnamed narrator of The Locked Room writes:

The entire story comes down to what happened at the end and without

that end inside me now, I could not have started this book. The same

holds for the two books that come before it , City of Glass and Ghosts.

These three stories are finally the same story, but each one represents a

different stage in my awareness of what it is about. 23

In short, each novel represents an iteration, a repetition of a sequence

of operations that yield results successively closer to a desired outcome.

The process of writing each novel brings Auster’s narrator (who refers to

himself in the first person only in the final chapter of City of Glass, in the

final paragraph of Ghosts, and from the first sentence of The Locked

Room) closer to understanding his situation. The process of reading each

novel brings a reader closer to understanding Auster’s perspective of

reality.

22 Ibid., 446.23 Ibid., 434-35.




Hilary P. Dannenberg writes that “The traditional coincidence plot is

a key plot feature in varying manifestations from the Renaissance to the

Postmodernist novel; however, Modernist and Postmodernist fictions

also developed their own specific forms of coincidence involving

analogical relationships of correspondence”.24 Auster’s use of

coincidence may appear postmodern compared to more conventional

coincidence narratives of the past, but is wholly modern in the sense of

the word as used in the common term “modern science”. Auster’s

insistent, intrusive coincidences have little in common with the

traditional coincidence plot. They reveal, rather, the existence of an

impersonal pattern of behaviour observed in nature and mathematically

verified in a wide range of situations in which a particular algorithm is

iterated repeatedly using the result of a previous iteration as the input of

each new iteration.

For example, a series of mathematical iterations of a simplified

formula for charting predicted population increases, one often used to

illustrate chaos theory, results in four distinct patterns of iteration

depending upon the initial value of one of its variables: first, the series of

numbers declines infinitely toward zero; second, the series of numbers

oscillates widely at first but rapidly converges to a steady state; third, the

series of numbers permanently oscillates between two values; and fourth,the series of numbers generates an utterly unpredictable pattern.

25 Paul

Auster seems to be replicating each of these patterns through his

protagonists’ struggles with identity. In City of Glass, Quinn’s identity

inexorably declines to a vanishing point. Blue, in Ghosts, achieves some

stability only after oscillating in bipolar fashion between affection and

revulsion with respect to Black. The unnamed narrator of The Locked

Room suffers a mental breakdown before ultimately regaining stability

enough to continue living. Quinn, Blue, and the unnamed narrator each

enter a chaotic state in which their actions become unpredictable even to

themselves. Garan Holcombe writes that Auster “is an author who

subscribes to the belief that it is only through the construction of reality

that we are truly able to perceive, rationalise and comprehend the one

24 Hilary P. Dannenberg, “A Poetics of Coincidence in Narrative Fiction”, Poetics Today,

XXV/3 (Fall 2004), 399.25 L. Douglas Kiel and Euel Elliott, “Exploring Nonlinear Dynamics with a Spreadsheet:

A Graphical View of Chaos for Beginners”, in Chaos Theory in the Social Sciences:

Foundations and Applications, eds L. Douglas Kiel and Euel Elliott, Ann Arbor: MI,

1996, 19-29.




within which we are forced to spend our lives; he is fascinated by the

breaking down of the boundaries between what is lived and what is read;

and the blurring of the distinction between what is experienced and what

is written”.26

Auster seeks to explain through stories how we can

discover, even recover, a sense of self.

The first plot iteration illustrates how the protagonist’s identity is

subsumed by the strange attractor, the second plot iteration shows how

the protagonist overpowers the strange attractor, and the final plot

iteration depicts the protagonist moving between these extremes toward a

solidified but probably tentative sense of his own identity.One should recall that the “chaos” of chaos theory refers not to pure

randomness, let alone meaninglessness, but to apparent surface chaos

overlaying a deep structural order. Complexity refers to “the ability to

switch between different modes of behavior as environmental conditions

are varied”.27 Mitchell Waldrop adds that “Self-organization depends on

self-reinforcement: the tendency for small effects to become magnified

when conditions are right”.28 For example, between 1960 and 1966,

Quebec transformed itself, seemingly overnight, from a Catholic,

agrarian, traditional society dominated by a system of clergy,

government officials, English corporations, and wealthy French

Canadians into a liberal, secular, industrial state with a burgeoningseparatist movement. Clearly, the social conditions for what has since

been called, by historians such as Claude Bélanger, the “Quiet

Revolution” had been brewing for decades, but the death of a man who

had been premier of Quebec for a generation, in a sociologically youthful

culture (the Baby Boom ran deeper and longer in Canada than in the US),

provided the final impetus to a reorganization that could never be undone

and returned to its original state.

The New Yorker writer Malcolm Gladwell suggested that some

messages, trends, fads, and ideas approach and then surpass what he calls

a “tipping point”.29

This popularization of the concept of emergence in

complexity theory, in which a complex system on the edge of chaos, at a

26 Garan Holcombe, “Reflections on the Work of Paul Auster”, California Literary

Review: available from http://www.calitreview.com/Essays/paul_auster_5007.htm

(accessed 12 August 2006).27 Grégoire Nicolis and Ilya Prigogine, Exploring Complexity: An Introduction, New

York, 1989, 218.28 M. Mitchell Waldrop, Complexity: The Emerging Science at the Edge of Order and

Chaos, New York, 1992, 34.29 Malcolm Gladwell, The Tipping Point , Boston, 2000.




specific point, spontaneously organizes into a new order, if true, would

let critics extend literary analyses derived from chaos theory even

further. Happily, the British science journalist Mark Buchanan makes

clear that the idea is true:

Even though we know … perhaps next to nothing at all about the

psychology and sociology of ideas, mathematical physics guarantees that

there is a tipping point. The basic idea of the tipping point is not even

debatable.30

As we said at the beginning of this essay, it is extremely unlikely that

Auster intentionally based the plots of his early novels directly on chaos

or complexity theory. Though foreseen by Edward Lorenz in 1962, when

Auster was only fifteen, chaos theory was only named as such by the

physicist James Yorke in 1975, when “scientists around the world

became aware of a … kind of motion … that we now call ‘chaos’”.31

And, as we noted earlier, James Gleick offered a compelling history and

lucid explication of chaos theory for the non-scientific reader only in

1987, the year The New York Trilogy first appeared in one volume after

its three sections, City of Glass, Ghosts, and The Locked Room, had been

published independently during the previous two years. Finally, the

history of complexity theory was not introduced to the general educated

reader in English until five years after that, by the physicist M. Mitchell

Waldrop.

Yet, Auster’s novels follow a pattern that bears a striking resemblance

to the entire perspective of chaos and complexity theory. With each

iteration of a plot whose underlying relatively simple order was revealed

in full in The Locked Room, Auster achieves a detailed, subtle, nuanced,

and precise image of the spontaneous reorganization of a new system

after it has reached its tipping point. Quinn’s decline pauses at one point,

but Quinn is finally unable to stop it. Blue violently asserts himself

against Black, spontaneously regaining equilibrium, but he is no longer

the same character, and we do not know what will become of him. Theunnamed narrator of The Locked Room oscillates between dissolution

and catastrophic violence, emerging after his breakdown with an identity

30 Mark Buchanan, Nexus: Small Worlds and the Groundbreaking Science of Networks,

New York, 2002, 168.31 Kathleen T. Alligood, Tim D. Sauer, and James A. Yorke, Chaos: An Introduction to

Dynamical Systems, New York, 1996, vi.




resilient enough to deal directly with Fanshawe.

Perhaps Auster is aware of chaos precepts two decades after Gleick’s

introduction of them to the educated general reader, but not necessarily.

The link between science and literature seems as nonlinear as the

relationships in nature observed by chaos and complexity theorists. There

is certainly no established lead time nor pattern of influence observable

between literature and any of the major scientific ideas of the past

century and a half such as evolution, genetics, psychoanalysis, quantum

mechanics, cybernetics, or system theory.

Though Auster is frequently described as a postmodern novelist,Auster himself claims he represents the role of coincidence as he has

actually experienced it. “I’ve always contended that I’m a realist”, Auster

has said, “that, indeed, the world is a lot stranger than people credit; that

really what they’re responding to are the conventions of fiction as

they’ve been established since the late nineteenth century”.32 Certainly,

“postmodern” is a term defined in widely divergent ways by different

writers. The advantage of viewing Auster through the paradigm of chaos

and complexity is that one’s critical terminology corresponds to

established technical definitions. Like “postmodern”, “chaos” can mean

different things to different people, but if one is investigating the

connection between a given literary work and chaos theory, chaos cannotmean, for example, entropy, randomness, or an existential abyss. In one

recent interview, Auster speaks of his narratives as arising from an

inaccessible place in his unconscious, and of course, agrees with his

interviewer’s by now routine observation about the role chance plays in

his stories (this is why we posited the butterfly effect as a lucid metaphor

for Auster’s narrative technique but not a thesis-worthy observation in

itself).33

Wittgenstein wrote that “language can been seen as an ancient city: a

maze of little streets and squares, of old and new houses with additions

from various periods”.34

A haunted glass city, indeed, and full of locked

rooms. Auster certainly understood how we use language to “orient

32 Adrian Gargett, “Paul Auster: Cruel Universe”, Spike Magazine, November 2002:

available from http://spikemagazine.com/1102paulauster.php (accessed 11 February

2008).33 Jill Owens, “The Book of Paul Auster”, 2007: available from http://www.powells.

com/interviews/auster.html (accessed 5 June 2007).34 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, trans. G.E.M Anscombe, Oxford,

1972, 8.




ourselves within discourse” to “make points and enforce stability”35

and

used his early plots to explore how a character rely on language in order

to survive the disintegration of one identity and the achieve

reconstruction of a second, more suitable and equally stable identity. But

as Auster’s narrator realizes at the end of The Locked Room, and as he

dramatizes through his alternate roads potentially travelled by, but not

taken, by Quinn in City of Glass and Blue in Ghosts, it could have easily

been otherwise, and a ringing phone, an opening door, or a letter falling

light as a butterfly through a mail slot, can set off a psychological

hurricane.

35 Kenneth J. Knoespel, “The Employment of Chaos: Instability and Narrative Order”, in

Chaos and Order: Complex Dynamics in Literature and Science, ed. N. Katherine

Hayles, Chicago, 1991, 109.

chaos and complaxity in paul auster

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